Author's note: Lollzie's Christmas present xxx

Brad crawled out of the corner sulkily and sat cross-legged against the sofa. "I'm sorry for being rude and inconsiderate about Suze" Brad said stiffly.

Helen bent down and ruffled his hair. "You're forgiven but you still need to apologise to Suze"

Brad stiffened and paled. It was not a conversation he was looking forwards to. Helen smirked to herself knowing full well her daughter would give Brad hell. Why punish your kid when your other child can do it probably even better than you could? She began to read the next entry in a loud, clear voice.

And yet I did. Make friends, I mean.

I didn't try to. I didn't really want to. I mean, I have enough friends back in Brooklyn. I have Gina, the best friend anybody could have. I didn't need any more friends than that.

Helen sighed. "Suzie, you can't just have one friend and leave it at that" she said disapprovingly. "It's not healthy"

And I really didn't think anybody here was going to like me – not after having been assigned a thousand-word essay because of what happened when I sat down. And especially not after what happened when we were informed that it was time for second period – there was no bell system at the Mission School, we changed class on the hour, and have five minutes to get where we were going. No sooner had Mr Walden dismissed us than the albino girl turned around and asked, her purple eyes glowing furiously behind the tinted lenses of her glasses. "Am I supposed to be grateful to you or something for what you said to Debbie?"

Helen's eyes widened, Andy looked rather stunned, David blinked and Jake looked awake.

"Wow...i didn't know they started off badly" Brad voiced their thoughts. "Or that Cee Cee had such a mean streak to her"

"You" I said, standing up, "aren't supposed to be anything as far as I'm concerned"

She stood up too. "But that's why you did it, right? Defended the albino? Because you felt sorry for me?"

"Even if that was why, you should have been polite about it!" Helen snapped at the book.

"I did it" I said, folding my coat over my arm, "because Debbie is a troll"

Jake and David burst out laughing and Brad merely shrugged, knowing full well that Suze was right. Besides the only reason he was with Debbie half the time was because Kelly never gave him the time of day.

I saw the corners of her lips twitch. Debbie had swept up her books and practically run for the door the minute Mr Walden had dismissed us. She and a bunch of other girls, including the pretty tanned one who'd had the empty seat next to her, were whispering amongst themselves and casting me dirty looks over their Ralph Lauren sweater-draped shoulders.

"It's like an army of clones" David shuddered.

I could tell the albino wanted to laugh at my calling Debbie a troll, but she wouldn't let herself. She said, fiercely, "I can fight my own battles, you know. I don't need your help, New York"

I shrugged. "Fine with me, Carmel"

She couldn't help smiling then. When she did, she revealed a mouthful of braces that winked as brightly as the sear outside the window. "It's Cee Cee" she said.

"What's Cee Cee?"

"My name. I'm Cee Cee" she stuck out a milky-white hand, the nails of which were painted a violent orange. "Welcome to the Mission Academy"

"And thus the friendship starts" Jake said. "God girls are weird. They were bitching at one another just a second ago"

"Language" Andy said automatically.

At nine o-clock, Mr Walden had dismissed her. By nine-oh-two, Cee Cee had introduced me to twenty other people, most of whom trotted after me as we moved to our next class, wanting to know what it was like to have lived in New York City.

"Is it really," one horsy-looking girl asked, wistfully, "as...metropolitan as they all say?"

These girls, I probably don't have to add, were not the class lookers.

"Of course not, don't be ridiculous" Brad muttered sarcastically, hoping that no one heard him and would send him back to the corner.

They were not, I saw at once, on speaking terms with the pretty tanned girl and the one whose fingers I threatened to break after school, who were the ones so well turned out in their sweater sets and khaki skirts. Oh no. The girls who came up to me were a motley bunch, some acned, some overweight, or way too skinny. I was horrified to see that one was wearing open-toe shoes with reinforced toe pantyhose. Beige pantyhose, too. And white shoes. In January!

"Fashion police, much?" Brad said raising an eyebrow.

"Yes she is a little obsessive" Helen agreed.

I could see I was going to have my work cut out for me.

"I don't think the girl would appreciate a makeover" David said. "After all it would imply that she doesn't look good and that's rather hurtful"

Cee Cee appeared to be the leader of their little pack. Editor of the school paper, the Mission News, which she called 'more of a literary review than an actual newspaper'

"Very true, though the material is very well written" David said.

Cee Cee had been in earnest when she informed me she did not need me to fight her battles for her. She had plenty of ammunition of her own, including a pretty packed arsenal of verbal zingers and an extremely serious work ethic. Practically the first thing she asked me – after she got over being made at me – was if I'd be interested in writing a piece for her paper.

"Nothing fancy" she said, airily. "Maybe just an essay comparing East Coast and West Coast teen culture. I'm sure you must see a lot of differences between us and your friends back in New York. Whaddaya say? My readers would be plenty interested – especially girls like Kelly and Debbie. Maybe you could slip in something about how on the East Coast being tan is like a faux pas"

"Ooh, she is so evil" Brad muttered. "No wonder she and Suze get on so well"

Then she laughed, not sounding evil, exactly, but definitely not innocent, either. But that, I soon realized, was Cee Cee, all bright smiles – made brighter by those wicked looking braces – and bouncy good humour. She was as famous, apparently, for her wise-cracking as for her big horse-laugh, which sometimes bubbled out of her when she couldn't control it, and rang out with unabashed joy, and was inevitably hushed by the prissy novices who acted as hall monitors, keeping us from bothering the tourists who came to snap pictures of Junipero Serra being fawned over by those poor bronze Indian woman.

The Mission Academy was a small one. There were only seventy sophomores. I was thankful that Dopey and I had conflicting schedules,

"Trust me, so am I" Brad muttered.

So that the only period we shared in common was lunch. Lunch, by the way, was conducted in the schoolyard, which was to one side of the parking lot, a huge grassy playground overlooking the sea, with seniors slumping on the same benches as second graders, and seagulls converging on anyone foolish enough to toss out a fry. I know because I tried it. Sister Ernestine – the one Adam, who was in my social studies class, it turned out, had called a broad – came up to me and told me never to do it again.

Everyone laughed. "I don't think she needed that, she would have gotten it from the mob she caused"

As if I hadn't gotten the point the minute fifty giant squawking gulls came swooping down from the sky and surrounded me, the way pigeons used to in Washington Square Park if you were foolish enough to throw out a bit of pretzel.

Helen shook her head, smiling fondly. "Silly girl, just because it's not a pigeon doesn't mean they won't act like birds"

Anyway, Sleepy and Doc shared my lunch period too. That was the only time I saw the Ackermans at school. It was interesting to observe them in their native environment.

"It is?"

I was pleased to see that I had been correct in my estimation of their characters.

"She was?"

Doc hung with a crowd of extremely nerdy-looking kids, most of whom wore glasses and actually balanced their laptop computers on their laps, something I'd never thought was actually done. Dopey hung with jocks, around whom flocked – the way the seagulls had flocked around me – the pretty tanned girls in our class, including the one I'd eschewed sitting beside. Their conversation seemed to consist of what they'd gotten for Christmas, thing being their first day back from break, and who'd broken the most limbs skiing in Tahoe.

"Yep, no one really broke many that year so the conversation was a bit dull. But Todd got this cool new x-box game called-"

"We don't care" Jake said monotonously.

Sleepy was perhaps the most interesting, however.

"He was?"

Jake shrugged. "I sleep during lunch, maybe I drool?"

Not that he woke up. Please. But he sat at one of the picnic tables with his eyes closed and his faced turned to the sun. Since I can see this at home, this was not what interested me. No, what interested me was what was going on beside Sleepy.

"Ah...Bryce" Jake said shaking his head. "An idiot if I knew one"

And that was an incredibly good-looking boy who did nothing but stare straight ahead of him with a look of abject sadness on his face. Occasionally girls would walk by – as girls will when there is a good-looking boy nearby – and say hi to him, and he'd tears his eyes away from the sea – which was what he was staring at – and say, "oh hi" to them before turning his gaze back to those hypnotic waves.

It occurred to me that Sleepy and his friend might very well be potheads. It would explain a lot about Sleepy.

"Hey!" Jake said offended.

But when I asked Cee Cee if she knew who the guy was and whether or not he had a drug problem, she said, "Oh, that's Bryce Martinson. No, he's not on drugs. He's just sad, you know, 'cause his girlfriend died over the break"

"An awful girl, who ignored me unless she wanted something for her little friends and treated people like scum" Jake muttered.

"While you just ignore everyone" Brad pointed out.

Jake shrugged. "I need to sleep"

"Really?" I chewed on my corn dog. The food service at the Mission Academy left a lot to be desired. I could see now why so many kids brought their own. Today's entree had been hot dogs.

"Hmm....maybe I should start preparing lunchboxes then" Andy said to himself. "I can't keep letting you kids eat junk"

I am not kidding. Hot dogs. "How'd she die?"

"Put a bullet in her brain" Adam, the kid from the principal's office, had joined us. He was eating Cheetos from a giant bag he'd pulled from a leather backpack. A Louis Vuitton backpack, I might add. "Blew the back of her head away"

"Urgh!" Helen said, wincing in disgust. "How heartless"

One of the horsy girls turned around, having overhead, and went, "God, Adam. How cold can you get?"

Adam shrugged. "Hey. I didn't like her when she was alive. I'm not gonna say I liked her now just because she's dead. In fact, if anything, I hate her more.

"These children are unnervingly cold" Helen muttered.

I heard we're all going to have to do the Stations of the Cross for her on Wednesday"

"Right" Cee Cee looked disgusted. "We have to pray for her immortal soul since she committed suicide and is destined to burn in hell for all eternity now"

"I thought that was Purgatory" everyone said confused.

Adam looked thoughtful. "Really? I thought suicides went to Purgatory"

"No, stupid. Why do you think Monsignor Constantine won't let Kelly have her dumb memorial surface? Suicide is a mortal sin. Monsignor Constantine won't allow suicide to be memorialized in his church. He won't even let her parents bury her in consecrated ground" Cee Cee rolled her violet eyes. "I never liked Heather, but I hate Monsignor Constantine and his stupid rules even more. I'm thinking of doing an article about it, and calling it 'Father, Son and the Holy Hypocrite'"

Everyone laughed.

"She's right though" Andy said grinning.

The other girls tittered nervously. I waited until they were done and then I asked. "Why'd she kill herself?"

Adam looked bored. "Because of Bryce, of course. He broke up with her"

"Such a stupid thing to kill yourself over" Helen said shaking her head. "A boy of all things, it's not like the world ended"

A pretty black girl named Bernadette, who towered over the rest of us at six feet, leaned down to whisper, "I heard he did it at the mall. Can you believe it?"

"Oh how heartless of him" Brad said sarcastically rolling his eyes.

Another girl said. "Yeah, on Christmas Eve. They were Christmas shopping with each other, and she pointed to this diamond ring in the window at Bergdorf's and was like, 'I want that' and I guess he freaked – you know, it was clearly an engagement ring – and broke up with her on the spot"

"Ok, that is a bit heartless, but still! You can't put a guy under pressure like that!"

"And so she went home and shot herself?" I found this story extremely far-fetched. When I'd asked Cee Cee where we were supposed to have lunch if, God forbid, it should happen to rain, she told me that everyone had to sit in their homeroom and eat, and the nuns brought out board games like Parcheesi for people to play. I was wondering if this story, like the rainy-day lunches, was an invention.

"No we really do have lunch in homeroom and play board games" David said. "Suze really can't trust people, can she?"

"She finds it difficult" Helen agreed.

Cee Cee was exactly the kind of girl who would get a kick out of lying to the new kid – not out of maliciousness, but just to amuse herself.

"But that is malicious!"

"Not then" Cee Cee said. "She tried to get back together with him for a while. She called him like every ten minutes, until finally his mother told her not to call anymore. Then she started sending him letters, telling him what she was going to do – you know, kill herself if he didn't get back together with her. When he didn't respond, she got her dad's forty-four and drove to Bryce's house and ran the bell"

"God, she was a desperate girl. I'm surprised that the police didn't get involved" Andy said raising his eyebrows.

Adam took up the narrative at this point, so I knew gore was probably going to be involved. "Yeah" he said, standing up so that he could act it, using a Cheeto as the gun.

Brad and Jake laughed.

"The Martinsons were having a New Year's party – it was New Year's Eve – so they were home and everything. They opened up the door, and there was this crazy girl on their porch, with a gun to her head. She said if they didn't get Bryce, she was going to pull the trigger. But they couldn't get Bryce because they'd sent him to Antigua-"

"- hoping a little sun and surf would soothe his frazzled nerves" Cee Cee put in, "because you know, he's got his college apps to worry about right now. He doesn't need to have the added pressure of a stalker"

"So why not call the police and get an restraining order?"

Adam glared at her, and went on, holding the Cheeto to the side of his head. "Yeah, well, that was a gross error on the part of the Martinsons. As soon as she heard Bryce was out of the country, she pulled the trigger, and blew out the back of her skull, and bits of her brain and stuff stuck to the Christmas lights the Martinsons had strung up"

Helen shuddered, Andy winced and the others pulled faces.

"Lovely, just the description I needed to hear at lunch time" Andy said sarcastically. "Blimey you kids are gruesome at times"

Everyone but me groaned at this particular detail. I had other things on my mind, however. "The empty chair in homeroom. The one by what's-her-name – Kelly. That was the dead girl's seat, wasn't it?"

Bernadette nodded. "Yeah. That's why we thought it was so weird when you walked past it. It was like you knew that that was where Heather had sat. We all thought maybe you were psychic or something-"

"You're also very stupid to think that" Andy said shaking his head.

"Oh come on Dad, she can speak to the dead why not see the future/past as well" Brad teased.

I didn't bother telling them that the reason I hadn't sat in Heather's sear had nothing whatsoever to do with being psychic. I didn't say anything, actually. I was thinking, Gee, Mom, nice of you to tell me why there was suddenly this space for me, when before the school had been too crowded to let in another new student.

"Like I could tell her that! She would have been mortified and refuse to come here" Helen exclaimed.

"You withhold a lot from her though" David observed. "Rather selfish of you really" Helen glared at him and he jump back a bit. "I'm sorry!" he said quickly.

I stared at Bryce. He was tanned from his trip to Antigua. He sat on the picnic table with his feet on the bench, his elbows on his knees staring out at the Pacific. A gentle wind tugged at some of his sandy-blond hair.

"Oh god, don't tell me we're going to hear all about her lustful thoughts on him as well" Brad spat out disgusted.

He had no idea, I thought. He has no idea at all. He thinks he's got it bad? Just wait.

Just wait.

Everyone shuddered.

"Well that was ominous" David said.