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“Hey, Liv. What's up? I'm just sitting here with Grey watching
Law & Order
.” Then he says in this really creepy high voice, “Me like the assistant D.A.”

“What was
that
?”

“Oh, that was Grey,” he says. “She's gotten to be a big fan.”

Oh, dear God, no. He sounds like he's losing it a little, too. He laughs out loud at himself.

“Dad, you do know that's not normal, right?” I try to laugh with him but I end up in tears.

“Liv? You okay?”

Oomlot sniffs my face as I cry, like he's trying to figure me out. I bury my hand in his soft fur. “Is that offer still open? The one where you said I could move back home?”

He's quiet for a second. “Well, yeah. If that's really what you want. But honestly, it doesn't really sound like it is.” Then he asks, with doubt in his voice, “
Is
it?”

Oomlot looks like he's finally given up trying to diagnose me (
Is she sick? Is she mad? Is she hurt? Will she feed me?
) and lays his head in my lap with a sigh. I console myself by rubbing his velvety ear, and he starts the loud breathing of dog purrs. I can't imagine leaving him.

Through the screen door, I see Corny outside. She's watering the lawn, and the dogs are playing chicken with the stream of water. Queso approaches the water, then scurries off to hide under the massive Ferrill. Tess runs back and forth as elegant as a deer. Bella lies on the grass, rolling from side to side, daring Corny to soak her. No, I can't imagine leaving any one of them—Corny
or
the dogs.

“What's going on, Liv?”

So I tell him what's gone on, minus, of course, the training part. Or the Mom part. I just tell him that Delia betrayed me, and I lost all my friends and started hanging out with Brynne. But now I want all my old friends back.

“Okay, well, I'm not a girl. And I'm not thirteen. But I don't get why you can't all be friends.”

“Stop talking like a guidance counselor,” I tell him. “Things like that just don't happen.”

“Nothing happens if you don't make it happen. You think a house builds itself?”

“Now you're talking like a carpenter.”

“So I should know what I'm talking about, right?” he says. “Don't you think you could talk to Delia and them, you know, straighten this whole thing out? Sounds like you've already forgiven them.”

“I don't know if I have or not,” I tell him.

The truth is, I'm not even sure I really know what forgiving
is
. It's not forgetting. It's not pretending it didn't happen. Clearly, I only know what it's
not
. I wish there was some sort of manual on forgiveness, like there is on dog training.

“Look, you don't have to tell me the exact details of this betrayal, or anything you don't want to,” my dad says. I feel a rush of love for him. “But answer me this. Are you still mad at them?”

“Mad?” I ask. “No, not really. I know Delia was trying to look out for me. The rest of them—well, they just kind of went along with Delia's stupid plan.”

“Sounds like she meant well.”

“Yeah, she did. They all did,” I say. “And it almost doesn't even matter anymore. I just want them back.”

“Well, then,” he says. “Sounds like you've forgiven her.”

“Really? You think?”

I have to wonder, all this talk about forgiveness—it's a concept right up there with holy stuff and saints and angels and all those other things that seem so out of reach. But my dad makes it sound so simple.

“Hey, I've done my fair share of forgiving. I know these things. Just because you love someone doesn't make them perfect.”

He's talking about my mother. The air seems to thicken around me. But thankfully, before I start to choke on it, he says, “Liv?”

Breathe in
. “Yeah?”

Outside, the dogs bark and Corny's laugh rings out. Someone must have gotten drenched.

“You know…” I hear a smile in his voice. “I may have some bad news soon, okay?”

It makes me smile too, just a little bit. Bad news means his job in Valleyhead might be drying up. Bad news means he may be moving here soon. Bad news is good news. Which I guess is normal when your world is completely upside down.

IT'S WEDNESDAY.
I decide I'm going to straighten everything out before lunch. Maybe my dad is actually right.

But that never happens. What happens is that on the way to lunch, Brynne takes my arm and rushes me down the corridor, around the corner to the dark, dead-end hall where the janitor keeps her stuff. She goes to a door, wiggles the handle, and pushes me in. Through another little door is a couch with a staticky TV tuned to a Spanish soap opera.

“Look. Janitor's closet. Our lunch spot from now on,” she says, beaming.

My heart starts fluttering. I think about Delia and Mandy and Joey and even Phoebe, and how the only thing I want right now is my old spot at the lunch table with them. But all I can say is, “Why don't they lock the door?”

She frowns. “It's broken,” she says, narrowing her eyes, and I find myself wondering if she had anything to do with that.

“Isn't this Mrs. Vittle's room? Where is she?”

“
Duh
. Lunch duty,” Brynne says. She sighs. “Will you please just stop worrying so much? We'll have fun. No one's going to find us here.” Which only serves to make me a little more worried.

Before I can tell her that I haven't brought lunch today, she opens her backpack and lays a couple of packages on the crate used as a makeshift coffee table: peanut butter crackers, a tube of Pringles, a crushed bag of Fritos, and some packets of fruit chews. “Have whatever you want, but I brought these especially for you.” She holds up a package of M&M's.

There's something so incredibly sad about it all—the sense of desperation under all those snacks laid out on the table, the tiny room—that keeps me from just standing up and walking away. So I grab some M&M's and let her turn up the volume on the TV, and we both watch like we completely understand Spanish. But all I'm really understanding is that everything feels broken and I don't know how to piece it back together.

Later, Corny and I go to see Kisses. I have grand plans to take her out into the backyard today; we're
that
close. But when I set the stones out on the lawn, she stops at the first one—two stones back from where we left off. The more I try to coax her out, the less she seems willing. By the end of the session, she's retreated to the patio. It's hard not to feel lame.

On the way home, Corny tells me we'll try again soon. She talks about how we saved Bella from wood and that soon we'll save Loomis from bikes, and maybe even sooner we'll save Kisses from those terrible blades of grass.

I guess I don't look too convinced.

“Look, Olivia, I know it's frustrating. Sometimes, with dogs like Kisses, you take one step forward and two steps back.”

Which pretty much explains everything happening in my life now. Every single little thing.

IT'S ONLY BEEN
about eight weeks since I hatched my evil plan, and so much has changed. It's clear who the alpha dogs are. First of all, now everyone is going around with marker on their lips. Our old lunch table is full of people like Morgan Askren and Erin Monroe and whoever else is lucky enough to get there first. Brant has a regular seat, and it's right next to Phoebe's. The Bored Game Club has swelled in membership, and now
two
teachers sit in the back of the room, one of whom, rumor has it, is a game specialist, hired
specifically
for that purpose. The biggest trend in school is having your own personal place-marker. Kids are bringing in everything from Barbie heads to bottle caps to house keys to mark their spot in Monopoly or Sorry! or whatever they're playing at the time. Having a place-marker means having a place in the popular crowd. The
popular
crowd.
My
old crowd.

It is time.

It's Friday, we're in our secret lunchroom, and I'm practically starting to
think
in Spanish. I guess even a couple of days of
La Vida Rica
will do that to you, especially if your brain is thirteen and still spongelike. I am on my third pack of M&M's when I finally get the nerve to bring it up.

“Brynne?”

“Hmmm?” I watch the chewing in her temples and feel a rush of overwhelming guilt. I've totally and utterly ruined the life of a regular eating, breathing, chewing, feeling human being.

“Don't you ever think we should, I don't know, get back out there?”

“Out
where
?”

“I mean, maybe make some friends?”

She shakes her head. “I like it here,” she says. “Want another?” She tries to hand me another pack of M&M's.

“No thanks,” I say quickly. She kind of shrugs and sits back again to stare at the TV, setting her foot up on the crate next to the buffet of snack food.

“I miss it,” I say.

She holds a hand out, signaling me to be quiet. Her eyes get big and her chewing stops. “
Oh. Em. Gee
,” she says through a full mouth. “No way he's going back to her!”

I take a breath and watch. Normally this would be enough to throw me off track—let's face it, these things do tend to suck you right in, language barrier or not. When it's clear that, yes, Ismael is begging Consuelo for her
corazón
, and that Consuelo isn't sure it's hers to give anymore, a tampon commercial comes on, and I say it again. Only more in the
telenovela
way.

“I just can't do this anymore.”

Brynne crinkles up her forehead, trying to make it into a joke. “Well, I don't know what you have against Ismael and Consuelo, but we can find something else to watch.”

“I mean I can't be your only friend, Brynne,” I say, and try not to think about the fact that it was my own engineering that made it this way.

I'm kind of hoping that her pride will kick in, that she'll deny that I'm her only friend and tell me that she's been voted most popular since third grade—even if those elections were strongly discouraged by faculty and school administration and are in no way considered “official”—but instead she says, in a very breaking-heart way, “Why not?”

I guess she realizes how very
un
popular she sounds, because she says, “God, Olivia, what happened to me?” She laughs unhappily. “God, I sound like such a loser.”

“But you're not, Brynne. You're the Most Popular Girl in School,” I say, as if the title stays with you for life—like it does for U.S. presidents and alcoholics. My voice is so awkward, so useless.

“
Was
,” she corrects me, stabbingly. “
Used
to be.” She starts to cry. I'm a little worried Mrs. Vittle will hear us. Or worse, the hundreds of kids we go to school with, thus cementing our newfound reputation as pond scum.

“People used to want to be my friend,” she continues, wetly. She snorts. “God, what happened?”

“I really don't know,” I lie. Bald-faced.

“I'm such a joke. I wish I could just drop out of the elections. I don't even care if I get an F in Social Studies now.”

The guilt is gnawing through my heart.

“Brynne—”

“And now you don't even want to be friends with me!
You!
”

It's tunneling through my spleen.

I swallow and say, “It's not that I don't want us to be friends. I like you, Brynne, I really do. I just don't want to be your
only
friend.”

Now it's making its way up my esophagus.

She looks at me like I've just slapped her or something, and says, “I would love to have things back to normal. You keep asking me that, and
yes
, I would love that! But I don't know how to make that happen! I feel so…so worthless.”

It's pushing its way up my throat. I'm afraid I'm about to get sick.

“Brynne,” I say, swallowing hard to fight the rising lump of guilt and M&M's down. “There's something I have to tell you.”