quarter report card under the Golding and Goodman Insurance magnet and ran a finger down the grades.
“So?” Who at Lincoln Middle School hadn’t heard about her and Madison? Yesterday Alice and Madison ate at the same lunch table. Today Madison ate at a different table with Casey Sue. And though Alice had inched her chair closer to Julie’s and made a show of laughing at Julie’s and Ashton’s chatter, even when it wasn’t funny, the empty chair on her other side had blared her loss to the cafeteria. It felt like each person who walked by her table—which might have been everyone, since she sat close to the lunch line—paused with a loaded tray to glance at that empty chair. Their faces were loaded, too, packed with curiosity and, from a few, something else, something nastier. Satisfaction.
Still standing at the fridge, Penny fingered a photo of Alice and Madison, side by side in a one-arm embrace, standing on the beach with a dark blue Lake Ontario and a paler blue sky behind them.
“I thought Madison thought Casey Sue was a slut.”
“So did I.” Alice looked over Penny’s shoulder at the picture. She and Madison wore the same swimsuit, just in different colors, red and pink. It made her think of the other things they’d shared over the past five years: the same American Girl dolls, the same light-up purple sneakers, the same butterfly barrettes. In fact, back in fourth grade, it’d been the coincidence of their identical Hello Kitty backpacks that had sparked their friendship.
Alice went to the sink to fill a glass with water. Matching things—was that all they’d had to work with?
As if she read her mind, Penny said, “Personally, I never thought you and Madison had much in common.”
Alice shrugged. If Penny was waiting for her to admit that,