CHAPTER 3

Yes it could, as it turned out.

“Mrs. Bonneville doesn’t take any guff,” my new homeroom teacher announced, right after she called out “Catriona Starr” and I said “Present.”

I had absolutely no clue what guff was, but I dutifully replied “Yes, ma’am” anyway. In Texas everybody says “ma’am” and “sir,” but I guess they don’t all that much here in Oregon, because every head in the classroom swiveled around to take a look at the weird new kid.

“And, um, it’s pronounced ‘Katrina,’” I added. Mrs. Bonneville had called me “Ca-tree-oh-na,” the way it’s spelled. “But I just go by Cat.” I didn’t bother trying to explain that the odd spelling was Scottish, or that I’d been named for my great-great-grandmother. Well, for her and for an asteroid, too. Can you believe there’s an asteroid named Catriona? My mother said she couldn’t resist, what with her being an astronaut and all.

But the asteroid wasn’t something I wanted to bring up on the first day at a new school. Not unless I wanted to assure myself a spot on the bottom rung of the popularity ladder.

Mrs. Bonneville frowned. “Mrs. Bonneville doesn’t like to be interrupted, Cat,” she continued, and proceeded to enlighten me on the rest of her list of rules. “Mrs. Bonneville doesn’t like chewing gum, or tardiness, or cell phones in class, and most of all Mrs. Bonneville doesn’t like sass.”

Great. My new teacher was the kind of person who referred to herself in the third person. Hawk Creek Middle School was not off to a very good start.

“Mrs. Bonneville doesn’t think you should sit here,” said Olivia a few hours later in the cafeteria.

Piper Philbin burst out laughing. So did all the rest of Olivia’s friends. I just stood there by the lunch table feeling stupid. Even the knowledge that my lunch bag held an Iz special—peanut butter and honey sandwich, carrot sticks, an apple, and a homemade chocolate chip cookie—didn’t help. Not that I should have expected anything else from my stepsister, but still, it was my very first day at this school, and you’d think she’d make at least a tiny effort to make me feel welcome, like any other normal person on the planet.

But noooo, not Olivia.

I turned away quickly so that she wouldn’t catch me blinking back tears. As I moved through the cafeteria, it struck me that it wasn’t all that different from the one back home in Texas. It’s strange how once you get to middle school, everybody splits up into different groups. In elementary school nobody cares whose table you sit at, but the minute you hit sixth grade—wham! I spotted the table with all the jocks right away because they were the loudest, and I already knew where the popular kids sat—with my stepsister, naturally. Drama kids (green fingernail polish, weird hair), check. Nerds (busy trading Elfwood cards), check. Skateboarders (baggy shorts and hoodies), check. Finally I spotted my people: the band kids.

The only bright spot in my morning so far had been band. When I’d walked into the music room, I’d instantly felt at home.

Mr. Morgan, the band director, practically swooned when I played my bassoon for him.

“Now, that,” he exclaimed when I finished, clasping his hands to his chest dramatically, “is music!”

I could tell right away I was going to like Mr. Morgan. He was young and energetic and funny. Whenever anyone hit a sour note, which was pretty often—this was middle school band, after all—he’d cry, “Oh, my delicate, shell-like ears!” and clap his hands over them protectively. Then he’d smile right away, to show us he wasn’t really mad.

After band practice Mr. Morgan took me aside and asked what kind of musical experience I’d had back in Texas. His eyebrows shot up when I told him I played with the Houston Youth Symphony.

“Too bad you got here so late in the year,” he said. “The Portland Youth Philharmonic is just finishing up their season. We sure could use you in Hawkwinds, though.”

“What’s Hawkwinds?”

“A wind ensemble I started last year for some of the more advanced musicians,” he explained. “They’re playing in the talent show next week. The trio could happily become a quartet, if you’d like to join. We could use a talented bassoonist.”

I signed up right then and there.

“You’ll like the other kids in the group,” Mr. Morgan told me. “Rani Kumar plays the flute, and her brother, Rajit, is our oboist. They just moved here last summer, so they’re still pretty new to the school too. And Juliet Rodriguez is our clarinetist. You should get to know them.”

I spotted the three of them at the band table and crossed the cafeteria to where they were sitting.

“You’re Cat, right?” said a pretty, dark-haired girl, smiling up at me.

I smiled back. The little knot in my stomach that Olivia and Piper Fleabrain had put there started to untie itself, and I took a seat. “And you’re Rani and you play the flute, right?”

“Uh-huh.” She pointed across the table at a boy who could almost have been her twin. “This is my brother, Rajit. He’s in eighth grade, so he thinks he’s better than the rest of us.”

A glint of mischief danced in Rajit’s eyes. “That’s because I am.”

The girl sitting on the other side of Rani started to laugh. Leaning forward, she waved and said, “Hi! I’m Juliet Rodriguez.” Her shiny hair was dark like Rani’s, but she wore it really long instead of to her shoulders. My hair was somewhere in between theirs in length, and plain old boring brown by comparison.

“Are you going to join Hawkwinds?” Juliet continued. “I saw Mr. Morgan in the hall a few minutes ago, and he said you played with the Houston Youth Symphony.”

I nodded shyly, taking my sandwich out of my bag.

“Cool.”

“So you’re from Texas?” said Rajit.

I nodded again. “I came to live with my dad. I’m Olivia Haggerty’s stepsister.”

The table fell silent. Rani’s smile vanished. “Oh,” she said cautiously, exchanging a glance with Juliet. “That’s nice.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. I knew exactly what they were thinking. “Don’t worry,” I told them. “We’re nothing at all alike.”

Rani flashed me a grin. “That’s a relief,” she said. “Olivia is, well—”

“Annoying?” I suggested helpfully.

“Big-time,” she agreed.

Now that the ice was broken, the four of us started to chatter away.

“Mr. Morgan said you guys are pretty new to Portland too?” I said to Rani and her brother.

“Yep,” said Rajit. “We moved here from L.A. at the end of last summer.”

“Our parents are originally from Mumbai, though,” added Rani, answering my unspoken question.

“India! Wow. Have you ever visited?”

They both nodded. “Our grandparents still live there, and a bunch of our aunts and uncles and cousins,” said Rani. “We’re going back again this summer.”

“How about you, Juliet?”

“Native Oregonian,” she mumbled through a bite of tuna fish sandwich. “They call us Webfeet. Because of the rain, get it?” She pointed to the cafeteria window, which was streaked with droplets.

They asked about my family, and I told them about my dad and Iz. Their eyes widened when I explained that my mother was an astronaut.

“Really? No kidding?” said Rani.

“She’s on the International Space Station right now. That’s how come I’m here in Portland.”

“Wow,” said Rajit. “That is totally awesome.” He flashed me another smile, and I smiled back. “How long will you be here?”

“Through the end of the school year.”

“That’s a long time to be away from home,” said Rani.

I glanced across the cafeteria at Olivia. “Tell me about it.”

Rani and Rajit and Juliet wanted to know all about NASA, and how I liked living in a high-rise building. I took my cell phone out of my backpack and showed them some pictures of our condo, and of my mother in her astronaut suit, and of my friends.

“Who’s that?” asked Rani, pointing to a boy with reddish hair and a gap-toothed grin.

“A.J. D’Angelo,” I told her. “He’s my best friend. He lives two floors down from us back in Houston.”

“Does he play in the youth symphony, too?”

I laughed. “Nope.” A.J. might be a computer genius, but he couldn’t carry a tune in a paper bag. Not that he didn’t try—he played trombone in our middle school band.

By the time the bell rang a few minutes later, I was on my way to having three new friends.

“What classes do you have this afternoon?” asked Rani as we cleared away our lunches.

I pulled my schedule from the pocket of my jeans and consulted it. “Uh, PE and then science.”

Her face lit up. “Me too! Come on, I’ll show you where the lockers are.”

I followed her out of the cafeteria feeling a lot more cheerful. It didn’t even bother me when we passed Olivia and Piper in the hall and I noticed them whispering. Who cared what they thought?

The cheerful feeling lasted right up until the moment when Ms. Suarez, our PE teacher, blew her whistle.

“Okay, girls!” she hollered. “Let’s beat those rainy Monday blues with a little hoops fun. Team captains—Olivia Haggerty and Taylor Brown.”

My heart sank. Basketball? How about a slam-dunk game of humiliation instead? When you’re barely five feet tall, basketball rarely qualifies as fun. I was about to go down in flames.

And my stepsister was happy to shove me into the fire.

Olivia and Taylor flipped a coin for first pick, and Olivia won. She looked straight at me and smiled. It was not a nice smile.

“Rani Kumar,” she said.

Rani gave me a regretful look and crossed the gym to stand beside my stepsister. I steeled myself for torture, Olivia-style. It was uncanny the way she knew exactly how to bug me the most in any given situation. By picking the first friend I’d made at school all day, she was hanging me out to dry. There was no way Olivia was going to pick me for her team, and the other girl, Taylor, didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, so no way would she pick me either until she was forced to. And since she was picking second and there were an even number of girls, that meant not only would I not be on the same team as Rani, but I would also be the absolute last person picked.

Which I was.

“You should go home to Texas,” Olivia whispered to me in the locker room afterward.

Can I please go home to Texas? I wrote that night in my daily e-mail to my mother. The D’Angelos said I could stay with them.

The answer was no, of course.

Pull up your socks, she replied. You’re a star—and a Starr! Things with you and Olivia are bound to get better, once you settle in.

But they didn’t, and the rest of the week pretty much went downhill from there. Tuesday and Wednesday were no different. Olivia kept up her campaign to send me packing, and the only bright spots at school were band and Hawkwinds practice. Especially Hawkwinds practice. I slipped into the trio-turned-quartet effortlessly, and Mr. Morgan found us a new piece to play for the talent show, a Bach fugue that was one of my favorites.

But even that couldn’t make up for Olivia’s Reign of Terror, as A.J. had dubbed it. My stepsister talked about me constantly to her friends behind my back and made a big show of giving me the cold shoulder whenever she could, which was often, since we were in the same homeroom and most of the same classes.

Life at home wasn’t any better. Because it had been raining nonstop since my arrival, I couldn’t even escape outside for a walk. In order to avoid Olivia, I was forced to spend most of my time in either the kitchen or the living room, where Geoffrey would pounce on me to play LEGOs with him. He’d been following me around like a puppy ever since I arrived, which was cute and everything, but sometimes a person just wants to be alone, you know?

The problem was, there was no place to do that in a house as tiny as my dad’s.

If I went upstairs to our room, Olivia would inevitably be there talking about me on the phone to Piper, or worse, sitting there with Piper in person, the two of them making loud, snarky remarks about my clothes (what was wrong with jeans and a T-shirt?), my hair (why should I have to brush it more than once a day?), my lack of makeup (who wanted to smear that goop all over their face?), and everything else they could think of. Oh, and forget practicing my bassoon. I had to barricade myself in my dad’s office if I wanted to do that, otherwise Olivia would moan about it hurting her ears.

On top of everything else there were the stupid dioramas. My bed was an island in a sea of art supplies, as Olivia’s stuff had soon crept over into my half of the room. Iz had spotted the duct tape on the floor that first night and made Olivia take it off, but it quickly reappeared in the latest Barbie vignette—an exact replica of our bedroom. On one side of the decorated box a Barbie meant to be Olivia (I could tell by the curly blond hair) sat on the bed with her arms folded, staring across the room at the other Barbie—actually a vintage Skipper, Barbie’s little sister, thank you very much, Olivia—who was standing by the door with a suitcase in her hand. From it hung a luggage tag that said HOUSTON, TEXAS. Above the Skipper-who-was-me’s bed hung a little poster of a red circle with a slash through it. The word inside the circle? “CAT.”

Nice.

I got even by sneaking another Barbie into the diorama—this one with dark hair just like Piper’s. I placed her by the tiny window in her underwear, looking out. Then I gave her huge red lipstick lips and taped a sign to her back that said FLEABRAIN LOVES CONNOR.

Olivia and Piper’s other favorite pastime, besides torturing me, was swooning over Connor Dixon, the boy next door. That’s another big difference between my stepsister and me—she’s boy crazy. Our bedroom was at the front of the house, and the window had a perfect view of the Dixons’ driveway, where Connor and his older brother, Aidan, spent a lot of time playing basketball. Olivia and Piper were always spying on them. Well, on Connor, mostly. They both had a huge crush on him. I knew Connor from the times I’d visited before, and also now from band, since he played the saxophone. Technically, I supposed he qualified as cute—I never really paid much attention to that stuff—but I didn’t think he was worth all the fuss the two of them made over him.

Olivia shrieked when she saw what I’d done to her diorama, but she couldn’t tell Iz, of course, without her mother seeing the rest of it. Instead she snapped a picture of it with her cell phone and sent it to Piper. Both of them were spitting mad at school the next day.

Funny, but hardly likely to help improve matters, my mother wrote back when I e-mailed her about it. Focus on the good things, Cat.

The good things were Hawkwinds, my new friends, and Mr. Morgan and his delicate, shell-like ears. Also Geoffrey and Dad and Iz. I dutifully wrote my mother about all of these, and about Mrs. Bonneville and her list of rules because I knew she’d get a kick out of that. My mother has a really good sense of humor.

I didn’t mean to complain, really I didn’t. I knew she needed to concentrate on her mission at the space station. But who else could I talk to? Iz had her hands full with Geoffrey and her job, and besides, she was living in her own little “Sisters are forever friends” world. It would be too awkward trying to explain to her what a twerp her daughter was, anyway. I knew I should probably talk to my father, but he’d been away the last couple of days collecting data on the spring Chinook salmon run in the Columbia River Gorge.

By Thursday night my spirits were as soggy as the weather. The diorama had disappeared, but Olivia and I were still barely on speaking terms. After dinner Iz shooed us upstairs to do our homework. Which we did, sort of. Olivia was talking to Piper on her cell phone, and I was using Iz’s laptop to IM with A.J. With my earbuds in to block out my stepsister’s annoying voice, I could almost pretend I was back in Houston. This was what A.J. and I did every night—worked on our homework while we instant-messaged each other.

I have a bad case of Olivia-itis, I wrote.

Poor you, he wrote back, adding a frowny face.

Need cure. Can u help?

No known remedy. Will ask NASA to arrange immediate airlift.

I had to laugh at that. A.J. always managed to cheer me up.

Iz poked her head in the door just then and saw me smiling. “I’m so glad to see you two getting along,” she said. “One big happy family.”

Olivia waggled her fingers at her sweetly. The second Iz left, though, she looked over at me and pretended to stick them down her throat. I stuck out my tongue at her and turned my attention back to the computer screen. A few seconds later I jumped when Olivia let out a loud squeal at something Piper had said. I pulled out one of my earbuds. “Could you maybe keep it down a little? I’m working on pre-algebra and it’s hard.”

“I’m working on pre-algebra and it’s haaard,” she mimicked in a high voice.

I sighed and stuck the earbud back in. A.J. was right. There was no known cure for Olivia Haggerty.