Mom was no Sally Stick Figure either. She was always on one of those celebrity diets. Last year it was the Celery and Carrot Diet, and all she did was fart and turn orange. Before that it was a Cottage Cheese Diet that packed on twenty extra pounds. Apparently the “eat all you want” part of the pitch wasn’t exactly true. This year it was the Salmon Diet. Dahlia figured that it was only a matter of time before Mom grew gills and began swimming upstream to spawn.

Well, maybe that would have happened if the world hadn’t ended.

— 2 —

It did. The world ended.

On a Friday.

Somehow it didn’t surprise Dahlia Allgood that the world would end on a Friday. What better way to screw up the weekend?

— 3 —

Like most important things in the world, Dahlia wasn’t paying that much attention to it. To the world. To current events.

She was planning revenge.

Again.

It wasn’t an obsession with her, but she had some frequent flyer miles. If people didn’t push her, she wouldn’t even think about pushing back.

She was fat and unattractive. That wasn’t up for debate, and she couldn’t change a few thousand years of developing standards for beauty. On the other hand, neither of those facts made it okay for anyone to mess with her.

That’s what people didn’t seem to get.

Maybe someone sent a mass text that it was okay to say things about her weight. Or stick pictures of pork products on her locker. Or make oink-oink noises when she was puffing her way around the track in gym. If so, she didn’t get that text and she did not approve of the message.

Screw that.

It’s not that she was one of the mean girls. Dahlia suspected the mean girls were the ones who hated themselves the most. And Dahlia didn’t even hate herself. She liked herself. She liked her mind. She liked her taste in music and books and boys and things that mattered. She didn’t laugh when people tripped. She didn’t take it as a personal win when someone else—someone thinner or prettier—hit an emotional wall. Dahlia knew she had her faults, but being a heartless or vindictive jerk wasn’t part of that.

Revenge was a different thing. That wasn’t being vindictive. It was—as she once read in an old novel—a thirst for justice. Dahlia wanted to be either a lawyer or a cop, so that whole justice thing was cool with her.

Justice—or, let’s call it by the right name, revenge—had to be managed, though. You had to understand your own limits and be real with your own level of cool. Dahlia spent enough time in her head to know who she was. And wasn’t.

So, when someone did something to her, she didn’t try to swap cool insults, or posture with attitude, or any of that. Instead she got even.

When Marcy Van Der Meer—and, side note, Dahlia didn’t think anyone in an urban high school should have a last name with three separate words—sent her those pictures last month? Yeah, she took action. The pictures had apparently been taken in the hall that time Dahlia dropped her books. The worst of them was taken from directly behind her as she bent over to pick them up. Can we say butt crack?