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perpendicular to the floor, one remaining platform shoe dangling precariously off a toe. Suddenly it slips and falls. “AAAAAHHHH!”
    An agonized scream goes up from the floor, and Nico and Melanie rush from their bench to help Trisha up. Nico gets there first since she’s in motion-favorable ballet flats.
    But Melanie can only shuffle over as fast as her leopard-print mules will allow.
    I stand from our bench, now able to see that Trisha is covered in the mayonnaise-based contents of her lunch tray, and blood is gushing out her nose from the assaulting shoe. The lunch lady rushes forward, but Nico staves her off. “We’ve got it. Come on, Trish. Little steps.” She picks Trisha’s shoes off the linoleum before wrapping a 32

    protective arm around her to escort her out of the riveted tuna-breathed hordes and tracking cameras.
    “Oh. My. God,” Caitlyn repeats. “She can never come back here. It’s over. After the world’s biggest wipeout, she just conked herself with her own platform heel. It was like a public service announcement against high fashion.”
    “Is that what she was wearing?”
    When I push open the girls’ room door a few minutes later to wash the fishy aroma off my fingers, I’m met with audible sobbing. I almost back out, but if I try to make it to the one on the second floor I’ll be late for next period.
    As if they’d even notice me in the midst of a PR crisis of this magnitude. I dart to the sink.
    Trisha is sitting on the tiled windowsill at the end of the stalls, her head tilted back as Nico swaps the bloodied paper towel for a fresh one, unwittingly tending to the person who was in a sleeping bag with her boyfriend not twelve hours ago. “Mel went to grab you a clean T-shirt from my gym locker. And some sneakers. As soon as she gets back we’re gonna take you to the nurse.”
    “I think i-it’s buh-roken,” Trisha chokes out in sobs. “I’m s-so em-barrassed. I w-want to k-kill myself. I’ll never,” she pauses, trying to catch her breath, “make the sh-show now.”
    “Shhhh.” In the mirror over the sink I see Trisha allowing her bare back to be rubbed reassuringly. “Of course we’re in the show,” Nico says with quiet certainty. “Who else would they pick? We are the glamour. We are it .”
    She coaxes an entitled smile out of Trisha, and I wipe my wet hands across my jeans and jog to Spanish.

33
    REEL 2
    The brown pumpkin glop sliiiiiides off the ice-cream scoop to puddle in the muffin tin as another minute at the Prickly Pear craaawwwwwls by. I’ll have been scooping from this tub for twenty-four months this June, and the bottom is still nowhere in sight. If only the bejeweled fools paying five bucks a muffin knew this crap was older than the bills they were handing over. God knows it’s ruined me. No matter how cute the case or how yummy the aroma, I can’t lay eyes on a baked good without flashing to the industrial tubs congealing in the Prickly Pear’s freezer.
    My job’s only perk—to make up for my lost pastry ardor—is the occasional glimpse of Drew corralling 34

    emptied shopping carts in the Stop & Shop parking lot across the street. Which helps. A lot.
    “Uh . . . Jesse?”
    “Yeah?” I push up the rim of my mesh Prickly Pear baseball cap to see Jamie Beth slouching on the bottom basement stair, staring in her vacant, bloodshot Jamie Beth way. “Yes, Jamie Beth?”
    “There’s, like, a chick up there who wants to know where you are.”
    I drop the scoop in a bowl of warm water and pick up the huge tray, the muffin glop tilting in each container.
    “A chick?”
    “Yeahhhhhh.” She dips her head in a slow nod.
    “Okay, well, can you tell her I’ll be up in a sec?”
    “She wants to see you doing what you”—she stretches her tongue out through her bubble gum—“do naturally.”
    I hand her the tray, and her eyes widen in surprise as they always do when she finds herself working here at work. “Put these in the oven for me, and