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she always was.
    â€œDunno,” Lili said. “She was right behind me.”
    Ashley looked down the hall and spotted Lauren hanging by the doorway, talking to someone she couldn’t see.
    â€œLauren? Coming?” she called.
    Instead of running over with a syrupy compliment like she always did, Lauren hesitated, turning to the personshe was speaking to and then looking back to Ashley with a somewhat tense smile on her face. “Go ahead, I’ll catch up with you guys in a bit,” she told them.
    â€œLet’s go, I’m starved,” Lili urged.
    Ashley shrugged. A. A. nodded, and the three of them walked to the refectory. The Ashleys waited for no one.

6
LAUREN TRIES TO DODGE A BLAST FROM THE PAST
    CHRISTIAN HAD TEXTED HER ALL through out class, and Lauren spent the hour furiously replying to him, her fingers flying on the phone hidden underneath her desk. Cell phones were supposedly banned on school grounds, but that didn’t stop anyone from using them. The girls of Miss Gamble’s could send a text with their eyes closed.
    She was so engrossed in their text flirtation that she didn’t pay attention to anything in class and didn’t even notice that the lunch bell had rung and that people were getting up from their seats. She tapped a hasty good-bye to Christian and gathered her books into her new Saint Laurent tote (which still gave her a bit of sticker shock,but as they say, when an Ashley, spend as an Ashley) when she felt a tap on her arm.
    Standing in front of her was a new girl who seemed to know her name and looked way too familiar.
    â€œLauren—is that you?” The girl was tall and skinny in a gawky, all-elbows way, her school uniform hanging like a sack. Her lank fair hair was pulled into two childish braids, and she wore the kind of thick reading glasses that the Ashleys always referred to as plane windows. “It’s Sadie—Sadie Graham!”
    â€œOmigod!” Lauren almost dropped her phone. She totally remembered her now. Sadie had left Miss Gamble’s in the middle of fourth grade when her parents moved to Connecticut. When Sadie left, Lauren had had nobody, really, except the other social rejects, and they weren’t really her friends, just comrades in despair.
    But Sadie was different. She was the only girl at school Lauren ever really liked. They used to sit together in the back row of every class and study together after school, rolling their eyes about the Ashleys. Sadie always insisted that the Ashleys were a bunch of stuck-up losers who were jealous of their superior brainpower, and of course Lauren always agreed.
    â€œI tried to get your attention in class, but you neverlooked up from your desk. Anyway, my dad’s company moved him back here. Can you believe it?” Sadie asked, beaming with happiness, pushing her thick black plastic glasses up onto the bridge of her nose. “I’m so happy you’re still here!”
    â€œUh . . . yeah, that’s . . . that’s great.” Lauren felt as though time had frozen. As though she was frozen. She was still holding her notebook and pen over her open bag, unable to move from the spot. She felt a rush of conflicting emotions—she was truly happy and surprised to see Sadie again, but she was also completely taken aback.
    Sadie knew Lauren when she had an unfortunate Shakira perm and wore patchy, cast-off sweaters rather than brand-new cashmere. When she was a social pariah. When the Ashleys didn’t even know she existed.
    Lauren looked anxiously to see if Lili, the only Ashley in honors history, had noticed Sadie talking to her. Lauren would totally lose major cool points if she were seen talking to a total zero like Sadie. While Lauren hated herself a little bit for thinking like that, it was the brutal truth. If she wasn’t careful, one tiny slip and she would lose her precarious position at the top of the social pyramid.
    The Ashleys