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passes.”
    I nod and reach into my purse for my inhaler.
    Ari’s phone starts playing “When You Wish Upon a Star.” She takes it out of the holster clipped to her belt and scowls. “Damn, it’s Patty.” She hits a button and puts it up to her ear. “Yeah?” She shakes her head and exhales loudly. “I thought you said you wouldn’t have it done until tomorrow. Well, I’m doing something now.” Ari rolls her eyes. “No, you don’t have to call Daddy. I’ll do it!”
    She hangs up and groans. “‘I guess I’ll just have to call your father and have him tell payroll to cancel this week’s check since you’re too busy doing nothing to earn it,’” she says, doing a dead-on imitation of her stepmother. “I could kill my father for marrying that witch and making my life a living hell! The summer I was ten she made me scrub toilets in the park so I could learn to ‘appreciate’ all the employees’ hard work! Do you know many toilets we have?”
    “Uh, a lot?”
    “ Sixty-five and I’ve cleaned each and every one of them.” She hands me her phone. “Put your number in. I’ll give you a call tonight and you can tell me what Nicki’s singing, okay?”
    “Okay,” I say, punching it in, “but sometimes she doesn’t pick a song until the last minute.”
    “Maybe you guys can come over sometime. I go to White Cliff Academy and most of my friends—besides Luke—summer elsewhere, so I’m stuck here in la-la land with nothing to do but obey Patty’s every command.”
    “Sure, that’d be great,” I say, thinking Luke’s family must be raking in the dough reading tarot cards if they can afford to send him to White Cliff.
    Ari’s phone starts playing “When You Wish Upon a Star” again. “Oh my freaking God,” she mutters as she takes it from me. She pushes a button and yells, “I’m coming already!” She rolls her eyes as she clicks the phone off and shoves it back into its holster. “I’ll call you.”
    “Great.”
    She turns the corner, and I take a hit of my inhaler. I count to ten and exhale as I open the door to the parking lot. Running toward Nicki’s car I wonder how long it’ll take me to bike from my house to Luke’s so we can finish our conversation.

THREE
    Slamming the car door shut, I’m relieved to see Nicki’s taken the keys out of the ignition and left them on the dashboard—her way of letting me know she’ll wait for me to say when it’s time to leave.
    “Well?” Nicki says as she turns her off iPod. “Are you gainfully employed?”
    I hold up my information packet. “Yup, and I met a friend of yours.”
    Nicki raises one eyebrow. “Oh?”
    “Arianna Roy.”
    “Ari Roy works here ?” She shakes her head. “I never in a million years would’ve thought she’d be slumming it in the Land of Misogyny.”
    “Oh, please!”
    “Sorry,” she continues. “Land of Enchantment isn’t just about stereotypically helpless women in need of rescue— there’s Hansel and Gretel’s Haunted Forest, which is more of a celebration of child abuse and cannibalism, and the petting zoo in Mother Goose’s Family Fun Farm, which is all E. coli, all the time!”
    I have to laugh. Nicki has never gotten over falling into a huge pile of crap at the Fun Farm during her first and last visit to the park when she was four. “Actually, according to Ari’s father— the owner of the park —they take great pride in the sanitary conditions at the farm, which I sincerely hope I’m never assigned to work at. I don’t care how fast the poop is scooped, when it’s ninety-five degrees out, that goat and pig crap is gonna smell worse than the rotting pile of gym clothes and half-eaten sandwiches lying at the bottom of Cooper Summerfield’s locker!”
    Nicki waves her hand in front of her nose. “Oh, God, I’m having an olfactory flashback to last Friday. Figures our lockers get the afternoon sun—all that sweat and stink just marinates in the heat. Who knows what exciting odor du