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“Starbursts or Kit Kats?”
    “Are you in a chocolatey mood or a fruity mood?” Emily asks.
    “Do they make a candy that’s fruity in the middle and chocolatey on the outside?”
    Through the security mirror, I steal another look at Mardi. Would Edge like her? She’s pretty, with emerald eyes and long, red hair, both of which I once envied. But she’s not Edge’s type. She’s in honors classes with us, but smart in a memorize-the-textbook way. In junior high, she turned into one of those people who is endlessly painting and hanging signs in the halls promoting School Spirit Day, or Alcohol Awareness Day, or Pajama Day, or the Homecoming Dance. It’s like her dedication to school spirit sucked away her soul.
    I know there used to be more to Mardi, and I know this because we used to be friends. Years ago, when she, too, lived with a single mom in the Hunters Run condos. In grade school, we rode our bikes together in the parking lot and made fairy wings out of crepe paper. We walked to and from school together. We swapped books and Sailor Moon anime DVDs. We memorized Kiki’s Delivery Service and pretended that we, too, were witches in training. We shared our deepest secrets and our wildest dreams.
    Then her mom got remarried. Mardi and her mom moved into the guy’s fancy house near Sheridan Beach. That’s where her shape-shifting began. She tossed all her Sailor Moon s and declared herself too old for Kiki. She got herself some trendy clothes, followed by rich, snobby friends. She joined a bunch of sports teams and got too busy to hang out. One day in seventh grade, she just stopped talking to me. She erased our whole friendship with one blank stare.
    These days, she still ignores me, except when her friends call me Manga-loid, and she laughs along with them. And this month, the yearbook came out with a caption by my only extracurricular picture. VIOLET ROSSI, NATIONAL FART HONOR SOCIETY . I found out that Mardi, a yearbook staffer, was responsible for proofreading the National Art Honor Society page. She’d let the joke slide all the way to the printer.
    Edge knows all this. So why would he hang with her now? Maybe he can see glimmers of the Mardi I once knew. Or maybe Mardi in her new form has bewitched him.
    I hurry to the register and throw ten dollars down on the counter.
    “So Mardi, what happened with you and Steven Spielberg last night?” Emily asks.
    I can’t hear her whole answer. The cashier loudly counts back my change.
    “. . . was really, really good. And then, after that, just totally crashed,” Mardi finishes.
    Crashed? He crashed at her house? And he was good. At what?
    “You know, he hangs out with the Manga-loids,” Kelly says.
    “Yeah, but he’s not really one of them. He’s a serious film buff, not just into cartoons.”
    Cartoons! I grip my coffee cup. How can she lump anime in with Scooby-Doo?
    “And he could be soooo much better,” Mardi goes on. “Some new clothes, the right hairstyle, maybe ten minutes of crunches a day to tone up. I see a lot of potential. He’s my special summer project. Come September, people are not going to recognize Edgerton Downey.”
    I can’t listen to this. I bolt from the 7-Eleven, spilled coffee burning my hand.

7
    A s soon as I burst into Jet City Comics, Jerry approaches with a Big Gulp in one hand, a box cutter in the other. “Well, look who’s here. Thanks for showing up.”
    “Sorry.” I toss my backpack on the floor behind the counter. “I’m staying at my dad’s in Fremont, and I have to take two buses to get here.”
    “Lots to do today. The Yoops came in.” Jerry nods at a massive stack of UPS boxes, then hands me the box cutter. “I need these babies on the racks, and subscriptions pulled, pronto.”
    I cringe as he picks up a notepad by the cash register. It’s filled with characters I copied from the Death Note manga series yesterday. I forgot to throw them away. “I found your doodles. Obviously, you have way too much