Claudia also shares my love of fashion. She believes clothes should do more than cover our bodies and keep us warm. Instead, she sees dressing as one more creative outlet, and it shows. She always looks fabulous, and she never looks just like everyone else. She'll pair a long white shirt with a colorful vest, accessorize with handmade jewelry, pull her hair up into an outrageous ponytail, and look like a million dollars.

Claud's gorgeous to begin with, anyway. She's Japanese-American and very exotic-looking, with her long black hair and almond-shaped eyes. On the other hand, I'm your basic blue-eyed blonde. The other differences between me and Claud? For starters, she thinks being in math class is like being in a

torture chamber. School is not Claudia's favorite thing, to say the least. (Her older sister Janine is a certified genius. Honest! Teachers are probably always wishing they had higher grades than A+ to give to Janine.)

For another thing, Claudia is the Junk Food Queen of Stoneybrook. Give her a Ring-Ding, and she's happy. Add a couple of Three Musketeers bars, and she's in heaven. Me? I don't eat the stuff. Not because I don't like it — I do. But I have diabetes, and I have to be very, very careful about every single thing I eat. Sweets are out. See, diabetes is this disease in which your body doesn't deal well with sugar. This has to do with an organ called the pancreas, but I don't really want to get into that right now. Basically, I'm all right as long as I follow my diet carefully and take shots of insulin every day. I give the shots to myself, which sounds much worse than it is. I'm used to it. I'd better be, since I'll probably have to do it for the rest of my life.

"People! People, please settle down." Mr. Schubert had finished passing out our papers, and he was standing in front of the room trying to get our attention. Everybody was comparing papers and talking excitedly about how much money they'd made — or lost — in the stock market. This boy, Pete Hayes, was joking about how there should be one last