It's Rebecca's first day in the eighth grade and the fourteen year old girl is excited. Her whole life she has been dreaming of this moment, the day when she will finally be queen of the school. For the eighth grade is the highest grade at Robert E. Lee Middle School. She had heard the big brouhaha about the changing of the school district, the redrawing of its boundaries and the busing in of kids from some of the housing projects in West End but she hadn't paid it any mind.
It's another single and lonely Valentine's Day for Maisie Kingston— and watching her effortlessly perfect twin sister have the time of her life only makes it worse. So Maisie decides to sabotage her sister's day... but the plan backfires, leaving Maisie with the most humiliating Valentine's Day imaginable.