So anyway, we became Lexi, Cole, and Rena. It was really great there for a fraction of a second, and then I walked into my kitchen, where the new and improved Lexi, formally known as Alexandria Devlin, was licking the cookie dough from one of my mom’s beaters. Mom always does that sort of thing—makes cookies, popcorn, brownies. That’s why Lexi doesn’t believe me about how annoying she can be. The double chocolate chips disorient her.

I heard Lexi telling Mom all about our new cool names and everything. Mom hadn’t even asked her; Lexi just spilled it out. Lexi’s like that. You can’t tell her anything. She even told Mom she could change her name too. Mom thought that was cool (she is always trying to do cool things in front of my friends) and her name could be Tiny, but that would be dumb. For once I wholeheartedly agreed with her.

“No, no,” Lexi said, all smiles as she licked the second beater clean, completely ignorant of my death-glare. “You could be Desi. The letters don’t have to all be in a row.” It was true; we had made that rule just for Lexi, because she pouted about being Lexa or Alex or Dria or Xand, which I personally adored. And so, as the legend goes, that is how Destiny Moore became hip, cool Desi Moore.

“Kinda like Demi Moore, huh?” Lexi had chirped.

I just muttered something like “Yeah, whatever.” And from that moment on, I never called myself Rena. Everyone else, Mom included, kept her four-letter nickname.

Funny, because I was the only one who really wanted to change. Go figure.

Destiny. I hate to admit it, but I much prefer Desi. I’ll never call her that, or Destiny, for that matter. I think it’s dumb the way Cole calls her mother Regina. Well, most of the time she pronounces it differently. You know, like that place in Canada, rhymes with vagina. But even so, it’s dumb. And Cole Blakely doesn’t have to do things like that to be cool. She exudes it without even trying. It emits from her like the glow from gold.

She doesn’t know it, though. That’s why she hangs out with us.

Or maybe it is just to piss off her old friends the PPs.

That’s what I like most about Cole, the way she loves to piss people off. Usually she’s subversive about it, but when she’s not, it’s a riot. Like this one time in art she took craft shears to her Juicy Couture sweats. Some of the Hauties cried out in horror when they saw it. The others pretended not to notice, but they did. Oh, they did. And within a month her cropped couture was en vogue. Everyone was doing it.