• Chapter 1
    “Lonnie! Get down here now!” said someone from across the hall. Obviously, I didn’t know who it was. Even if I did, it was always someone I didn’t know, always.
    By the way, let me introduce myself. My name is Samantha Higgins, but you can call me Sammie. I’m 12, and I’m going into the 7th grade this fall. All the adults say that it’s an important grade, but that there’s nothing extremely hard about it. But, all the kids who have gone through it recently, tell me that it’s hell. Absolute ******** Hell. And to make matters worse, we’ve just moved here, to New York City, in the middle of downtown Manhattan, from a quiet little town. Which was located in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin. Population there? About 23. Population here? Don’t even get me started.
    But seriously? Who did my parents think they were, moving me away from the four other kids in my grade?
    Oh, let me introduce all of them, too. First of all, there’s my mother. Ever heard the term “man of the house?” Well that about sums up my mom. Standing at 5’10”, and weighing 164 pounds of pure muscle, is my Mother. The only person who can intimidate her, is my Father. And, well, that doesn’t quite add up.
    My father is 5’7” and is one of the most gentle people in the whole world. Which is why we don’t understand how he can intimidate my mother. It was fun when my friends and I used to come up with reasons why. My two personal favorites are that he’s an alien, or that she’s so madly in love with him, she still gets nervous around him, weak in the knees and all of that. Although the real answer is that G-d works in mysterious ways. At least, that’s what my mother says, and it’s also her chief philosophy.
    Yes, when I said the other four kids in my grade, I was serious. Believe it or not, we were the biggest grade in our school. But now with me leaving, we’ll be tied for first. It’s so sad that I had to move away from them. Gina, Phil, Bess, and Tom were my closest friends.
    Gina. She was my favorite. She was the one that I could tell all of my secrets to. There are things I could tell her that I couldn’t tell anyone else, not even my parents. I told her every one of my secrets. Well, except for one, but the only people who knew that secret, were the ones involved.
    And then there was Phil. Phil & I loved to fight. Everyone said that we fight more than a bull and a matador. Though the only thing was, we enjoyed it. It amused us to fight. It was our main source of entertainment. We didn’t have many opportunities to watch TV. Each of us for our own reasons. Either, it was our parents eyes glued to the TV (his case), or we were constantly getting pushed out of the house (both of our cases). So we’d fight. Or probably debate, it depended on our mood. But no matter what, we’d end up doubled over, laughing.
    Bess. Well I don’t know what to say about her. The relationship between us was thicker than molasses. Even when we had out rough patches, there was nothing that could separate us. We were twins, born two minutes apart, except to our own mothers.
    Perhaps the one hardest to move away from was Tom. This is because Tom & I had a secret relationship. No one knew about it, not even Gina. That’s the only secret I ever kept from her. But I must say, in the eight months that we did go out, I found out, he’s a good kisser. Well just a good boyfriend in general. Very gentle. He took it slow, but only as slow as I wanted. And the farthest we went was second. And even then he was very gentle.
    That was one benefit of living in the middle of nowhere. Going out on dates was the easiest thing in the world. There weren’t millions of people to hang out with, so it just looked like we were going to go chill, because that’s what friends do. But when no one else was there…well you can only imagine. Yesterday, when I told him I was moving, he asked why I hadn’t told him earlier, I told him I only just found out myself. And when we were making out, I let him go to second again.
    Ugh. I don’t know how I will do this. There’s a chance I won’t survive. I’ve lived there since I was born, had the same three friends since I was born, had an amazing boyfriend for the past eight months. And now? Being exposed to all these new people, and this new environment, and all the germs around here? How would you hold up? That’s what I thought.