Katie is now in the sixth grade, and things are changing too fast for her. The girls seem to like boys, lipstick and movie actors, much to her disgust. Katie tries to deal with this by rebelling and ends up a pariah for a while. Highly imaginative, she finds an old house on one of her solitary hikes, and a picture of a young girl she decides was named Etta. Comforted, she relies on this image for a while to figure how and where she fits in at school and home.