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Mrs. Reingold, she of the fluffy sixties hairdo and take-no-prisoners attitude. Most of Gaia’s teachers were not especially impressed by her… cavalier attitude toward school, to say the least. Mrs. Reingold in particular had her own hang-ups: she liked to collect assignments at the beginning of class rather than at the end—no fool, she—and she was not pleased with Gaia’s extreme lack thereof. Now Gaia was on her hit list for the day.
    â€œIf you’ll turn to page 176 in your textbooks,” she droned, “you’ll see a selection of proofs, I’d like for us to work the top three out on the board. This should be simple enough for those of you who have done the assignment.” With this prediction, she glared directly at Gaia. In all fairness, Gaia had given her no reason to know that this proof would be simple enough for Gaia regardless—homework or no.
    She slouched back in her seat, certain she’d becalled on to work out a proof at the board, but Mrs. Reingold nominated two other “volunteers” and Mindy White, who nearly gave herself an aneurysm, falling out of her seat, straining to be picked.
God bless her
, Gaia thought, relaxing back at her desk for the moment. Standing at the board would be tedious under the best of circumstances; she was thrilled to have a brief reprieve from her newfound social anxiety disorder.
    Next to her Tammie and Megan whispered hurriedly to each other. Gaia could sense the bad vibes radiating off them in waves. She knew she’d damaged whatever currency she’d held among the FOHs when they spotted her with Liz Rodke, off to the Rodkes’ mucho-exclusive black-tie affair. Gaia thought it was totally unfair that in order to fit in with one group, she was going to have to give up another. No wonder she had chosen to avoid Village School social politics up until now. It was just too exhausting trying to get the game right.
    These days, though, she wanted to get the game right.
    She took a calculated risk and edged her desk closer to Megan’s, scraping against the linoleum floor as she did. She winced at the sound and prayed that Reingold had gone spontaneously temporarily deaf or something. “Hey,” she offered tentatively.
    Megan turned briefly to Gaia, eyebrows raised,before resuming her hushed conversation with Tammie.
    Denied. Okay, well, she deserved it, she supposed. Gaia was preparing to accept her lot, to turn back to the math lesson, when she decided to go for broke and make a second attempt. She had nothing to lose, right? The teacher hated her, and she was obviously a social pariah.
    She leaned in again. “How weird was it running into you guys the other night?” she whispered lightly, as if bumping into the FOHs on the street was the most unexpected, most hysterically random incident in the history of random incidents. As though they didn’t all live downtown, frequent the same haunts, and run into each other by accident as a general rule. “I mean, come on. Liz only asked me at the very last second, and I wasn’t even going to go”—here she knew she had to tread lightly since it was obvious the other FOHs
had
in fact, wanted to go—“but Liz had an extra spot because some date had bailed on her at the last minute, and she knew I was the lame-ass who wouldn’t already have plans for the night. So, you know, I grabbed the one clean thing in my closet that was even remotely right for the event and offered to help her out.” Gaia felt like she’d been possessed by the spirit of a former head cheer-leader. Where was this vapid banter coming from? Why was it so important to her to win these girls over?
    And most importantly, was it working?
    Possibly it was. Tammie regarded the deliberately frayed pockets of her stretch Seven jeans before tilting her entire desk toward Gaia, relenting. “I liked the dress,” she said, in a tone that suggested she