You see, Sister Hildy’s School of Proper Etiquette for Perfect Young Ladies hadn’t agreed with me from the start. It was a school whose only purpose was to teach girls how to hold their spoons correctly while drinking tea with their pinkies curled. I was only there because my older sister Marilyn, the certified twit of the Stunt family, had decided that I needed to be shipped off somewhere for the summer so as not to complicate any remaining years of Grandma’s life. However, I’d lived with Grandma my whole life, and if the shiny Harley-Davidson she secretly kept in the back shed was any proof, a 16-year-old girl would hardly be too much for her to handle.

But you know how those evil twittish sisters are.

I pretty much failed the etiquette courses at that school before they even began. I couldn’t dance, couldn’t sing, couldn’t walk across a room with a book on my head, was incapable of distinguishing between salad forks and dinner forks—and I didn’t particularly care, either. I liked jeans and T-shirts and dirt bikes and guy talk and keeping garden snakes as pets. To someone like me, Sister Hildy’s was absolutely Hell on Earth.