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mood.

She gulped the mocha as fast as humanly possible, given that Oliver had heated it up to the surface temperature of lava. She felt truly betrayed, not just because Eve had dragged her into the middle of Common Grounds with her face looking like undercooked hamburger, but because she was sitting there chattering away with Kim, ignoring Claire's presence entirely now.

As Claire got up, though, Eve blinked and looked at her. "You're leaving?"

"Yeah." Claire couldn't bring herself to sound too apologetic. "I need to get home."

"Oh. I'm sorry, I just thought - I thought you'd like to meet Kim, that's all. Because she's cool."

"It's nice to meet you," Kim said. She didn't sound all that sincere about it, but more like she wished Claire would hurry up and hit the bricks so she could get back to her BFF-fest with Eve. "Hey, you guys live in that house with Michael Glass and Shane Collins, right? What a couple of hotties!"

Claire didn't like that Kim had even noticed Shane, much less knew his last name. Eve didn't seem to mind at all. She just nodded, eyes wide. "They are, right? Man candy. We know!"

Claire grabbed her backpack. "I really have to go."

"Claire - you okay?"

"I'm fine," she said. Kim was kind of smirking at her behind her drink, and Claire had a wild impulse to dump that coffee all over her.

But she didn't.

"Bye?" Eve said, and made it a kind of pathetic question. Claire didn't answer. She just pushed past Kim's chair, not being too careful about it, and headed for the door.

Behind her, she heard Kim's clear, carrying voice say, "Wow, what crawled up her ass and didn't die?"

Claire threw a venomous look back over her shoulder, and saw Oliver watching her with a very slight frown grooving his forehead. Eve looked stricken, clearly surprised at Claire's departure. Kim . . . Kim wasn't even watching her. She just lifted one shoulder in an I-can't-be-bothered shrug.

Then Claire was outside, taking deep breaths of the dry air and lifting her face to the sudden, swirling push of the wind. Sand hissed over the sidewalk, blown in from the desert.

Claire, miserably aware that she was in a horrible mood, walked home with the feeling that everyone, absolutely everyone, was watching her.

Chapter Four

4

Michael was playing guitar in the living room of the house when Claire stomped down the hall, dumped her backpack without much care for the electronic feelings of the laptop inside, and threw herself full length down on the sofa. Michael stopped in mid-chord, and she sensed he was staring at her, but she didn't look. Eventually, he started up again. The music spilled over her, beautiful and complicated, and as Claire lay there and just concentrated on breathing, she felt some of the awful tension inside her start to ease up. Still a horrible day, but she could never feel too angry when Michael was playing.

"So," he said, not looking up from the frets as he tried out a complicated new flood of sound, "I'm thinking of going electric. What do you think?"

"Eve dumped me. I've been best-friend dumped."

Michael's playing stuttered, then smoothed out again. "Huh. I'm guessing that's a no?"

"There's this girl, Kim? You know who she is?" Michael nodded, but didn't say anything. Claire felt her hands curl into fists, and deliberately, carefully straightened them out. "So this Kim, she's like perfect and all. Ooooh, she's an artist. And all of a sudden she and Eve have everything in common and I'm just - the stranger who doesn't get the jokes."

"I've met Kim," Michael said. His voice was neutral, and he kept his gaze on his guitar. "She's like a black hole; she just pulls people right out of their orbits. Eve's still your friend. She's just crushing on Kim because Kim never wanted to hang with her before."

"So what's the story of the fantastic Kim, anyway?"

He shrugged, and shot her a quick, unreadable look. "She went to OLOM, so I didn't know her all that well."

"OLOM?" Claire repeated.

"I forget you didn't grow up here. Our Lady of Mystery. Catholic school across town run by the scariest nuns you've ever seen. Anyway, Kim bailed on school when she was fourteen, I think. She's our resident funky-artist type, I guess - more likely to flip you off than shake your hand."

"I'll bet she sucks."

It looked like Michael was trying hard to hide a smile. "Art's always subjective. She may suck to you."

"She doesn't to you?" Claire felt a