Kieren is Kori’s older brother—he’s a senior. She has two— Kyle, who is perfect; and Kieren, who pretends to be perfect. Kori, who doesn’t give a shit about perfection, is the black sheep of the family despite all her mother’s bleaching efforts.

“Yeah,” Kori said as she rolled her eyes. “He wants to take his skateboarding to a”—she made finger quotes—“whole new level. Anyway, now I can go down to that club in LoDo I was telling you about.”

“The karaoke thing?”

“It’s not karaoke, it’s a real club, real band, actual singing. Bleeder Valve? Remember, the band I told you about? Kieren’s going to drive me. Mom would shit a brick if she knew.”

I glanced at the fake ID in my hand. “Well, since you have a license and all, you could actually drive yourself, couldn’t you?”

“True. I’d have to get a car, though. The only one I could jack would be Park’s. It would be easy; he’d be too stoned to even notice.” She thought about it for a moment. “No. I couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t be fair.”

I snorted. “Honor among thieves?”

Her burgundy lip curled in a smirk. “Yeah. Something like that.” Then: “You know, Parker thinks the ID looks more like you than me.”

“Really?” I looked again at the ID. Now that I’d dyed my hair black and flattened it out with the Pro Style, Kori and I looked identical.

Lexi Devlin (my friend and yet also my mother’s biggest advocate—go figure) thinks I dyed my hair to upset my mom. But really, I did it to be different from her.

See, the thing with my mom—she was just seventeen when she got pregnant with me. So she’s got this chip on her shoulder. Like she has to prove to everyone that she isn’t the slutty, white-trash girl they think she is. She totally overcompensates. Like the way she always wears panty hose and pumps even though she’s on her feet all day, and all her how-to and self-help books so she can be an expert on everything—oh, perfect example—the Baked Alaska. Okay, so, she asked me what I wanted served for my tenth birthday. My reply—hamburgers and ice cream.

In the living room—full-on Martha Stewart decorations and not a speck of dust, and for dinner these bizarrely exotic vegetarian “hamburgers” with ciabattá-like buns. The whole spread could have made the cover of Bon Appétit.

In our kitchen—half a wall burnt to a crisp, because who else besides my mother would even think about putting a blowtorch to ice cream?

It’s all about the illusion. And my mom would love nothing more than for me to appear, if not actually be, just like her— sunshine, white light, daisies, and doves.

And I wanted to be dark. Like Kori.