Boo was down the hall getting some fake tattoos drawn on by Gaenor. Jazza was squeezing herself into her Union Jack dress, which she had made out of a decorative pillowcase. I was trying to tease out my hair as big as it could go.

“You never showed me your essay,” she said, out of the blue. “The one on Pepys. You said you wanted me to read it over.”

“Oh . . .” I rubbed the gray makeup hard into my face. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

“What did you end up writing?”

I had no idea what I’d ended up writing. I’d typed it, but I’d barely read it. It had something to do with the concept of a diary kept for both public and private reading and how that affected the tone of the narrative. So I lied.

“I compared it to modern accounts of major events,” I said. “Like Hurricane Katrina. He was writing about the Great Fire of London, which was where he lived. I wrote about how you talk about things that affect you personally.”

That was actually a genius idea. I only ever have genius ideas after the fact. I should have just written the damn paper.

“You and Boo have been getting along a lot better this week,” she said, doing a chest check. Her dress was really tight. This was a whole new Jazza coming out—almost literally. Normally, I would have started joking about this, but I smelled trouble. Those words meant, “You haven’t told me anything about Boo this week, and now I am convinced you like her better than me.”

“I’ve accepted her,” I said as breezily as I could. “She’s our pet.”

Jazza gave me a slight sideways look as she pulled the dress up a little higher over her girlish assets. It was wrong to refer to Boo as a pet. That was normally the kind of thing Jazza would censure, but she said nothing.

“It could be worse,” I said.

“Of course,” Jazza said, going over to her bureau. “I’m not saying, you know, that I . . . but . . . I’ve . . .”

Boo returned, dressed in a shiny tracksuit with a lopsided ponytail. I was pretty sure those were just some of her actual clothes, and not something she had gotten as a costume.

“Watch this, yeah?” she said, immediately going into a handstand and walking a few steps. Then she tumbled over and crashed into Jazza’s desk, almost knocking over her photos. “Haven’t done that since I was fourteen.”

Jazza looked at me through the mirror as she attached her false eyelashes.

There was a look on her face that suggested a rapidly dwindling patience level.