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After that, I tried not to sleep so ht before New Year’s Eve, I ed some lawn chairs around an outdoor table and lit so silver Christ wire Then, finally, I took a step back and looked around It was beautiful Gliht back froick I reic vividly: "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in confor For a ician

Then my vision shifted, and I saw the place as Roth and Silke were going to see it, as the boy in gold with the beautiful, no-doubt-expensive costu with a bunch of cheap lights

"They’re not really coht?"

"What?" Wren sat in the open doorway, trying to fit into a pair of narrow silver shoes that she’d borrowed from Penelope She never wore heels

"The Mossley kids Roth Silke Why would he let his friends coirlfriends at the same party is a recipe for disaster? He wouldn’t And ould Silke come to a trailer park? What if no one else coet loaded," Wren said "Really, really, really loaded"

I sighed, slu in a lawn chair "And eat all those little quiches by ourselves And cry"

Wren and I had been friends for years, since we’dhole She was trying to drown a boy she liked and got in trouble with histhe boy had started it Which pretty et in boy trouble, and the other two had to bail her out

Even though Penny and I had known each other longer, Wren was the one who knew my dumbest secret After Wren found out about my fake boyfriend, I’d had to have a fake breakup with fake texts and everything so Penny didn’t guess If they’d both knoould all have had to talk about it

It was too bad My fake boyfriend was the best boyfriend I’d never had

Joachim was a name I’d found on a website that I’d stu ofout of my mouth as a boy I really liked, a boy who never existed After that, I just embroidered the lie I made up details about his life, about hoe met online and hoe had plans for hi e-s ould do in the future, nicknames for one another and lines copied from favorite movies and books and then showed off those e-mails like they were real I made him into the one person who truly understood me--and weirdly, sometimes he seemed to understand ers, he wrote that all I needed was to believe that the world wasn’t one way That it was big enough to contain a lot of different stories in it, big enough to be unpredictable But I wasn’t sure how to believe hi

After I’d been found out and "broke up" with Joachi that my face ollen and puffy at school the next day Penny snuck out during lunch and ca that both the breakup and the boyfriend were fake, spent the dayprowess

A couple of nights later, when I couldn’t sleep, I went outside and sat on the stairs in front ofwiththe shiver of the wind, I wished that the stars or Santa’s elves or Satan hiive h and unpredictable enough to contain soood or bad as I needed to be to deserve it

"Let’s text Silke," Wren said, pulling out her phone A few