Cass Levin was in her bedroom, on the top floor of the town house, when she heard the familiar sounds – the wheels of the cart scraping the sidewalk and squeaking to a stop, then footsteps on the stoop.

Cass stubbed her toe and nearly broke her neck tearing down the stairs. She swung open the front door with such force that she startled the mailman, who nearly fell backward. They stood blinking at each other for several moments, Cass’s eyes adjusting to the bright outside. The first thing she saw clearly was the packet of mail in his hand – the yellow envelope was on top.

“Finally!” she yelped, swiping it away. She’d shut the door halfway when she realized how rude she’d been, then poked her head back out. “Thank you!” she cried cheerily, hoping it didn’t sound like an afterthought. The mailman was already backing his cart down the stoop.

Back upstairs, Cass made a beeline for the telephone to call her two best friends. “Well, what are you waiting for?” she whooped, when they said their class schedules had come, too. “Get over here – pronto!”

Penelope and Tillie lived on opposite sides of Manhattan yet somehow managed to arrive at the same exact moment. Cass’s eyebrows rose suspiciously when she opened the door to see her friends standing side by side. “We made a pact! If you guys opened them without me, I’m going to go ballistic!”

Tillie was a pale girl, who was allergic to just about everything on the planet as well as the sun. “Nice to see, too,” she said dryly, barging past Cass to get inside the house, tossing off the visor and jacket her mother had made her wear.

Penelope remained outside, grinding the tip of her sneaker into the front step. She’d gotten braces a day ago, and her gnawed bottom lip jutted out poutily. “Oh, what, you’re mad?” Cass balked. Penelope held up her envelope, still sealed. “Oh, I was just joking!”

Cass tried not to sound as impatient as she felt. “I know you wouldn’t do that! Sheesh!”

“Three, two, one…”

“Ouch!”

Opening the envelope, Cass got a paper cut. It was whisker-thin and shaped like a frown and stretched across her index fingertip. A drop of blood dribbled onto the letter from the principal, landing on the sentence “Welcome back, middle schoolers, to Elston Prep, recently ranked New York City’s finest private school.”
“Okay, is everyone ready?” Tillie asked, glancing first at her own schedule. “Anyone have first-period French?”

“I do!” hooted Penelope.

“Nope,” said Cass.

“English with Mr. Linzer?”

“Same,” Penelope gasped.

“Uh-uh,” Cass shook her head.

“Third-period Geometry?”

“Me, too!” said Penelope.

It kept going like this. Until Penelope and Tillie had every class with each other. And Cass had every class by herself. The room was silent but for the ssss sound of Penelope sucking air through her new braces.

Cass was a tall girl, who’d returned from summer camp even taller. She stretched her legs out, feeling like they didn’t belong to her.

She didn’t have to look up to know that Penelope and Tillie were staring. She could practically feel their eyes boring into her forehead – horrible sorry-for-you eyes. There was nothing Cass hated more.

“Sheesh,” she sniffed, concentrating on her kneecaps, “it’s just a stupid schedule. Quit it with the pity party.”

Cass was used to people feeling sorry for her, of course. Her parents had died in a car accident when she was eight years old. “A tragic car accident,” it was usually called. That was shorthand for, “it wasn’t just a fender bender – people were hurt, and not just moderately but tragically.”

Tell people your parents are dead, and after the “I’m sorry’s” and the “How horrible’s,” they run out of things to say. That’s when the looks start. They gaze at you with awful woeful eyes, frowning to show you how sorry they feel, then scrounge for something to nervously fiddle with – a packet of Sweet’N Low at a restaurant or a pen on a desk, looking far too happy when the topic finally changes and – phew! – they’re free. What a relief to be out from under the dark shadow of Cass’s dead parents!

Cass hated people feeling sorry for her, and she hate the looks, so they were all the worse when they came from her two best friends.

She sucked on her wounded finger, feeling like all the energy had been sucked out of her.