We haven’t really spoken much since.

So, figuring that people who are in Special Ed really need a break now and then—especially the ones who have to wear a helmet all the time due to being prone to seizures or whatever—I declared that, for them, my celebrity-drawing services were free, as they were for my friends and the non­English speakers at Adams Prep.

Really, I was like my own little UN, doling out aid, in the form of highly realistic renderings of Freddie Prinze Jr., to the underprivileged.

But it turned out that Kris Parks, now president of the sophomore class and still an all-around pain in my rear, had a problem with this. Well, not with the fact that I wasn’t charging the non­English speakers, but with the fact that it turned out the only people I was charging were Kris and her friends.

But what did she think? Like I was really going to charge Catherine, who has been my best friend ever since I got back from Morocco and found out that Kris had pulled an Anakin and gone over to the Dark Side? Catherine and I totally bonded over Kris’s mistreatment of us—Kris still takes great delight in making fun of Catherine’s knee-length skirts, which is all Mrs. Salazar, Catherine’s mom, will allow her to wear, being super Christian and all—and our mutual contempt for Rodd Muckinfuss.

Oh, yeah. I’m definitely going to give free drawings of Orlando Bloom to someone like Kris.

Not.

People like Kris—maybe because she was never forced to attend speech and hearing lessons, much less a school where no one spoke the same language she did—cannot seem to grasp the concept of being nice to anyone who is not size five, blond, and decked out in Abercrombie and Fitch from head to toe.

In other words, anyone who is not Kris Parks.

Catherine and I were talking about this on our way home from the cathedral grounds—Kris, I mean, and her insufferability—when this car approached us and I saw my dad waving at us from behind the wheel.