She intended to preview that by making one today.

By junior year, most of the students had formed their own tribes. Making room for the new girl took time, and she hadn’t had a full three weeks.

She knew those established tribes studied her, sized her up, considered. Though she’d never been shy, Adrian took her time as well.

The jocks could make sense for the next couple of years. Sports might not be so much her thing, but athleticism was. The fashionable girls could be fun, as she did love clothes. (Another reason to hate the uniform.)

The party animals didn’t interest her any more than the scarily serious eggheads.

As always, the group as a whole had scatters of the snobs, the bullies—often intertwined.

The nerds were, always, anywhere, deadly to social strata.

But for her project, that’s exactly where she aimed.

She made the choice during lunch period that would almost certainly doom her chances of joining the social hierarchy.

In the dining hall, Adrian carried her tray—field green salad with grilled chicken, seasonal fruit, sparkling water—past the table of jocks, away from the fashionable girls, and to the lowest of the rung, the nerd table.

She caught the lag in some of the conversational buzz, and a few snickers, as she paused by the lowly table and its three occupants.

Since she’d done her due diligence—reading back issues of the school newspaper, combing last year’s yearbook—she targeted Hector Sung.

Asian, coat-hanger thin, square-framed black glasses with dark brown eyes behind them. Those eyes blinked at her now as he stopped in the act of biting into a slice of veggie pizza.

“Is it okay if I sit here?”

He said, “Um.”

She just smiled and sat across from him. “I’m Adrian Rizzo.”

“Okay. Hi.”

The girl beside him, with skin like caramel cream and a gorgeous head of braids, rolled big, round, black eyes. “He’s Hector Sung, and he’s thinking nobody sits here but us. I’m Teesha Kirk.”

She jerked a thumb with a thick silver ring to the boy sitting warily and red-faced beside Adrian. “The ginger is Loren Moorhead—the third. You’ve got about five-point-three seconds to move before you’re infected by nerd germs and permanently ostracized from society.”

Adrian had done her due diligence on Teesha as well, who’d have ranked with the scarily smart eggheads but for her nerd bones. She preferred Dungeons & Dragons tournaments or Doctor Who marathons to meetings of the National Honor Society or National Merit Scholars.

“Oh well.” Adrian shrugged, added a squirt of lemon to her salad, took a delicate bite. “Guess time’s up. So, nice to meet you, Hector, Teesha, Loren. Anyway, Hector, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

He dropped the pizza onto his plate with a little splat. “A what?”

“Business proposition. I need a videographer, and since that’s your interest, I thought you could help me out with a project.”

His gaze darted between his two friends. “For school?”

“No. I want to do a series of seven fifteen-minute videos. One for each day of the week. I’d want voice-overs for some of them, real-time audio for others. I thought about setting up like a tripod and camera, just doing it myself. But that’s not the look I want.”

His gaze finally came back to hers, and she read interest in it. “What kind of videos?”

“Fitness. Yoga, cardio, strength training, and so on. To put on YouTube.”

“Maybe you’re messing with us.”

She shifted to Loren. His hair, painfully red and cut close to his head, framed a milk-white, freckled face. He had soft blue eyes and a good fifteen pounds of extra pudge.

She thought she could help him with that if he wanted.

“Why would I? I need somebody to video my segments, and I’ll pay fifty dollars for each one. That’s three-fifty for seven. I guess that’s negotiable, within reason.”

“I could think about it. When did you want to start?”

“Saturday morning—sunrise. I want to do segments at sunrise, and at sunset. I have a big terrace, and it would work for this.”

“I’d probably need assistants.”

Adrian ate more salad, considered. “Seventy-five per segment. Split it however you want.”

“What time’s sunrise?” Loren wondered.

Before Adrian could speak—because she’d looked it up—Teesha said, “Sunrise on Saturday, six-twenty-seven a.m. Sunset, seven-twenty p.m. EDT.”

“Don’t ask,” Loren suggested. “She just knows stuff like that.”

“Great. You’d need to get there in time to set up and whatever you need to do. I’ve got my address, and what I’ve outlined, the basic scripts.”

Adrian took a thumb drive out of her pocket, set it beside Hector’s tray. “Look it over, think it over, let me know.”

“Your mom’s the Yoga Baby lady, right?”

Adrian nodded at Teesha. “That’s right.”

“How come you don’t have her people do it? She’s got her own production company.”

“Because this is for me. It’s mine. So, if you decide to take the job, I’ll have you cleared to come up. It’ll probably take the whole weekend. Maybe longer. I don’t know how much postproduction time you’d need to get it done, get it up.”

“I’ll take a look, let you know maybe tomorrow.” Hector offered her a little smile. “You know, you really are screwed around here now. I hope it’s worth it for you.”

“Me, too.”

She got through the rest of the day by ignoring the smirks, the snide comments, and the snickers.

When she stepped back out into the air, Hector and his little tribe came after her.

“So hey, listen. I had a chance to look at some of your outline. Seems doable.”

“Great.”

“I’d want to see the space, though, before committing. Make sure it’ll work for what you’re after.”

“I can show you now if you’ve got time. I’m only a few blocks from here.”

“Now’s good.”

“We’re all going,” Teesha told her.

“Fine.”

“So …” As he trooped along beside her, Hector shoved up his glasses. “I took a look at a couple of your mother’s videos during my free period. Her production values are total, right? I’ve got some good equipment, but I’m not going to be able to match what she’s got going in the studio.”

“I don’t want what she’s got. I want mine.”

“I looked up stuff about her, and you.”

Adrian glanced back over her shoulder at Loren.

Debate team nerd, she remembered. Always picked last for any team in PE—and first to volunteer for hall monitor.

“And?”

“People are always running scams and stuff, so I wanted to take a look. Your mom seriously killed your dad.”

It wasn’t the first time someone had prodded her on it, but Adrian had to admit, Loren hit the most direct.

“He wasn’t my dad, he was my biological father. And he was trying to kill me at the time.”

“How come?”