Amy listened to her halfheartedly. She couldn't help feeling a twinge of jealousy.

Tasha tried to be optimistic. "Your mother could change her mind," she said. "When she gets this new job, she'll be in a better mood."

"If she gets the job," Amy corrected her. "If she doesn't, she'll be in a worse mood than she's in now. And if she does get the job, she'll probably be working so hard, she'll still be in a bad mood."

"Think positively," Tasha advised. "Maybe when she sees me with my pierced ears, she'll realize it's not a big deal."

"For you maybe," Amy replied glumly. "But it's not going to change anything for me. She'll never let me get my ears pierced. She doesn't like me to get anywhere near doctors. She's always afraid that they'll figure out what I am and stick me in a hospital for tests and experiments."

"You don't have to go to a doctor," Tasha pointed out. "There's the place at the mall that will do it for free if you buy a pair of earrings. I wish my mom would let me do that, so I wouldn't have to pay a fortune to go to a doctor. But she's worried I'll get an infection."

Amy sighed. "My mother doesn't even have to worry about that. I've got such a superior immune system that I can't get an infection. I think she just doesn't want me to grow up. As if pierced ears make you look ten years older or something. You're lucky to have a normal mother, Tasha." After a moment she added, "You're lucky to be normal."

"Right," Tasha declared dryly. "So I can spend an hour memorizing South American exports while you do it in five minutes."

"But at least you'll be able to memorize with your ears pierced."

"Right," Tasha said again. "But I still have to figure out how I'm going to get the money. And not just for the doctor. Now my mother says I have to wear real gold or silver earrings. Not just gold plate, either. And those are going to cost another fifty dollars."

"Don't you have any allowance saved up?"

"I blew it all on those shoes. I even had to get an advance on the next two weeks' allowances. I only make four dollars an hour baby-sitting, and I don't get that many jobs anyway. It could take me months to save up."

Amy wished she could come up with a helpful suggestion, but she couldn't think of any. There weren't very many ways for kids their age to make money. "I'd lend you my allowance," she said, "but I'm saving for something too."

"What?"

"A haircut."

Tasha was surprised. "Your mother won't let you get your ears pierced, but she said you could get a haircut?"

"Well, not exactly. But if I go ahead and cut my hair, there won't be anything she can do about it."

"Amy! Are you crazy? Your mother will go nuts!"

"She's half nuts already, so what's the difference?" Amy grumbled. But Tasha was right. Would Amy really have the guts to defy her mother like that?

As they rounded the corner to the main entrance of Parkside, they were both startled to see Jeanine sitting on the front steps. This was the area where the very popular crowd from the ninth grade hung out, and only a few younger students were permitted to join them. Amy recognized Tracee Bell, a ninth-grader who had failed French twice and who was in Amy's seventh-grade French cla.s.s. Tracee wasn't too intelligent, hut she was friendlier than the others in that crowd.

Jeanine had tried hanging out with them once before, but she'd gotten on the nerves of one of the leading members and had been sent away. But that particular member of the crowd was now at another school, so apparently Jeanine was making another attempt to fit in. She was using her new prestige as a mysterious love child as the key.

From where she and Tasha stood, Amy could hear Jeanine speaking in a solemn tone. "I'm going to search the whole planet Earth over for my true parents. I don't care how long it takes. Someday I'll find them."

Amy reported what only she could hear to Tasha, who laughed. "She'd better expand her search beyond Earth. I know those parents have to be living on some other planet. What else is she saying?"

Amy concentrated. "She's telling them she might be royalty - like a French princess."

Tasha snorted. "What a dummy. There are no princesses in France. They had a revolution to get rid of all their royalty."

Amy recalled reading a novel about this. "That's when Marie Antoinette was sent to the guillotine and her head was cut off."

"Exactly," Tasha said. Her eyes lit up. "Hey, Jeanine could be a direct descendant of Marie Antoinette. Maybe if she goes to France, they'll cut her head off too." They were now almost at the foot of the steps, and she too could hear Jeanine's fantasies.

"I'm sure there must have been a good reason for them to give me up," Jeanine was saying. "Like, maybe I would have caused some international scandal."

"Exactly how are you going to find your parents?" Tracee asked with mild interest.

"I'm going to hire a private detective."

"That's expensive," Tracee said.

"I have a very good allowance," Jeanine told her. "My parents - well, I guess I should say the people who adopted me - are very generous."

"They'd better be generous," someone else said. "My mother hired a detective once, when she was getting a divorce from my father. It cost her a hundred dollars a day."

Jeanine actually went a little pale. "A hundred dollars a day?" she repeated.

Tracee spotted Amy and Tasha coming up the steps. "Hi, Amy!" she called. "Could you meet me before cla.s.s and listen to me recite my congregations?"

"Conjugations," Amy corrected her. "Sure, Tracee." She thought Tracee's English was almost as bad as her French. But the poor girl was seriously trying to pa.s.s the course so she could go on to high school next September with her friends.

Jeanine looked mildly impressed to see that one of the popular crowd was so friendly with Amy. Amy didn't care - but Tasha stepped forward and spoke to Jeanine unexpectedly.

"You know, Jeanine, you don't really need a private detective to find your natural parents. All you need is someone who knows how to research leads."

Jeanine stared at her uncomprehendingly. But one of the ninth-graders spoke up in support. "That's true. I saw something on The Ricki Lake Show about how these twins were separated at birth but found each other on their own through the Internet."

"That wasn't on Ricki Lake," Tracee said. "It was on Jenny Jones."

It didn't really matter to Jeanine which talk show the report had appeared on. She was actually looking interested. She addressed the popular crowd. "I don't have time to fool around on the Internet. But I could pay a computer nerd to do it for me."

"I could do it for you," Tasha offered. A giggle went through the group, as Tasha had just clearly identified herself as a nerd. But Tasha didn't seem to care, and Amy knew why. Here was a chance to make some money.

Jeanine gazed at her suspiciously. "You know how to do stuff like that?"

"Of course Tasha knows," Amy said. "No kidding! Tasha is a whiz at surfing the Net. That's what detectives do."

Jeanine examined Tasha through narrowed eyes. "I'm not paying you a hundred dollars a day."

"What can you pay me?" Tasha asked her.

Jeanine considered this. "Five dollars a day."

"Ten," Tasha countered.

Jeanine snorted. "Forget it."

"With a guarantee," Tasha added. "If I don't find at least one of your parents, you'll get half your money back."

"That sounds like a pretty good deal to me," a ninth-grade boy piped up.

Amy was pleased because she knew there was no way that Jeanine would disregard the opinion of a very good-looking athletic ninth-grader of the opposite s.e.x.

Sure enough, Jeanine was nodding, if a little reluctantly. "Okay." She reached into her bag and took out ten dollars. "And you start today. But if you don't find one of my parents in a week, that's it."

"Deal," Tasha said, happily taking the money.

Personally, Amy thought Tasha was being rash in agreeing to Jeanine's conditions. Still, Tasha was certainly getting a lot closer to having her ears pierced.

5.

"Do you really think you'll find Jeanine's parents in a week?" Amy asked as she and Tasha walked home from school that afternoon.

"Hard to say, but anything's possible." Tasha smiled. "At least it'll be fun checking out all these Web sites I've never seen before. Besides, I'll make at least thirty-five dollars."

Amy couldn't argue that. Things were looking up for Tasha either way.

When they came around the corner near their condos, Amy saw her mother's car in the driveway. The last thing she wanted was to go home and listen to her mother nag. "Want to do something at your place?" she asked Tasha.

"Sorry, Amy, I want to get started searching."

Amy sighed. Eric had his usual basketball practice, so there was no one for her to hang out with. "Can I come over and watch you?"

"Sure," Tasha said.

Amy called her mother to say she was at Tasha's, but it wasn't very interesting to watch her best friend stare at a computer screen. Restlessly Amy wandered around Tasha's room, which she knew just about as well as her own. Then she moved out into the hallway.

She noticed a large box containing jars and bottles. "What's this stuff, Tasha?" she called out.

Tasha glanced away from the computer to see what Amy was talking about. "Oh, it's stuff from the cabinets in the bathroom. Mom was cleaning it out yesterday."

Amy picked up one of the bottles. It was half full of some sort of rose-scented bath oil. She unscrewed the top and took a whiff. It was disgusting.

She poked around the other stuff. There were some old cosmetics, a jar of brown gook that claimed to remove wrinkles, and bottles that contained hardened bits of nail polish.

But there was one small box that appeared to be intact and unopened. Amy picked it up and brought it over to Tasha. "Whose is this? It looks new."

Tasha tore herself away from the screen and examined the box in Amy's hand. Her brow furrowed in puzzlement and then smoothed. "Oh! I remember." The memory made her giggle. "My mother found these gray hairs, and she wanted to get rid of them. She decided that if she was going to put color on her hair, she might as well go a little wild. It's red hair dye."

"But she didn't use it?"

"Nah. Dad took one look at the picture on the box and said he'd divorce her if she dyed her hair that color. I was younger, and I remember being worried, because I didn't know he was kidding."

Amy examined the picture of the red-haired woman on the box. "It's not so bad. I kind of like it." But by now Tasha's focus was once again on the computer screen, and she didn't respond.

Amy sat down on one of the twin beds and looked at the picture for a while. Then she opened the box. Inside she found two plastic bottles, one larger than the other, and a pair of plastic gloves. There was also a sheet of instructions.

Amy read the sheet. It looked remarkably easy to her. All she had to do was put on the plastic gloves, cut off the plastic tip of the larger bottle, pour the stuff from the smaller bottle into the larger bottle, and shake it up. Then the instructions said to squeeze the mixture onto your hair and leave it there for twenty minutes. After that, you rinsed it out. And presto! You were a dazzling redhead.

Amy got up and went to the mirror that hung over Tasha's dresser. Her brown hair hung straight to well below her shoulders. Every other month her mother trimmed it straight across to keep it that length. No one else was allowed to cut Amy's hair.

She was forbidden to change her hairstyle. But Nancy had never said anything about the color.

A smile crept onto Amy's face. There was no one else home at the Morgans', and the bathroom was free for at least half an hour. And she was bored.

Without bothering to disturb Tasha again, Amy took the hair dye into the bathroom. She clipped the top of the larger bottle, poured in the contents of the smaller bottle, and even remembered to put a gloved finger over the tip of the large bottle while she shook it up. Then she began applying the brownish gunk to her hair.

It was a thick liquid, almost like mud, and it didn't drip at all. It didn't look very powerful either - in fact, the stuff was just about the same color as her own hair. It dawned on her that the dye was pretty old and might have lost its effectiveness. But she followed the instructions, covering her hair with the gooey dye and then piling it on top of her head.

The Morgans kept magazines in a basket by the toilet, so Amy selected one and sat down on the edge of the tub to read and wait. Twenty minutes, the instructions said.

With her advanced intellect, Amy could read extremely fast. And she used this skill when she had to read boring stuff like textbooks. But she preferred to read like an ordinary person when she was reading for pleasure. The article she selected was interesting - it was all about teenage runaways who lived on the streets of Los Angeles. So Amy put her brain in "normal" mode and read at an ordinary pace.

The life of the runaways sounded pretty grim. They slept in alleys and under bridges. They were scared and dirty and they never had enough to eat. Half of them were doing drugs. The descriptions of their awful existence kept her glued to the pages. No matter how bad things got at home, Amy couldn't imagine running away and living hand to mouth.

When she remembered to check her watch, she realized that it had been thirty-five minutes since she'd applied the dye to her hair. She wasn't upset, though. The stuff was so old, it probably wouldn't even work. She stuck her head under the tap in the tub and started to rinse the dye out.

She rubbed her head until she couldn't feel any more gunk squishing between her fingers. Then she squeezed out the excess water and stood up to look into the mirror.

There was definitely something different about her hair - it looked lighter. She wasn't sure she'd call it red, though. It was hard to tell what color hair she now had, with her head soaking wet.

From under the sink she pulled out a blow-dryer. Plugging it in, she aimed the blast of hot air at her head. As the hot air dried her hair and the new color became clearly visible, her eyes slowly widened in horror.

She gazed at her reflection for several minutes. She'd wanted to make a dramatic change in her appearance. And this was definitely dramatic.

She went back into the bedroom. "Tasha . . ."

Tasha was still looking at the computer screen, and her back was turned to Amy.

"This is so great," Tasha said. "I found the e-mail addresses for all the big talk shows. Ricki, Jenny, Oprah, and Jerry. So I've written to them and asked if they'd help find Jeanine's parents. This is the kind of stuff they do all the time. Maybe Jeanine could be reunited with her parents on TV!" Tasha turned to Amy. "You know she'd love to . . ." She stopped short.

Amy managed a weak smile. "What do you think?"

Tasha found her voice. "You used my mother's hair dye."

"Well, she was just going to throw it away, right?"

"Right," Tasha murmured. It was clear that was not the reason why she looked disturbed.

Self-consciously Amy fingered a lock of her hair. It didn't feel any different. But when she pulled the lock around where she could see it, her stomach began to churn.

"What do you think?" she asked again.