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Whoever this Dex guy was, I already felt sorry for him. We took the stairs and then the elevator back to the lobby in silence.

 
    3
    The next morning, my sister let me use her phone to call Doon. Delia pretended to water her one sad plant for about fifteen minutes so that she could listen in, but being monitored was better than not getting to talk at all. I needed my cell phone situation remedied in the very, very near future.
    â€œI have a hit out on you,” Doon said. “You picked the worst week of my life to run away. I think my parents are shopping for bars for my windows. My mom just threatened to ground me until you get back from California. You are coming back, right?”
    Doon was eating cereal. I could tell because she kept slurping between sentences, and whenever she and her parents were fighting she’d eat ten bowls of Corn Flakes at a time.
    â€œI guess,” I said. “It’s that or move in with my lunatic sister forever.”
    I was a little nervous that Doon wasn’t telling me something, that she’d been dead serious when she joked that I was a “traitor” the other night. A few weeks ago, I’d taken the fall for a bunch of texts that the two of us had sent together, texts that had been Doon’s idea to begin with. Sending anonymous messages was the kind of thing that didn’t seem so terrible at the time, but made my mom grow another head when she read what we’d written. On the scale of terrible things, if a one was sticking your tongue out at someone and a ten was flying a plane into a building, I think that what we wrote rated a 1.5. Maybe a two. But to my mom it was like an eleven. She waved a stack of printed-out messages in her hand and practically wailed at me, “How could you have such cruelty in you?” Like it was even my fault! If I’d really broken it down for her, all I’d done was let Doon use my phone to send maybe fifty words and a couple of pictures to one of the most popular girls in my school, Paige Parker, because Doon swore she knew a code where they couldn’t trace your phone. Which, as it turned out, she didn’t. If Doon hadn’t spent half her life with her phone privileges revoked, it wouldn’t have even been an issue.
    â€œWhat is this?” my mom asked, pointing to the picture on top of the second page.
    â€œA dog eating its poop?” I said. Underneath was written “TASTES LIKE PAIGE, YUMMMMM,” and even though it was stupid and I was supposed to act like I felt terrible about it, the gleeful look on the dog’s face cracked me up every time.
    â€œYou think this is funny ? I don’t even know you, Anna.”
    Maybe it would have been mean if Paige Parker were some kind of social leper, but she wasn’t. Paige Parker could have had any guy she looked cross-eyed at, and she certainly got more than her share of invitations to slumber parties and dances. Yet somehow from my mom’s point of view, Paige had become this tragic victim of her daughter the bully. I tried to tell her that my bullying Paige Parker would be kind of like a minnow eating a whale, but she wasn’t having any of it. I guess that Paige’s mom had some relative in law enforcement trace the texts back to my phone, and she called my mom in tears. Actual tears. I made the mistake of rolling my eyes when my mom told me that part.
    â€œYou don’t seem to understand that she could get the police involved. I had to beg on your behalf. Do you know how that made me feel?”
    I didn’t answer. Who knew how anything made her feel? The whole thing was so much less of an issue than she was making it.
    I had heard my mom talking to Lynette later about whether or not I was “you know, a sociopath,” which I definitely wasn’t. The one thing I couldn’t tell them was that the whole stupid thing had been Doon’s idea, not mine. Besides, Paige Parker was beautiful and popular