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diabetes, got Alzheimer’s, and then forgot she had diabetes and so did her body. It might be the same here. Petula’s near-death might have, you know, given her popularity amnesia.”

“That’s genius!” Wendy Thomas said sincerely. “I don’t know why everyone is so shocked that you were accepted to online college for next year.”

Petula got back in the car, fully aware of what The Wendys were thinking, and moved quickly to defuse the situation.

“What was that about?” Wendy Thomas asked accusingly.

“I asked her where she got that scarf she was wearing,” Petula spouted, feigning indignance. “It looked just like one that might have fallen out of my car last week.”

The Wendys accepted the explanation for the time being, but Petula was angry that she’d let herself get carried away like that. This kind of schizophrenic behavior was getting harder for her to keep under wraps. She could neither understand nor control it.

As soon as Petula pulled away from the curb, Wendy Anderson received a foreboding emergency text.

“Petula,” she said, “you aren’t going to like this.”

“Out with it,” Petula demanded.

“Someone spotted that transfer student, Darcy, wearing the same sweater that you have on now!” Wendy Anderson chirped, fishing for a reaction.

Petula made what she was wearing a status update on each of her social networking sites every day so that no one would wear the same thing that she had on. Everyone knew that, except, apparently, for the new girl. Or maybe, Petula was thinking, it was intentional.

“It’s the same color too,” Wendy Thomas added. “Reportedly.”

Petula had nothing but hate for Darcy, even though she didn’t really know her, and no one seemed to know much about the new girl, except that she’d recently come to Hawthorne from Gorey High. That on its own was enough to put her right at the top of Petula’s Out list, but she’d had a bad feeling about Darcy since she’d arrived at Hawthorne. It was a gut feeling, much like her instinctive aversion to buying jewelry from the home shopping channels. The Wendys, on the other hand, may not have liked Darcy either, but they secretly liked that Petula was threatened by her.

Petula pulled over, stopped the car again, got out, and opened the trunk, which was filled with plastic bags packed with clothes of all sorts. One more thing to alphabetize in the “crazy file,” The Wendys thought. It was becoming pretty clear that Petula was two garments short of a runway show.

“Was the dry cleaner’s closed?” Wendy Anderson called out the rear window.

“My closets are bursting and I think Harlot is stealing my clothes,” Petula offered. “I don’t want to leave anything lying around.”

The Wendys nodded in unison and waited patiently in the car. This seemed plausible. Scarlet had been looking better lately, they grudgingly admitted to themselves.

Petula rifled through the bags until she found a suitably fashionable and competitive change of clothes, pulled off her crewneck sweater, and right there on the street replaced it with a plum-colored cashmere cardigan. She was never worried about making a public display of her assets because Petula believed wholeheartedly that you should only be embarrassed if you had something to hide. She, on the other hand, was perfect and was always happy to flaunt it. The world was her dressing room. That much had not changed.

Scarlet was working feverishly as she stepped around her cluttered bedroom; piles of her weathered, worn, and otherwise “artfully destroyed” one-of-a-kind pieces of clothing were strewn everywhere. She’d decided it was time to cast off her old self, and she was making fast work of it to reduce the pain.

At first Scarlet had picked through her closets and drawers carefully, like a miner sifting for diamonds, but before long, she was grabbing armfuls of outfits that had once been precious to her and tossing them indiscriminately to the ground,