The damage went deeper than the bite marks. Quinn was such a problem child, I secretly hoped Mom and Karen would break up. I knew it wouldn’t happen—they were far too happy—but my peaceful home was in tatters as a result of their relationship. As a result of Quinn. Mom kept assuring me that Quinn was adapting and to be patient, but I knew what evil lurked behind that bedroom door. A bona fide bitch. And bitches kept right on bitching because that was their basic bitch function.

Quinn threw the curveball our first day of school. I went downstairs in my jeans, sweatshirt and wet hair, expecting attitude, but she was smiling at the breakfast table. Rare. And conversational. Rarer. For the briefest moment, I wondered if maybe Mom was right. Maybe Quinn had purged the douche bag demon festering inside. Or maybe her fairy godmother had granted her a modicum of decency sometime during the night.

“You have good hair, Emma. Like, a nice color and it’s long. You should wear it down,” she said.

I blinked at her over my wobbly pile of scrambled eggs, expecting a second head to sprout from her neck. She smiled. I glanced over at my mother, who was hovering by the sink. Mom and I shared a look. She nodded, encouraging me to say something equally accommodating. It took me a minute to get over my opossum-in-headlights shock, but after a couple of bites I managed, “Thanks. I’ve been growing it out.”

“You can use my flat iron to straighten it before school if you want. Tomorrow or whatever.”

“Oh. Cool.” I had no idea how to use a flat iron, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. I apparently didn’t need to, either.

“...I’ll show you later. After school.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

One morning of her being nice didn’t assuage the pain of our introductory weeks, but it did shake my resolve to hate her with the fury of a thousand suns. The whole time we waited for the bus, she chattered about how she missed her old friends and how much a new school terrified her. I mustered some sympathy for her that day. Actually, I maintained that sympathy the first week of school because she was nice to me. In turn, I introduced her to everyone I knew because that’s what you did when you had the new kid on your hip.

I wasn’t so stupid as to think that we were going to be best friends, but she was tolerable enough that I thought maybe we could coexist amicably. I was even encouraged when I found out we were going to be in the same art class. Quinn liked photography and I slanted toward sketching and inking, but art was a common interest.