Perfect Match

by J. Minter

  Morgan sighed. “It didn’t seem like something you would do,” she said. “It’s just that you rushed out of there so fast, I felt abandoned, like you just pawned me off on the first guy that came along.”

  For the record, this was not exactly true. From the way Morgan latched onto Rob, I’d thought she’d be thrilled to air-kiss me good-bye. But since I figured this was just her hurt pride talking, I said:

  “Not even, Morg. Rob’s so into music, I thought—”

  “Most people on earth are into music,” Morgan said. “Would you pawn me off on most people on earth?”

  I looked at my other friends, whose faces indicated Morgan had a point. This was not going so well. Maybe I needed to find a new way in.

  “The other day at the spa,” I said, fiddling with the stem of a strawberry, “you guys were all so into the boy-boycott idea. I know I’m odd girl out because I want to spend Valentine’s Day with Alex, but it’s more than that. I want to go to the dance with all of you.” I turned to Morgan. “The Rob thing happened by chance, but if I admitted that I have been thinking about fixing you guys up with dates for Valentine’s Day—would you hate me?”

  The table was quiet. No one looked ready to hurl a chocolate-covered strawberry in my face, but they also weren’t jumping up and down with joy.

  After what seemed like an eternity, I sensed a different kind of commotion out of the corner of my eye. When I looked over at the entrance to the cafeteria, I saw a girl with black pigtails and a green beret waving her arms at the French teacher, Madame Florent. The bereted girl was shouting in French—and I caught a few very choice slang words that they definitely didn’t teach you in language classes at Thoney.

  Omigod, was that SBB? She’d totally dropped off my radar the past couple of days. I sort of assumed she’d gotten tired of her undercover student project and rented High School Musical for research. Wrong. SBB’s high school stamina was still going strong, and today it seemed refocused on playing as a foreign exchange student.

  I looked at my friends, who still hadn’t responded to my matchmaking proposal, and weighed my responsibilities.

  “I totally forgot I have to check on something in the darkroom,” I said, slinging my bag over my shoulder. “Why don’t you guys think over what I said—I’ll be back in a few minutes and we can discuss.”

  Before they could answer, I hurried toward the spectacle of my starlet pal. I loved her, but the girl was like a wildfire. She needed to be managed before she spread.

  By the time I reached her, Madame Florent had exited the scene and SBB was red-faced and huffy.

  “Thank God,” she cried when she spotted me. “Where have you been?”

  “Shhh,” I whispered, looking around at my classmates, who were taking a keen interest in the loud, kneesock-wearing girl who slipped a little too easily in and out of her French accent. “Maybe we should go somewhere more private.” I tugged her back into the cafeteria and we ducked behind the vending machines.

  “Good, yes, I can work in this space,” SBB said, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. “It comforts me. And I have never needed comfort like I have these last few days. Why didn’t anyone tell me how hard high school is?”

  I laughed. “I rest my case of the past six months.”

  “At least you’re a good student,” SBB moaned. “I thought this research was going to be all about navigating the social jungle, but ever since I enrolled in this awful school, they’ve been springing these assignments on me. I failed my French test this morning. Do I look like the type of girl who can afford to fail a simple French test?” she wailed. “Look at me.”

  “It’s hard not to,” I said, taking in SBB’s wild argyle knee socks, skinny tie, tortoiseshell glasses, and the large black mole she’d drawn in over her lip. “What are you going for with that look, early-nineties Cindy Crawford?”

  “Hello—French foreign exchange student? Which is why it is not cool that I flunked that test today. Now Madame wants to call my mother! Imagine Gloria’s reaction if a high school teacher called her to talk about my grades. Uh-uh, no way!”

  As SBB rattled on about her academic struggles, I sneaked a peek at my friends around the corner of the vending machine. I was getting strangely used to the view from here. They looked engrossed in a conversation, and I really wanted to be over there to make sure it was going in the right direction. One pessimistic remark from Morgan could throw off the gravity of the whole table and send them back over to the dark side of the boy boycott.

  “So I gave Madame your cell number.” SBB was still talking. “So you’ll remember to pretend to be my mother when she calls, right?”

  “Huh?” I said, tuning back in. “You want me to what?”

  “Is someone back here?” A throaty voice, followed by an unwelcome face appeared behind the vending machines. Willa Rubenstein looked positively devilish in her red Stella McCartney sweater. “Flan? Did you get a part-time job stocking the vending machines?”

  SBB stepped forward and before I could stop her, she adjusted her beret and piled on the Frenchy. “I vas lost.” She shrugged. “I am new and Flan iz helping me find my way to ze class.”

  Willa looked at SBB, then at me, then back at SBB. “Honey, if you want to get to know your way around Thoney, I’d suggest a better tour guide. Au revoir.”

  After the she-devil disappeared, SBB winked at me. “I know you hate her, but don’t you love how helpful she is to my research?”

  I groaned and dragged her out from the vending machine hideaway just as the bell rang to announce the end of lunch—and the end of my chance to talk to my friends about Valentine’s Day.

  SBB was oblivious. She was tugging on my arm and looking at me with wide eyes. “So you’ll help me, right? I need to focus on fitting in—not French class.”

  I was flustered by Willa and bummed at the sight of my friends heading up the stairs without me, so without thinking I jerked my arm away from SBB.

  “Look, I don’t really have time to be your mother right now, SBB. If your French is bad enough that you fail a French test, maybe you should have picked a smarter cover.” I nodded at her outfit. “Anyway, you’re drawing way too much attention to yourself to fit in here. I have to go.”

  I knew I’d left her stranded in the hallway looking stricken, but she wasn’t exactly making it easy to help her. Plus, I had my own issues to take care of, not the least of which was the chemistry test I had to take right now.

  I rushed to my locker to grab my periodic table, and when I opened it up, two notes fell out.

  The first one was scrawled on loose-leaf paper in Amory’s signature purple pen:

  Okay, okay, we’ve agreed. matchmake us. May the best date win.

  XO, Table Four

  The second note was a postcard with a photograph of an old darkroom with black-and-white prints hanging to dry. On the back, it read:

  It’s coming into focus how great you are. Be my valentine?

  Always,

  Your secret admirer

  My heart skipped a beat. Alex must have been thinking about the photos I’d showed him from the Balthazar shoot. I loved that he understood perfectly how important photography was to me.

  If he could make me this swoony over a simple card, I couldn’t wait to see what our first Valentine’s Day would be like.

  Oh, shoot. I’d been too busy to think about my (lack of a) gift for Alex until this little reminder. Valentine’s Day was exactly a week away, and the only thing I had to show Alex how much he meant to me was the mocket I’d bought with SBB and Camille. It was more like a gag gift. The pressure was definitely on to find something deserving of a guy who left swoonworthy love notes in lockers.

  Chapter 12

  LOOK WHAT BLEW IN FROM THE WINDY CITY

  With the stress of my chemistry test behind me, I took out my Kate Spade planner to pencil in a shopping trip for Alex’s gift 2.0 after school. But first, I had a meeting for the Valentine’s Day Dance committee. It was ir
onic to be planning an event that I might not even get to go to, but it was also the perfect way to make up for my dismissive behavior to SBB at lunch. She didn’t know it yet, but being dragged to an extracurricular meeting was exactly the kind of drama that would bolster her understanding of the life of a high school girl.

  Just before last period, taking a cue from the note-droppers in my life, I raised—or dropped—a white flag into SBB’s locker.

  When I found her after school, she was tapping on the padlock, murmuring what sounded like some kind of chant into the slats of her locker.

  “What are you,” I said, coming up behind her, “the locker whisperer?”

  “What are you?” she replied. “The friend abandoner? How the heck do people open these things?”

  “What’s your combination?” I asked.

  SBB looked confused; then a flash of recognition came across her face. “Oh, that’s what those numbers are for?” She rummaged through her massive yellow JanSport backpack, and when she caught me giggling, she dropped the bag with a thud and said defensively, “What? The guidance counselor told me this backpack is really good for the spine. It distributes the weight evenly across your shoulders. I’m carrying a lot of heavy books here, Flan; it’s not like I can be fashion-forward every second of my life—”

  “Calm, calm.” I coached, putting my hand on her shoulder. “Which is why I’m going to show you how to use your locker. You can keep some of your books in there.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just stressed.” She turned and pointed a finger at me. “And you didn’t make it any better. I’ve never been dissed in the hallway before! And even though, from an acting perspective, it was kind of good for me, from a friend perspective, I did not like it.”

  “I know.” I nodded. By then, I had opened up her locker. It was dusty and empty, save for my little white envelope. “Which is why I’m going to make it up to you now.”

  “What’s this?” SBB reached for the envelope. “My first note! I wonder who it’s from!”

  As she tore into the envelope, I had to wonder whether she’d be disappointed when she found out that it was only from me, but when she read my message, her face lit up. “You want me to join you at a dance committee meeting? I’m so excited—see, this is the kind of thing I had in mind when I signed up for this torture. Okay, you’re forgiven!”

  As I pulled a happily chattering SBB down the hall to the student activities lounge, I wondered whether I should warn her about how to act in front of everyone on the planning committee. I was about to open my mouth to put out a few suggestions, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “What’s all this?” Kennedy asked, waving her hand dismissively at SBB. “The dance committee is an elected position, Flan, and what goes on there is top secret. You can’t just bring anyone you want to sit in.”

  Leave it to Kennedy to be a stickler for the rules as long as they worked against me.

  “This is a new student, uh, Simone,” I stammered. “She just moved here from—”

  “Chicago,” SBB responded, working the Midwestern accent. “The headmistress matched me up with Flan, since she was a former new student who adjusted really quickly—”

  “That’s debatable,” Kennedy said, rolling her eyes.

  “You debate with your headmistress?” SBB asked innocently. “Anyway, the headmistress told me explicitly that the best thing I could do for myself would be to follow in the footsteps of a model student like Flan.”

  Oh boy, SBB was taking this a little far. Now Willa had joined the conversation, and she was definitely going to remember SBB’s French persona in the cafeteria. I decided to do some damage control.

  “I’m sure if you have a problem with Simone sitting in on the committee,” I told Kennedy, “you can take it up with the headmistress.”

  That might be enough to shut them both up. Ever since Willa had been implicated in a treasury scandal last month, both she and Kennedy were on academic probation. There was no one who made them more nervous than the headmistress.

  “Whatever,” Kennedy said, unlocking the student lounge and taking a seat at the head of the table. She gestured toward the back of the room, where a lone desk was set off from the conference table. “She can sit in the back if she signs a confidentiality agreement.”

  “Yay! I’ll have my agent fax a standard nondisclosure—I mean, I used to plan dances all the time at my old school in Chicago, but—” SBB squealed until I nudged her to shut up.

  Willa took a seat next to Kennedy and narrowed her eyes at SBB. “Weren’t you the girl behind the vending machine at lunch? Weren’t you French?”

  Whoops.

  “I just act French for an hour before and after every French class, to immerse myself.” SBB tilted her head seriously. I wished she would just stop talking so she wouldn’t dig herself in any deeper, but I was too far away to nudge her again.

  “So the Valentine’s Dance,” I said, changing the subject. A few other girls from our class had filed into the meeting, and I didn’t think everyone needed to be privy to SBB’s methodology. “It’s one week from tomorrow, and we still don’t have a theme, right?”

  “What about Romeo and Juliet?” my friend Dara asked, brushing her long black hair behind her ears. She was the secretary on the student council, so she referenced her notes from our last meeting.

  “Lame,” Kennedy dismissed her. “Shakespeare’s not sexy.”

  I glanced at SBB, whose face had that “ooh, I know about Shakespeare from a movie I once made” look on it. Before I could stop her, she’d climbed on top of her chair.

  “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo,” She spouted off the lines so theatrically that her beret fell down over her eyes. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet—”

  “What are you doing?” Willa asked. She and Kennedy were the only ones in the room nasty enough to ask, but I could tell from the other girls’ faces that they were all thinking the same thing.

  “We learned Shakespeare,” SBB said, “at my old school … in Chicago. Yeah, I took a test over it and everything.”

  I covered my face with my hands. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.

  “What’s your point?” Kennedy said, then turned to glare at me. “Flan, your shadow is being disruptive.”

  “Uh,” I stalled, “I think her point is that Shakespeare is romantic, right, Simone?” I raised my eyebrows at SBB to try to get her to sit down and just observe.

  “No,” Willa said flatly. “I’m class president and I veto that idea. Dara, what else do we have?”

  As Dara flipped through her notes, SBB got back up on the chair. “That’s dictatorial!” she said, throwing out a word she’d loved since playing Napoleon’s mistress in a smutty period piece. “At my old school, in Chicago, we always voted to democratically settle such important matters.”

  “This isn’t your old school, in Chicago,” Kennedy hissed. “At this school, in New York City, we socially annihilate people who annoy us.”

  I had to stop SBB before she made any more of a spectacle of herself. I knew from experience that SBB had to feel needed in order to stay out of trouble. I racked my brain for a task to keep her occupied.

  All I had in my not-so-good-for-the-spine Muxo schoolbag was the portfolio of prints from my photography class. Without much of a plan, I pulled them out and slid them across the table to SBB.

  “Uh, Simone,” I said quietly, “I was wondering if you could help me figure out which one of these to blow up and turn in for my final project.”

  SBB/Simone looked flattered and immediately set to work. For three blissful minutes, she was focused on flipping through my prints, and the conversation about the Valentine’s Dance got shakily back on track.

  “Kisses on My Pillow, Love Me Do, Red Hot Valentine …” Dara listed off the uninspiring ideas for themes.

  “Who came up with these?” Kennedy demanded. “They’re all completely forgettable.”

  I glanc
ed at Dara’s notes. Kennedy’s name was listed next to each of the bad ideas we’d come up with at the last meeting, but I could tell Dara would rather take credit for them herself than point this out to Kennedy.

  “The ideas themselves aren’t terrible,” I chimed in. “It’s just they’re sort of vague. We need something concrete. We need a concept. After that, coming up with the ideas for decorations, music, and activities should be easy.”

  “What about …” SBB/Simone said. The room waited impatiently for her to articulate. I just hoped she wasn’t going to get back up on the chair.

  “What about this one?” she finally said, laying one of my photographs on the table. Of all my prints, this one was particularly well shot and well developed. It was an image of the perfect Balthazar linzertorte.

  “You’re right.” I smiled at SBB. “This is exactly the print I should use for my class.”

  “Not only that,” SBB/Simone said, laying on the hard a in that like a true Midwesterner, “it’s also the perfect theme for the dance: Picture Yourself in Love.” She turned to the other girls on the committee, but stayed—mercifully—in her seat. “What do you guys think? We could blow up giant classy prints of romantic city shots and hang them on all the walls for decoration. We could have one of those photo button-making machines and give the buttons out for favors.”

  As I looked around the table, everyone seemed pretty intrigued by the idea. Even Willa and Kennedy hadn’t thought of anything nasty to say—and that was huge.

  “Ooh.” SBB grinned. “And you know that song they keep playing on the radio, ‘Picture You with Me’? Who’s that by again—that really hot guy?”

  “Jake Riverdale!” Dara chimed in. “Love him.”

  “Me too.” SBB/Simone grinned. “That could be the theme song!”

  I held back a laugh. The undercover pimping of her boyfriend’s new hit single was definitely SBB’s best acting of the day.