Eighth grade blew chips as far as she was concerned; 1974 had turned out to be a totally sucky year, a social desert. Thank God there was only a month left of school. Not that the summer promised to be any better.

It was still dark when Kate Mularkey's alarm clock rang. She groaned and lay there, staring up at the peaked ceiling. The thought of going to school made her sick.

In sixth grade she'd had two best friends; they'd done everything together -- showed their horses in 4-H, gone to youth group, and ridden their bikes from one house to the next. The summer they turned twelve, all that ended. Her friends went wild; there was no other way to put it. They smoked pot before school and skipped classes and never missed a party. When she wouldn't join in, they cut her loose. Period. And the "good" kids wouldn't come near her because she'd been part of the stoners' club. So now books were her only friends. She'd read Lord of the Rings so often she could recite whole scenes by memory.

It was not a skill that aided one in becoming popular.

With a sigh, she got out of bed. In the tiny upstairs closet that had recently been turned into a bathroom, she took a quick shower and braided her straight blond hair, then put on her spazo horn-rimmed glasses. They were hopelessly out of date now -- round and rimless were what the cool kids wore -- but her dad said they couldn't afford new glasses yet.

Downstairs, she went to the back door, folded her belled pant leg around each calf, and stepped into the huge black rubber boots they kept on the concrete steps. Moving like Neil Armstrong, she made her way through the deep mud to the shed out back. Their old quarterhorse mare limped up to the fence, whinnied a greeting. "Heya, Sweetpea," Kate said, throwing a flake of hay onto the ground, and then scratching the horse's velvety ear.

"I miss you, too," she said, and it was true. Two years ago they'd been inseparable; Kate had ridden this mare all that summer, and won plenty of ribbons at the Snohomish County Fair.

But things changed fast. She knew that now. A horse could get old overnight and go lame. A friend could become a stranger just as quickly.

When she opened the back door, she stepped into pandemonium. Mom stood at the stove, dressed in her faded floral housedress and fuzzy pink slippers, smoking an Eve menthol cigarette and pouring batter into an oblong electric frying pan. Her shoulder-length brown hair was divided into two scrawny pigtails; each one was held in place by a strand of hot-pink ribbon. "Set the table, Katie," she said without glancing up. "Sean! Get down here."

"'Bye." She clomped back up the dark, muddy driveway and left her dirty boots on the porch.

Kate was just about to sit down at her regular place when she happened to glance across the kitchen and into the living room. Through the large window above the sofa, she saw something that surprised her: A moving van was turning into the driveway across the street.

"Sean -- breakfast," Mom yelled up the stairs again. This time she added the magic words: "I've poured the milk."

Kate did as she was told. Almost before she was finished, her mother was behind her, pouring milk into the glasses.

Within seconds eight-year-old Sean came running down the stairs and rushed toward the beige speckled Formica table, giggling as he tripped over the Labrador puppy who'd recently joined the family.

"Someone's moving in across the street," Kate said.

"Wow." She carried her plate through the two rooms and stood at the window, staring out over their three acres and down on the house across the street. It had been vacant for as long as anyone could remember.

Kate bit back an irritated retort. Only mothers thought it was easy to make friends in junior high. "Whatever." She turned away abruptly, taking her plate into the hallway, where she finished her breakfast in peace beneath the portrait of Jesus.

She heard her mother's footsteps coming up behind her; hard on the fake brick linoleum of the kitchen floor, quiet in the moss-green carpeting of the living room.

No. I'm lying.

"Maybe they'll have a girl your age. It would be nice for you to have a friend."

"Really?"

"What?" Kate snapped when she couldn't take it anymore.

As expected, Mom followed her. She stood by the tapestry wall hanging of The Last Supper, saying nothing.

Mom's sigh was so quiet it could hardly be heard. "Why are we always bickering lately?"

"You said it, not me."

"It's not my fault, you know."

"That you don't have any friends. If you'd --"

"By saying hello and asking how you're doing? Yeah, I'm a real witch."

She hid in her bedroom until she heard the old Ford station wagon start up. The last thing she wanted was to get driven to school by her mom, who yelled goodbye and waved like a contestant on The Price Is Right when Kate got out of the car. Everyone knew it was social suicide to be driven to school by your parents. When she heard tires crunching slowly across gravel, she went back downstairs, washed the dishes, gathered her stuff, and left the house. Outside, the sun was shining, but last night's rain had studded the driveway with inner-tube-sized potholes. No doubt the old-timers down at the hardware store were already starting to talk about the flooding. Mud sucked at the soles of her fake Earth shoes, making her progress slow. So intent was she on saving her only rainbow socks that she was at the bottom of the driveway before she noticed the girl standing across the street.

"You're the one who starts it."

Thankfully -- for once -- Mom didn't follow her. Instead, she went back into the kitchen, calling out, "Hurry up, Sean. The Mularkey school bus leaves in ten minutes."

Kate walked away. Honest to St. Jude, one more if-you'd-only-try-harder speech and she might puke.

"What isn't?"

Her brother giggled. Kate rolled her eyes and went upstairs. It was so lame. How could her brother laugh at the same stupid joke every day?

The answer came as quickly as the question had: because he had friends. Life with friends made everything easier.

Kate clutched her books against her chest, wishing she hadn't picked her pimples last night. Or that her jeans weren't Sears Rough Riders. "H-hi," she said, stopping on her side of the road. "The bus stops on this side."

Just then, the school bus arrived. Wheezing and squeaking, it came to a shuddering stop on the road. A boy she used to have a crush on stuck his head out the window and yelled, "Hey, Kootie, the flood's over," and then laughed.

Kate put her head down and boarded the bus. Collapsing into her usual front-row seat -- by herself -- she kept her head bowed, waiting for the new girl to walk past her, but no one else got on. When the doors thumped shut and the bus lurched forward, she dared to look back at the road.

She was gorgeous. Tall and big-boobed, she had long, curly auburn hair and a face like Caroline of Monaco: pale skin and full lips and long lashes. And her clothes: low-rise, three-button jeans with huge, tie-died wedges of fabric in the seams to make elephant bells; cork-bottomed platform shoes with four-inch heels; and an angel-sleeved pink peasant blouse that revealed at least two inches of stomach.

Chocolate-brown eyes, rimmed heavily with black mascara and shiny blue eye shadow, stared at her, revealing nothing.

Hell, no.

The coolest-looking girl in the world wasn't there.

When the school bus drove up, she made a split-second decision. She wasn't going to go to school in this hick backwater. Snohomish might be less than an hour from downtown Seattle, but as far as she was concerned, she might as well be on the moon. That was how alien this place felt.

Drama, she'd learned, was like good punctuation: it underscored your point.

No.

Already Tully didn't fit in. It had taken two hours to choose her clothes this morning -- an outfit right out of the pages of Seventeen magazine -- and every bit of it was wrong.

She pushed past them, grazing the armoire so hard they swore under their breath. Not that she cared. She hated it when she felt like this, all puffed up with anger.

She marched down the gravel driveway and shoved the front door open so hard it cracked against the wall.

"You must be high," she said loudly, realizing a second too late that the only people in the living room were the moving men.

One of them paused and looked wearily her way. "Huh?"

"Cloud."

In the master bedroom, her mom was sitting on the floor, cutting pictures out of Cosmo. As usual, her long hair was a wavy, fuzzy nightmare held in check by a grossly out-of-date beaded leather headband. Without looking up, she flipped to the next page, where a naked, grinning Burt Reynolds covered his penis with one hand.

"Fine, Tallulah." Mom looked up to make sure her point had been made. It had.

Tully closed her eyes, counted to ten, and said again, "I don't have any friends here."

"Oh." Mom flipped to the next page, then reached for her scissors and began cutting out a spray of flowers from a Breck ad. "Okay."

"My job is to love and support you, baby, not to get in your face."

Tully wanted to scream. "Okay? Okay? I'm fourteen years old."

"Make new ones. I heard you were Miss Popular at your old school."

"Come on, Mom, I --"

"I'm not going to this backwater school. They're a bunch of hicks."

"I'm not calling you Cloud."

She wouldn't let her so-called mother make her feel twisted up inside, not after all the times that woman had abandoned her.

"I don't belong here."

"You know better than that, Tully. You're a child of the earth and sky; you belong everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita says…"

For the next week, Kate watched the new girl from a distance.

Tully Hart was boldly, coolly different; brighter, somehow, than everyone else in the faded green hallways. She had no curfew and didn't care if she got caught smoking in the woods behind the school. Everyone talked about it. Kate heard the whispered awe in their voices. For a group of kids who'd grown up in the dairy farms and paper mill workers' homes of the Snohomish Valley, Tully Hart was exotic. Everyone wanted to be friends with her.

"That's it." Tully walked away while her mother was still talking. The last thing she wanted to hear was some drug-soaked advice that belonged on a black-light poster. On the way out, she snagged a pack of Virginia Slims from her mom's purse and headed for the road.

Her neighbor's instant popularity made Kate's alienation more unbearable. She wasn't sure why it wounded her so much. All she knew was that every morning, as they stood at the bus stop beside each other and yet worlds apart, separated by yawning silence, Kate felt a desperate desire to be acknowledged by Tully.

Not that it would ever happen.

"… before The Carol Burnett show starts. It's ready now. Kate? Katie?"

"I made Hamburger Helper for our new neighbors. I want you to take it across the street."

"But…" Kate tried to think of an excuse, anything that would get her out of this. "They've been here a week."

"I've got too much homework. Send Sean."

"Sean's not likely to make friends over there, now, is he?"

Kate lifted her head from the table. She'd fallen asleep on her open social studies textbook at the kitchen table. "Huh? What did you say?" she asked, pushing her heavy glasses back up into place.

Mom faced her. The brown hair she'd curled and teased so carefully this morning had fallen during the day and her makeup had faded. Now her round, apple-cheeked face looked pale and washed out. Her purple and yellow crocheted vest -- a Christmas present from last year -- was buttoned wrong. Staring at Kate, she crossed the room and sat down at the table. "Can I say something without you jumping all over me?"

"So I'm late. Things have been crazy lately."

"Neither am I," Kate said miserably.

Of all the things Kate might have expected, that was not even on the list. "It doesn't matter."

"Probably not."

"I'm sorry about you and Joannie."

"It matters. I hear she's running with a pretty fast crowd these days."

"Life is hard sometimes. Especially at fourteen."

Kate rolled her eyes. If there was one thing she knew, it was that her mother knew nothing about how hard life could be for a teenager. "No shit."

Kate wanted to say she couldn't have cared less, but to her horror, tears stung her eyes. Memories rushed at her -- Joannie and her on the Octopus ride at the fair, sitting outside their stalls at the barn, talking about how much fun high school would be. She shrugged. "Yeah."

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that word from you. It'll be easy because I'll never hear it again. Right?"

Kate couldn't help wishing she was like Tully. She'd never back down so easily. She'd probably light up a cigarette right now and dare her mom to say something.

Mom dug through the baggy pocket of her skirt and found her cigarettes. Lighting up, she studied Kate. "You know I love you and I support you and I would never let anyone hurt you. But Katie, I have to ask you: What is it you're waiting for?"

"What do you mean?"

"So that I can make friends?"

"They don't want to know me."

"So that you know you can be whatever you want to be. Your generation is so lucky. You can be anything you want. But you have to take a risk sometimes. Reach out. One thing I can tell you for sure is this: we only regret what we don't do in life."

"You spend all your time reading and doing homework. How are people supposed to get to know you when you act like that?"

Kate heard an odd sound in her mom's voice, a sadness that tinted the word regret. But what could her mother possibly know about the battlefield of junior high popularity? She hadn't been a teenager in decades. "Yeah, right."

"It's true, Kathleen. Someday you'll see how smart I am." Her mom smiled and patted her hand. "If you're like the rest of us, it'll happen at about the same time you want me to babysit for the first time."

Mom touched her hand gently. "It's never good to sit around and wait for someone or something to change your life. That's why women like Gloria Steinem are burning their bras and marching on Washington."

Kate went over to the counter and stared down at the red-brown glop of a casserole. Dully, she fitted a sheet of foil across the top, curled the edges down, and then put on the puffy, quilted blue oven mitts her Aunt Georgia had made. At the back door, she slipped her stockinged feet into the fake Earth shoes on the porch and headed down the spongy driveway.

"What are you talking about?"

Mom laughed at some joke Kate didn't even get. "I'm glad we had this talk. Now go. Make friends with your new neighbor."

"Wear oven mitts. It's still hot," Mom said.

Yeah. That would happen.

Perfect. The mitts.

The house across the street was long and low to the ground, a rambler-style in an L shape that faced away from the road. Moss furred the shingled roof. The ivory sides were in need of paint, and the gutters were overflowing with leaves and sticks. Giant rhododendron bushes hid most of the windows, runaway junipers created a green spiky barrier that ran the length of the house. No one had tended to the landscaping in years.

At the front door Kate paused, drawing in a deep breath.

Balancing the casserole in one hand, she pulled off one oven mitt and knocked.

The door swung open to reveal a tall woman dressed in a billowy caftan. An Indian-beaded headband circled her forehead. Two mismatched earrings hung from her ears. There was a strange dullness in her eyes, as if she needed glasses and didn't have them, but even so, she was pretty in a sharp, brittle kind of way. "Yeah?"

Weird, pulsing music seemed to come from several places at once; though the lights were turned off, several lava lamps burped and bubbled in eerie green and red canisters.

"H-hello," Kate stammered. "My mom made you guys this casserole."

Please let no one be home.

"Right on," the lady said, stumbling back, almost falling.

Almost instantly she heard footsteps from inside.

And suddenly Tully was coming through the doorway, sweeping through, actually, moving with a grace and confidence that was more movie star than teenager. In a bright blue minidress and white go-go boots, she looked old enough to be driving a car. Without saying anything, she grabbed Kate's arm, pulled her through the living room, and into a kitchen in which everything was pink: walls, cabinets, curtains, tile counters, table. When Tully looked at her, Kate thought she saw a flash of something that looked like embarrassment in those dark eyes.

"Was that your mom?" Kate asked, uncertain of what to say.

"Oh." Kate didn't know what to say except, "I'm sorry." Quiet pressed into the room. Instead of making eye contact with Tully, Kate studied the table. Never in her life had she seen so much junk food in one place. Pop-Tarts, Cap'n Crunch and Quisp boxes, Fritos, Funyuns, Twinkies, Zingers, and Screaming Yellow Zonkers. "Wow. I wish my mom would let me eat all this stuff." Kate immediately wished she'd kept her mouth shut. Now she sounded hopelessly uncool. To give herself something to do -- and somewhere to look besides Tully's unreadable face -- she put the casserole on the counter. "It's still hot," she said, stupidly, considering that she was wearing oven mitts that looked like killer whales.

"She has cancer."

Tully lit up a cigarette and leaned against the pink wall, eyeing her.

Kate glanced back at the door to the living room. "She doesn't care if you smoke?"

"She's too sick to care."

"Oh."

"Yeah. That's what I thought."

"You want a drag?"

"Uh… no. Thanks."

She was halfway to the road when Tully called out to her, "Hey, wait up."

Tully led the way back through the living room, where her mother was now sprawled on the sofa. "'Bye, girl from across the street with the cool neighbor attitude."

Kate stepped past her and into the night.

"Later."

"Cloud?"

"It'd be cool if I did know how to cook. Or if we had a chef or something. With my mom having cancer and all." Tully looked at her.

"That's my mom's current name."

On the wall, the black Kit-Kat Klock swished its tail.

Tell her you'll teach her.

But she couldn't do it. The potential for humiliation was sky-high. "Well…'bye."

Take a risk.

"Well, you probably have to get home for dinner," Tully said.

"Oh."

Tully yanked the door open. Beyond it, the falling night was a blurry purple rectangle that seemed too vivid to be real. "Thanks for the food," she said. "I don't know how to cook, and Cloud is cooked, if you know what I mean."

"Oh," Kate said again, sounding even more nerdy than she had before. "Right."

"I didn't mean to laugh," Tully said, but she didn't stop.

"What's your name?"

She felt a flash of hope. "Kate. Kate Mularkey."

Tully laughed. "Mularkey? Like bullshit?"

It was hardly funny anymore, that joke about her last name. She sighed and turned back around.

Kate slowly turned around.

"Yeah. Whatever."

"Fine. Be a bitch, why don't you?"

Kate kept walking.