High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Snail Mail address. After a year of snail mail following Tara Starr's move to Ohio, the long-distance friends are ready for the more immediate gratification of e-mail: with e-mail, it doesn't take 3 or 4 days for a letter to get to the other. Therefore, they start to have an even closer relationship. Eighth grade turns out to be as intense as seventh, with still more challenges to the best friends' relationship: including new local friendships for each, a baby sibling on the way for Tara Starr, which is due near Christmas (to her parents, it's an amazing present; to Tara Starr, it's a lump of coal), devastating drama from Elizabeth's alcoholic and absent father, and ever-broadening horizons for both teens.