BESIDES BEING FORCED to undress in public, there’s another form of twisted abuse going on in the Hubert C. Frost Middle School gym, and it’s called Sleeterball. Sleeterball was created by Colonel Sleeter, who taught P.E. at the school for like a million years and, lucky for me, retired the year before I got here. When dodgeball was outlawed in the county in 1998, Colonel Sleeter dreamed up this supposedly more humane version, so it’s basically the same game with a somewhat lighter ball, fewer ball-launchers, more inner-circle victims, and specific (but completely ignored) rules about hitting only between the shoulders and belt.

When you “play” Sleeterball, it becomes pretty clear that the school board overlooked the fact that Colonel Sleeter had extensive military expertise in “ballistics and trajectory weapons,” which really means missiles and bombs.

So it’s Tuesday, and I am in the middle of the Sleeterball circle, scared out of my wits. There are five of us left inside, and only one of them has a larger body mass index than me. His name is Charles Wooten, and he moves faster than you’d think—certainly too fast to hide behind. And yes, I’ve tried.

One of the other potential casualties is none other than Brynne Shawnson.

Amber Menendez, who seems to be looking for extra credit, shoots the ball across the circle at us, and we all scamper successfully and breathe a collective sigh of relief.

But it gets worse, of course. Tamberlin catches the ball. She narrows her eyes and looks at me. I hop around, having abandoned any sense of dignity for the more important goal of survival. I run to the back of the huddle, which opens up and exposes me. We are all running around like roaches under the nozzle of a can of Raid. It is every roach for himself.

Finally, having nothing to protect me from Tamberlin’s angry glare, I crouch and cover my face. I bring my arms close in to my body. I don’t have much, chestwise, but what I do have, I would like to protect. My body squeezes up and prepares for the pain. And then I hear the slap of rubber meeting flesh. And then a wail.

I look up. Brynne Shawnson is doubled over, rubbing the red welt on her thigh. Her face is crunched up like she’s about to cry. “You’re out,” Tamberlin says, and cracks her illegal gum.

Brynne stumbles toward the bleachers, and I blink and look at Tamberlin. She gazes back at me vacantly. I look for her eyebrows to lower, her lip to curl at me in disgust, for some sign that she still hates me. And then—

Thwack.

The ball has hit me in the back of my knee—Amber’s doing—and my legs buckle. The sting of the rubber is almost unbearable. “Whoops, sorry, Olivia,” Amber says, and appears to mean it.

“Why weren’t you looking?” Charles asks, and gives me a look that tells me how stupid I am, just in case I had any doubts about it.

I scoot out of the circle just as Tamberlin fires the ball back in. It hits Charles with a rich splat, square in the belly. “Awwww,” he moans, and bends forward, his hands on his stomach.

I am back on the bleachers by the time he throws up. Everyone acts like it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in weeks.

But I am busy mulling it over, marveling at the fact that Tamberlin chose to assault Brynne instead of me. Marveling at the fact that Brynne is sitting thirty feet away from me, alone on the bleachers, nursing not only her injury but also her ego.

Because I can’t exactly hop across the court and stick a piece of lame Freedent into Tamberlin’s hand, I stare at her until she glances in my direction. And then I “reward” her with a smile.

Of course she doesn’t smile back. But what she does do is look away very quickly, and then back at me, and away quickly again. And it’s the weird nervousness in her glances that makes me really, truly believe that yes, Mandy could be right. And yes, Delia could be right. And yes, maybe even Phoebe’s right.

It feels too good to be true. Could the plan really be working?

That afternoon, Corny and I go to Kisses’s. By now she’s mastered the sod, although she still won’t step out onto the lawn. But today I get this wild idea all on my own. I take a few extra patio stones and make a short path on the grass. You can tell she’s not happy about it, but I get her to walk three stones out. She’s surrounded by all this enemy territory, but she manages to stay sitting on the third stone for close to five pretty calm minutes.

She’s almost there. And maybe we are too. Like I said. Maybe it really is working.