by Toni Runkle
The next few days passed for Kat like they were some kind of bizarre dream. Everything was upside down. She was getting her rides to school from her own mom now, and she could barely remember the lie she had told to explain why Jules had suddenly stopped being around. Something about Kyle practicing with the Mustang on the way to school and his license and their parents not wanting Kyle to have any distractions when he still only had his restricted permit, although Kat would be hard pressed to re-create that lie even if you gave her a whole day to think about it.
Meanwhile, Kat couldn’t stop obsessing about who had sent the video. She had already concluded that neither Darcy nor Zoe could have taken it. She remembered that you could see Darcy in the corner of the shot at the end, and you could hear Zoe’s voice, which sounded far away, not that weird close sound that the person who’s taking the video always has. And if neither of them took the video, it was hard to believe one of them had sent it. That would be a “Let’s screw up Kat’s life” conspiracy to rival all others. With her two BFFs back in the fold, it took a little of the sting off the dustup with Jules. Instead Kat was trying to look forward to the launch party as much as she could.
“I heard another ad for the launch party on the radio,” Darcy said at lunch just two days before the event. “Those ads are, like, on more than the songs now.”
“Did you guys hear Jessica Aguirre’s new single?” Zoe asked. “I just downloaded it. It’s totally sick. I wonder if she’s going to sing that one on Saturday.”
“Jessica Aguirre has a weird nose,” said Darcy, giving her best shot at music criticism.
“Yeah, but at least she doesn’t have acne!” Zoe said, mocking the scene from the infomercial that all the girls had seen about a billion times. “Does your skin cause you embarrassment? Do people scream when they see you coming? Do your pets cower in fear when you open the door to your house? That happened to me too, before CleanSweep from Remoulet!”
Zoe and Darcy cackled and howled. Kat just watched them. Usually a good joke mocking a teenage celebrity would be right up her alley, but today, she wasn’t up for it. She had thought it would be totally uncomfortable to go to school and have to interact with Jules all day long. But it wasn’t awkward at all. Instead Kat finally realized how little they actually hung out anymore…unless they made a point of it.
They were only in three classes together, and even then, they sat on opposite ends of the room. Then, at lunch, Kat usually let Jules eat her vegan stuff with her brown-bag crowd, and their paths hardly crossed in the hallways. It was a big school, after all. After school, it was the same thing.
Jules and Kat hadn’t done the same after-school activities since fourth grade, when their parents pushed them both to sign up for the junior volleyball team. Even then, the only thing they had agreed upon was what a horrible idea it had been in the first place. So here was Kat fully expecting to be missing her friend, only to realize she wasn’t around that much to miss. Weird. Maybe Chelsea was right, after all.
When the girls walked by the gym on the way back to class, they noticed two enormous trucks bearing the logo of some production company from Chicago parked outside. Guys who looked like they knew what they were doing wheeled equipment off the trucks and into the gym. To the starstruck Zoe, it looked like catnip.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s check it out.”
“Guys, passing period’s almost over!” Darcy protested. “I don’t want to get busted.”
“Oh come on, what’s the worst that could happen?”
“One of those big spotlights could fall on my head and leave me permanently brain damaged?”
“How would we tell the difference?” said Zoe under her breath.
Zoe wasn’t in the mood for a debate at the moment. So she did what every girl in her position would do—appeal to authority.
“Kat, don’t you want to see what’s going on?”
Kat smiled. A little adventure could be just the thing right now.
“Let’s do it.”
“Ka-a-a-a-a-a-a-t!” Darcy said, adding about twenty-eight syllables to her name.
“Relax, Darcy,” Kat said peeking around the corner. “You know Ms. Tate is barely awake after lunch. She won’t even notice if we walk in a few minutes late.”
That was good enough for Darcy.
“Okay,” said Kat, changing into full Alpha Girl mode for a moment. “You guys follow me. Kyle showed me a secret passage into the gym through the visitors’ locker room.”
“And just what were you doing exploring secret passages with Kyle?” Zoe asked.
“Shhh! I think I heard something!” Kat hadn’t heard something, of course, but discussing Jules’s brother at this particular moment rated high on the bummer-ocity meter.
Kat led the girls down a narrow passage behind the same stack of temporary bleachers where she had witnessed Coach Scofield and Coach Deevers having their conversation a couple of days earlier. At the end of the passage was one of those fire doors that you absolutely, positively weren’t supposed to open unless the school was under a nuclear attack.
“You’re going to sound the alarm if you push that!” a still spooked Darcy said.
“Then shield your ears, Darcy, cuz here we goooooo!”
Zoe and Darcy dived behind Kat and cowered, expecting one of those ship horns like they had on the Titanic. Or at the very least one of those horrible noises that some fire trucks make in old foreign movies.
Instead, nothing.
Kat smiled and gently pushed the door to the visitors’ locker room open.
“You knew that was going to happen!” said Darcy.
Kat laughed. “Of course I did. The janitor disarms it so he can get from one end of the school to the other without having to tramp through the halls. Come on.”
The faint stench of unwashed socks filled the air as the trio tiptoed through the locker room. They peeked out of the door to the gym, doing their Nancy Drew best to avoid detection. Since the production company had showed up the day before, nobody had been allowed to enter and all gym classes had been stuck playing softball out in Foley Field on the other side of campus.
As the girls took cover behind a rack of folding chairs, Kat could see why.
The gym had been transformed. Totally transformed. And not crummy transformed like when you have to decorate for the fall dance, and you’ve only got a three-hundred-dollar budget for the whole thing and nobody wants to volunteer, so the best you can come up with is a lot of crepe paper decorations and glitter on signs. This was like Hollywood!
A huge stage had been constructed in the place where the pep band usually sat during the basketball games. It must have been thirty feet wide. Behind the stage, workmen were putting up a giant video screen so everyone could see no matter where they were sitting. Gigantic banners advertising Glitter Girl products were being hoisted into position on huge ropes. It was a massive operation—a shrine to teen beauty and style. Kat, who had just studied ancient Egypt in social studies class, whispered to herself.
“It’s like they’re building the pyramids at Giza.”
“Only this isn’t for King Tut,” Zoe answered in a whisper. “This is all for you, Kat.”
Kat had been so caught up in the drama of the last few days that she had almost forgotten about the Face of Glitter Girl contest. But it was true. She could be the Glitter Girl, just as easily as any of the other forty-nine girls. And the way Chelsea was talking when they went to the mall, maybe even easier. She could barely allow herself to believe it. Her face on magazines, on TV even.
“Guys, look!” Zoe whispered excitedly, pointing toward the stage.
“Wow, a giant shampoo bottle!” said the easily impressed Darcy.
“No, behind that, it’s Jessica Aguirre!”
Sure enough, there she was. Among a sea of what Kat took to be stage managers and producers
was the teen queen of pop herself. You’d barely recognize her without the belly shirt, short shorts, and metallic boots. She was dressed in a denim jacket, jeans, and a plain white T-shirt as she shook hands and listened quietly to the producers explain something about the upcoming show. She looked like, well, a teenager.
“Gosh, she’s so beautiful,” said Darcy, apparently forgetting her comments from just twenty minutes earlier.
“This show is going to be great!” squealed Zoe under her breath.
Looking around at the massive construction project underway at her school, Kat could hardly disagree. There wasn’t much that could make this better.
Well, maybe one thing.
• • •
Just as Kat predicted, the girls managed to sneak into Ms. Tate’s class undetected before she had even bothered to take the roll. The lesson that day was on avoiding something called dangling participles, which couldn’t be good with a name like that. As far as Kat was concerned the only things that should be dangling were earrings. However, fresh from their adventure in the gym, Kat couldn’t concentrate on participles of any kind. Seeing the preparations made her more sure than ever that she was right to trust Chelsea and ignore her gut and go to the launch party. Still, whenever she thought about Jules, who at this moment was sitting at the back of the room very deliberately not looking at her, Kat felt a pang of guilt. Well, she’d just have to get over that. To whom much is given, much is expected.
Chapter 19
Get Thee to a High School Costume Shop on the Other Side of Town
For Jules, the days between her big fight with Kat and her birthday on Saturday couldn’t pass fast enough. There were a couple of moments at school when Kat seemed like she might have wanted to talk or apologize or something, but those moments passed fairly quickly. Jules figured it would be tough to take back anything that was said by either of them, so maybe it was best she didn’t say anything for a while.
But just as she was getting ready to forgive and forget, and maybe even make the first move herself, she saw Kat hanging out with those two airheaded harpies Zoe and Darcy. It positively drove her up a wall. On Thursday, they’d come wandering into Ms. Tate’s class twenty minutes late with smug grins on their faces like they were getting away with something so naughty. It made Jules want to puke and immediately sent all thoughts of trying to work things out with Kat out of her head. Let her apologize first. Then, we’ll see.
Instead she had her own birthday to plan. And even though Kat wasn’t going to be there, this was going to be a big deal. So on Friday afternoon as Ms. Donovan had arranged, the entire Shakespeare Club piled into one of the parents’ mininvans and headed to the high school. Everyone was excited about looking through the drama department’s costumes to figure out what they were wearing to the Renaissance Faire.
Jules sat next to her friend Rory Retzlaff, a slightly tubby, sandy-haired boy she had a bit of a crush on because he was so funny. He always talked about how he was going to be running away to join the Renaissance Faire himself someday.
“You’re so full of it!” Jules laughed at him as the van pulled out of the Willkie parking lot.
“You just wait!” said Rory. “Next year you guys will be coming to see me.”
“As what? Court jester?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I could be a falconer or something.”
“Yeah,” laughed Jules, “I hear falconry is a real growth industry, right up there with high tech.”
“You laugh now, but who’ll be laughing when my birds are trained to do surgical strikes against my mortal enemies?”
For a brief moment, Jules entertained a fantasy of Rory’s imaginary falcons attacking Kat and her band of Glitter Girl hangers-on. She imagined training the falcons to snatch those hideous spangled engineer’s hats off their empty little heads and keep flying until they dropped them all into nearby Mirror Lake. However the fantasy abruptly ended when she thought about the possibility of exposing the innocent marine life in the lake to such toxically high levels of lameness. The environmentalist in her couldn’t bear to do it, even in her mind.
In the front passenger seat of the minivan, Jules saw that Ms. Donovan was busy texting someone on her cell phone. She looked a little upset. Ms. Donovan had been a little extra moody as they were getting ready for the Faire, but Jules had just thought that was because her teacher was going to be on the hook if any of the costumes were damaged or lost. Maybe all this texting meant something else. Maybe boy trouble.
The short van ride to the high school was over quickly. Ms. Donovan stuffed her cell phone into her purse and practically barked at the students to get out. As Jules hopped out of the van with Rory, she thought she saw Ms. Donovan wipe a tear out of her eye.
“Is everything okay, Ms. Donovan?” Jules asked.
“Yes, fine,” the teacher answered, wiping away a second tear and taking a deep breath. “‘Let me not think on it,’” she said, quoting from Hamlet. “‘Frailty, thy name is woman.’ Come on, kids, let’s go.”
Ms. Donovan turned on her heel and led the small group of students into the costume shop behind the theater. The theater department at the high school was famous for its lavish productions and had been awarded a big grant from the state a few years ago to improve the arts education in the city. So going into the costume shop was simply amazing. It was like stepping back in time. There were gorgeous turn-of-the-century dresses from last year’s production of Hello, Dolly! And over there, the simple peasant clothes from two seasons ago when they did Fiddler on the Roof. But three racks down was the real treasure trove—the Shakespeare stuff. The members of the club were drawn magnetically to the costumes.
“They’re just soooo beautiful!” Jules said, holding up a much-too-big taffeta gown that must have been worn by somebody royal in one of the plays. Jules was mesmerized.
“Jules what do you think?” Rory said, wandering around in a donkey’s head costume from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“I think you’re wearing the wrong end of the donkey,” Jules said.
“Ha, ha.” Rory laughed and turned and nearly ran over Gwen Roswell, who was trying on some slippers that didn’t quite match her gown.
“Were we born in the wrong century or what?” said Jenny Burcher, looking at the rack of clothes in front of her.
“Yeah, except for the pestilence and plague, it was a real charmer,” said Jules, whose romantic streak was about a half inch deep at best.
“But they were so well-dressed!” said Jenny. “And the men were all so chivalrous! Putting down their cloaks so that their lady could walk across a mud puddle. Can you imagine?”
“Chivalry is dead, ladies,” came Ms. Donovan’s severe voice from two racks away. “Now let’s make our selections so we can go.”
Jenny and Jules looked at each other. Awkward!
Jules found a costume that fit her decently—a dark green costume that the character Portia wore in the Merchant of Venice. Jules really liked that character because she had a lot of spunk and she wasn’t going to let people push her around. At one point in the play, she even disguises herself as a man so that she can plead a case in court. Her mom the lawyer would especially like that part. Anyway, the costume fit. Well, it nearly fit if she did some strategic stuffing in the chest area. Plus, it wasn’t too frilly or girly like some of the others, so she figured it would more than do the trick for Saturday.
After another thirty minutes, everyone had pretty much settled on a costume and was ready to head back to Willkie. The group had turned positively giddy after an hour of trying on Elizabethan costumes. Even Ms. Donovan seemed to have gotten over whatever bee might have been in her bonnet. She had chosen a lovely dress that Ophelia wore in Hamlet before she went lovesick crazy and tossed herself in the river. Jules just had to hope her teacher’s mental state was a bit better than that. This was, after all, the twenty-first century.
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br /> On the ride home, all the students started to sing a song they knew from Madrigals, “This Sweet Merry Month of May,” even though it was the middle of October. Jules sang along for a bit and smiled:
This sweet and merry month of May,
While Nature wantons in her prime,
And birds do sing, and beasts do play
For pleasure of the joyful time
As she listened to the mostly in-tune laughing voices that filled the van, she thought that she really didn’t need to have Kat at the Faire anyway. These were her real friends, weren’t they? The ones who didn’t let their heads get turned by something as dumb as Glitter Girl. By the end of the ride she had almost convinced herself it was true.
Almost.
Chapter 20
Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Crown
Saturday. The Day. The Date. It had been circled on both Kat’s and Jules’s calendars (although for totally different reasons) for some time.
Kat woke that bright fall morning with a mixture of excitement, queasiness, and anticipation. It was that roller-coaster feeling again. Sort of like she felt when she had gotten the ride home from Kyle, which seemed like a lifetime ago. Kat knew that whatever happened, she would be able to divide the rest of her life into two easily defined sections: “Before Saturday” and “After Saturday.” It wasn’t quite Pearl Harbor Day or the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July, but it was close enough for a fourteen-year-old girl in the middle of Indiana.
The launch party didn’t officially begin until the afternoon, but Chelsea had called the night before and made it clear that she wanted all her Alpha Girls there no later than noon. That would give her the chance to go over what they were supposed to do and where they were supposed to stand during the show. Kat was looking forward to meeting the other girls, after hearing about them for so long. She felt sure they would hit it off right away, since they had so much in common. It would be nice to get a look at what these other Alpha Girls were like. What would an Alpha Girl from Alaska be like? From California? From Idaho? Who knew? That was part of the excitement of them all being together in one place for this big launch party.