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going down in writing. I tried to smile around the room, but the effort made my cheeks hurt.
    The priest cast an appraising eye up and down me, with a flicker of mirth in his eyes that let me know we were both in on the joke.
    “Perv,” I thought I heard Deena mutter.
    “Miss Rowley. As this is your senior year, and you’ve been a student at St. Joan’s since the Bush administration, I feel certain you are aware of the dress code?”
    I cleared my throat. “The dress code?” I echoed.
    “Next year you’ll be at whatever university will be fortunate enough to have you, and you will be free to wear as few scraps of handkerchief as you see fit. But at St. Joan’s, we still stubbornly insist that our students wear actual clothing. That skirt is—six inches, I believe? Seven?—above the knee. Roll it down, please.”
    Eight, actually. Okay, maybe more like nine. I reached to my waistband and tugged to bring it back down to regulation length. All around me, girls with rolled waistbands shifted in their seats, some pulling down the ends of their cardigans to cover the evidence. I didn’t see why he’d want to call me out on some BS skirt-rolling. Everybody does it. They start doing it in middle school.
    “Thank you. Now then,” he said. “Would you mind repeating your comment to Miss Gupta just now? The suspense is killing us.”
    Anjali squeaked and pressed her lips together, since I’m sure she was afraid I’d rat her out about the phone. I opened my mouth to speak, not really clear about what was going to come out, when the door to advisory clicked open and I was momentarily spared while we all dropped everything to watch Clara Rutherford come into class.
    The first thing to know about Clara is that I like her. I really do. And she likes me too. We’re not
not
friends or anything like that. That was the crazy thing about Clara—pretty much everybody liked her. She was so nice that I kind of wished I could hate her, if for no other reason than that she was definitely nicer than me. But as much as I may have wanted to, I couldn’t quite hate her. I don’t think I’d ever seen her get mad or lose her temper at anyone. She wasn’t friendly, exactly. There were plenty of girls at St. Joan’s who thought that being friendly to everyone, even people they hated, would make them popular. Instead they just came off as insincere, and fewer people wound up liking them than if they’d just acted normal.
    That wasn’t Clara’s style. Instead she had this air about her, as though there was always a red velvet carpet rolling out under her feet. She did okay in classes, but not so well that anyone would resent her, or feel like she was so much smarter than them that it was annoying. She played field hockey well enough that everyone wanted to have her on their team, but not so well that anyone would find a reason to high-stick her in the face. She even managed to look cute in the field hockey skirts, which really killed me, because I had a serious complex about my knees. Her hair was just the right length, with just the right amount of wave, and with a reddish-nut hue that glowed. Clara didn’t even have to straighten her hair, which I could admit envying about her. Mine springs straight out in dark corkscrews all over my head, so that half my childhood was spent with my mother ripping a hairbrush through thick snarls, saying I looked like the teenage bride of Frankenstein. It wasn’t until last year that I finally figured out the stuff to use to get them to fall in spirals.
    It was like Clara Rutherford belonged to some other species, one that didn’t sweat or smell or have anything go seriously wrong in its life. Her family, as far as I knew, was wealthy, and happy, and healthy, with a chocolate-haired mother who manned booths at school fund-raisers and a squash-playing father who actually came to some of her field hockey games. She had a brother who was in Emma’s brother’s class, as unblemished and likeable as