After several hours of swinging from the oak tree in their netted trap, Jack and Sarah heard the leaves stirring and then the sound of a saw meeting rope. Before their eyes had time to grow wide, they suddenly found themselves falling to earth.

The bus stops, and Edie gets on. I keep my eyes glued to the book.

Rubbing their backsides and scowling, Jack and Sarah looked around to find themselves surrounded by stubby creatures with gray skin and pointed ears. Clover elves. Each set of long twiggy fingers held a bow, and each of the bows held an arrow. All of these arrows, Sarah noticed with alarm, were pointed directly at—

Just as we pull away from Edie’s stop, I feel something hit me in the back of the head, and—thinking of elves with their bows at the ready—I instinctively spin around.

Too late, I realize it was just a balled-up candy wrapper that Edie threw at me, and now I’m staring at her and the Graces, and all three of them are staring back at me, mouths agape.

“Oh. My. God,” Edie says, a joyful smile spreading across her face. “What. A. Freak!”

“She’s like a zombie or something,” says Grace One.

And because I have the worst luck ever, Grace Two already has her phone out. In the instant before I turn around, she snaps my picture.

I whip forward, cheeks on fire. I mean, I knew it was bad, but are my new bangs really that terrible? And how do they make me look like a zombie?

I sink lower in my seat and fumble in Gram’s satchel for my phone so I can get a look at myself. Before I find it, though, we reach Ruby’s stop and she climbs up. Relief fills me as she sits down next to me.

“What’s with Edie and her friends?” she whispers. “They’re all looking up here and laughing.”

“I think it’s my bangs,” I say. “I did a really bad job cutting them.”

Ruby stares at me, her cheeks going even pinker than usual. “Um, I don’t think it’s just the bangs,” she says. “It’s your face? It’s all white.”

My heart plummets. I thought my bangs covered the spots. Could they have somehow spread even farther since I looked in the mirror a few minutes ago? Do I have some kind of super strain of vitiligo or something?

Ruby lifts her hand to my face and rubs at one of my cheeks with her thumb. “I think it’s sunscreen.”

I turn my phone camera lens toward me and see that Ruby’s right. The sunscreen Mom got me is like chalk against my skin. I look like I’m about to go to a mime convention.

“It’s this new stuff my mom’s making me wear,” I say, breathing a sigh of relief. “It’s really high SPF.”