The girl I’d hit turned, rubbing her hip. “Just find me.” I took a deep breath and plunged out of the office and into the hallway-and instantly hit someone with the door. “Find me at lunch, okay? I’ll be the one sitting by myself.” My first class is on the other side of the building.” I squinted at the map. “It’ll all be fine,” Juliana said faintly. It wasn’t even all that clean because our fourteen-year-old sister, Layla, had hogged the bathroom that morning and I’d barely had time to brush my teeth, let alone take a shower. How is that possible?” Mine was in a ponytail. “Did you see the girls in the hallway? How much makeup they’re all wearing? And their hair is perfect, like they spent hours on it. I put my head closer to hers and lowered my voice. She and I do look a lot alike, but there are infinitesimal differences-her eyes are just a touch wider apart, her hair a bit silkier, her lips fuller-and all these little changes add up to her being truly beautiful and my being reasonably cute. It’s lucky for me we’re not, because if we were, Juliana would be The Pretty One. Juliana’s a year older than me, but she sometimes seems younger-mostly because she’s the opposite of cynical and I’m the opposite of the opposite of cynical.īecause we’re so close in age, people frequently ask if the two of us are twins. She started and looked up at me, slightly panicked.

“You okay?” I asked Juliana, as she stared at the map like it was written in some foreign language. True to the school’s reputation, the administrator in the office was brisk and efficient and had quickly printed up and handed me and Juliana each a class list and a map of the school. that had a “condom tree”-kids allegedly tossed their used condoms up into its branches-so I guess my parents could have done worse than, you know, Coral Tree. And even an AP math student would lose count of the Louboutins on the girls here.” Yuck.īut while I was clicking around that site, I learned about another private school in L.A.

But I was less thrilled to read that Coral Tree was “basically a country club masquerading as a school.” The same anonymous writer added, “I’ve yet to see a student drive a car onto campus that’s not a Porsche or a BMW. Since it was on the other side of the country from where we’d been living-from where I’d lived my entire life-I couldn’t exactly check it myself, and I was desperate for more information.Ī well-oiled machine didn’t sound too bad. That was a direct quote from the Private School Confidential website I had stumbled across when I first Googled Coral Tree-right after my parents told me and my three sisters we’d be transferring there in the fall.

The front office wasn’t as crazy as you’d expect on the first day of school, which seemed to confirm Coral Tree Prep’s reputation as “a well-oiled machine.”

Epic Fail by Claire LaZebnik