A/N Part Two takes place twenty-two years before Part One.

Joanna Sinclair was the smartest girl in her eighth grade class. That was the general perception, anyway, so widely assumed that she'd almost begun to believe it herself. So when she failed an algebra test one day in September, she locked herself in a bathroom stall during lunch recess and sobbed. If she wasn't smart, what was she?

Danielle and Helen would be shocked, she was sure. They'd give her such crap she'd start crying again. That's how they were with each other. Emily wouldn't laugh, but she'd give one of her pitying looks, which would definitely be worse.

Eventually, Joanna faced her classmates on the blacktop. She'd tried to wait until her eyes weren't so puffy anymore, but it was hard when they were already on the smaller side, something she was sure everyone else noticed all the time. She'd been one of the only non-white kids since kindergarten, though she hadn't really realized it until third grade when the one Black girl in the class moved, leaving Joanna on her own as the token diversity child. For the most part, kids weren't overtly mean; it wasn't as if they'd never seen an Asian person. Still, Joanna had convinced herself they all saw her more than she wanted to be seen, and she'd subconsciously figured the only way to assuage their certain judgment was to excel, to do so well that she could always use their lesser intellect against them. She couldn't change how she looked or the fact that she was so very clearly adopted, but she could be better in other ways, the easiest being in grades. Athletics were too visibly competitive, though the others seemed to enjoy their soccer team. Joanna resented them for it, but she'd never tell them.

The eighth grade girls—her coterie, anyway—were sitting in the same place they always sat, the stairs outside the gym. Their K-8 private school consisted of three buildings around a parking lot: the school itself, Holy Infant Catholic church, and the gymnasium (which had been built in the last five years to host CYC basketball tournaments and fish fries). So long as the weather cooperated, the three upper grade levels exited the school building after lunch and had free reign of the blocked-off blacktop, and though there were numerous balls and jump ropes and frisbees and other outdoor paraphernalia, Danielle and Helen were insistent that such trivialities were far beneath their thirteen-year-old selves, and of course they were right.

"What's up, bitch?"

Joanna tried to smile at Danielle's greeting as she approached, tried to mask her trepidation.

Helen laid on the thick, sloping concrete slab that acted as one of the half-walls flanking the wide stairs. Her large legs were hanging across the sides, and Joanna could see her white underwear even though Helen wore athletic shorts under her plaid uniform skirt. She'd have said something under normal circumstances, but the math test had put her out.

Next to Danielle on the stairs was Emily, her uneven crop of blond hair framing her large eyes, the ones that made her look about five years younger than she was. It didn't help that Emily was thin as a rail, no shape yet to speak of, whereas the rest of them had begun to fill out (though none so much as Helen). Seeing Emily angered Joanna for some nonsensical reason, but not as much as did the hangers-on, the other three girls who hovered around them on the stairs every day, thinking they were somehow part of the group when they definitely were not.

Whatever. Joanna stepped up and sat next to Danielle, shuffling around in her purse to fish out a crumpled sheaf of paper. "I've got the new Delia's."

Danielle gasped. "What? Joanna! Why didn't you say during lunch?"

"You know Mrs. Shurck would've taken it away, the old hag," Joanna explained.

Rolling off the wall, Helen joined them in a cluster. The wannabes tried to hover, said things that went largely ignored. What commenced were several absorbing moments of fawning over relatively unattractive, overpriced clothing and accessories: cargo skirts and chunky-heeled shoes, fair-isle cardigans and mini T-shirt dresses, ball chain necklaces and flower hair clips. It'd become something of a ritual, to sit and sift through the pages of the quintessential teen clothing catalog together, to read every one of those obnoxiously alternating uppercase/lowercase phrases printed on each page and imagine how much more awesome they'd be showing up on a dress-down day in some of the coveted attire.

"My mom's getting me this," Joanna commented, tapping a thin finger on the photograph of a kiss-blowing adolescent in a corduroy overall-dress. "And she said I could pick two shirts and some shoes to go with it."

Danielle scoffed. "Don't brag about it."

"Your mom always buys you anything you want!" Helen whined.

At the risk of further annoying Danielle, Joanna added, "She just likes getting me stuff."

"Look at how she's wearing the chopsticks in her hair," Emily put in, her softer voice drawing them from their bickering. "I wish I could do that."

Leaning away from the group, propping back on her elbows, Danielle sighed as if now bored. She shook her long brown ponytail. "I could do it, but I think it looks stupid. Who wants chopsticks in their hair?"

Emily giggled while the others protested.

"It's weird!" Danielle insisted. "It's like a Chinese person putting a fork in their hair. Right, Joanna?"

The addressed paused mid-page-turn. She swallowed awkwardly before replying, "Yes. It is." The moment the words left her mouth, she wished she'd said something else. Anything else.

"Oh my God, look!" one of the other girls cried, pulling everyone's attention across the parking lot to a row of boxwoods lining the walkway into the school building. "Look at Bobby!"

A boy of about thirteen had fallen into the bushes and was struggling to get out of them.

Danielle snorted. "What the hell is wrong with him? I mean, besides everything."

"You think we should help?" Emily half-rose.

"No, sit down," Danielle ordered, pulling the blonde back onto the stairs.

"Jerry's helping him," Helen noted, and they watched as a tall, bluff giant-of-a-boy jogged to the boxwoods, reached in a hand, and pulled a scrappy, pimply, bespectacled creature out of them.

"He's so nice," some girl remarked, obviously not in regard to Bobby.

"Yeah, but he looks like a big penis."

"Danielle!" Helen was scandalized. She was always scandalized by anatomical terms.

"Doesn't he?" Danielle persisted. "Like a big stupid, smiling penis. Come on, Joanna—you agree, right? Or do you want to make out with him? You think Jerry's hot?"

Joanna's thoughts raced, but only for a moment. She knew where she didn't want to be in this debate. "You're right, definitely."

The "he's so nice" girl tried to redeem herself. "Ok, but I didn't mean I like him like that, I was just saying I—"

Danielle jumped up, put her weight on one foot, gaped as if she'd caught sight of a celebrity. "Oh . . . my . . . God!"

The girl who'd spoken trembled, realizing she'd been caught in a very undesirable web.

"You want to make out with Jerry the Penis!"

"No—I—"

"He'll be so happy to hear. You know he just sits around masturbating in his basement all day. Me and Joanna will set you up. Come on."

Hearing her name again, Joanna rose to attention. She hated being forced to follow Danielle toward some other girl's certain mortification, but she also felt a thrill at the idea that someone else's day was about to be worse than hers. Ignoring the protests of the nondescript girl whose all-encompassing pubescent life was about to be ruined, Joanna and Danielle set off across the blacktop toward a group of boys, which included the only tolerably cute ones in their small eighth grade class of twenty-three.

For the most part, Joanna was too self-conscious to talk to boys, but she knew she didn't have to worry with Danielle, who always dominated a conversation. Joanna hardly listened as her friend stirred the drama pot, caused Jerry to turn beet red, and then skipped the two of them back toward the others, who were waiting with bated breath on the stairs.

The resulting squeals and laughter and tears and stormings off seemed to disintegrate around Joanna as if she were in a vacuum. She hardly processed any of it, being somewhat lost in thoughts of what her parents would say about that test. She'd managed to hide her score from her peers, pretending at modesty, but she'd be unable to keep it from her mother in particular. The woman's expectations weren't inordinately high; in fact, Joanna put more pressure on herself than either of her parents did. And yet, there was something about her mother, some hint of dissatisfaction always hovering at the corners of her mouth, the edges of her eyes, obvious in the nuanced gestures she made with her hands—clasped with the left thumb tapping on top, for example, or holding her right wrist with her left hand—a dissatisfaction she never voiced yet which Joanna always sensed was there. Because Joanna wasn't really her child. Not her true child. No matter what her parents told her, she could never quite satisfy what she was sure they felt lacking within.

"Hey, Earth to Joanna!"

She looked up from her morass of dejection into Helen's round face.

"Emily says Sister Krist said she had the best grade on the math test."

"Not exactly that," Emily hurried to correct. "Just that only one person got ninety-two as the highest, and that's . . . that's what I got. Maybe we both got it, though. Maybe she just didn't remember."

Danielle's radar went off; she whipped from whatever mischief she'd been concocting and toward Joanna. "Whoa whoa whoa—you didn't get the best grade? What did you get?"

"I got a seventy-eight," Helen frowned.

"Yeah, well I got an eighty-one," Danielle attested. "You get a B?" She watched for some signal from Joanna's shifting facial expressions. "A C? You can't . . . you got lower? D? Holy shit, Joanna, you got a D? Have you ever gotten a D in your entire life? This is—it's like a world record!"

The bell rang the moment Danielle was hopping back up, rolling her skirt to shorten it. Relief rushed through Joanna, but it was short-lived.

Cupping her hands around her mouth, Danielle shouted across the blacktop, "This girl got a D, everyone! You hear me? Joanna Sinclair isn't a bad grade virgin anymore!"

"Shut up!" Joanna hissed, reddening as several students looked back at them on their way into the building. How many people actually heard or understood Danielle was irrelevant.

"Oh don't be so sensitive," Danielle laughed, jumping down the stairs onto the pavement and starting back toward the school. "Be a little humble sometimes."

Letting the girls around her pass and continue in their gossiping cluster toward the brick cube that was Holy Infant Academy, Joanna slowed her pace considerably. Her arms trembled; heat suffused her core, her throat and face and neck. Angry water shivered in her eyelids. Stupid Emily, she thought, the images of those ahead blurring as the tears began to run and she felt more sorry for herself than she ever had. I wish she were dead.

The warm late September sunlight mocked her personal tragedy. Joanna swept away the moisture on her cheeks, dropping her Delia's in the process. Uncharacteristically swearing, the girl stooped to pick it up, saw the phrase on the open page: "YoUr wIsh iS mY cOMmAnD!"

Joanna snorted. She scooped up the catalog. "I wish that was true," she mumbled, and then she hurried her steps in fear of being late; she'd never had a tardy in her life.