Summary

The fist chapter, titled “Wanda,” opens on Monday in Room 13. Peggy is the most popular girl in the class. Madeline, known to he fiends as Maddie, is Peggy's best friend. Another girl in the class, Wanda Petonski, is absent, but no one really notices. Wanda sits in a corner of the room where mostly boys sit. The boys are all from the countryside and the students in this corner usually have mud on their shoes from their walk to school. Most of the boys in this corner don't make good grades and they are very noisy. Wanda is not noisy. She sometimes smiles but never laughs out loud. She lives in a poor neighborhood called Boggins Heights. Wildflowers bloom there in the summer but it's not a good neighborhood.

No one really notices Wanda during class but the girls often gather around her before...