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and crawled up to my head. It was hard not to giggle as her small hand started brushing my hair back from my face, but that would have spoiled it. So I would lie with my eyes closed until she’d brushed all the hair from my face, then leaned down and whispered, “Wake up, Dylan. It is time to bring some happiness into this day.”
    That was my cue to erupt with a roar and grab her tight and squealing in my arms. We would roll around for a bit, giggling our heads off until Mom poked her head in the door and said it was time to get moving. Then Keelie would slide whooping off my bed and scamper out the door, and I would watch her go, wondering if I’d been like that at her age—barreling around in a body that felt like a promise or a wish come true, riding the wave crest of my own happiness.
    Thursday after school, I lay sprawled on Rachel Gonzales’ bed, bored out of my mind. I’d been invited here to play audience while Rachel put Julie Crozier through her idea of the perfect makeover—heavy on the eyeliner, massive on the mascara and absolutely brutal on the eye shadow and lip gloss. Both Julie and Rachel were core members of the Dief’s jock crowd, and as such, considered themselves to be semi-divine. As far as they, and admittedly most of the Dief student population, were concerned, it was a privilege to be seen with them and an even greater privilege to worship everything they said and did.
    As their invited audience, I was expected to remain in a near-comatose state, making single-syllable statements such as “ooh” and “ah.” This wasn’t because Julie and Rachel didn’t understand two-syllable words. They regularly pulled A s and B s on class assignments, and Rachel was planning on studying engineering at McGill in two years. But they were both seriously protective of their semi-divine status, and no female outside their tiny inner circle was allowed to display anything beyond a basic Neanderthal intellect in their presence.
    So there I was with my back to the wall, flipping through one of Rachel’s Sweet Valley High books and trying to ignore the obvious fact that Julie’s pale skin and blond hair were not meant for thick globs of olive eye shadow. In fact, Julie was beginning to look rather like an alien experiment gone terribly wrong, but no way was I saying anything. Rachel and Julie were not only two of the Dief’s minor goddesses, they were also part of a group that Joc and I had dubbed “the phone patrol.” Get on their bad side, and their phone network would be passing your name around like a helpless electron in a massive electrical current. The next morning you wouldn’t begin to recognize yourself in the new rumors flying around school.
    Generally speaking I wasn’t into the worshiping thing, at leastnot unless it was absolutely necessary, and in this case it sort of was. As part of the jock crowd, Julie and Rachel were Cam’s friends—not close friends, but they always sat together in the cafeteria and went to the same parties. For the past two years I’d played on the girls junior volleyball team with them, but neither Julie or Rachel had given me a second glance until Cam and I started dating. Then they’d stared in what can only be described as stunned astonishment. I mean, why would Cam Zeleny date a fringe jock with definite nerd overtones, when he could have been dating diaphanous nymphs like Julie and Rachel?
    But when Cam’s interest in me showed no sign of fading, the leaders of the phone patrol—Julie, Rachel and Deirdre Buffone—reluctantly began to include me in some of their activities. Which meant that today I got to lie here in an awed stupor, listening as Rachel and Julie attacked, mutilated and otherwise dragged through the absolute sludge the characters of various female students from the Dief. Survival of the fittest—that’s the way it works, I guess. But y’know, it’s so boring .
    “Lindsay Horner’s been carrying her ass pretty high these days,”