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grandparents a lot more accepting of Mom’s whole single-parent test-tube-babies plan.
    I think when my mom moved back to Maine andstarted her own business as the shampoo hippie, before she morphed into this corporate, wealthy CEO type who still dressed like a hippie, she was, basically, a flake. Her flakiness still comes through in her creative product ideas, but now she actually gets paid a lot for being flaky. (But not having flakes, à la dandruff. That could be a career killer.)
    Sometimes I think that Olivia must be Mom’s daughter, not me. They can both be so clueless. They should have passports from la-la land.
    Anyway, Gianni’s more like a distant cousin than anything. He sends lots of stuff to me from his work at fashion shows both abroad and in New York, where he’s a hair stylist for a couple of runway supermodels. Sometimes I have some of the coolest clothes at school—especially T-shirts with unique colors, cuts, or logos.
    Not that anyone there recognizes this, or cares. They’re too busy all wearing the same stuff from Abercrombie, L.L.Bean, or Aèropostale.
    The cool thing about being best friends with Cassidy years ago was that she had only her mom, too, so the two of us were in day care together because our moms worked full-time, and nothing seemed off at the time about them being single moms. (Cassidy’s dad had moved about an hour away and she saw him every other weekend.) My mom would always say that “lots of people have different family situations and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
    Now Cassidy’s mom was remarried so she had a stepfather, and my mom had her on-again, off-again thing with David. He wasn’t part of our family, and he wasn’t
not
part of it, if that makes any sense.
    Cassidy and I used to be good friends. We attended the same preschool, where we both liked to wear dresses and spin a lot—according to Mom, anyway. I’ve blocked it out. Then, as we got older, we took dance classes together.
    I had an empty fish tank on my big desk, under my loft bed. I used to have fish, but when we moved into this house a few years ago, I started to feel really guilty. Here I was, living right on the water … on the ocean … and then having these captive fish. I wanted to free them but I knew they wouldn’t survive in the cold Atlantic water, but still, it seemed wrong that they had to
look
at it.
    So when they went to the great fish tank in the sky, I gave them a proper burial at sea and didn’t replace them. Instead, I cleaned out the tank and turned it into a display case for my old dolls and their fashionable outfits. So it’s my doll tank now. They look sort of bizarre, but it’s like a department store window that I keep designing.
    Looking at my dolls, I thought about how once last year Cassidy and I had taken my Malibu Barbie and turned her into Bar Harbor Barbie for a school project—we’d made orange rubber boots for her, and built a lobster trap from toothpicks. (They tend not tomake dolls and toys about Maine because we’re not as glamorous as California—but if you want a red stuffed lobster, there are a hundred to choose from.)
    But sometime last year things changed with Cassidy. It had started out with small things I didn’t really notice at the time. Like one time she uninvited me to a sleepover at her house, telling me at the last second that it was called off. Then I found out at school that it hadn’t been—she’d just decided to invite Alexis instead.
    Or the time we had plans to go to the movies, and she didn’t show up. I finally called her, and she said, “Oh, something came up.”
    It was agonizing at first. I used to lie awake at night and wonder: why did she want to be friends with them, instead of me? Why couldn’t we all be friends, like we used to be?
    There was this weird, almost geological shift happening, like Cassidy and I were two glaciers moving in opposite directions.
    “What happened? You used to be such good friends,” my mom