After locking up the house and leaving the cat-eye glasses where I found them, I add the reply letter and Kiera’s original letter to the package of letters that will go to print this week.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, baby. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Chapter Sixteen

Neutral Territory

If I could brush all my hair in front of my face and just go to school as a giant head of hair instead of as Sweet Pea the Projectile Puker, I would, but the fact is I wouldn’t be able to see where I’m going.

Mom insists on driving me to school and I don’t fight her, because I’m more than happy to not face the bus crowd today. About a block away from school, Mom pulls over onto a neighborhood street.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. It feels like she’s about to say something heavy and serious, but it’s not like she’s getting another divorce.

She gives me a soft smile. “Nothing’s wrong, Sweet Pea. I just wanted to be sure that you understand you have nothing to be embarrassed about.”

I want so badly to plug my fingers in my ears and scream la, la, la, la, la!

Reaching over the parking brake, she pats my thigh. “Sometimes bodies are just bodies—”

“And what?” I ask. “Are you going to tell me it’s perfectly natural to puke all over my classmates?”

“No,” she says, her thinning patience showing. “I was going to say that sometimes bodies are just bodies and there’s not much we can do about it.”

I wedge myself against the door, trying to push down the little prickles of guilt I feel for not just letting her be nice and comfort me. “But did my body have to be such a body in front of my whole class?”

Her shoulders shake as she chuckles. “Chalk that up to a mystery of the universe, my dear. It’s like that gosh darn news cycle,” she says. “Someone will come along and do something even more memorable and no one will ever remember about your incident, so you hold your head up high, baby.”

I roll my eyes, but really she makes me feel a little bit better.

She pulls back out into the street. “If you’d rather,” she says, “we can talk about the research project you’ve got coming up. I haven’t seen you do even a little bit of work on it, you know.”

I groan. I’ve got no clue what I’m going to do for that project, and if I don’t get my act together soon, I might not even make it to eighth grade. “Can we go back to talking about me puking on my whole class?”

At school, I don’t exactly hold my head up high, but at least I don’t hide under my desk.

The moment I step out of Mom’s car, Oscar is on me like a magnet. At first, he doesn’t ask questions or prod. He called to check up on me while I was home from school, but no official word on the incident.