“I’M SORT OF LOOKING forward to this,” Deanie said. It was the next morning, and she was watching herself in the mirror as she blow-dried her hair.

“I’m not,” Clara said.

“Remember when we were little and we’d go to Fun World, and they would have statues of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and Tweety Bird beside the rides, and if you weren’t as big as Tweety, then you wouldn’t get to go?”

Clara nodded. She was sitting on the bed, hands in her lap, shoulders sagging. She had spent a miserable night. She had tossed and turned for hours, trying to get to sleep. And when she did sleep at last, she dreamed she had vomited all over her blouse and when she tried to wipe it off, she got the vomit all over her hands, and then she wiped her hands on her skirt and on her face and arms and then—she was desperate now, because John D was coming—on her hair and on her sunglasses, and when John D arrived with that small knowing smile of his, she was standing there with her entire body covered with vomit.

Now, this morning, still feeling ill, she was faced with a living nightmare. They were all going to Seven Continents for a day of rides and fun, and the thought of sitting in the backseat next to John D made her shudder.

“Promise me I won’t have to sit by John D,” she asked Deanie for the third time.

“I used to get just desperate.” Deanie went on as if Clara had not spoken. “I’d run up to every statue and stand there. ‘Am I big enough? Am I big enough?’” She stuck out her tongue and panted like a puppy.

“I don’t remember that.”

“That’s cause you were big enough,” Deanie said, giving her hair a final flip.

“I’ve always been big enough.”

“Anyway, the thing I remember most—the real blow—was that to go in Haunted City you had to be as big as Casper the Friendly Ghost—and I wasn’t—and I cried so hard, my nose ran all over my ice cream.”

“Girls, are you ready?”

“And believe me, snotty peach ice cream is—”

“Girls!” their father called louder. “What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing, Dad,” Deanie called back cheerfully. “We’re on our way.”

“Promise me,” Clara said. She got off the bed and crossed the room to Deanie.

“What?” Deanie asked. She was still admiring her hair. “Never get between me and the mirror,” she said to Clara, laughing. “My hair only looks good at the beach for fifteen seconds. Then I start to look like Frankenstein’s bride.”

Clara shifted out of the way. “Promise!”

“What?” Deanie asked.

“That I won’t have to sit by him.” There was something about the thought of touching John D …“I just hate to sit by people who don’t like me.”

“Everybody feels that way.”

“Not like me.”

“Yes, like you. That’s why I almost flunked math—because I had to sit by Marie Edwards, and we have hated each other since first grade. She would deliberately make mistakes so that when I copied off her paper I’d get them wrong.”

“Promise, Deanie.”

“Listen, I can’t promise anything. I have no control over these terrible two weeks whatsoever, or over these terrible people.”

“You do! You can! Just promise to sit in the middle!”

Deanie turned away from the mirror, satisfied. She grinned. “I am a puppet in the hands of Fate.” She wiggled her way comically to the door, ankles wobbling, arms flailing helplessly in the air as her strings were pulled from above.

“That’s not funny,” Clara called after her. “That’s the way I really feel.”

Slowly, arms dangling, shoulders drooping, she followed her sister into the living room.