CHAPTER 1

When I showed up for the first day of seventh grade, I’d already color-coded my schedule.

Gray was for periods that were definitely going to be miserable (math, science and technology, social studies, Spanish, health, homeroom, assembly).

Yellow was for periods that might be okay (English, PE).

Red was for periods that I was actually looking forward to (art, music, lunch).

School had barely begun, and already this year was looking like just one big expanse of gray.

Social studies was the first class of the day, and the teacher, Mr. Valdez, began by handing out blank paper and telling us to draw maps of the United States. “Don’t stress over this. I don’t expect you to know where every state is,” he said.

Which was a relief, since I didn’t know where any states were, and even though I was accustomed to failing to meet expectations, I’d hate to do so on the first assignment of the year.

“Just do your best for today,” Mr. Valdez went on. “Put down whatever states you can remember, wherever you think they go. Trust me, by the end of the semester, you’ll be able to draw this map with your eyes closed!”

Which is not true. I can’t even draw my own face with my eyes closed, and I’ve been working on that for years. It always winds up with the nose and mouth on top of each other and the ears way off somewhere in space.

“Please take the next ten minutes to work on this,” Mr. Valdez instructed.

I started out trying to follow the assignment to draw a faithful map of the country, but then I wound up going in sort of a different direction . . .

“Okay,” Mr. Valdez said once our ten minutes were up, “now I’d like you to share your map with the student sitting next to you.”

Naturally the student sitting next to me was My Friend Daniel, and naturally he just about died laughing when he looked at my map. Which would have been fine, because I knew what I’d done was kind of ridiculous, and I knew My Friend Daniel would appreciate it. But what wasn’t fine was that he then tapped on the shoulder of Polly, the girl sitting in front of him, and said, “Hey, take a look at what Maddie drew. She thinks the state of Colorado is actually shaped like a mountain!”

“I do not,” I objected. “I just thought it’d be more interesting to draw a mountain than to draw a rectangle in the middle of the page and call it Colorado. I was capturing the essence of the state. Colorado’s essence is mountainous.”

Now Polly’s two best friends, Molly and Holly, also turned around to look at my map.

“What?” giggled Molly. “Why didn’t you just do the assignment, Maddie?”

Holly just gave me a look. Holly rarely says much—at least not loud enough for me to hear, though she’s always whispering with her friends. Instead, she just communicates by looking sort of disgusted.

The three of them held up their maps, which all looked pretty much the same and pretty much like every other map of America that I’d ever seen.

“I was being creative, Molly and Polly and Holly,” I told them wearily.

“Who are you calling Molly and Polly and Holly?” asked Polly.

“You three.”

“But none of those is my name,” said Molly. “My name is Adrianne.”

“And my name is Dahlina,” said Polly. “You know that.”

I turned to the last girl and asked, “Do you have anything to add?”

“Not really,” she said. “My name actually is Holly.”

“You might as well all have rhyming names,” I said, “since it seems like you want to be as similar to one another as possible.”

Of course they’re not exactly the same—for one thing, Holly is white, Polly is Indian, and Molly is black, plus they all have different body shapes and hair colors. But none of this stops them from acting like identical triplets or clones.

Molly rolled her eyes. “Why are you so weird?”

“Wasn’t her map weird?” asked My Friend Daniel. “That’s why I wanted to show it to you guys. I was like, whoa, Maddie’s map is so weird, I bet they’d want to see how weird it is!”

“You are not helping, My Friend Daniel,” I told him.

“See, even that is weird,” commented Polly. “Why do you call him My Friend Daniel?”

“Because Daniel is his name,” I answered, “and ‘My Friend’ is an honorific. You know, like how you’d say ‘Prince William’ instead of just ‘William’ or ‘Captain Underpants’ instead of just ‘Underpants.’ ‘My Friend’ is Daniel’s title.”

They stared at me.

“You don’t have to call him My Friend Daniel,” I reassured them. “He’s not your friend.”

“But I could be,” Daniel interjected, still smiling. “I am fully ready to be Anybody’s Friend Daniel!”

“Eyes to the front,” Mr. Valdez said from his desk. “Time to start talking about America, folks.”

The Three Meansketeers turned back around. I spent the rest of the period refusing to look at My Friend Daniel, except to occasionally glare at him.

“Do you think they want to be friends with me?” asked Daniel as the period ended and he watched Molly and Holly and Polly run for the door like a school of fish.

“Um,” I said.

My Friend Daniel didn’t wait for my reply. “They definitely seem to want to be friends with me,” he said with a nod. “Definitely. I’m going to invite them to my bar mitzvah.”

And somehow I’m the weird one?