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glittery stickers to their temples. I’d talked Momma into buying me a set. Because the drugstore had sold out of the flowers and butterflies the other girls wore, I chose a sheet of lusterless tropical fish. They were still pretty: koi and Siamese fighting fish with trailing tails. But only minutes after I entered the classroom, I was dubbed Fishface, far worse than Faker or Wannabe. The next day, there wasn’t a single sticker in sight.
    I wasn’t a trendsetter. I was a trendstopper.
    Until then, I hadn’t stood out. But nobody had, not really. In early elementary school, when there had been only twelve girls in each class, by decree we were all best friends. There was little competition. The only people who cared about the Little Miss Washokey pageant winners were the grown-ups—and Alexis Bunker. Eight years ago, after I’d disqualified myself, she’d won the crown, and she reminded us about it for years afterward.
    The change came so swiftly I never saw it coming. All of a sudden, the other girls had discovered Glamour and Cosmopolitan , flatirons and eyeliner, and the ability to purchase clothes online instead of at the Walmart in Cody. Alexis’s dedication to the regional pageants became admirable instead of uncool.
    And everything that mattered to me—rocks and books and schoolwork—was deemed peculiar.
    I didn’t want to stand out in a bad way, like I had during the Fishface disaster. But as the years passed and the gap between me and everybody else widened, I couldn’t make myself fit in either. So I did the next best thing: I quit trying.
    I let myself fade into the collage of faces and hallways. And I pretended I didn’t care.
    Now I scowled at my reflection. Behind me, my bed bulged with a mountain of mismatched pillows. A row of swans Momma had cut from pink flowered contact paper trailed along the tops of my walls. My carpet did not quite make it from one side to the other, leaving a strip of floorboards exposed. My computer was a neighbor’s hand-me-down. The stacks of novels on my shelves came from the junk shop and garage sales. Except for the plastic shoe boxes of rocks stacked beside my dresser, hardly anything about my room reflected me.
    Not even my reflection.
    The door banged open behind me. I whirled around, tugging up my jeans. Strands of opera music drifted in through the doorway.
    “Dang it, Taffeta! Can’t you knock?”
    She flounced in anyway. “Why? What were you doing that’s so secret?” She wore a blue jumper with white kittens prancing along the neckline. Momma always changed my sister’s clothes after school. As if life itself were a beauty pageant. “Were you doing something obscene ?”
    “None of your business.”
    “Momma says come to dinner. It’s Hawaiian salad.”
    Whatever that meant. Momma loved to concoct strange recipes from miscellaneous cooking magazines and use Taffeta and me as guinea pigs. When she stumbled upon a particularly impressive dish, she’d cook it for all her lady friends and claim it as her own invention.
    “Fine,” I said. “Now scram. I’ll be right behind you.”
    As soon as I heard her thump down the stairs, I knelt beside my stack of shoe boxes. I removed the first two—the ones that contained shoes—opened the third, and swapped the quartz stone for a baby geode, the size of a half walnut. If dinner got too infuriating, I could poke my thumb inside the stone, feel the angles and rock candy ridges, and think about geology instead of my mother.

    My Little Miss Washokey fiasco launched our downward spiral, though it didn’t become obvious until Taffeta was born. Now Momma and I moved through our house like strangers, each disapproving of the other.
    Momma’s disapproval of me seemed more like confusion, bewilderment. As if she could never understand how she had created a person so different from herself. A daughter who preferred books to beauty, who cared nothing about winning—until the All-American Essay Contest, and look