“But you already know how to draw!” she kept saying.

I, of course, couldn’t have agreed more. Still, it was good to know I wasn’t the only person who thought my having to spend every Tuesday and Thursday from three thirty until five thirty at the Susan Boone Art Studio was going to be a massive waste of time.

“That is just so like Lucy,” Catherine said as we walked Manet through the Bishop’s Garden on Monday after school. The Bishop’s Garden is part of the grounds of the National Cathedral, where they have all the funerals for any important people who die in D.C. It is only a five-minute walk from where we live, in Cleveland Park, to the National Cathedral. Which is good, because it is Manet’s favorite place to chase squirrels and bust in on couples who are making out in the gazebo and stuff.

Which is another thing: who is going to walk Manet while I am at the Susan Boone Art Studio? Theresa won’t do it. She hates Manet, even though he’s fully stopped chewing on the electrical cords. Besides, according to Dr. Lee, the animal behaviorist, that was my fault, for naming him Monet, which sounds like the word no. Since changing his name to Manet, he’s been a lot better . . . though my dad wasn’t too thrilled with the five-hundred-dollar bill Dr. Lee sent him.

Theresa says that it is bad enough that she has to clean up after all of us; over her dead body is she cleaning up after my eighty-pound Old English sheepdog.

“I can’t believe Lucy did that,” Catherine said. “I’m sure glad I don’t have any sisters.” Catherine is a middle child, like me—which is probably why we get along so well. Only unlike me, Catherine has two brothers, one older and one younger . . . and neither of whom are smarter or more attractive than she is.

Catherine is so lucky.

“But if it hadn’t been Lucy, it would have been Kris,” she pointed out as we trudged along the narrow, twisty path through the gardens. “Kris was totally onto you. I mean about only charging her and her friends.”

Which had been, really, the beauty of the whole thing. That I’d only been charging girls like Kris and her friends, I mean. Everyone else had gotten drawings for free.

Well, and why not? When, as a joke, I drew a portrait of Catherine with her favorite celebrity of all time, Heath Ledger, word got around, and soon I had a waiting list of people who wanted pictures of themselves in the company of various hotties.

At first I didn’t even think about charging. I was more than glad to provide drawings to my friends for free, since it seemed to make them happy.

And then when the non-English-speaking girls in my school got wind of it and wanted portraits, too, well, I couldn’t very well charge them, either. I mean, if you just moved to this country—whether to escape oppression in your native land, or, like most of the non­English speakers at our school, because one of your parents was an ambassador or diplomat—no way should you have to pay for a celebrity drawing. You see, I know what it is like to be in a strange place where you don’t speak the language: it sucks. I learned this the hard way, thanks to Dad—who is in charge of the World Bank’s North African division. He moved us all to Morocco for a year when I was eight. It would have been nice if somebody there had given me some drawings of Justin Timberlake for free, instead of staring at me like I was a freak just because I didn’t know the Moroccan for “May I please be excused?” when I had to go to the bathroom.

Then I got hit by a bunch of requests for celebrity portraits from the girls in Special Ed. Well, I couldn’t charge people in Special Ed, either, on account of how I know what it is like to be in Special Ed. After we got back from Morocco, it was determined that my speech impediment—I said th instead of s, just like Cindy Brady—wasn’t something I was going to grow out of . . . not without some professional help. So I was forced to attend special speech and hearing lessons while everybody else was in music appreciation.

As if this were not bad enough, whenever I returned to my regular classroom, I was routinely mocked for my supposed stupidity by Kris Parks—who’d been my best friend up until I’d left for Morocco. Then whammo, I come back and she’s all, “Samantha who?”

It was like she didn’t even remember how she used to come to my house to play Barbies every day after school. No, suddenly she was all about “going with” boys and running around at recess, trying to kiss them. The fact that I, as a fourth grader, would sooner have eaten glass than allowed a fellow fourth grader’s lips to touch mine—particularly Rodd Muckinfuss, who was the class stud that year—instantly branded me as “immature” (the th instead of s probably didn’t help much, either). Kris dropped me like a hot potato.

Fortunately this only fueled my desire to learn to speak properly. The day I graduated from speech and hearing, I strode right up to Kris and called her a stupid, slobbering, inconsiderate simpering sycophant.

We haven’t really spoken much since.

So, figuring that people who are in Special Ed really need a break now and then—especially the ones who have to wear a helmet all the time due to being prone to seizures or whatever—I declared that, for them, my celebrity-drawing services were free, as they were for my friends and the non­English speakers at Adams Prep.

Really, I was like my own little UN, doling out aid, in the form of highly realistic renderings of Freddie Prinze Jr., to the underprivileged.

But it turned out that Kris Parks, now president of the sophomore class and still an all-around pain in my rear, had a problem with this. Well, not with the fact that I wasn’t charging the non­English speakers, but with the fact that it turned out the only people I was charging were Kris and her friends.

But what did she think? Like I was really going to charge Catherine, who has been my best friend ever since I got back from Morocco and found out that Kris had pulled an Anakin and gone over to the Dark Side? Catherine and I totally bonded over Kris’s mistreatment of us—Kris still takes great delight in making fun of Catherine’s knee-length skirts, which is all Mrs. Salazar, Catherine’s mom, will allow her to wear, being super Christian and all—and our mutual contempt for Rodd Muckinfuss.

Oh, yeah. I’m definitely going to give free drawings of Orlando Bloom to someone like Kris.

Not.

People like Kris—maybe because she was never forced to attend speech and hearing lessons, much less a school where no one spoke the same language she did—cannot seem to grasp the concept of being nice to anyone who is not size five, blond, and decked out in Abercrombie and Fitch from head to toe.

In other words, anyone who is not Kris Parks.

Catherine and I were talking about this on our way home from the cathedral grounds—Kris, I mean, and her insufferability—when this car approached us and I saw my dad waving at us from behind the wheel.

“Hi, girls,” my mom said, leaning over my dad to talk to us, since we were closest to the driver’s side. “I don’t suppose either of you is interested in going to Lucy’s game.”

“Mom,” Lucy said from the backseat. She was in full cheerleader regalia. “Do not even try. They won’t come, and even if they do, I mean, look at Sam. I’d be embarrassed to be seen with her.”

“Lucy,” my dad said in a warning tone. He needn’t have bothered, however. I am quite used to Lucy’s disparaging remarks concerning my appearance.

It is all well and good for people like Lucy, whose primary concern in life is not missing a single sale at Club Monaco. I mean, for Lucy, the fact that they started selling Paul Mitchell products in our local drugstore was cause for jubilation the likes of which had not been seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I, however, am a little more concerned about world issues, such as the fact that three hundred million children a day go to bed hungry and that school art programs are invariably the first things cut whenever local boards of education find they are working at a deficit.

Which is why at the start of this school year, I dyed my entire wardrobe black to show that

I was in mourning for our generation, who clearly do not care about anything except what’s going to happen on Friends next week, and

fashion trends are for phonies like my sister.

And yeah, my mom nearly blew a capillary or two when she saw what I’d done. But hey, at least she knows one of her daughters actually thinks about something other than French manicures.

My mom, unlike Lucy, wasn’t about to give up on me, though. Which was why, there in the car, she put on a bright sunshiny smile, even though there was nothing to feel too sunshiny about, if you ask me. There was a pretty steady drizzle going on, and it was only about forty degrees outside. Not the kind of November day anyone—but especially someone completely lacking in school spirit, like me—would really want to spend sitting in some bleachers, watching a bunch of jocks chase a ball around, while girls in too-tight purple-and-white sweaters—like my sister—cheered them on.

“You never know,” my mom said to Lucy from the front seat. “They might change their minds.” To us, she said, “What do you say, Sam? Catherine? Afterwards Dad is taking us to Chinatown for dim sum.” She glanced at me. “I’m sure we can find a burger or something for you, Sam.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Madison,” Catherine said. She didn’t look sorry at all. In fact, she looked downright happy to have an excuse not to go. Most school events are agony for Catherine, given the comments she regularly receives from the In Crowd about her Laura Ashley­esque wardrobe (“Where’d you park your chuck wagon?” etc.). “I have to be getting home. Sunday is the day of—”

“—rest. Yes, I know.” My mom had heard this plenty of times before. Mr. Salazar, who is a diplomat at the and makes all his kids stay home that day every week. Catherine had only been let out for a half-hour reprieve in order to return The Patriot (which she has seen seventeen times) to Potomac Video. The trip to the National Cathedral had totally been on the sly. But Catherine figured since technically a visit to a church was involved, her parents wouldn’t get that mad if they found out about it.

“Richard.” Rebecca, beside Lucy in the backseat, looked up from her laptop long enough to convey her deep displeasure with the situation. “Carol. Give it up.”

“Dad,” my mom said, glaring at Rebecca. “Dad, not Richard. And it’s Mom, not Carol.”

“Sorry,” Rebecca said. “But could we get a move on? I only have two hours on this battery pack, you know, and I have three spreadsheets due tomorrow.”

Rebecca, who at eleven should be in the sixth grade, goes to Horizon, a special school in Bethesda for gifted kids, where she is taking college-level courses. It is a geek school, as is amply illustrated by the fact that the son of our current president, who is a geek if there ever was one—the son, I mean; but now that I think about it, his dad’s one, too, actually—is enrolled there. Horizon is so geeky, they do not even hand out grades, just term reports. Rebecca’s last term report said: “Rebecca, while reading at a college level, has yet to catch up to her peers in emotional maturity, and needs to work on her ‘people skills’ next semester.”

But while her intellectual age might be forty, Rebecca acts about six and a half, which is why she’s lucky she doesn’t go to a school for regularly intelligent people, like Lucy and me: the Kris Parkses of the eleven-year-old set would eat her alive. Especially considering her lack of people skills.

My mother sighed. She was always very popular in high school, like Lucy. She was, in fact, voted Miss School Spirit. My mom doesn’t understand where she went wrong with me. I think she blames my dad. My dad didn’t get voted anything in high school, because, like me, he spent most of his time while he was there fantasizing about being somewhere else.

“Fine,” Mom said to me. “Stay home then. But don’t—”

“—open the door to strangers,” I said. “I know.”

As if anyone ever even came to our door except the Bread Lady. The Bread Lady is the wife of a French diplomat who lives down the street from us. We don’t know her name. We just call her the Bread Lady, because every three weeks or so she goes mental, I guess from missing her native country so much, and bakes about a hundred loaves of French bread, which she then sells from door to door in our neighborhood for fifty cents each. I am addicted to the Bread Lady’s baguettes. In fact, they are practically the only thing I will eat, besides hamburgers, as I dislike most fruits and all vegetables, as well as a wide variety of other food groups, such as fish and anything with garlic.