Kevin and I had just gotten off the bus that afternoon when my cell phone rang. My heart jumped. Could it be Benny? Pulling off one of my mittens as I trudged up the recently shoveled front walk, I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and answered it, my head down to fend off the icy breeze blasting down the street.

“Hey, it’s me, Miko!” I heard.

I swallowed my disappointment and tried to sound cheerful. “Oh, hi! I’m just getting home. Hang on one second while I open my front door so my hand doesn’t freeze.”

“Paulie, I’m going to break the ice on all these puddles before I go inside. Paulie, did you hear me?” Kevin called.

He was already making his way up our sidewalk and smashing his heel down on all the ice he could find.

“Yes, I heard you. I’m on the phone, and I’m going in. It’s freezing out here,” I told my little brother.

The minute I was inside my house I went and stood over the heating grate in the front hall, pressing the cell phone to my ear.

“Hey, Meek, I’m back. What’s up?”

“So yeah, I ended up running into Ms. Delacroix after school, and we had this really great talk. She showed me some of her paintings that are up on her website. She is just phenomenal. And we got to talking about school and art, and I told her all about 4 Girls and showed her the cover art I created for that first issue. And guess what—she said she thought it was as professional a piece as she’d ever seen! She said the idea of drawing different girls swinging from the stars was really original, and that my use of color was really innovative, and that I was good at drawing faces and hands, which apparently a lot of people aren’t. She loved it!”

“Wow, Miko, that is so great!” I told my friend.

“I know, right?” Miko said. “She was really interested in 4 Girls, and she had tons of questions, especially when I told her our current issue was a collaboration with other students. Apparently she used to be an editorial director of this French art journal when she lived in Paris. In a way, it was kind of like what we’re doing with 4 Girls. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence?”

“It is,” I said, kicking off my shoes so I could stand on the grate and feel the heat directly on my feet. Of course Ms. Delacroix had worked at a real art magazine. That just figured.

“Oh, Paulina, she is so cool. We talked about painting and drawing, and she told me how she and her family lived in Paris when she was my age, and she used to go to the museums and see the famous paintings. I could have talked to her all day, but my dad had come to pick me up for one of my extra violin lessons, and I kind of lost track of the time. He sent me this pretty irritated text, so I had to run off.”

“What a bummer,” I said. “But it sounds like you had a good talk.”

“Oh, we really did,” Miko said. “I think we could actually be sort of friends, I mean, as much as you can with a teacher. Anyway, the reason I was calling is I had this idea. What if we asked Ms. Delacroix to be our faculty adviser for 4 Girls?”

“Faculty adviser?” I asked. “Do we, uh, need one of those? I’m not even sure what they do.”

“A faculty adviser would give us advice, some guidance,” Miko said. “I just think it would be really cool if she said yes. I mean, not only is she a real artist, but she’s edited an art journal herself. It could be really amazing for us!”

It seemed to me that 4 Girls was doing just fine on its own, without an adviser. It kind of sounded like we’d be making more work for ourselves, not less. But Miko sounded so excited, I didn’t want to just shoot the idea down. Was it such a bad thing to be pushed to be a little more professional? Yes, a tiny voice said inside my head.

“Well,” I said, “as soon as I’ve gotten warmed up and had a cup of hot chai, I’ll give Ivy a call and ask her what she thinks about it.”

“Oh, that would be—”

Miko’s voice broke off suddenly. “Hello? Miko, are you there?” I thought maybe my phone had dropped the call.

“I will,” I heard Miko’s voice say, slightly muffled as if she had her hand over the phone. “I am, Dad, I just—okay. Okay!”

I waited silently, feeling like I was eavesdropping on half of a private conversation.

“Hey, sorry about that. I have to go right now or my father is going to have a meltdown,” Miko said. “I’m supposed to be doing these music-theory workbooks he got. Talk to you later, okay? Bye!”

“Bye!” I said, a moment too late, because Miko had already hung up.

I walked to the kitchen, unzipping my coat along the way, and put the kettle on the stove. Miko had sounded so animated and excited before her father came to scold her for being on the phone. I couldn’t imagine having my mom do something like that.

Of the four of us, Miko was definitely the one under the most pressure. With her audition coming up soon, things were only going to get more intense. There were mornings she showed up at school looking so tired I wondered if she’d even slept. I really liked Miko, and I worried about her sometimes. I didn’t like to see my friend so stressed out.

I thought about asking the new art teacher to be our adviser. The more I thought about it, the more the idea worried me. We did things in our own way, working around people’s schedules. We didn’t really have an official process or even a set schedule for publishing 4 Girls—somehow it just got done. If one of us dropped the ball on something, someone else picked it up. What if a faculty adviser wanted to change all that? Especially one who had already announced she expected us to be professional in class. As the wind rattled the windows, I pulled the box of chai tea bags down from the shelf, stood close to the stove where the kettle was chugging away on the front burner, and called Ivy on my cell.

“Hiya,” I said when she answered. “So Miko just called all excited because she ran into Ms. Delacroix, and they had this great talk about art and everything. Miko showed her the cover she made for the first issue of 4 Girls, and I guess she really liked it.”

“Cool,” Ivy said. “Glad to see our Miko being appreciated.”

“Yeah, you should have heard her. They talked about Paris and museums and all that, and apparently she used to edit an art journal there or something. Miko was so impressed that she thinks we should ask Ms. Delacroix if she’ll be our faculty adviser.”

“Faculty adviser?” Ivy asked. “Who says we need one of those? Is this a new requirement from Principal Finley?”

I sighed, placing a tea bag into my mug and watching a jet of steam come from the teakettle.

“No, there’s no requirement. This is just Miko’s idea. I guess she thinks because Ms. Delacroix is a professional artist and editor that she’d somehow be helpful.”

“I sort of feel like we’re doing fine right now,” Ivy told me. “Why try and fix something that isn’t broken? We don’t need an adviser.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t think we need one, either. But the thing is, Miko seems to really want this. Her judgment is usually pretty good.”

“Well, yeah,” Ivy said as my teakettle began to whistle. “But she’s basing all this on exactly one class and one conversation. She doesn’t really know this teacher all that well. And we have no idea what she’d be like to work with. We’ve had total control over the content and the schedule of 4 Girls from the beginning. We’ve done things our way, in our own time, and it’s worked out. What if she wants to mess with all that? What if she wants to make it more rigid or something? It’s not like we can ask someone to advise our club, then fire them if we don’t like their input.”

“I totally see your point,” I said, pouring the steaming hot water into my mug. “And actually, I agree. It’s just . . . Ivy, Miko seemed so sure that this would be a good thing for us. You should have heard her just now, that is, until her father started yelling in the background for her to get off the phone. And hey, we don’t even know if Ms. Delacroix would accept. I’d hate to just reject the idea totally, when it’s obviously so important to Miko. Because Miko is important to us!”

“Well, what if we wait, take some time to get to know Ms. Delacroix better, and see how she operates day-to-day in class,” Ivy suggested.

I blew on my mug of chai, which smelled delicious as it steeped.

“I guess we could do it that way,” I said. “But I think Miko had the Collaboration Concepts issue in mind. She’s under so much pressure because of this Music Conservatory audition, and it’s only going to get worse the closer it gets. Plus, who even knows how long Ms. Delacroix is staying? I had two different art teachers in two years in elementary school. They don’t always stick around.”

My mother walked into the kitchen, blew me a kiss, and pulled a plate out of the refrigerator.

“Organic cheese-cube snacks,” she whispered, and I nodded and smiled as she placed the plate on the table. I would eat a few when I got off the phone, just to make her happy, but really I craved Cheetos.

“True,” Ivy replied. “And Miko does have good judgment on this stuff. I mean, it could end up being a really good thing. I just feel like it might be a bad idea to get us roped into something when we don’t know how it will end up working.”

I sighed, tried to take a sip of my chai, and put the mug back down when I found it was still too hot to drink. My mother was unwrapping a frozen casserole and preheating the oven. I hoped it was something good. The cold weather made me feel constantly starving. I wanted comfort food. Mashed potatoes. Lasagna. Sausages.

“Okay, what if we do this,” I began. “The whole theme of this issue is collaboration. We’ve been focusing on collaboration between us and the students, but what if we extend the concept to include faculty? We could ask Ms. Delacroix to be our adviser for this one specific issue. It works with the theme, plus we were talking about having a faculty judge for the competition, remember? So if we end up having a great experience, we could ask her to become our official adviser. If it ends up creating more work or we don’t all get along or whatever, then after this we just go back to the way things were.”

There was a brief silence. I tried my chai again. It was still hot, but ready to drink. It tasted delicious.

“Paulina, you may have a future as an ambassador,” Ivy said. “That is a brilliant idea.”

“Cool!” I said. “Miko will be so psyched. Though I guess we should check with Tally, too, to make sure it’s okay with her.”

“You know Tally, she’s usually on board with just about anything. But I’ll shoot her a text,” Ivy said. “And I’ll let you know when I hear back.”

“Perfect!” I said. “Then I can call Miko. Actually, I probably shouldn’t call her. I don’t want her to get in any more trouble. I’ll e-mail her. I’m sure she’ll want to be the one to ask Ms. Delacroix.”

“Coolio,” Ivy said.

The front door slammed, I heard a dull thud, then Kevin shot into the kitchen, almost colliding with my mother.

“Kevin, my goodness,” she exclaimed. “You could have knocked me down.”

“I have frostbite!” he yelled, holding his hands out. “I just saw Luke Zimmerman, and he said at least two of my fingers will probably fall off!”

“Is that Kevin I hear? What’s going on?” Ivy asked.

“Apparently he has frostbite,” I told Ivy as my mother took both of Kevin’s hands in her own and rubbed them briskly. “He’ll probably die.”

Kevin stuck his tongue out at me.

“Well, tell him I enjoyed knowing him,” Ivy said. “So listen, do you want to talk about today? About Benny?”

I turned to face the cabinets and lowered my voice. “I totally, totally do,” I said. “But I can’t right now. Can we talk tonight? I’ll be in my room later doing homework.”

“Definitely,” Ivy said. “Call me when you have some privacy.”

“I will,” I said, relieved. “Thanks—bye.”

I put my phone onto the counter. “Ivy says if you end up dying of frostbite, she enjoyed knowing you.”

“I’m not going to die,” Kevin said, rolling his eyes. “You don’t die of having your fingers drop off.”

“How about we get a little hot chocolate into you, Kev,” my mother said, putting the kettle back on the burner. “Just to make sure you get warmed up, and you get to keep all ten of your fingers. Toes too.”

“Can I have whipped cream?” Kevin asked.

“We never even have whipped cream, Kev,” I told him.

“No, we do! Left over from when we had pumpkin pie at Christmas!” Kevin insisted. “I want a huge squirt of it on top. Okay, Mom?”

The kettle, which was still hot, had already begun to whistle.

“I think that can be arranged,” my mother said with a smile as she took down a package of hot chocolate and poured it into Kevin’s favorite mug.

“But it would be really cool to have a finger fall off,” Kevin said. “Especially if it happened at school! In the cafeteria! I could send my food back, and they’d find a finger in it! Wouldn’t that be hilarious?”

My mind was back on Benny and on how long I would have to wait before I could call Ivy to discuss my theory that Benny had totally ignored me after art class. But suddenly what Kevin had just said appeared as a picture in my mind. I entertained a brief vision of Shelby Simpson finding a finger sticking out of her chicken chow mein, and I smiled.

“You know, Kev,” I said. “I think you’re right. That would be hilarious.”