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I left both her and Mary looking a little stunned and took my seat.

“All right,” Ryder Garfield said before the class began. I looked up at him. “You’re right.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? For what?”

“For being a nasty bastard,” he said.

We stared at each other, and then I smiled. “Okay. Now that you have reached the point where you can admit it, you can join the NBA.”

“The NBA? Basketball?”

“No, Nasty Bastards Anonymous. It works the same way Alcoholics Anonymous works. The first meeting is today at lunch.”

He laughed. “Are you in it, too?”

“Sometimes. Especially around here,” I said. “It is like an addiction.”

His smile widened. “I’ll be there,” he said.

Damn you, Kiera, I thought, your techniques with boys really are infallible. Maybe I had taken on many of Kiera’s traits, I thought, but what of it? They weren’t bad so far and certainly weren’t bad for me, someone who had once been too shy and embarrassed to look at herself in a mirror.

Later, when I walked outside with my lunch and stepped away from the girls, Jessica practically leaped out of her seat. “Where are you sitting?”

I nodded at the table where Ryder was sitting alone.

“Did he ask you to sit with him?”

Everyone paused to hear my response. “Since he joined the NBA, I thought I would give him another chance,” I said.

“Huh?”

I laughed to myself as I headed for Ryder’s table. He looked up, and then, to my surprise and I’m sure that of just about the rest of the student body who were watching, he stood up before I sat. Won’t Kiera be interested in that? I thought. She thought Richard was the only proper gentleman.

“Is that all you eat for lunch?” he asked me, nodding at my salad.

“I could live on salad, cheese, and bread.”

He sat and stared guiltily at his hamburger and fries. “My parents are neurotic when it comes to food, too.”

“I’m far from neurotic, Ryder. I just think about what I eat. Why are your parents neurotic?”

“Are you kidding? My mother claims the camera puts anywhere from five to ten pounds on her, and my father, although he pretends not to, thinks the same way. It’s not who you are and what you can do in this world. It’s what you look like. Don’t you know that?”

I shrugged. “Not to me. I must be from another planet.”

He nodded and began to eat his hamburger. “So, am I permitted to ask how you came to be living here and attending one of the most expensive private high schools in California, if not the whole country?”

“Gary seems to have told you everything else. He didn’t tell you that?”

“Maybe he thought I wasn’t interested enough.”

“Maybe you led him to believe you weren’t.”

“Maybe I wasn’t,” he replied sharply. “Maybe I am now, okay?”