It's September 1st. Time for school to start! Also, so I don't get any questions about Glee Club, it is basically a group of anyone musical, so instrumentalists are just as welcome as singers – in this case, I made it more of an "anything goes" music group so Kameron has her own position.

Despite feeling ready after my talk with Veronica, I didn't feel that good when she was driving both of us to school, letting me out before she parked so I had time to enter without her.

But I had to say, I felt a lot better when I got to my locker without anyone yelling at me, and it turned out Stacy was already at school and had a locker just a few down from me. The sophomores had their own locker hallway of course, but it wasn't often friends got theirs so close together.

"Hey, Kam, how was summer?" she asked.

I made a face. "Boring. But better than the school year. You prepared for the first rehearsal on Thursday?" Stacy played the keyboard in Glee Club, so we sometimes practised together over at her house, but we hadn't seen much of each other. I'd just spent most of the summer here in Ohio, but Stacy's family went to see her grandparents in New York for most of August, so I hadn't seen her since July. She'd gotten new glasses frames since I last saw her, cute round ones in purple.

We waited at our lockers for Michelle and Jon to arrive. I'd seen Jon a few times in the summer apart from three weeks when his parents took him to Minneapolis, but poor Michelle had been stuck on a road trip that lasted for literal months. She'd even gotten a few new patches on her jacket from her stops with Iowa and Illinois on them, plus a Guns N Roses patch to match her T-shirt.

"It's only the start of the year and I'm already exhausted!" she complained, pretending to fall asleep on Stacy's shoulder.

Stacy swatted her away. "Did you at least have time to practise your guitar-playing?" she asked. Michelle played the guitar, and she nodded at Stacy's question.

Jon nodded too, although he was talking about the violin he played. "I'm going to have to keep the case in my schoolbag, though," he remarked. "I'm sick of the other guys making out it's a girl's instrument."

"It's a shame you guys can't sing," I teased. "I wouldn't mind taking a break from doing voice warm-ups." I got slightly less harassment than my friends because of being the lead singer, but I was still picked on for my T-shirts and being in a school-operated club at all. Actually, everyone sang some bits, mostly the chorus, but I was the only one who sang solo.

"Not me!" Stacy said, laughing. "You're right."

"We'll just have to hope none of the new kids can sing," Jon added. "You were lucky the lead singer before you was a senior and left the spot open. How many spots are open now?"

Michelle shrugged. "Anyone who wants to join can. The club's allowed to have more than one. All that we need to hope is that if someone plays our instrument that they won't outshine us." She wasn't the only guitar player, but the other one was a senior this year and they were about the same, since Michelle had started playing earlier.

"You can only have one keyboardist, though," Stacy said, grinning. "Good thing no one else can do that!"

"Well, you'd be able to outshine any of the new kids, Stace," I said with a shrug. "I guess we better wait and not sweat it until the auditions. There's what, eleven of us left?"

"We just need one more to keep the club running," Michelle said thoughtfully. "I'm glad we won't be the youngest, though. Maybe we'll get to pick some of the songs this year."

"If we do," I said, "I'm totally making sure we get to do some Cyndi and Bangles stuff. You know that song Eternal Flame? I'm dying to do it."

Now that was what made me feel able to take on the first day, and the morning was mostly okay. Okay, apart from when some older kid walked into me and then snapped "Watch where you're going, skank!" But that was normal. Not really enough to get me down. I just smiled with my al naturel lip gloss, just a few shades pinker than my lips, and pretended not to care. You didn't talk back to older kids or more popular kids, not if you didn't want to get beaten up. No one discriminated in this school and girls got beaten up just as much as guys – Veronica had told me what talking back could cause before I even started. I'd avoided it for a year so far, and I intended to continue avoiding it.

It was only at lunch when things changed. One of the senior jocks walked straight into Michelle and slapped her lunch tray down, splattering gravy all over her denim jacket. "Whoops!" he smirked. "Sorry, geek." We knew the lunch ladies wouldn't let her go back for another tray, either. Even if they did, it was likely she'd lose it again.

As we sat down with Jon and Stacy, Michelle shrugged off her jacket. "I guess it'll wash,' she sighed. "At least it's warm enough to take it off."

"I guess it'll be my turn next time," Stacy said. "It always seems to happen to one of us, at least every week."

"I know, it sucks," I agreed. "You can share my lunch, Chel." Whenever one of us lost our lunch trays, one of us would share our lunch with her (or him when it happened to Jon).

"It's just for being us," Jon said gloomily. "Hazard of being part of – hey, who's the new Heather?" He peered over at the popular table, where the three Heathers usually sat.

Sure enough, a fourth girl was sitting with them, her side visible but her head turned away from us. She even had her own signature colour. I knew which Heather was which – Heather Chandler, the one everyone listened to, was always in red. Heather Duke, the head of the yearbook committee who always seemed to be in the bathroom before school, always wore green. And head cheerleader Heather McNamara was never out of yellow unless she was in her cheer uniform, and even then she kept her hair ribbon. This new girl wore a dark blue blazer, and she had wavy dark hair. And as she turned further towards us, I saw her profile. I blinked in confusion.

I knew that face. I'd seen it every day for most of my life.

I turned back to my friends for a moment. And then Michelle said it before I could. "Kam, isn't that…your sister?"

I looked back at her again, as if her features would rearrange. But no. I didn't recognize the blue blazer with the shoulder-pads, although the miniskirt was familiar. But it was still Veronica.

I turned back and nodded, eyes fixed on my lunch. "Yes, I think it is. I'll ask her about it later, when school's over." Where had she even gotten the blazer? And I could tell from there she was wearing more makeup than she had this morning. But what had she done that would make the Heathers let her sit with them, and even dress like them?

The Heathers brought Veronica and her forgery talent into their clique on the first day of senior year in the musical, but Veronica also states in her diary that she's been with them for three weeks as soon as "Beautiful" is over, so we've got more time to get through. Now you've met Kameron's friends! And by the way, that senior guy who walked into Michelle? No, it's not anyone important – we only get introduced to two senior jocks and probably most of them do the same things.

Oh, and Eternal Flame? The Bangles originally wrote it and released it in 1988. It's better known by the Atomic Kitten cover, but the point is, the Bangles did it first, and that's the one Kam is talking about.

Also, as a side note, I recently saw an amateur production. I was interested to see that Veronica's blazer was actually dark, more of a navy shade than the brighter blue in most productions. Despite it being amateur (the girl playing Heather Chandler is actually a primary school teacher), it was good and I loved the directing, such as Heather Duke being intentionally wooden until Chandler dies and McNamara had the perfect voice – I thought Veronica was a little too Madonna and not girl-next-door enough, but that was more of a personal preference.