Ren Rasmussen walked into Castle Rock High and let the conformity wash over her. She'd lived in Castle Rock all her life but she was feeling caged lately. As he friends spotted her and began rushing over to her, she decided she'd give just about anything for marginal excitement to come into her boring, small-town life.

"Omigod, Ren, I think I'm going to die," her friend Sue Arnold griped, latching herself on to Ren's arm like a leech.

"Well, I'll be sure to come to the funeral," Ren said, hoping that Sue wouldn't indulge her in a great big sob story about the latest boyfriend that broke up with her.

Another friend of hers, Caroline Jennings, put a death grip on Ren's other arm. "Whatever, your death can wait. Ren, do you think that Michael Perkins would want to take me to the dance on Friday?"

"You want Michael to take you to the dance?" she asked.

"Yeah, he's so cute," Caroline giggled. "You don't mind, do you?"

"Go ahead, he's all yours," she said. "It's not like I care or will be jealous or anything."

Michael Perkins was the boy that Ren had had a monstrous crush on for as long as she could remember. He had big blue eyes and curly blond hair and he played football and he wasn't all that smart but he was really nice to look at…She couldn't believe that Caroline was actually asking for permission to go to a dance with him when she knew how much Ren liked him. Sometimes Ren hated being a part of the popular crowd. It was like who she was got erased a long time ago as far as everyone else was concerned. Her friends expected her to check her feelings at the door apparently. But she didn't know who else to be.

After she'd gotten the books she needed from her locker, Ren waited around for the morning bell to ring. When it did she moved her way through the sea of people down the hall to first class.

Taking her usual seat, she opened her math notebook, not incredibly excited when Mr. Benfield jumped directly into today's lesson.

"The formula for calculating the surface area of a sphere when radius is known is…" Mr. Benfield looked around the class, searching for a vacant-eyed victim to ask for the answer. "Chris Chambers? Care to venture a guess?"

Chris sat beside Ren. She'd been watching as he filled in his best friend Gordie on last night's assignment, and now she watched as he paled. He hadn't heard the question, and he knew that people would laugh at him if he said something stupid.

"Uh…" he began, looking at Gordie expectantly. But Gordie hadn't been listening either.

"No, that would be incorrect," Mr. Benfield said. Some people around them snickered, but most of them weren't paying attention. "Caroline, do you know?"

"Surface area equals four times pi times radius squared," she replied pertly. She smirked at Chris and whispered, "Maybe you'd be better at building birdhouses."

It still disgusted Ren how much of a bitch Caroline was. She'd gone her whole life thinking that other people didn't have as many feelings as she did, and she had always treated this Chambers guy like shit. Ren didn't really know the guy, just that he came from a bad family and one time he supposedly had stolen some milk money when they were in grammar school, but she had never talked to him. As far as she was concerned, he could be the nicest guy in the world, but she'd never know because her friends would never let her get close enough to find out.