No one likes Caroline Pearce. She's prim and prissy and spreads malicious gossip like it's the latest superflu. For some reason, she's in Pi Beta Alpha despite this. One can only assume that the members were too scared to blackball her for fear that she'd be passing on nasty rumours about them for the rest of their high school life.

Somehow, Caroline comes up with the perfect plan to garner a little more attention, both from the kids at school and from her sister, Anita, at home: she'll invent a fake boyfriend, 'Adam'. She's not completely stupid, so she pretends he's from a town some distance away. She's almost completely stupid, though, because she decides that the best way to make her faux beau seem realistic is to plagiarise the love letters that Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett. Everyone knows that teenage boys write just like nineteenth century poets.

Amazingly, Caroline's plan works. The Pi Beta Alpha crew is all over her letters from 'Adam' and Anita arranges for her to have a complete makeover. Not only does she have a hair cut, but she also begins to wear clothing that doesn't cover every inch of her body. For a while, she gets to bask in her new-found popularity... but then she discovers that Elizabeth is writing a play about Browning for an upcoming play competition. And guess who's spotted the similarity between Caroline's letters and the letters quoted in Liz's piece: Jessica.

Jess and Lila, extremely suspicious that Adam doesn't exist, decide to throw a party for him, and make sure that all potential ways out for Caroline are completely blocked off, even going so far as to buy him a ticket to Sweet Valley. Realising she's cornered, Caroline confesses to Saint Elizabeth. For some reason, Liz decides to do all she can to save Caroline from facing up to her own shoddy, lying behaviour, instead enlisting Todd to find a boy to pretend to be Adam for the party.

Meanwhile, Liz's play wins the competition, because Liz is perfect and doesn't ever need to be taught a lesson about how sometimes you can't get everything you want, or be the absolute best. Unlike Jess, who is forced to learn this lesson painfully once every couple of books.

This is a particularly moralistic story, but at least the moral is quite a decent one for a change, instead of being all about telling pre-teens to go on unhealthy diets in order to be popular. It suffers greatly from being so Caroline-centric, however. Let's see just how long her vow to not gossip any more lasts...

Moral of the Story? If you want people to like you, invent a fake boyfriend don't spread malicious gossip about them.

[re-read - previously read twice, I think]

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