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MONCHERIE'S WEARING
a pink sweater that has thick shoulder pads in it. It looks like she's got boobs sprouting up near the sides of her neck. Even I know it's disastrously unfashionable—and keep in mind, I've been known to wear Velcro-strapped sneakers to school before. Not that I'm proud of it or anything. I'm just saying.

I follow her into her office. She takes her seat in the armchair, and I sit in the folding chair facing her. It's cold and hard, and I think I've learned where my coccyx is—we studied it on the skeleton in Science today. I move around in my seat and end up perching on the side of my thigh.

“Oh.” Moncherie crinkles her nose. “Not comfy, huh?”

I shake my head no.

“Sorry to hear that. So how are you otherwise?” She squints. “Are you wearing
mascara
?”

“Do you like it?” I ask.

“I think—” she starts. “Never mind. It's not important what I think. What's important is how
you feel
about it. But I'd go with a brownish-black, if I were you. But I'm not.” She smiles.

I nod, like it's an acceptable answer.

“So, how's school?”

“Okay.”

“Good to hear.” She checks off something on her notepad. “Now—” she says, and at the same time I say, “It still sucks,” and we sit there staring at each other, like each of us is afraid to keep talking.

She takes a breath. “Okay, you're sending mixed messages, Olivia. Which is it?”

“Well, it still sucks, but you're not going to believe this,” I say. After our last session, I think she might really want to hear this. “My friend Phoebe? Well, this totally popular guy asked her to the Fall Ball. It's got to be a joke but—”

She is nodding, but she has this pained look on her face, like I'm giving her the details on a frog dissection or something. I stop and ask her what the matter is.

“Well, Olivia, it's just that you're here for a reason. We're supposed to be talking about the issues regarding your mother.” She taps the notepad with the tip of her pen, leaving a stipple of frustration on the page.

Just when I was actually beginning to like her.

Her eyes go a little soft. “I'm sorry. It's just that you always find other things to talk about.”

I study my cuticle and find a spear of skin to pull off. My houndlike destructive behaviors always seem to kick in when I'm stressed.

“Olivia?”

I don't answer. I hit blood and reach for a tissue to blot it.

“How do you feel, Olivia, about your mother—and where she is now?”

I just shrug. I have no desire to unpack that Space Bag, to unload any of the baggage in my brain-trunk. Everything is fitting back there nicely enough, thank you.

She sighs and slumps a little, which makes me feel like I'm letting her down. So I decide to give her a little something for her notepad. I don't have to dig too deep in the trunk for this one. It's sort of like the souvenir you might pack in your carry-on luggage. Not like a snow globe or anything fun, but something with some shock value, like the paperweight with a dead scorpion in it that my dad brought back from a trip to Arizona. I remind myself that I'm breaking my bathroom-wall rule
yet again
for her. “I think she's got a boyfriend.”

She sits up a little straighter and her eyebrows move into that concerned position. “And how do you feel about that?”

So I tell her. “It's just gross.”

She's quiet, like she's waiting for me to add more, and I wonder, doesn't she know me by now? Good thing she's not holding her breath.

“Okay, Olivia, good,” she says gently, showing me mercy. “Why don't you finish telling me about your friend?”

“Phoebe?”

“Sure.”

So I start to tell her about Phoebe again, and she puts down the pen. It's always better when she puts down the pen. She's actually a lot easier to talk to when she stops trying so hard to make me speak.

IT'S SATURDAY,
and it's been an exhausting week. I've had to do a lot of ignoring. On Monday, as I walked by her on the bus, Brynne sniffed the air and said, “German shepherd! No, Rottweiler! No, wait! I got it! Husky!” On Wednesday, in P.E., Brynne publicly declared that she didn't want me on her soccer team because I was “overheight.” What was even worse was that Mr. Mack assigned me to her team anyway because he said “overheight” wasn't a real condition—like it would have been an acceptable reason if it was. And on Thursday, Carolyn harassed me because my jeans were a millimeter too short, and then Tamberlin took over and carried the joke even further, into my socks. “Is that a tube sock? Oh.
My.
God.” And even though it
wasn't
a tube sock, I kept my mouth shut.

After such a grueling week, I'm glad to be in the company of Loomis, the neurotic bike-hating dog.

“Places, everyone,” Corny says, like she's directing a play rather than running a dog-training drill. She stands on Mrs. Taylor's lawn, with her hands clasped together in front of her chest and a hopeful look on her face.

Mrs. Taylor steps to the sidewalk, holding Loomis's leash, and glances over her shoulder at me with a worried look on her face. I steady myself on the bike and turn around to smile at Delia, who is sitting safely on the hood of the pickup truck. She gives me a thumbs-up, fully playing up her role as my moral support.

“And, go,” Corny directs.

Mrs. Taylor starts down the sidewalk with Loomis, who, at this point, is behaving like a show dog. He's a little chow and a little golden retriever, so of course he's too mixed-up to make it into one those snobby shows, but right now he's pretty convincing.

I wait for them to get about two houses away, and then I push off, bringing my standing leg to the pedal and lifting my butt off the seat to get some speed. As I get closer to them, I see Mrs. Taylor's shoulders stiffen, and I hear her voice getting higher in tone and pitch. “No, Loomis.
No
, Loomis. No,
no
, Loomis!” And then Loomis goes crazy and starts cussing me out with these big, loud, insulting dog barks, which startles me and makes me freeze up. I fall to the ground, my helmet thudding against the pavement.

Corny and Delia rush toward me, cooing concern. Mrs. Taylor apologizes and strains to hold back Loomis, who looks like he's grinning, but he's really just threatening me with his fangs.

I sigh, completely humbled. “I'm okay,” I say. I start to brush off the pebbles and leaves sticking to my whole left side. Corny latches one of her bony hands around my forearm and pulls me to standing. She may be old, but she's strong. Delia slaps the debris off my jeans, so it looks like she's spanking me.

“You got a rip,” she tells me, still absentmindedly beating the crap out of me.

“Um,” I say, “you're sort of hurting me.”

“Oh! Sorry!” She backs away. “I think those jeans are beyond repair.”

Corny is standing on the sidewalk with Mrs. Taylor, counseling her. Loomis has gone back to playing Good Dog, and sits there panting and just looking around, relaxed and happy.

“What happened with Loomis?” Delia asks. “Hasn't your grandma been working with him for a while?”

“Yes,” I tell her. I point out the way Mrs. Taylor tensed up when I approached on the bike, and the way she started yelling at Loomis. “She got really nervous because she thought he was going to go crazy when he saw the bike. But it wasn't really the bike that set him off—it was her reaction. She got scared, so he wanted to protect her.”

“Wow,” Delia says. “That was actually pretty sweet of him, then.”

“Don't tell
her
,” I say quietly to Delia, “but I think she's really the one we're training. Or
trying
to.”

“We'll try again next week,” I hear Corny tell Mrs. Taylor. “In the meantime, keep walking him and don't let yourself get nervous.”

Mrs. Taylor looks a little embarrassed, but Corny gives her a little shoulder hug and says, “It's never really easy.” Which I have the bruises to prove.

Corny feels so bad about my torn jeans and about, well, using me as bait that she drops me and Delia off at the mall and gives me money to buy some replacements.

“You know,” Delia says gently, “they do make jeans in long sizes.”

“Not where my dad shops,” I say, trying to make it funny. It might be if it weren't true.

“Maybe it's time that your dad stops doing all the shopping.” She says this so nicely, so sweetly, that I just nod and start to feel a little grateful. She's absolutely right.

I follow her into a store where everyone looks like a model—well, not like the six-foot-two
magazine
models, but like perfect little models of what people who make jeans expect people who buy them to look like. You know, no crazy, jutting hip bones, or warped butts, or tree-trunk thighs. “I'm not sure about this,” I tell Delia. I can't help but stare at one salesgirl who's so pretty and willowy she almost looks like she's been drawn by some expert artist with a nice flowing charcoal pencil. Everything about her looks perfectly put into place.

I, on the other hand, look like I was drawn by that artist's third-grade student. I try to explain this to Delia, but she just hands me six pairs of jeans and leads me into an ant-sized dressing room. We cram in together, and when I slip out of my awful jeans, she takes them and looks at the tag. “These are guys' jeans.”

“Yeah, well.” I shrug. I don't tell her about the other pairs my dad bought me that have tags that say
irregular
. And yet seem to fit me.

The first pair mocks me by riding up in the crotch. The second pair plays a trick on me by making my butt magically disappear. The third pair serves me up a generous portion of muffin top. After the fourth pair just whines at me and sags so much in the crotch that I look like I've changed genders, my frustration takes over. “This is why I just give up.” I reach for my jeans. “Why even bother?”

She snatches them out of my hands. “Last time I shopped for jeans, I tried on fourteen pairs!” Which I know is only because she was seeking absolute perfection, not simply trying to be passable, like I am. She may have acne, but she's like a little mannequin. Clothes look as good on her body as they do on the displays.

Three stores, nineteen pairs, and one heated argument later (about which was worse, cystic acne or bad bone structure), I find them. Two pairs! On
sale
, even! They are magical. I can't help smiling when I see them in the mirror and find that I look incredibly normal. Somehow they've made my legs look less like odd appendages created strictly for the function of walking, and more like flowy things a dancer might have. Okay, that might be pushing it a little, but still, I
do
feel a little graceful in them. There's a shape to my butt, and it's not a rectangle. The crotch is perfectly gender-appropriate. It's just—normal. And acceptable. Both such beautiful, glorious words.