Surviving High School

“I’ve always wanted to look like a movie star.”
    Emily gave Kimi a once-over. Kimi had styled her usually straight black hair into waves, and she wore a brown pencil skirt with a crisp white collared shirt and black wedges. Maybe a little formal for high school, but it was the first day. Lots of people dressed up. The whitening strips Kimi had been applying all summer made her teeth sparkle like snow and matched the single pearl she wore around her neck.
    “You look—nice,” said Emily.
    “It’s business casual,” said Kimi, smiling coyly. “First impressions count for everything, and the teachers here need to know who they’re dealing with. I’m going for a studious-yet-highly-efficient, sexy-secretary kind of look. What do you think?”
    Two girls in the nearby line laughed a little too loudly, and Emily and Kimi turned to find out what was so funny. It took a moment for Emily to recognize Dominique Clark and Lindsay Vale without their swim caps on. Great. Two more people she’d hoped to avoid today.
    “Nice outfit, Chen,” said Dominique. “Let me guess. You’re here to sell real estate?”
    Kimi blushed and looked down at her skirt.
    “This is vintage!”
    “You mean ‘old,’ ” said Dominique, smiling icily.
    “Don’t be so hard on her,” added Lindsay. “At least her clothes fit .” She glared over at Emily’s baggy jeans and too-big sweatshirt. The clothes were hand-me-downs from Sara that Emily had dug out of a box in the garage a week earlier. She knew how loose they were, and her mom had offered to take her shopping, but Emily refused to wear anything else.
    Kimi stared the blondes down, trying to melt them with her eyes. Both of them wore pastel summer dresses and had obviously visited the salon in the last twenty-four hours: Their shimmering platinum hair was as artfully arranged as Japanese flowers. Dominique and Lindsay didn’t look good—they looked perfect .
    After a second, Kimi smiled.
    “At least Emily and I aren’t wearing the same shoes ,” she said, pointing at their feet. Dominique and Lindsay looked down in horror. It was true. They were wearing the same designer ballet flats.
    “Hope you had a nice summer, Emily,” said Dominique, quickly recovering. “I noticed you didn’t make it down to LA for training camp. Too bad. All the other girls were asking about you.”
    “My dad—Coach—thought it would be better for my form if I just trained here,” said Emily, gritting her teeth. “Fewer distractions.”
    “Oh, he’s totally right,” said Dominique, twirling her hair around a finger, her French-tipped nail cutting through the air. “We ended up having to go to these awful parties with Michael Phelps and some of the other guys from the Olympic team. So boring. I’m sure you were better off here at Twin Branches with Coach. I can’t wait to start working with him again.”
    “Come on, Emily,” Kimi said. “Let’s get out of here.”
    “See you at the pool!” Dominique called as Kimi dragged Emily away from the blondes and down the hall.
    “Stupid name-dropper,” said Kimi once they were out of earshot, her face flushed with rage. “She’s not even that good of a swimmer.”
    “Yes, she is,” admitted Emily.
    “Okay, fine. But not as good as you—right?”
    Emily had checked Dominique’s summer race timesonline, and they’d been almost identical to her own. Over the last two years, ever since Dominique had moved to town to work with Emily’s dad as part of a club sport back in middle school, the two girls had gone head-to-head dozens of times, with Emily dominating in breaststroke and butterfly and Dominique beating her in freestyle and backstroke.
    “We’ll see,” said Emily. “It’s a new year.”
    Kimi reached into her bag, took out a meticulously organized notebook, and flipped to the inside cover, where she’d taped her class schedule.
    “Who do you have for homeroom?” she asked.
    “Ms. Prez.”
    “Shoot. I’ve got Sanderson.”
    Emily glanced over Kimi’s schedule.
    “So we don’t have homeroom together,” she said, frowning as she read the list. “Or anything else. Aren’t you in any honors classes?”
    “Not this year,” said Kimi. “It’s all about strategy. Back in middle school, when I tried to step it up and take all those gifted classes with you, I got mostly B’s and C’s. I figure if I just take the regular stuff, I can pull off straight A’s. Good for the résumé and good enough for my