Popularity Takeover

by Melissa de la Cruz

  But Max didn’t seem to appreciate any of that.

  After French class the other day, they had kissed and made up. Apparently the Lana Del Rey look-alike was his cousin—Lili had been jealous for no reason. Max had suggested they spend the day together hiking, and Lili had agreed in order to show him that she could have fun in the outdoors after all, if it was only the two of them and she didn’t have to deal with the doomsday chorus of Cassandra and Jezebel.

  But things weren’t working out that way.

  “I can tell you’re not enjoying yourself,” Max said as they trudged up the hill, wind gusting Lili’s hair into her face. “We can just go back if you like.”

  “No!” she protested. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Then why haven’t you said anything for the last ten minutes?” He hurried on ahead.

  “Maybe because I’m out of breath climbing Mount Everest!” Lili couldn’t help herself.

  “This isn’t steep at all.” Max spun around to face her and stopped dead. “This isn’t as steep as the hill you walk up from Starbucks every day to get to school!”

  “But that hill isn’t all muddy and rutted,” Lili complained. She kicked one hideous boot against the ridges of the track. The boots had been black when she left home—now they were a crusted clay brown. Flecks of mud had sprayed all over her fleece vest. Gross.

  “See—this is the problem.” Max looked exasperated. “You’re way too high maintenance!”

  “I am not high maintenance,” argued Lili. She tugged at the strands of her hair that were sticking to her mouth and felt the grit of windblown dirt salting her lip gloss. Disgusting.

  “Just admit it.” Max folded his arms, staring her in the eyes. “That’s why things didn’t work out between us before, right? It wasn’t about my friends or your friends. We’re just too different.”

  “I thought it was because one of those mean girls you hang around with told you a whole lot of lies about me,” Lili snapped.

  After they’d finally stopped kissing that day at French, Max had confirmed what Lili had suspected all along. He’d confessed that Jezebel had told him that she’d seen Lili out with another guy on the same night that Lili was at home, totally grounded. Why, why, why Jezebel had made up such a malicious story, Lili wasn’t sure. She was probably in love with Max herself. Hello! He was much cuter than her boyfriend.

  “It wasn’t just that,” Max said now, looking kind of sheepish when Jezebel’s Big Lie came up in conversation. “We’re very different as people.”

  “No, we’re not!” She felt like she was going to cry.

  “Look, Lil, you can’t even get dirt on your shoes. . . .”

  “I can so!” Lili held up one foot, almost tumbling over onto her butt.

  “You hate this.”

  “I do not!”

  Max was laughing, shaking his head. He walked up a steep incline, using his hands to pull himself up to a narrow ledge jutting out of the mountain. “Come on up here! The view is amazing!”

  Lili looked at her nails. They were freshly painted. If she scrambled up after him, she would ruin them. “I can’t!”

  “C’mon!” Max called. “Of course you can!”

  “But I’ll get . . .” Lili was about to say dirty, but she knew that Max would just mock her. “I mean, what if I fall?”

  “You won’t fall. I’ll pull you up once you get close,” he assured her, gazing down at her, his dark eyes sparkling. “Don’t be scared.”

  But Lili didn’t make a move.

  “You can’t do it, can you?” Max sighed. “Just admit it. You’re one of the most high-maintenance girls in the Bay Area.” He climbed down from the ledge and stood next to her.

  Lili dropped her head so Max couldn’t see her crying. He was right. She knew it. She was high maintenance. She liked everything to be clean and tidy and perfect, which was why she and Nature had never gotten along, exactly. Nature was so random and messy.

  And Max was a free spirit. He didn’t care about things like wearing a smart blazer or using the right knives and forks at a formal dinner.

  “It’s all right,” he said kindly, stroking Lili’s arm. She tried not to flinch at the thought of his muddy hands messing up her fleece vest. “Let’s just cut our losses and go back.”

  She nodded and turned to follow Max back down the hill. Maybe he was right: It was time to cut their losses.

  Maybe they just weren’t meant to be.

  24

  ALL IN THE STEPFAMILY

  “AND NOW A TOAST!” JEANINE, A. A.’s mother, held her goblet of sangria aloft and beamed around the table. This was the closest thing to a family dinner A. A. had experienced in a long time—even if it was after ten o’clock on Saturday night, and they were sitting in the chic, minimalist restaurant Limon in the Mission rather than around their own dining room table, eating Peruvian delicacies rather than chicken potpie.

  “A toast,” echoed Marty, raising his glass. A. A. tried to ignore the calamari bits stuck in his beard.

  “To our little actress, A. A., who just made her film debut!” Jeanine was talking in too loud a voice, but the restaurant was still pretty crowded, luckily. “And to my family,” she added, gesturing at Ned and A. A., “meeting your family.”

  Marty clinked her glass with his and smiled across the table at his son, Jake. A. A. smiled at Jake too—why not? He was fifteen, with straight, shoulder-length dark hair and intense dark eyes. His mother, Jeanine had stage-whispered earlier that evening, was an Argentinian actress. She and Marty had divorced five years ago, and Jake spent most of his time in Los Angeles these days, living with Marty in the Hollywood Hills.

  And he wasn’t just cute: Jake was really friendly and fun. He and Ned were already buddies, apparently, because they’d met at some statewide track meet earlier in the semester. When the talk turned to soccer, A. A. liked the fact that Jake didn’t patronize her, the way some guys did, because she was a girl. He didn’t even turn on her during a big conversation they had had about South American soccer, when she’d argued that the Brazilian soccer giant Pelé was a much greater player than the old Argentinian star Maradona.

  While the kids talked, Jeanine and Marty leaned all over each other, feeding each other morsels from their dinner plates and giggling like children. So embarrassing.

  A. A. and Ned and Jake just ignored them. It was nice to see her mother happy like this, even though A. A. wasn’t sure this romance would last any longer than Jeanine’s other passions and obsessions. Oh well, at least if she married Marty, A. A. would get another cool stepbrother.

  When Jake and Ned started talking about people they knew through track meets, A. A.’s attention wandered. Holding her phone under the table, she surreptitiously sent Tri a text. No reply. The only text in her in-box was from Lauren: SS PLAN GT AM FOR CONGE. That was good news and bad: It was great that Lauren knew what the S. Society had up their polyester sleeves, but Great America was going to be a hard destination to beat. How were the Ashleys supposed to top that?

  She sent another message to Tri and then folded up her phone so she could eat dessert. Ten minutes later she checked again—still no reply. That was weird. The other day, when Tri was over at their apartment playing video games with Ned, A. A. overheard him saying he was lying low this weekend, hanging out at home. Maybe he was blowing her off—but why? What had she done this time?

  Actually, he’d been kind of keeping his distance from her for ages. Ever since that day she’d gone over to his place and helped his mom with some cooking, he’d acted like he barely knew her. This didn’t make sense at all. At Ashley’s party, they had agreed that it was probably best that they forget about everything that had happened before and just go back to being friends. It was nice to have their old friendship back.

  But now he was acting cold and distant, as though he needed to send her some “message
.” Well—message received, idiot! He didn’t even want to be friends anymore, obviously.

  But wait a second. Hadn’t that been Tri in the crowd earlier today, when she was filming? If he wanted to avoid her, why come along to that? Ned must have blabbed about it. How annoying. If only her brother was sitting closer to her, A. A. would have kicked him under the table. Luckily for him, he was just out of leg’s reach. And she certainly didn’t want cute Jake to think she was trying to play footsie with him. . . .

  “A. A.!” Her mother was snapping her fingers in A. A.’s face. “Wake up! We’re leaving. Jeez, Marty—I hope she wasn’t this out of it on the set!”

  “She was just fine,” rumbled Marty, his squinty eyes disappearing as he smiled. A. A. felt her face flush. Maybe Tri had come along earlier to see how horrible she was at acting. Give her a break: She was hardly a professional! All they told her to do was walk up and down the street over and over, and then kiss Rake over and over. At first it was kind of exciting, and then she noticed Rake had bad breath, and then it was just tedious.

  And so what if Tri saw her kissing Rake. He didn’t even like her these days. Right?

  “I heard you sucked,” Ned teased, almost tipping his chair over when he got up.

  “Who told you that?” A. A.’s heart thudded. She squeaked along the banquette, trying to shrug on her jacket and getting the arms all twisted in the process.

  “It was on Entertainment Tonight,” he drawled. “Preteen nonactress ruins multimillion-dollar pro­duction with terrible acting.”

  “Shut up!” A. A. glared at her brother. This wasn’t the time for his stupid jokes!

  “I thought you were great.” Jake flashed her a sympathetic grin.

  “You were there?” A. A. was confused. She didn’t remember seeing Jake on the set.

  “Yeah—I was standing with Ned near the catering truck.”

  A. A. shook her head. So Ned was there today, and Jake, and Tri. Did they want her to feel self-conscious?

  “I was going to get Tri onto the set,” Ned told her as they all walked toward the restaurant’s front door. “But something was up with him. He said he just wanted to stand on the street. Weird.”

  Weird was the word for it. A. A. sighed, bracing for the brisk evening breeze blowing in from the street. Her mother zoomed from one grand passion to the next, but to A. A., all this boy stuff was way too confusing.

  Who knew why they did the strange things they did? Who knew what they were thinking?

  25

  ASHLEY SPIES ANOTHER FISH IN THE SEA

  ASHLEY WAS COLD AND TIRED and lonely. After meeting Lili for cheer-up after-dinner fro-yos at Pinkberry, she was waiting for Cooper to meet her so they could make the late movie, but he hadn’t shown yet. She kept checking the time on her cell phone every few minutes. He was five minutes late, then eight, then ten, then twelve. . . . What was going on? Maybe something terrible had happened to him. Maybe he’d been run over on the way here, or maybe his convoy had been attacked by some Greek terrorist organization.

  BEEP.

  At last! A text from Cooper. Ashley eagerly clicked it.

  SORRY CANT MAKE IT RLLY SORRY.

  Whaaaaat?? He was standing her up? It wouldn’t be so bad, but this wasn’t the first time Cooper had backed out of a date at the last minute. It was soooo depressing how he always had other things to do. Ashley realized he must have a packed calendar, since his family was always traveling. But she wished that once in a while he would invite her to some swish event and not leave her stranded on a street corner somewhere. Did he like her or not?

  So now she had to slink home and waste what was left of the evening watching some makeover marathon on TV or—even worse—listening to her parents discuss baby names while her father rehearsed dreary lullabies on his acoustic guitar. She called them to ask for a ride home, and they told her to wait in the lounge of a busy restaurant they liked, where the mâitre d’ knew the whole family by sight.

  Inside the lounge it was too crowded, not to mention boring. There were no magazines, and everyone waiting at other tables kept looking at her strangely, as though she were a teenage runaway. Ashley tried to focus her mind on the text that had come in from Lauren earlier in the evening. So the S. Society was planning a jaunt to Great America? Whatever! The Ashleys could come up with something much better than that.

  But right now, Ashley couldn’t think of anything amazing. In fact, all the ideas they’d been discussing over the past couple of weeks were pretty lame. The only idea that Ashley really liked was a day trip to Stinson Beach, mainly because Cooper had told her that Flown the Coop was going to be moored there next week. Any chance to see Cooper was better than nothing. This argument, however, was unlikely to win over a committee of teachers. They’d think that Great America sounded like a whole lot more fun for everyone else—and Ashley had to admit they’d be right.

  When her father finally texted with an ETA of five minutes, Ashley wrapped her thick cashmere scarf tightly around her neck, buttoned up her new fur-trimmed Miu Miu coat, and braved the chilly weather outside. If only her parents would let her catch a cab by herself! She could have been home by now.

  “Ashley! What are you doing here?” Bounding out of the same restaurant with her usual giant strides was A. A., followed by her stepbrother Ned, and some other guy. Some cute guy. Some very cute guy. Well, hello.

  “Waiting to get a ride home,” Ashley told her.

  “Where’s Cooper?” A. A. scanned the sidewalk. “Aren’t you having dinner with him tonight?”

  “He had to leave. Family emergency.” There was no way Ashley was confessing to A. A.—or anyone—that Cooper was a no-show this evening. She didn’t want their pity. And, most of all, she didn’t want the story getting out. Her ranking as Queen Bee at Miss Gamble’s was hanging by a thread again, and she couldn’t risk any reputation-destroying gossip getting out. She nudged A. A. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

  “Oh, yeah—this is Jake Law. Jake, this is Ashley Spencer.”

  “Her best friend,” interjected Ashley, shoving one gloved hand at Jake. He shook it, then smiled at her. Those dreamy green eyes! That gorgeous curly hair! Ashley had no idea that Ned had such good-looking friends.

  “Are you at Gregory Hall with Ned?” she asked him, wrinkling her forehead. She would have remembered this guy, she was sure.

  “No, I’m just visiting from L.A.,” Jake explained. “My dad is here making a movie. Here he is!”

  Jeanine and Marty stepped out of the restaurant, Jeanine staggering and laughing uproariously. They were holding hands, and Marty was pecking little kisses all over her dark hair. Not another lovey-dovey old couple? Why did elderly people have to behave so badly in public? Didn’t they know that PDA was disgusting over the age of twenty-one?

  “He’s my future stepbrother,” A. A. whispered in her ear. “Possibly. Who knows?”

  “You should have come by the set today,” said Jake, turning back to face Ashley. “I could have shown you around. But we’ve finished filming here now. All the interiors in the movie will be shot in Vancouver.”

  “I was there. Well, I was in the crowd, watching A. A.” Ashley pushed her hair back from her face. She was so busy staring her eyes out at Rake Parkins, she hadn’t realized there would be even cuter boys hanging out on the set.

  “Another time.” Jake smiled. Ashley was so distracted, she didn’t even notice her father’s SUV pulling up until A. A. brought it to her attention. After shaking hands with Jake again, kissing A. A., and forgetting to say good-bye to Ned and the doddering lovebirds still making fools of themselves, Ashley climbed into the front seat next to her father. The car smelled odd.

  “I’ve been helping your mom with her painting, since the smell is getting to her even though we bought the safe, nontoxic paint,” her dad told her with a sheepish grin. Ashley looked at him: His swe
atshirt and jeans were speckled with paint of every possible color. “We’re almost finished with a woodland mural in the baby’s room. If you’re not too tired, you could help when we get home!”

  “I’m exhausted,” Ashley said. It was true: Part of her was depressed about Cooper not showing for their date, and part of her was kind of happy she’d gotten the chance to meet Jake. It was all too tiring and confusing. A. A. was lucky—her life was much more straightforward. She got to live in a cute apartment and do whatever she wanted, and now some hot guy from L.A. was going to be living there as well.

  Ashley’s life was a mess. She had a boyfriend who was AWOL, parents who’d lost their minds, and a tiny room in the attic. Before too long, all she’d be able to hear would be the baby crying and screaming, and everyone stampeding around the house attending to its every demand.

  Once the new baby came, she’d have to get used to being numero dos. Maybe she was already numero dos with Cooper. He was probably out tonight with some European princess or something. Ashley was beginning to realize something. No matter how much you wanted something—or someone—you couldn’t always get what you wanted in life. Not even if you were Ashley Spencer.

  26

  LAUREN TUNES IN TOKYO

  IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A perfect Saturday night date, Lauren thought. Just her and Christian, goofing around in a bowling alley and then sharing a giant ice-cream sundae in Joe’s Diner. No stress, no Ashleys, no Sadie, no school. She spooned a heaping, melting mound of delicious vanilla ice cream—dripping with hot fudge sauce—into her mouth, and had a brief moment of utter happiness. How nice it was to be out with a cool guy like Christian. She didn’t have to put on an act with him.

  But it wasn’t a perfect Saturday night date. In between giant mouthfuls, Christian was talking away about stuff he wanted them to do next weekend, but Lauren really couldn’t pay attention. All she could think about were ideas for the perfect Congé celebration. It wasn’t enough to know what the S. Society was planning. The Ashleys—and she included herself here—needed to come up with a brilliant alternative plan and totally kick the S. Society’s behinds. Lauren couldn’t kill the queen just to have another tyrant on the throne. The S. Society had to be put in its place.