“Okay,” I said. She still hates it when I’m nice. She says I do it on purpose to make her look bad. She only has two friends, and I think it’s because she’s not relaxed or easygoing or nice. Not that I can judge right now. I currently seem to have no friends. Oops. Sorry. That sounded bad. I know we’re still friends. Or we will be when we start talking again.

I went into the living room and sat on the couch. I didn’t feel like going in my room because then I would have to think about how small my new room is. It’s basically like what most people would use for a closet. It might actually have even been a closet, for all I know. My mom has a proper bedroom and my sister has a proper bedroom and I got an eighth of a room. It feels like a coffin, sort of. None of us even has an en suite bathroom. My sister would probably have started a human rights complaint if my mom made her take the closet-coffin, and I don’t mind, really. I just don’t like spending time in there. Sometimes, though, I wish Missy Stephenson could see my new coffin room so she could see what lying does to other people. Maybe then she’d tell the truth and we wouldn’t have to hide out in Stony Butte anymore.

I was about to start up Death Spawn 4, but then Kate stomped into the living room.

“Don’t start blasting that stupid game,” she said. I know you think Kate is pretty, but she’s really not. She’s especially not pretty here. Girls here all dress like they’re going camping. Kate dresses like she wants to hurt people’s eyes. She’s cutting her hair even worse than usual and wearing even uglier old-man sweaters and old-man pants, and she’s barely even cleaning the lenses of her huge glasses, so I have no idea how she can see. Maybe she can’t. Maybe that’s the point.

She fit in at the Vegas Academy, but not here. I doubt people here get her at all. They’re probably even less into Kate’s fashion sense than they are into my Doug T-shirt.

I was going to tell her I could wear my headphones, but she had a mean look on her face, so I went to watch the new Van Johnson video. Remember the episode where my dad played poker with Van and his Johnson Boys? I wish we could have gone to that one. Oh well, at least we got T-shirts. Which reminds me that I didn’t wear my Van Johnson T-shirt today because people here don’t seem to understand T-shirts. But Kate wasn’t done with me.

“I need you to help me with something later,” she said.

“What?”

“A blood test.”

“A what?”

“A blood test.”