Our yellow Mercedes convertible turned a corner onto Perry Street, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I'd spent the whole long summer in boring Connecticut, but now, thank God, I was back in the city again.

And, more important, I was free.

My brother, Patch, was driving, and our sister, Feb, was supposedly in the city somewhere, but our parents were staying in Connecticut for a couple more weeks, to go to a horse show and go yachting and stuff while the weather was still nice. After that they might go on to Marrakech, to see some sultan's palace or something. It used to make me nervous when they went traveling for weeks without us, but I was used to it by now. This time, I was even glad they were going to be away for a little while. As much as I love them, they're so scatterbrained and wrapped up in their own lives that they drive me kind of nuts sometimes.
Besides, I was fourteen years old and about to start my first year of high school. I figured I was old enough to take care of myself. After all, Patch and Feb had started taking care of themselves as freshmen, and look how they turned out.

“Looks like some of your friends are here to welcome you home, Flan,” Patch said as he turned off the engine and double-parked in front of our town house.

The three girls I'd been hoping to avoid most were standing right there on the sidewalk staring at us: Angelica, Camille, and Beverly. They weren't in school uniforms, but they might as well have been. Beverly and Camille were both wearing those footless leggings that just came back in style, and all three of them had on these gauzy, faux-vintage tank tops in pastel colors. We'd all gone to this private girls' school on the East Side together from the time we were little kidsâuntil now. I wasn't going back to Miss Mallard's Day this year. But of course they didn't know that yet.

“Flan! It's so good to see you!” they cried, rushing over to me. After a tornado of air-kisses, I stepped back, leaned against the car, and counted the milliseconds before the questions started.

“So,” said Camille, sneaking a look at Patch, who was unloading our bags from the trunk. “We're
dying
to know how your summer has been! Where did you go? What did you do? Who did you meet?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Like I said in May, I was just out at our place in Old Greenwich all summer.”

“But what about your brother and sister? What parties did they take you to?” pressed Angelica. She sat down on the steps to our house, like she was settling in for a long conversation.

“I didn't really go to any parties. Mostly I just rode my bike and went swimming and stuff. On the Fourth, I watched the fireworks from my parents' sailboat. Seriously.” Actually, I had gone to a few parties out on the beach with Febâthere was this one really wild one where some guys from the house next to ours roasted a goatâbut I wasn't about to tell them that. One little story and they'd be pumping me for details for the next fifteen minutes. And I wasn't in the mood to recap my entire summer just then.

“Well, what about Patch?” Beverly whispered. An air conditioner dripped onto her head, but she didn't seem to notice. “Did he have a good summer? Is he â¦ seeing anyone?”

“I don't know,” I said in a normal tone of voice, right as Patch walked by us carrying a couple of suitcases. “Why don't you just ask him yourself?”

Angelica, Camille, and Beverly all just stared at me
like I'd killed Santa Claus. And that right there is exactly the reason I wasn't going back to Miss Mallard's Day.

You've probably heard of the Floods: February and Patch, my older sister and brother. Their parties, their celebrity friends, their VIP passes. Both of them are gorgeous (not to brag, but good looks run in our family), and by the time they were my age, they were both as popular as any Manhattan private school teenager can possibly beâwhich, believe me, is pretty popular.

You might think that having them as siblings would be the coolest thing ever, and in some ways you'd be right: there's a reason everybody likes them so much. But let me tell you firsthand, there's nothing as uncool as having your friends more interested in your siblings than in you. Sure, I could have a party at a cool club like Lotus, like I had for my birthday at the beginning of the summer. It hadn't made any difference: by July the only friend who even bothered to call me was my old pal Liv, and she just wanted to grill me on what was going on with Patch, who sheâlike most all the girls I knowâis so totally obsessed with that she's fooled herself into thinking it's love.

“So,” said Camille, to fill up the shocked silence still hanging in the air. “Did you hear about the new
uniform rule? Ramona Wood's mother is on the committee, and she said they voted to make the skirt two inches shorter.”

“Finally,” said Angelica. “Thank God we don't have to start high school looking like nuns.”

“Listen, guys,” I said, because now seemed as good a time as any. “I've got something to tell you. I'm not going to Miss Mallard's this year.”

“
What?!
” all three of them cried at once.

“I got into Stuyvesant. I would have told you in the spring, but I wasn't sure what I was going to do, and Stuyvesant held a place for me. So I'm doing it. I'm going to public school.”

The girls all looked confused and almost scared, like I'd just told them I was committing myself to a mental institution.

“But Flan, you're a Flood,” Camille breathed. I could tell she was upset, because even though a cute guy in Diesel jeans came out of a town house right across the street from us, she didn't take her eyes off me for a second.

“So?”

“Your sister's a legend at Miss Mallard's. Your brother was voted hottest private school boy. You're
legacy
cool. Why would you give that up? For a
public
school?”

I shook my head. “Listen, if you guys don't understand it already, I don't think I can explain it to you.”

And with that, I walked into the house. The truth is, I'd been prepping for that moment for the past two months and now that it had happened, I was deliriously happy and almost kind of in shock. I'd done it! The first true speech uttered by the new Flan!

So I was glad to get away from those three. But once I was inside the town house, it seemed awfully big and empty all of a sudden.

“Feb?” I yelled, dropping my bags in the foyer. I stepped out into the living room. “Anybody home?”

My older sister, February, had supposedly been living in the attic for most of the summer, but except for a lipstick-stained wineglass on the coffee table that looked like it had been there for weeks, I didn't see signs of her anywhere. Patch tossed his duffel down next to mine, then glanced around aimlessly.

“I think I'll go out for a sandwich,” he said, trying to stifle a yawn. “You gonna be all right here by yourself?”

“Sure,” I saidâI kind of didn't want to be by myself, but it wasn't like I'd never been home alone before. “I'll be fine.”

“Okay, well, call me if you need anything. I'll be back.”

When Patch left, he didn't even bother closing the door all the way behind him. And the thing about Patch is that going out for a sandwich could equal being gone for an hour or a day or a week. He could go out for a sandwich and end up on a mountaintop in Nepal or surfing off the coast of Australia. Which is why I didn't bother to ask him to bring me back a coffee yogurt.

After I locked the door and put the chain on for good measure, I glanced around. Our house is really niceâthree floors if you count the attic, four if you count the basementâand the living room is one of the best places in it. It always cheers me up to sit in there. Mom and Dad aren't huge art collectors, but a few years ago they went to Florence and found this great Italian artist who does all these sort-of-Cubist-but-not-really ink-on-paper drawings. They bought the whole show and shipped it home and now his pictures are all over our walls: colorful little shapes and noodly lines. Then they have this great supermodern sofa, made of soft leather and sort of shaped like a Nike swoosh, but unlike a lot of designer furniture it's really comfortable, and it's got all these llama-fur afghans on it that they found in Peru a few years ago. There's a glass coffee table, usually covered with remotes for the TV and all the different VCRs and CD and DVD
players, not to mention some video game controllers. Across from that is our entertainment system. Through the door at the far end of the room is our kitchen, which is usually bright and sparkly clean. Right now, though, the whole house looked dark and unused and somehow a lot less friendly than I remembered.

What was I going to do for the rest of the afternoon? I could curl up on the couch and watch my new DVD of
Some Like It Hot
, but I'd already binged on old movies back in Connecticut, and it seemed pretty dumb to keep on doing that now that I was back in New York. I should be doing something fun, something wild and independent, something grownup. Or at least I shouldn't just be standing around. Maybe I should have gone out for a sandwich with Patch and seen where that led me.

Before I could even step away from the door, though, the bell rang urgently, three times in a row. I figured it was Patch, just having forgotten his money or what his mission was or whatever, and so I opened it without even looking through the peephole. Now that he was back, maybe he'd take me with him. Sure, I'd be tagging along, but so what? I didn't feel like being alone in this big dark house. When I opened the door, though, I saw it wasn't my brother at all.

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