I WAS IN A super-crabby mood after school. First of all, Lauren showed up that morning wearing my skirt. Seriously, she was wearing the exact skirt I’d shown her on Saturday when we were in H&M.

“When did you get that?” I asked her at our lockers. Amira, Yoko, and Lindsay were there, too.

“What?” she asked, trying to sound innocent.

“You know what. The skirt.”

“Oh. My mom took me shopping yesterday.”

“So you bought it even though you knew it was the skirt I wanted.”

“Was this the one you wanted? I thought it was the brown one.”

I just crossed my arms over my chest and glared at her.

“Well, I was going to get the pants I’d tried on, but you told me they made my butt look big, remember? So then I tried on the skirt, and my mom said it looked great on me.”

“And you believed her? She’s your mom.”

Lauren pursed her lips. “I like it. I think it looks good on me.”

“So do I,” Amira said.

“You could still get the brown one,” Yoko said to me. She doesn’t like it when we fight.

“And have people think I copied her? No, thanks.”

Claudia walked past. “Hey, Lauren. Nice skirt.”

“Thanks.” Lauren threw me a defiant look. I wanted to throttle her.

Then, in English class, Mrs. Donnelly gave us back our essays on To Kill a Mockingbird. She’d asked us to write about something of “thematic importance” in the book, and, if I am one hundred percent totally honest, I never got past page fifty. So I’d cut and pasted parts of my essay from Wikipedia, and Mrs. Donnelly figured that out. I got an F. She took me aside after class and told me I had to redo the assignment or risk failing the class.

When I got home, I decided to pamper myself. I made some Red Velvet Cake tea from David’s Tea, and I curled up on the couch to watch Maury. Shoo-Fly poked his head around the corner and meowed, but he didn’t come over even after I called him. Stupid cat.

It was a good episode. It was about a guy who found out, right there on the show, that DNA testing had proved he wasn’t the father of his girlfriend’s baby, and that the real father was the guy’s own brother. I was starting to feel a bit better when he entered the room.

“Hello,” he said.

I turned up the volume on the TV.

“Why are they all screaming at each other?” he asked.

I turned up the volume a little more.

He picked up Shoo-Fly. “I’m supposed to pass on a message,” he yelled. “From Jared.”

Even though the brothers were now throwing chairs at each other, I muted the TV.