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picked at the cafeteria slop. That way everyone knew she was way too cool to care what a bunch of kids thought about her.
    The book thing worked for school, but after school we had to deal with something more challenging: those hockey tryouts Mom had been talking about the night before. Tryouts might have been fine
if Riley had her core memories and Hockey Island was still running, but she didn’t and it wasn’t. It was dark. So Fear, Anger, and I knew what would happen if Riley attempted to play
hockey. It was going to get real ugly, real quick.
    When we arrived at the hockey rink, I quickly looked around. I didn’t see any of the cool kids there. At least that was a relief. I did
not
want them to see what was about to happen
to Riley.
    “Good luck, sweetie!” Mom cheered as Riley took the ice.
    “Luck isn’t going to help us now,” I told Anger and Fear. “If she tries to use Hockey Island, it’s going down.”
    That’s how it seemed to work. If Riley tried to activate an island without the core memory to power it, the whole island would crumble.
    But Fear had a solution. He had recalled every hockey memory he could think of to take the place of the core memory. Yep, he had us knee-deep in memory spheres.
    “One of these has got to work in place of the core memory,” Fear said.
    Yeah. Like he knew. But, hey, we had to try. We started pumping hockey memories into the core memory holder. Fear ran to the window to check on Hockey Island. Even I could see it was lighting
up. Not much, but a little.
    “Ha-ha!” Fear cheered. “We did it! It’s working—”
    BOOM!
The core memory holder flat-out rejected one of the memory spheres; blew it out like a bullet and nailed Anger right in the stomach.
    I laughed. Just for a second. You totally would have, too—little, red Anger getting whopped like that. But then he roared back to the console and he was—shocker—furious. He
took the controls and had Riley play without even thinking, just slapping the puck around and…I’m not even going to pretend I know anything about hockey, but whatever Riley was doing
wasn’t hockey. It was ugly, and soon she stormed off the rink and tore off her skates. Mom tried to calm her down and tell her everything was going to be okay, which just proved she knew
nothing
about what was going on in Riley’s head.
    “Stop saying everything will be all right!” Riley roared, and then stomped out of the building.
    You can guess what happened to Hockey Island, right? Rubble.
    By that night, I couldn’t even deal anymore. “On a scale of one to ten,” I said, “I give this day an F.”
    “Well, why don’t we quit standing around and do something?” Anger asked.
    “Like what, genius?” I pressed him.
    “Like quitting,” Fear said. “That’s what I’m doing.”
    For real. He was. He had a recall tube coming down and he was going to zip away to who-knows-where like Joy and Sadness. But of course, this was Fear. He couldn’t even quit correctly. He
got sucked halfway into the tube, got stuck, and practically smeared his face off on the tube.
    Can you believe I have to live with these two? Me neither.
    “Emotions can’t quit, genius,” I said.
    “Wait a minute,” Anger said. “Wait a minute!” He started rummaging through Riley’s idea bulbs, then held one up like it was something special.
    “What is it?” Fear asked.
    “Oh, nothing…just the best idea ever,” Anger said.
    “What?” I asked.
    “All the good core memories were made in Minnesota,” Anger said. “Ergo, we go back to Minnesota and make more. Ta-da!”
    “Wait, wait, wait,” said Fear. “You’re saying…we run away?”
    “Well, I wouldn’t call it that. I’d call it the Happy Core Memory Development Program.”
    It still sounded majorly gross to me. If I’m traveling, I want to travel in comfort. Running away would
not
equal comfort. It would equal cheap food and smelly buses.
    Of course, our new home wasn’t much better. And Anger