Best Frenemies Read Free Page A

envelope and began to run down the school policies. Alice gave herself permission to zone out, pulling out the purple notebook and opening to its first promising blank page, feeling reassured by the ♥ you! note Cass had written beneath her locker combination on the inside of the front cover.
    She glanced up at Ms. Garrity, who was wearing an unflattering khaki skirt cut to a weird place on her legs, above the ankles and below the knee. Even Alice’s mom, who wore yoga pants like it was her job, would call the skirt “unfortunate.” Ms. Garrity continued to read the announcements almost comically loudly and slowly, as if she were just killing time and couldn’t stand to have to actually look at or speak with the students.
    That gave Alice a brilliant idea: if she could paint a clear picture of what her homeroom was like for Cassidy, and Cass did the same for her, they wouldn’t feel that far apart after all. And if they ever exchanged funny stories about what happened in class, they could each perfectly picture what happened.
    Alice drew a grid on the page and starteddiagramming a funny seating chart of the kids in the class. She illustrated Christy Gillespie’s seat with flowing curlicues, then noted “Cute! Nice!” next to Aaron Woolsey and described the kids she hadn’t met yet with words like Hawaiian-shirt kid, too-strong-perfume girl , and shoes I want to steal .
    Alice wrote Me! inside the square that indicated her desk, and doodled a little panda on the edge to indicate her backpack. When she got to the mean-looking girl’s seat, Alice scribbled a frowny face with a dark V between her eyes to indicate her furrowed brow. The effect was funny. Alice had to suppress a giggle.
    â€œI said, did you hear me, Alice Kinney?”
    Alice was jolted out of her illustration. It felt like her armpits went from dry to nervous and sweaty in one second.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œI appreciate that you’re taking notes so studiously, but it’s really not necessary in homeroom,” said Ms. Garrity, who really seemed like she was in a really bad mood for so early in the year. She leaned against her desk and crossed her clog-clad ankles as if she were already exhausted. “What I was asking is whether you knew if your parents were going to be providing us the permission slip for you to participate in biology labs.”
    â€œOh. Yes,” Alice said in a tiny voice. Her face was burning up so much she was tempted to touch it to see if it was as hot as it felt. The other students stared at their desks, probably thinking, I’m glad that wasn’t me .
    â€œGreat, thanks for letting me know,” said Ms. Garrity, diving back into her announcements.
    Out of habit, Alice glanced to the seat on her right, which was where Cassidy used to sit when they were in homeroom together last year, when everything was easy and made sense. Whenever anything funny used to happen in class, Alice would glance over so she and her best friend could laugh together, like the time before Christmas break when they secretly added a tiny cap and beard to the stuffed duck Mr. Shears kept in his science lab and everyone in the class noticed, one by one, except for Mr. Shears. Or whenever she or Cassidy got in trouble (like the time they got chided for disrupting Mr. Shears’s class, even though they could totally tell he thought it was funny too), they’d perfected the art of sneaking a quick look to each other for reassurance.
    However, this time Alice found the opposite of reassurance: with Cassidy being in the other room, her glance fell again on the dark curly-haired girl from the bus, who stared at Alice and rolled her eyes beforefixing her gaze pointedly to the front of her room, as if to say, “It’s not that hard to pay attention, is it?”
    Alice looked back miserably at her desk, yearning to write about this already to Cassidy, but obviously, she couldn’t. She