A man and a woman greet us as we walk up the path. The Insanely-Hots indeed—they don’t look like the parents of my friends. For one thing, they’re too young. The man, who introduces himself to us as Greg Lewis, with his shiny hair and wide smile, looks so much younger than Dad that he could pass as his son. And his wife, Julia, has red hair and a big laugh. She’s not supermodel pretty, but her smile lights up the world. Neither of them looks old enough to have teenage sons. Julia’s carrying a wriggling toddler, a little girl with blond wavy hair who totters over to us when her mother puts her down and shows us the doll she’s holding, a battered naked Barbie with wild frizzy brown hair.

“She looks like you,” the little girl says, holding the doll up to me.

Everyone laughs and I blush as everyone looks from the doll to my own wild curls. Great. Bloody great.

“Tess likes the outdoors and getting her hands dirty too much to worry about her hair,” Dad says, and Greg Lewis turns to smile at me.

“So you’re a gardener? You’ll have to come over and help me with mine.”

I can feel my cheeks get even hotter and I stuff my hands in my pockets like he might see the dirt under my nails and know what I’ve been doing. “Um, yeah, I guess I could…”

But he’s already turned away, laughing now with Dad, and I feel stupid. God, Tess, he was just being polite, it wasn’t a real invitation.

I look around and spot the boys right away, two strangers standing apart from a sea of familiar faces. I see Nicole and Bella’s other friends have already found them, though, all hovering with adoring smiles. Bella was right—they are both so good-looking; shiny and different. The boys have darker hair than their kid sister, but all together they could be a family straight out of a fairy tale, too pretty to be real. The older one is smiling, but the younger one looks like he might bite.

“Let’s say hello,” Bella says, hooking her arm through mine.

I pull away from her and step backward. “No thanks,” I say, moving into the shadows. “I don’t like the look of them. But you go ahead.”

She shrugs and saunters off to join her friends. Nicole waves to her. She looks over at me for a second, then smiles and leans in to whisper something to the boys. They glance over at me. The younger one doesn’t smile, just stares, but the older one laughs. My face goes hot imagining all the horrible things Nicole could have said.

“Why don’t you go and join them?” Julia says with her dazzling smile.

“Or you could play Barbies with me,” the little girl says, brandishing the naked Tess-doll.