Victoria Lee lives alone in a huge mansion while her successful parents run their businesses in Hong Kong. The teenager has made it through one semester of her junior year at Manderley Prep, a prestigious school for Silicon Valley spoiled brats, but isn't sure how the second semester will go. She misses her friends from home, and although she's started to make new friends -- Cindy and Maggie -- she's lonely.

Victoria spends most of her time day-dreaming about jock Steve Heller or sketching fashion designs. But although Steve took her to the Welcome Dance last semester, he's ignored her since then.

To top off her bad school beginnings, Victoria is assigned a weird and difficult lab partner, Gabe. He's already reamed her out for conspicuous consumption and harming the environment with her BMW. (He rides a bicycle.)

But as the two are forced to work together, and a party reveals Steve's true character, Victoria starts to see that Gabe is a pretty cool guy. She and he could get to be good friends. Friends, that's it.

This is the second book in the BFF series and it stands out as tremendously better than the first one. (I didn't like the clichéd plotline in that book at all.) But Victoria is likable and more real, as is Gabe. I enjoyed the plot more in this one and like that Victoria didn't just suddenly change her personality to adapt to Gabe's "green" thinking. They learned to respect each other, and that's not a bad lesson in a teen book.