The Palace kitchen. Brooke and Sam with their zig-zag hairdos are unusually chummy with each other, bonding over their periods and comparing how much water they’re each retaining. Sam pulls a bottle of "Lady Time" out of her bag, an herbal remedy to help ease the mood swings caused by ovulation that she bought when she went shopping with Lily for "cruelty-free eyeliner." She hands it to Brooke and pours herself a product-placement glass of Minute Maid orange juice. "Hey," says Brooke, all touched by Sam’s gift. "Is it me or has the whole hatred thing between our two groups reached an all-time high?" The girls agree that they need to bring an end to all the fighting. "You know actually," says Brooke as Leave It To Beaver music plays in the background. "I think that if we got them all into one room and communicated. We could all be friends. Don’t you think?" Flash forward to twelve hours later in the Novak: Lily is strangling Mary Cherry and calling her a total liar while Nicole watches, smirking. Brooke pulls Lily off of Mary Cherry and asks Sam if there’s any "Lady Time" left. "Oh my god," says Sam. "We’re out. Thanks, Brooke, you hog!" Brooke bitch-slaps Sam and starts pulling her hair. "Oh my god, this is how it ends!" whimpers Lily. "Trapped in this hell-hole restroom. Out of food. Out of oxygen!" "We’re all going to die in here," says a disheveled Mary Cherry.

Credits.

Nine hours earlier, "Ethel" Kennedy High. Wow, I didn’t realize that Kennedy High had a Feminist Studies class that had only six students, namely Sam, Brooke, Mary Cherry, Lily, Carmen, and Nicole. What an amazing education these ladies are getting. Teaching this class is a new teacher whose name is Mr. Bennett. Mr. Bennett is played by Mitchell Anderson, an actor with amazing range. Until I saw the credits I had no idea that the openly gay feminist-studies teacher with a Frankenstein-shaped head on Popular was the very same actor who played Ross Workman, the openly gay violin teacher with a Frankenstein-shaped head, on Party of Five. Anyway, today’s class is all about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which as we all know is about a woman in a Puritan community who had to wear a big red "A" on her chest for committing adultery. "Hey Carm," says Nicole. "I think you should sew a great big ‘L’ on your chest, you know, for ‘Loser.’" Sam buries her face in her arms and Mr. Bennett looks uncomfortable with all the tension between all six girls. "Mr. Bennett," says Mary Cherry, wrapped in a fur coat. "Do I have to sit next to her? She stinks." "No," says Lily, "you are the one who smells -- like road kill." Brooke and Sam exchange looks as if to say, "What were we thinking earlier?" Mr. Bennett calls for order and urges all the girls put themselves in Hester Prynne’s clogs and imagine having a shameful secret. Actually, Mr. Bennett, Hester didn’t really have a shameful secret. You see, the whole town knew she was an adulteress because she had to stand around in public with a scarlet A on her chest for adulteress. But hey, that’s not the point. The point is that all the girls have shameful secrets and that’s the theme of tonight’s episode.