Mrs. popular

Chapter one

Skylar summer's always dated the changes in her life from the day maya lefevre, whose goal was to be a gossip columnist,came rushing into the school lunchroom on an other wise ordinary Monday,with terrible news. "Did you hear about Lily Yates's  father?" She gasped,trying to catch her breath. "No! What?" Her friends chorused.
"He hanged himself in his barn."
"Your kidding," someone said.
"HOW absolutely gross," another echoed.
Skylar shivered. "Are you sure? How do you know?"
"I heard my parents talking about it," said maya, whose father was president of the local bank. "It happened last Thursday night. The bank was going to foreclose on his farm, so he took out lots of life insurance and then just did it. My dad is really upset but my mom says he's not to blame, that running a bank is just a business,like any other business. He's still kind of upset, though."
"I guess my parents will run a story about it," said juno, whose parents owned the town newspaper. "How  really awful for the family.sometimes I just don't know how people can survive the terrible things that happen to them. Like that family we wrote about last week that got burned out."
"Or the way my father just walked out on us," said sam. "I don't know if we'll ever recover from that."
"Maybe it's just a rumor," said zoe.
"Rumors start,you know."
"No, it's the truth,"maya insisted.
"Gosh,how super embarrassing,"zoe said.
Again, skylar shivered involuntarily. "That poor family. Does anybody know anything about Lily?" She vaguely knew who Lily was but had never really noticed her. "Of course not,"Sam said. "That girl gives the word nerd New meaning."
"They moved here a few years ago,"juno said. "I remember reading something about it in the paper. They brought that old farm."
"A really stupid thing to do," derekca said.
"Obviously they didn't properly research the farm. Anybody could have told them that it was three-quarters swamp and had never been successful. Only city people would have been so optimistic about a long unworked farm."
"I wonder if she'll come back to school?"skylar said. "I'll ask my father about it tonight." Skylars father was the superintendent of the huguenot schools. "I hope she doesn't," zoe said. "Just because she's had a tragedy that's no reason to upset all the rest of us. What would we say to her if we saw her?"
"There's nothing we can say," sam said dismissively. "I guess the best thing to do with awful  things is just pretend they don't exist."