I didn’t have a ton of other friends at school, and I generally kept to myself. If I disappeared from Vista Green, I wasn’t sure too many people would notice, beyond Colin and those two teachers. Maybe also Amanda, whose mom lived in my dad’s building. We were friends, you could say. I probably would have been hanging with her if she hadn’t been at camp for the summer. But I was always relieved to get home at the end of the school day and be alone—to nestle into my window seat at my mom’s or into my comfy marshmallow armchair at my dad’s. The way I’d felt like I’d escaped from food-writing class, that was kind of how I felt every day when I got home from school.

But now that I’d been away from school for five weeks or so, it all felt like a dream. Had I really switched schools this last year? Left my two besties and everything I knew behind? Had I really worked in the library and written for the school paper? Had I really tutored kids at the town library? I guessed I had, but it was hard to imagine doing it all again. I dreaded restarting it all, rekindling the relationships, just as I dreaded having to interact with all new kids in my food-writing class. It would be so much easier to just hide at home with a book!

The two customers stood up to leave, and Sierra looked up from the notebook where she was writing down lyrics. “Good-bye, my darling fans!” she called after them. “I’ll be performing every weekday afternoon, from one to six, and Sundays from one to eight. Come on back!”

They laughed and waved and promised to return, while I shook my head in amazement.

“Oh, Sierra, you are too much!”

“In a good way or a bad way?” she asked with a smile, but her eyes were serious.

“In just the right way,” I said. For you, I added silently. Not the right way for me at all!

CHAPTER THREE MAKING NEW FRIENDS IS HARD

When we left work on Monday evening, I invited Sierra to go to dinner with me the next night at a new vegetarian food truck, Dirt Treats, at the mall. I needed a place to review for class and figured something brand-new would be ideal. Plus, I was dying to try their Amazing UnBurger—a vegetarian meat alternative that supposedly looked, smelled, and tasted like regular meat. Most likely no one else in my class would have tried it yet, and my take on it would be fresh.

So on Tuesday at six fifteen, Sierra and I were in my dad’s car headed to the food-truck park, and my dad was asking Sierra all about her summer.