The coolest-looking girl in the world wasn’t there.

Already Tully didn’t fit in. It had taken two hours to choose her clothes this morning—an outfit right out of the pages of Seventeen magazine—and every bit of it was wrong.

When the school bus drove up, she made a split-second decision. She wasn’t going to go to school in this hick backwater. Snohomish might be less than an hour from downtown Seattle, but as far as she was concerned, she might as well be on the moon. That was how alien this place felt.

No.

Hell, no.

She marched down the gravel driveway and shoved the front door open so hard it cracked against the wall.

Drama, she’d learned, was like good punctuation: it underscored your point.

“You must be high,” she said loudly, realizing a second too late that the only people in the living room were the moving men.

One of them paused and looked wearily her way. “Huh?”

She pushed past them, grazing the armoire so hard they swore under their breath. Not that she cared. She hated it when she felt like this, all puffed up with anger.

She wouldn’t let her so-called mother make her feel twisted up inside, not after all the times that woman had abandoned her.

In the master bedroom, her mom was sitting on the floor, cutting pictures out of Cosmo. As usual, her long hair was a wavy, fuzzy nightmare held in check by a grossly out-of-date beaded leather headband. Without looking up, she flipped to the next page, where a naked, grinning Burt Reynolds covered his penis with one hand.

“I’m not going to this backwater school. They’re a bunch of hicks.”

“Oh.” Mom flipped to the next page, then reached for her scissors and began cutting out a spray of flowers from a Breck ad. “Okay.”

Tully wanted to scream. “Okay? Okay? I’m fourteen years old.”

“My job is to love and support you, baby, not to get in your face.”

Tully closed her eyes, counted to ten, and said again, “I don’t have any friends here.”

“Make new ones. I heard you were Miss Popular at your old school.”

“Come on, Mom, I—”

“Cloud.”

“I’m not calling you Cloud.”

“Fine, Tallulah.” Mom looked up to make sure her point had been made. It had.

“I don’t belong here.”

“You know better than that, Tully. You’re a child of the earth and sky; you belong everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita says . . .”

“That’s it.” Tully walked away while her mother was still talking. The last thing she wanted to hear was some drug-soaked advice that belonged on a black-light poster. On the way out, she snagged a pack of Virginia Slims from her mom’s purse and headed for the road.

For the next week, Kate watched the new girl from a distance.

Tully Hart was boldly, coolly different; brighter, somehow, than everyone else in the faded green hallways. She had no curfew and didn’t care if she got caught smoking in the woods behind the school. Everyone talked about it. Kate heard the whispered awe in their voices. For a group of kids who’d grown up in the dairy farms and paper mill workers’ homes of the Snohomish Valley, Tully Hart was exotic. Everyone wanted to be friends with her.