Beth went a little nuts.

I don’t blame her. When her dad got involved with his twenty-one-year-old dental hygienist, Beth got involved with the junk-food aisle at the grocery store. She carried processed snack cakes around the way toddlers carry teddy bears. She gained, like, twenty pounds, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. I figured she’d get back to her usual weight once the shock wore off.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only person who noticed.

May 14 was “Fun and Fit Day” at Surrey Middle School, so the gym was full of booths set up by local health clubs and doctors and dentists and sports leagues, all trying to entice us not to end up as couch potatoes. That part was fine. What wasn’t fine was when the whole school sat down to watch the eighth-grade cheerleaders’ program on physical fitness.

They had a PowerPoint presentation, and it started out okay, if a little stupid….Finding their misspelled words made it kind of fun, actually: “veggetables” and “carbhohydrytes,” and don’t forget to eat plenty of “protene.” Beth and I sat there and laughed. Good times.

Then came the next segment. You know those DO and DON’T pages in fashion magazines? Like, “DO try belting your hideous $900 fuchsia sweater with a ridiculous $400 belt” and “DON’T leave the house with your underwear on the outside of your pants.”

The cheerleaders did that—only they used pictures of kids from our school.

“DO exercise regularly”–insert photo of several cheerleaders looking really pretty as they pretend to lift weights.

“DON’T sit on the sidelines in gym class.” The picture that went with this one had a black bar over the kid’s eyes, just like in a magazine, but

everyone could tell it was Javier Delgado, who’d been overweight since kindergarten.

That’s when most people started laughing nervously.

And that’s when Beth and I stopped laughing.

“DO eat lots of fresh produce.” A shot of Kira Conroy and Megan Wiley daintily eating a salad outside the lunchroom.

“DON’T go back for seconds in the lunch line.”

And there it was.

A picture of Beth.

Yeah, there was a black bar over her face, but it was obviously her. She had her favorite rainbow-striped sweater on—the really expensive one from Nordstrom, the one she loved to wear even if it was tight and sometimes rode up a little to show off her new Twinkie stomach.

Beth didn’t want to come back to school after that. She got out of her mom’s car a minute before first bell, ate lunch in the main office, and got special permission to leave five minutes before final bell. Probably because Mrs. Goldberg and Javier Delgado’s mom threatened to sue the pants off the school board.

The cheerleaders got a slap on the wrist. A bunch of us started a petition to keep the high school from letting them on the junior varsity squad. We had hundreds of signatures, including a lot from teachers and parents. The

JV coach at Surrey High agreed and barred the whole team from tryouts.

But then the varsity cheerleaders decided to stand up for their sisters. And they invited just about the whole troupe to skip JV and join their team.

That was right around when Beth and her mom put their house on the market and started packing up to move to Florida.

So now, not only did my best friend leave, but the cheerleaders and their mindless followers assumed I was personally responsible for the petition (which, yeah, I was) and started being openly rude to me—shutting doors in my face, leaving nasty notes on my desk and in my locker, making fun of me when I could obviously hear them.

That’s when I began keeping really quiet in class, and finding ways to show the other kids I wasn’t afraid of them—like staring them straight in the eye when they looked at me, taking a step toward them when they talked to me, or walking right up to them and getting in their personal space if I heard them say my name. Saying the meanest things I could think of whenever I had the chance—repeating rumors, embellishing them. I found out that Kira Conroy had been arrested for shoplifting at the mall, and made sure everybody knew about it. The girl who’d had five beers on New Year’s Eve and peed her

pants, the girl who tripped and fell off the stage at the Miss Teen California pageant—I shared those stories the moment I heard them.

All’s fair in war, right?

So suddenly I wasn’t a nobody anymore.

I was a somebody.

Somebody everyone was afraid of.

Since Megan Wiley was the captain of the cheerleaders, the school withheld her Student of the Year award. Seeing how she’s always been star of the student body and undisputed queen of the cheerleaders, I can only imagine the whole Fun-and-Fit presentation was her idea in the first place. And it’s not like she’d break formation and say otherwise, even if it wasn’t.

Beth and her mom moved the Saturday after the last week of school. We tried to stay in touch—we really did. But I guess going to a ritzy private school changes your priorities. All I know is that we swore we’d talk once a week, and it took about three months for that plan to dissolve into nothing. When Beth started talking about going on the Zone diet and wanting a Prada purse (pardon me, bag), I knew that was the beginning of the end. And when I dyed my hair pink last year, it was the end of the end. So.

Since Beth left, I haven’t really had a best friend. I guess I don’t have any real friends at all.

I mean, there’s Kasey. She’s thirteen—two years younger—so if you believe the greeting card commercials, we should have this special bond or something. We get along all right, but once she hit middle school, I started to feel less like her friend and more like her security blanket.

There was a time when we used to hang out—Kasey, me, Beth, even Mimi—goofing off and watching movies. But gradually, my formerly funny and cool sister morphed into a neurotic, oversensitive, doll-obsessed mess. Now our vibe is pretty much “big bad sister protecting timid little sister.” So until the greeting card companies start making cards that say ” you’ve always been there when i was either scared or bored ,” our relationship doesn’t measure up to Hallmark’s standards.

There’s one group I hang out with at school, but their attitude is getting tiresome. My secret name for them is the Doom Squad. Everyone assumes they’re morbid and strange, so they do their best to live up to the hype. Some of them are really nice, and I think they could be okay…if they would just stop trying so hard.

I mean, just because you don’t want to be a cookie-cutter clone doesn’t mean you have to wear a spiky collar and dress like a vampire wannabe. In the first place, I’m too lazy to put that much effort into my appearance, and in the second place, I’m really paranoid about wearing

nonmatching blacks, so I usually end up in jeans and a T-shirt.

After history, I stopped by my locker. Lydia Small, who might as well be the Doom Squad poster child, wandered up and rested her forehead on the locker next to mine. She spends a lot of time and energy trying to give people the impression that she’s too emo and gothic to be interested in anything. Still, I did notice she was wearing a wedding veil that she’d shredded and glued a bunch of plastic spiders on to.

Lydia is rude and overbearing and pretentious, and to be honest, there are actually several people I’d rather hang out with than her. But she’s the one who always seems to appear out of thin air. And because of her big old attitude, people tend to do what she says. So when she walks over at lunch and says, “Move, worm,” to whoever’s sitting next to me, they move.

In spite of my misgivings, Lydia and I had been hanging out a little lately, going to see movies, people-watching at the mall, ending up next to each other at lunch. She was drawn to me, like a moth to a porch light. In fact, sometimes I suspected it was my ambivalence about her that made her so eager to hang out.