Vanessa's best friend Bailey isn't her best friend anymore, and Vanessa can't figure out why. When she finds an abandoned museum, she cleans it up and puts her own exhibit there: one all about Bailey. Then someone else discovers the museum and begins adding to it: Eli, a classmate from Hebrew school, creates an exhibit about his old dog, Einstein. Then Vanessa's older brother Sterling wants to exhibit his baseball cards. The three curators make some rules for the museum (no adults, for one), and then begin inviting visitors. In the process, Eli and Vanessa become friends, and Vanessa's friendship with twins Rosalie and Honore grows, and her understanding of her friendship with Bailey changes, too - it's not exactly as she presented it to the reader at first, but it's not exactly how she remembers, either.

The kids' museum can't last forever; the scheduled demolition is rescheduled, and Vanessa manages to reach a famous artist whose painting is the only one left in the museum, leading to a surprise visit, conversation, and outcome.

Vanessa and Sterling's father is in the military, visiting home between deployments and video-calling from abroad when he can; at one point they are afraid he has been killed, and Vanessa considers the horrible what-if.

Vanessa is also struggling with a habit of picking at her skin, something Bailey's new friends find disgusting and her father finds disturbing. In an unlikely coincidence, Mariko Marsden has a similar condition - picking out her own hair - and knowing there is a name for the condition, and other people like her, comforts Vanessa and allows her to talk to her mom about it.

Beautifully balanced and realistic.

See also: The Meaning of Maggie by Megan Jean Sovern, The Lost Library by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass (different tone)

Quotes

You'd think you'd need to go far away to find something new, but sometimes it was as simple as just turning left instead of right. (11)

Vanessa felt like the world was crumbling around her. She didn't want Bailey to act like a good friend just because she was fulfilling an assignment or something. She wanted Bailey to want to be a good friend. (59)

It took a long time to make, but to ruin it took almost no effort at all. (155)

Everybody wanted her to be somebody different. Because there was something wrong with her just the way she was. (170)

...it was worthless to the world, and priceless to Vanessa. (191)

"...it's just going to get taken down again."
"Maybe....But it would be good for as long as it lasts. Isn't that reason enough to do it?" (Vanessa and Rosalie, 212)

"What if he never comes home?"
"That would be terrible....It would be unspeakably tragic. It would be one of the worst things that could possibly happen. And we would find a way through it." (Vanessa and her mom, 218)

"If we don't work to protect beauty, it will disappear in favor of whatever people think they want at that exact moment in time. Beauty is harder to find, harder still to create, and easy to destroy." (Mariko Marsden, 233)

Everything was out of her control, and she hated it. (239)

Ruining something on purpose and ruining something on purpose were two very different matters. (251)

She didn't need the artifacts to prove that all this had been real and had mattered. (275) ( )

Vanessa is a middle school, struggle with a common but serious middle school problem. Friendship, Friendship begins to change at that age and Vanessa cannot understand why her former best friend now wants nothing to do with her. Vanessa explorers her past to discover why Bailey as disappeared from her life, Through this process she creates artifacts in her own museum of their former friendship, and Vanessa discovers a lot about herself and Bailey, and friendship. ( )