I flashed the note, actually feeling thankful for it. “I’ll be grounded, remember?”

“Since when does that stop you?”

“Fine.” I closed my locker door and started toward the front exit. I looked over my shoulder at her and confessed, “But I’ll just wuss out of it too.”

“Over my dead body,” she called.

“Stop it with the morbid death and dying stuff, okay? Leave it to the goth kids; they’re more convincing anyway.”

“I know you don’t mean that! I’m just as depressing as they are,” she called after me, but I was already rounding the corner making my escape. “And you will be doing the dare.” And then with dramatic flourish, she announced more than asked, “If not tonight—when?”

I should’ve known that I was in serious trouble when my mother showed up at school in a suit and heels. The hairdo she’d sprayed in place looked hard enough to repel a hollow-point bullet or two. She headed straight to Principal Teasley’s office, so she could personally apologize for my behavior. The way she strode purposefully down the hall and into his office, you’d have thought she was at the county courthouse and I was on trial. Or maybe that’s just because I was humming the theme song from Law & Order.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t take this version of her seriously. I’ve been to Oz. I’ve seen behind the curtain. And the woman behind it wore mismatched socks and giggled when she burped.

“I don’t know what she’s thinking, that’s not how I raised her to behave,” I’d heard Mom tell Teasley. Just a little dramatic for being five minutes late to class, but whatever.

“You’re grounded, starting tonight,” Mom said as she came out of Teasley’s office.

“You don’t even want to know what happened?” I probably shouldn’t have started with that, considering I didn’t really have a good excuse.

“This is unacceptable, Ser. Completely.” Even as she was saying this, her head ducked down and the blond bangs that usually fell away from her face stayed plastered in place as she scrawled off her signature on the note Teasley’s secretary had given me. “I’m serious—no phone, no TV.”

If it got me out of Gilmore Girls reruns, it was well worth it.

“Fine,” I said, turning my phone off and setting it in her palm. “It wasn’t on purpose.”