Harper tuned her out—after all, she already knew the story. It was more important to regain her focus and start working on damage control. But cool, calculating strategy was impossible when one unquestionable fact kept drilling into her brain.
Miranda had betrayed her. No one else knew what she knew.
She wouldn’t have done it on her own, Harper was certain ofthat. She didn’t have this kind of nastiness in her. She would have been goaded into it by someone else, someone so pure and innocent that no one would ever suspect her of spewing such poison.
“What are we going to do?” Mini-Me moaned. As if there were a “we.”
“Who needs to do something?” Harper asked, crumpling the flyer into a ball and tossing it over her shoulder like the trash it was. “You know what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
“You don’t even care?” Mini-She asked, eyes wide and adoring. From the expression on the Minis’ faces—impressed and totally devoid of pity—Harper grew certain that she’d be able to fix this.
These last few weeks had been the most lonely and miserable of Harper’s life—something like this could have been a fatal blow. And yet, she marveled, perhaps Beth had done her a favor. Because she suddenly felt invigorated. She felt offended and insulted, righteous and wronged, empowered and enraged.
She felt like herself again.
And it felt good.
Beth and Miranda met up in the second-floor girls’ bathroom after third period to compare notes. The school was buzzing about the already legendary flyer—half the student body had memorized it, and the other half had used it as a springboard to create and pass along wildly unlikely rumors of their own.
“I can’t believe we actually did it,” Miranda whispered, checking under the stalls to make sure they were really alone.
“You should have—” Beth quickly stopped talking as two babbling juniors burst through the door. Miranda turned on the faucet, pretending to wash her hands, while Beth peered into the streaked mirror, applying a new coat of transparent lip gloss.
“You think she, like, did it to herself?” the tall brunette asked, smoothing down her hair and using her pinkie to rub in some garish blue eye shadow. “But, like, why?” She dug through her overstuffed silver purse and pulled out a large gold hoop, wide enough to fit around her wrist, and clamped it onto her earlobe.
“Oh, puh-leeze,” the shorter, pudgier one said, locking herself inside an empty stall. Her bright yellow platform shoes tapped against the linoleum. “She’s mad crazy for attention, you know she’d do anything.”
“But we’re talking total humiliation hot zone—”
“Massive meltdown territory, but does she seem upset? Negative. You know she’s, like, loving every minute of it.”
“I don’t know,” the tall one said, now perched on the sink, fiddling with her nails, which were painted cotton candy pink and so long that they almost curled back toward her fingertips. “Maybe it was some nobody, like, you know, some bitter loser who wanted—”
“As if.” A laugh floated out of the stall. “How would some loser know all of that? No, it had to be—”
Finally, Miranda couldn’t help herself. “Did you ever think that maybe—”
“Uh, excuse me?” the brunette said, glaring. “Were we talking to you?”
The shorter girl burst out of the stall and quickly slathered on a layer of hot pink lipstick. She didn’t bother to look in Miranda’s direction—or make a move toward the sink. “Was she, like, eavesdropping on our conversation?”
“Whatever. Forget her.”
“Her who?” the other girl cackled as she pushed through the girls’ room door, the brunette following close behind.
Miranda and Beth stared at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter. “Were they for real?” Beth asked in wonderment.
“Oh, yeah, like, totally, I mean, you know, whatever,” Miranda said, giggling. “For reals, dude.”
“And that makes us the losers?” Beth asked, grinning.
“Apparently.” Miranda stuck out her hand to shake. “Nice to meet you, I’m nobody. And who are you?”
“Someone who would never walk out of this bathroom without washing her hands,” Beth joked.
“I think we’re missing the key point here,” Miranda said, trying to stop laughing. “Did you hear the way they were talking about ‘her’?”
“Harper,” Beth filled in.
“Right. Obviously. Like she was this pathetic nonentity, desperate for attention….”
“Humiliated,” Beth said, raising her eyebrows.
“Pitiful,” Miranda added, shaking her head.
“Defeated.”
Miranda grinned and slung an arm around Beth’s shoulders. “And all by a pair of bitter nobodies. Who would’ve thought?”
The curiosity-seekers had been swarming Kane all morning—and by lunchtime, it seemed half the school had surrounded him, desperate for insider information and some notoriety-by-association. Outwardly, he smiled, preening under the attention. But underneath, he was fuming. It was Beth. It had to be. No one else could know some of the things she’d printed, the few secrets he’d been foolish enough to share.
That was the worst of it: the realization that he’d brought this on himself. After swearing to protect himself, he’d left himself raw and exposed.
Not again—never again.
After spotting the flyer, Kane had quickly started his own campaign of disinformation; judging from Kaia’s and Harpers animated smiles and the naked curiosity of their eager disciples, it seemed the girls had chosen to do the same. They sat at separate tables, each the center of a small whirlpool of people, flowing past to catch a moment with the stars. The horde surrounding Kane was, of course, the largest.
“She begged me to take her back,” he confided to the second-string point guard. “It was getting pathetic. I mean, tears is one thing—you know girls. But when she started showing up at my house in the middle of the night? It’s not like I wanted to call the cops….”
“Let’s just say, I now have a pretty good idea of what it must feel like to kiss a cold, dead fish,” he confided to the sympathetic blonde from the cheerleading squad.
“And the smell … you know, she works at that diner, and all the onions, the grease, the sweat …” He shook his head, and the busty freshman patted him sweetly on the shoulder. “It was nauseating. I have a very delicate stomach, you know, and sometimes …”
“Sure, she couldn’t get enough of it,” he bragged to the gawky junior who managed the basketball team. “But what was I supposed to do? She was—well, let’s just say Adam’s pretty lucky he never made it to home base.”
He almost felt sorry for Beth. She was like a dolphin, playing at being a shark. Which was a dangerous game: You were likely to get eaten.
The note the teacher had handed her had been short and sweet: Report to my classroom. Now.
Okay, maybe not so sweet.
“Jack,” Kaia said simply, stepping into his empty classroom and closing the door behind her. “Bonjour.”
Powell was perched on the edge of his desk, fingering a red sheet of paper. Kaia recognized it immediately, with little surprise.
“You said you’d stopped seeing him,” Powell said coldly, placing the flyer carefully down on the desk. “I thought I’d made my position perfectly clear: I don’t like to share.”
Kaia strode toward him and took a seat at one of the desks in the front row, aware that his gaze was glued to her long, tan legs, barely covered by a green suede miniskirt.
“Do you really want to discuss this here, Jack?” It was a violation of every rule he’d set for them, and it stank of desperation.
“There’s nothing to discuss.You told me you’d stopped. You told me you wouldn’t, with—that. And now I read …”
Kaia laughed. “Are you going to believe some piece of trash you probably confiscated from one of your clueless freshmen? Just how gullible are you?”
She got up and walked slowly to the door, as if to leave, then paused with her hand on the knob. “Do I really need to defend myself?” Kaia asked. “Or can we stop this game and play another … ?”
Powell hopped off the desk, walked toward her, and then did something he’d never done before on school grounds. He touched her.
Placing his hand over hers on the doorknob, he turned the lock.
“We can table this for now,” he told her, his lips inches from the nape of her neck, his fingers digging into her skin. “You’re a smart girl, Kaia. You know better than to screw this up. Take this as a warning.”
He pulled her roughly toward him, and she let him, hyperaware of the people in the hallway, just on the other side of the door. Only a few inches separated them from discovery, a thought that turned her on far more than Powell’s hands roaming across her body.
Yes, Kaia was a smart girl, and she almost always knew better. She just never acted on it.
Where was the fun in that?
The whispers flew back and forth over Miranda’s head. No one thought to ask her what was true—most likely, no one thought of her at all.
Without Harper, I’m invisible, she thought, pushing around the soggy food on her tray. She had no appetite. Not when Harper was at the center of an admiring crowd, soaking in the attention. Miranda had just given her more of what she loved the most. From across the room, Miranda couldn’t see the self-satisfied grin on Harper’s face, but knew it was there. And she couldn’t hear the spin Harper would put on everything to cast herself in a good light—but she knew Harper would. A spotlight. It all seemed so obvious now, that this was how their feeble plot was doomed to end.
Teaming up with Beth, blandest of the bland, to take on Haven High’s dark queen? What had she been thinking?
Beth wasn’t as bad as Miranda had always thought, and was probably undeserving of all the hours she and Harper had put into mocking her behind her back. (Miranda had long ago perfected her Beth imitation, which never failed to send Harper into uncontrollable gales of laughter.)
But “not that bad”? What good was that, when you were going up against someone who had It? Someone who could mold minds, bend wills, make the world into exactly what she wanted it to be. Harper had It, and Beth didn’t. Neither did Miranda.
Together, they made one big, fat nothing, and Miranda was beginning to wonder if she might have been better off alone.
Spin control only took a small portion of Harper’s attention, and she devoted the rest of it to watching Miranda, pathetically slumped over a table on the other side of the cafeteria. They’d fought before; their friendship was built on fights. But this was different.
Miranda could never hold a grudge—and so Harper had never had to worry that, eventually, all would be forgiven. She’d learned that lesson in sixth grade, when the two of them had their first huge fight while rehearsing their sixth-grade performance of Macbeth (suitably abridged for attention-deficit-disordered twelve-year-olds). It had started small: an argument over who got to use the “real” (plastic) sword and who would be stuck wielding a wrapping-paper tube covered with aluminum foil.
Harper won, of course, bringing up the unassailable point that the whole show was named after her character. It seemed only logical that she, as the star, get the best of everything—lines, costumes, makeup, and, of course, swords. But Miranda had given in grudgingly, and only after hours of endless argument; by the time Harper finally took the stage, plastic sword in hand, she and Miranda hadn’t spoken for a week.
When the climactic scene arrived, Miranda had the first good line. “Turn, hellhound, turn!” she cried as Macduff, the one man destined to take down Macbeth.
Harper spun to face her challenger. They stared at each other across the stage, readying themselves for the sword fight, gritting their teeth and narrowing their eyes as if the fate of the kingdom truly lay on their shoulders. Their teacher had been very specific: Cross “swords” three times, and then Miranda would slice off Harper’s head. In a manner of speaking, of course.
Miranda swung, Harper parried, jumped back, sliced her sword toward Miranda, who blocked the blow with her wrapping-paper tube and danced around the stage, taunting Harper under her breath.
And Harper, who’d been planning to lie down and deliver the greatest death scene Grace Elementary had ever seen, couldn’t bring herself to lose the fight—and, by definition, her dignity—in front of all those people. She swung wildly, and Miranda’s flimsy sword bent in two—at which point Miranda screeched in frustration and launched herself at Harper. The two of them stumbled to the ground, writhing and rolling across the stage, pinching and poking, tickling and tugging hair … until their eyes met and, simultaneously, they burst into uncontrollable giggles.
Harper and Miranda had spent that weekend in an intense, forty-eight-hour catch-up session, sharing every detail of the painful hours they’d spent not speaking to each other.
“I was sooooo bored,” Miranda had complained.
“You were bored? I fell asleep standing up,” Harper countered.
“I had to play Jeopardy Home Edition all night with my parents.”
“I spelled out the names of everyone I know in alphabet soup.”
“I missed you,” Miranda had confessed, laughing.
Even then, Harper had known better than to confess that she’d missed Miranda more.They’d laughed about it for years, and sometimes even now when Harper was being particularly bitchy, Miranda would call her a “hellhound”; Harper always replied with her own favorite line: ‘Lay on, Macduff, and damn’d be he that first cries, “Hold, enough!’” It was the code of their friendship, and its meaning was simple. They would never turn into their characters; they would fight—but never to the death. They would always stop in time, just before landing the final blow.
But here she was, watching Miranda pick at her food, scared to go over to her, scared not to. If Harper stood over her pleading, “Lay on, Macduff”—meaning, Yell at me, hit me, hate me, and then, please, forgive me—would it fix anything?
Not likely, Harper decided—not if Miranda had been behind the gossip flyer. That was a death blow. Harper may not have seen it coming, but she knew when it was time to lay down her sword and leave the stage.
chapter
4
“Okay girls, time for a vote: 13 Going On 30 or The Princess Bride?”
As 13 Going On 30 won by general acclamation, Beth tried to will herself to care. A few days ago, she would have said this was all she wanted—to be accepted back into the fold, to regress to the good ol’ days of sleepover parties and road trips to the mall, popcorn and girl talk.
“Beth, can you grab us another bag of Hershey’s Kisses?” Claire asked, and Beth traipsed upstairs, fighting against the suspicion that they’d start talking about her as soon as she was gone. They’d invited her, which was a step in the right direction—but no one seemed to particularly want her around.
“Have no fear, the chocolate’s here,” she said gamely, returning downstairs and pouring the Hershey’s Kisses into a bowl.
“Great, let’s stick in the movie,” Claire suggested. Beth couldn’t wait. As soon as the lights went out, she could drop the fake smile and stop trying to force perky conversation. She could let her mind wander and try to figure out exactly how she was going to make it through to graduation.
“Before we watch, I want to ask Beth something,” one of the girls said eagerly. It was Leslie, the one Beth had come to think of as her replacement. Though had she ever been that timid and sallow? Claire rolled her eyes, but plopped d
own on the couch, defeated. “So … ,” the girl continued. “What was it like?”
“What was what like?”
“You know,” Abbie said. “It.”
“You and Kane,” Leslie pressed, “what was it like when you …”
“What was it like to have a boyfriend?” Beth asked incredulously. Yes, when she’d been part of this group, they’d all been single—but almost two years had passed. Since then, surely at least one of them had—
“Sex,” Claire said harshly. “They want to know what it was like to have sex.” She scowled at Beth, as if daring her to respond.
“But I—” Beth had been embarrassed by her virginal status for so long that she’d almost forgotten what it could be like, to be part of a group where there was no pressure to be someone you weren’t or go somewhere you weren’t ready to go. For the first time all night, she smiled a real smile. “I haven’t,” she explained, feeling a surge of relief that she could say the words without worrying that anyone would judge her. She’d forgotten what it was like to have girl friends—real friends. “I mean, Kane and I never—and neither did Adam and I, so I’m still a …”
“Virgin?” Claire snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“I am,” Beth insisted, trying to ignore her.
“But,Beth,” Abbie began hesitantly, “we’ve all heard … Kane said …”
“Kane’s lying,” Beth protested hotly. “Whatever he said, we never—”
“And I heard that you were the one who talked him into it,” Leslie said. “That he wanted to take it slow, but—not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she added hastily, catching sight of Beth’s expression.
“Leave her alone,” Claire decreed, and Beth felt a brief stab of gratitude. Very brief, as Claire continued, “Obviously, she doesn’t want to talk about it, not with us. No need to lie anymore, Beth. We’ll just stop asking.”
Beth kept the smile frozen on her face as Claire popped in the movie and the lights went out. It was only then, under the cover of laughter and music and inane dialogue, that Beth was able to move. She crept over their sprawled bodies, and up the stairs to the guest bathroom. Once inside, the door shut and locked behind her, she sat down on the toilet seat, put her head in her hands, and let the tears leak out.
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