A few seconds later, Margot strode in and heaved her stuff onto the desk beside mine—a bloodred water bottle and an army-green backpack with the words If you can read this back the F up scrawled across it in Sharpie. It all clashed horribly with her drapey burnt-orange sweater and turquoise hair, but somehow she always made her ensembles look like a mood.

“You’re alive,” she said. Since I’d overslept and missed homeroom, it was the first time I’d seen her since bailing on the party.

“Yeah, I’m feeling better now.”

“Good,” she said as she sat down, giving me the side-eye.

I took a breath. “So—”

“You didn’t miss much,” Margot said at the same time. “Although I did kind of miss you in the middle of all those strangers.”

“Strangers? They all love you.”

She pointed at herself. “Love? Me?”

“They were cheering for you during that Rocky Horror thing!”

Margot glanced at the teacher’s desk before responding. Mr. Dale always let us talk during study hall, but he had a weird way of jumping into the conversations and pretending to relate. Now he seemed pretty invested in Teddy Hansen’s monologue to Pauline Caffrey about Hitchcock films, so Margot went on.

“Okay, there’s a difference between cheering for someone and loving them. They respect me, I guess. But I’m not friend-friends with many of them.”

“Why not?” Margot had been in the musical every year since she was a freshman, and she’d seemed in her element last night. But now that I thought about it, at auditions and callbacks and the party, she’d only talked to me, Ethan, and Jude.

“So…” Margot fiddled with the ends of her bob. “I used to hang out with a different crowd.”

“Which one? Wait, was it the Hitchcock crowd?” Teddy was still yammering on to poor Pauline. It was hard to ignore.

Margot snorted. “I like that you don’t know anything. I mean, that you don’t know anything about anyone who goes here. But I guess it had to come out sometime. I used to be friends with Izzy Kramer.”

I actually did know of Izzy Kramer. It was hard not to, considering her face was plastered all over the school’s trophy cases, as a homecoming court “princess” and captain of the state champion volleyball team.

Last week on my way to trig, I was behind Izzy and the pack of girls she always hung out with. She turned to one of them and said, “Olivia, you smell like Snausages. Move over.” Just like that. The other girls cackled. I couldn’t picture Margot among them. Margot knew how to hurl a good insult at a jerk, but she wasn’t mean to innocent people like that.