When Penelope stepped off the school bus after her suspension, she knew exactly what she had to do, and it didn’t involve watching Vicki and Stacy sip coffee with half-and-half in the cafeteria.

Instead, she walked across the field. Her stomach fell as her feet treaded the very place where Tillie had been attacked. She bit her lip, still tender from the dentist, and followed the crooked walkway she’d seen Cass take. Penelope had never been to this part of campus before. Behind her a voice screamed, “Hey, man, wait up!” Another yelled: “Kaufman, do we have glee club now or what?” She kept going.

The crooked walkway became a set of steps. Penelope followed them down and found herself in front of The Elston Art Center. Inside, it wasn’t as clean as Gritzfield Hall or as newly renovated as the Solden Science Center. The paint on the walls was peeling, and the hallways were lined with canvases in all different sizes. At the end of the hallway, off to the left, was a room called The Annex.

The door creaked open to reveal wood tables covered in blank pieces of paper and littered with charcoal pencils, rulers, and markers (markers!). There were older girls sipping Pepsi Light and listening to Walkmen. And there, in a corner, huddled over their Earth Science textbooks, were Cass and Tillie.

Penelope didn’t even know how she’d known where to find them. So how come it seemed like they were expecting her? They looked at her at once, then stood up and grabbed their backpacks.

There is no chance, thought Penelope. Say something, she told herself. Talk!

Cass and Tillie had their backs to her now. She watched them walk away from her — was that still a bit of blue ink on Tillie’s neck? was that the bumblebee shirt Cass was wearing? — and then Cass turned to Penelope and, with a flick of the wrist, motioned for her to follow.

I deserve whatever I get, thought Penelope, marching several steps behind them.

I’ll take it.

Except all Cass and Tillie did was give her a tour. First, the girls’ bathroom on the second floor of the Solden Science Center, then the girls’ bathroom in the gym. Then Gritzfield Hall. It was a silent tour. They didn’t want to talk; they just wanted to show her that the writing was gone.

Over the weekend and during Penelope’s suspension, all of the bathrooms had been repainted. It had been part of a larger maintenance job, the repainting; the sinks had new faucets, chipped tiles had been replaced. But, regardless — whether the point was to remove the graffiti or not — the writing was gone. Penelope stared in awe at the bright white walls. They look so clean, she thought. It’s like nobody was here.

The five-minute warning bell clanged as they emerged from Gritzfield Hall, and facing Cass and Tillie, standing in the cold, Penelope willed herself to speak. Out of her mouth flew a hundred embarrassed apologies, a thousand “I’m so sorry’s.” She couldn’t find the words to say exactly what she felt, but Tillie and Cass seemed to understand. Somehow they knew that even if the words hadn’t found their way out yet, they were somewhere inside Penelope. It was just a matter of time.

January turned to February, and Penelope spent the break between semesters watching Rick and Monica’s affair fizzle on General Hospital, playing video games at Baronet with Nathaniel, looking for Moe Was Heres with Tillie and Cass, and studying Algebra with her tutor. She was a dorm mate of Jenny’s, and sometimes after their sessions, she’d eat dinner with them, listening to Elvis Costello during dessert. Cass’s favorite song was “Watching the Detectives,” which was actually a violent song that had nothing to do with detectives, but she liked to pretend it did.

Every now and then, Penelope ate dinner at Empire Szechuan with Stacy and Shirley Commack. Ben even came along sometimes. Shirley Commack was wary of him until he told her he didn’t believe in thinking about colleges until at least eleventh grade, and, anyway, he was thinking of joining the Peace Corps. Sometimes Penelope would meet Stacy and Ben at Baronet for video games. Ben loved the Upper West Side, and through his eyes Stacy learned to like it again, too — so Penelope had to figure that was a good thing.

Still, there were some afternoons when Penelope passed Stacy’s apartment building and felt the strangeness of it all. To not even go up! To not even say hi to the doorman or Bernice! She’d force herself to keep going, then trip her way up Broadway, the immensity of loss churning in her belly, feeling like the world was tilted.

But then she’d think about her dream about the rope ladder. She’d see Stacy scaling the rope ladder; she’d see herself falling. She wasn’t sure what it meant, if it meant anything at all. But she sure slept a lot better not having that dream anymore.

Life was easier not having the bad thought, too. Sometimes Penelope even let herself have a new thought: that she and Stacy might match again someday, that it was just a matter of time.

And, so, Stacy got closer to Vicki and, to Pia’s dismay, to Annabella. Not long after Stacy met Ben, Annabella found a boyfriend, too, a new kid she met in her F. L. class. With their first kiss came the collapse of The Pledge and the No Newks crusade. Dr. Alvin’s threats became moot, The No Newks Newksletter ceased publication, and No Newkers traded their NO NEWKS T-shirts for college ones like the upperclassmen wore.

It was over, despite Pia Smith’s desperate attempts to rally the troops, despite everything. Annabella had broken her own rules — or maybe it was more like the rules were changing. Or maybe that was just growing up.