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noticed.”
    “You give him the cold shoulder.”
    “I don’t mean to, Kim. I have a lot on my mind.” (I didn’t, though. It was an excuse.)
    Kim looked concerned. “Like what?”
    “Like how Mr. Wallace will never be my husband,” I joked. “I’m pining away for him, but he’s such a Marxist, he’ll never marry me.”
    “Roo.”
    “All I want is to be Mrs. Wallace and have little South African-accent babies—”
    “Roo!”
    “… and look at him in his Speedo swim trunks every morning before I go off to work, while he stays home with the kids. But he’ll never go for it.”
    “He’s already married.”
    “Oh, yes. That’s another problem. My love is unrequited. Must you add to my misery?”
    “Roo, seriously—”
    “Mr. Wallace doesn’t love me. I need some more ice cream.”
    “—what is the deal with you and Finn?”
    Now, the intelligent girl would not have told. The intelligent girl would have said, “Nothing, I swear on my life,” and started talking to Finn like a normal person.
    But me, no.
    I decided to spill my guts about this minor weirdness from second grade that clearly no one remembered except me and him. I told Kim the whole story. How we had fun looking at the wildlife book, how Katarina and Arielteased us, how he’d save swings for me and had still given me that sweet, shrimpy look as recently as last semester.
    Kim was my best friend. I wanted her to understand why I had been so weird with Finn. I figured I could tell her everything.
    But now, I wish I hadn’t.
    1 The refectory is Tate Prep’s pompous way of saying lunchroom. Or rather, food building. The school has like eight different buildings, all around a big lawn (the quad). It’s pretty posh.
    2 Muffin: nice, pleasing, but ordinary. A perfectly fine baked good—but nothing to get too excited about. Not as festive as cake. Not as glamorous as a croissant. Not as scrumptious as a cookie.
    3 The B&O Espresso is a coffee bar. It’s like Starbucks, but with fancy cake and old Indian-print cloths on the tables. It’s walking distance from the neighborhood full of big beautiful houses where Kim lives. You can sit there as long as you want, doing homework or whatever. We go there a lot when we’re not at Cricket’s—except that everyone else goes there more than me, because Kim and Cricket and Nora can walk there or ride a bike, but I have to take the bus and transfer twice.
    4 Neither Nora nor I got asked to Spring Fling freshman year—Cricket went with Tommy Parrish and Kim went with an older guy named Steve Buchannon—and then later we found out there were perfectly decent boys who didn’t go either. We made this rule to safeguard against future such debacles.

3. Hutch (but I’d rather not think about it.)
    Doctor Z didn’t say anything while I told the story about Finn. She just nodded, and looked at me.
    At home, my dad is always asking me questions about stuff, wanting to know the details of all my friends and their lives. And my mom is always interrupting anything I’m talking about to tell me stories about when she was young, and how she felt just like I do—only worse. It was weird to talk and have someone listen quietly for half an hour. When I was finished, Doctor Z looked up at the clock and said it was almost time to go, anyway. “Come back Thursday,” she added, “and we’ll do number three.”
    Number three on the list is Hutch.
    I almost didn’t put him on at all. I’d rather forget thewhole thing. Not that anything drastically bad happened. It’s just that Hutch has become a leper at Tate, 1 and though I’m sure I’d be a better person if I was comfortable talking to all kinds of people, and if I treated everyone equally—I’m not, and I don’t. It’s sad that he’s a leper. He eats alone. He sits in the back corner of the classrooms. I’m sure he suffers unspeakable indignities in the locker rooms. And I do feel bad when people sneer at him. But he also creeps me out, like he’s