What he really meant was I was a geek and he was already having sex with girls older than he was.

Not that I’d had a crush on Stevie.

And let’s not forget the time the teacher asked us in English what our favorite book was and Heather said, in front of everyone, that my favorite book must be Matilda because I could relate to having parents who hated me.

I’d suspected at the time that Steph had let something slip about my relationship with my parents when she’d attended Heather’s thirteenth birthday sleepover. Vicki, like a true friend, had turned down the invitation, but Steph had said she thought that would be rude.

She didn’t think it would be rude. She was just afraid of not being popular.

I was mad at her but I hadn’t said anything. Vicki said enough for the both of us, Steph stopped talking to us for a few weeks and then after a while we were all friends again. Like nothing had happened.

But Steph’s attitude now brought it all flooding back. “If she’d called you STD Steph to your face and behind your back for an entire year, would you have forgiven her by now?”

My friend’s cornflower blue eyes widened. “Did she call me that?”

“Probably,” Vicki muttered.

“I’m making a point. The girl chanted ‘Comet, Comet, she makes me want to vomit’ at me every day for weeks.”

Steph exhaled. “Look, Com, I didn’t mean to be insensitive. I know she was mean to you. But she hasn’t bothered you in years. Come to the party.”

If it was Heather’s party, that meant the guests would be every kid at our school who had no idea who I was. Meaning the ones who were involved in extracurricular stuff like...sports. Their social adeptness, their ability to walk into a room and just start chatting and laughing with complete strangers, was foreign to me. I was socially awkward and pretty certain no one was interested in hearing anything I had to say anyway.

Why would I put myself in an uncomfortable position, go to a party that would make me insecure and miserable, when I could be reading a book that made me feel giddy with anticipation?

“I can’t.” I shrugged, stepping back into my hallway. “I have to have a shower and get stuff ready for school tomorrow.”

Vicki frowned at me while Steph threw up her hands. “What was the point?”

I flinched but shrugged, trying to appear as apologetic as possible.

“C’mon.” Steph grabbed Vicki’s hand. “It’s freezing standing here. Let’s go.”

Vicki gave me a half-hearted wave and one last look I couldn’t decipher, but hoped wasn’t irritation. I watched my friends stride off down my garden path. They stepped outside, closed the gate and walked away along the esplanade.

The Studio, our house, sat right on Portobello Beach. Which meant I just had to walk out of my garden and across the esplanade, and I stepped right onto the beach. My bedroom, a guest bedroom, the kitchen, sitting room and a bathroom were situated on the ground floor of the white-painted brick midcentury building we called home. Upstairs, taking full advantage of the sea views, was Carrie’s art studio and my dad’s office. My mother was famous among the art crowd as a successful and generously compensated mixed media artist. My dad was a writer. He’d won a few literary awards for his second novel, The Street, a commercially successful book that had even been made into a British television mini-drama. The money from that novel paid for our house in this sought-after location. Although he did well with his books, my dad had never achieved the same heights with his subsequent novels, and I think he kind of enjoyed playing the part of the frustrated artist.

Most people thought it must be pretty cool to have semifamous artist parents.

It wasn’t.

At least not my parents.

The most thought my parents have ever given me was in choosing my name. For two weeks I was Baby Caldwell while they struggled to find something unique they could agree upon. Then they gave me a name I couldn’t possibly live up to and proceeded to treat me with offhand kindness, disinterest and sometimes outright negligence. I was an accident, and not a happy one. My parents were too much in love with their art and each other to have any love left to spare for me.

That’s why my friends were important to me. But so was self-preservation.

I shut the front door and locked it, then leaned back against it as a sudden headache flared behind my eyes. This wasn’t the first time I’d refused to hang out with Vicki and Steph.

When we were kids we were all quiet, geeky, book-types, but when we got to high school they started to change. Steph decided she wanted to be an actress and even won a part in a local advert for a soft drink company. She came out of her shell, landing parts in the school plays, and as the years turned her from an average blonde girl into a stunning teenager, she got so much attention from boys that she became boy-crazy.

Vicki seemed happy to spread her wings, too, socially. And where Steph’s bubbly loudness got her what she wanted, Vicki’s laid-back, effortless cool made people flit to her. She was the kind of girl everyone wanted to be friends with. She was my BFF, and seeing her friendship circle grow was hard for me.

I would admit to being a little jealous.

Now I was worried, as well.

If I kept refusing to hang out with them if it involved hanging with other people, would Vicki and Steph one day give up on me?

The thought caused angry butterflies to take flight in my stomach and tears to prick my eyes. Some days I wished I could be more like my friends. But if it meant pretending to be something I wasn’t, exhausting myself trying to please people who didn’t really care about getting to know the real me, then I chose lonerhood. I chose books.

I slammed into my bedroom, not caring if the noise jerked my dad out of whatever sentence he was taking a painstaking amount of time over, and launched myself onto my bed. Lying flat on my stomach, I stared across my large bedroom at the shelves that lined two walls. Books, books and more books. Just the sight of all the shapes and sizes, all the colors, all the textures, stretching up on bookshelves that were fitted to the ceiling, made me content. No matter what was happening in my life, in my room, I had over eight hundred worlds to disappear into, and over a thousand others on the e-reader on my nightstand. Worlds that were better than this one. Worlds where there were people I understood, and who if they knew me would understand me. Worlds where the boys weren’t like the boys in this one. They actually cared. They were brave and loyal and swoonworthy. They didn’t burp your name in your ear as they passed you in the hall or bump into you a million times a day because they “didn’t see you standing there.”

I stretched across the bed, picked up the paperback I was reading and flipped it open.

No way was some cruddy party hosted by Heather McBitcherson better than the world I was holding in my hands.

THE FRAGILE ORDINARYSAMANTHA YOUNG

2

If only you studied me

As hard as you study that canvas

It would set me free.

Instead bit by bit I vanish.

—CC

My dad wandered into the kitchen as I stood at the counter eating a bowl of cereal. As he strolled toward the coffee machine with his hair in disarray and his pajamas crumpled, he stared at me curiously.

He reached for a mug in the cupboard above the coffee machine. “You’re in uniform.”

I looked down at myself in misery. I loved clothes. I loved color and shape and throwing things together that other people might not think worked but that felt fun and adventurous to me.

I did not like the black blazer I was wearing over a scratchy white shirt, or the black pleated skirt with its frumpy knee-length hemline. I’d tucked in the waist, lifting the hem to just above my knees, so it didn’t look as ridiculous. The blazer had gold piping and a gold crest over the left breast pocket. Matching it was the black tie with the small gold crest beneath its knot. My only concession to fun was my black Irregular Choice shoes. They had a midheel, closed just below my ankle and laced up. The fun was in the bright gold stars that made up the eyelets for the laces.

“When did you start back at school?” Dad turned to me once his coffee was brewing. He crossed his arms, then one ankle over the other, and peered at me over the top of his glasses.

“Today.”