A Novel Idea

by Aimee Friedman

  My friends and I are always as hot to guess who’ll be the year’s surprise social superstar as my dad is to bet his retirement fund on whatever new-ish company he thinks will be the Next Big Thing on Wall Street.

  Conversely, my friends and I also like to speculate about who’ll fall on their face, becoming the pariah of the year. It’s never a nice thing to see happen, but such is life.

  This year, though, I’m too depressed to notice any of the usual first day of school maneuvering, even though everyone around me seems electrified with the possibilities of the year ahead.

  The reason why is simple. Sean’s not here.

  Sean Norcross and I have been together since roughly halfway through eighth grade (okay, there’s no “roughly” about it—it’s been ever since he kissed me at exactly 7:48 p.m. on January 10, while standing in the snow in the parking lot after the school talent show.) So starting junior year with him all the way across the country sucks.

  I mean, who in their right mind moves from Vista Verde, Colorado, all the way to New Haven, Connecticut, when they have three kids in high school? Well, that’s just what Professor and Mrs. Norcross did. Sean’s dad accepted a job teaching at Yale, since apparently the Ivy League’s more fulfilling professionally than the University of Colorado. The Allied van left a month ago, headed east on I-70 with all the Norcrosses’ furniture and at least a dozen boxes full of Professor Norcross’s books on molecular biology. However, Sean, his younger brother, Joe, and his older sister, Darcy, were allowed to stay behind with their next-door neighbors for a couple weeks to finish up their summer jobs and tell everyone good-bye before they started at their uppity new East Coast private high school.

  It sucked, seeing his house standing empty like that, knowing Sean was down to his last few days and would be following that bright orange moving van out of town.

  Three days before he had to leave, Sean and I looked up New Haven on MapQuest and printed off the driving directions, just for kicks and giggles. I didn’t tell Sean, but I wanted to do it just so I could mentally find my way there when I’m trying to go to sleep at night. It’s exactly 1,867 miles from Vista Verde to New Haven, which MapQuest says should take only twenty-eight hours and ten minutes to drive. Even if that time includes bathroom breaks and stops for gas, it’s a long haul.

  Although counting miles is probably as good as counting sheep when I need to get myself to sleep, seeing that distance all plotted out on paper made me feel like I wasn’t about to lose an appendage. Like I could draw a line from Point A to Point B and still connect with Sean.

  Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to think that Sean would want to try to make it work across that long distance too.

  But no. Even if I could make that drive to New Haven, there wouldn’t be a point. Because when Sean saw that map, it was like a switch flipped in his brain that said, “Babycakes, this relationship is so over.” Our funky, cool connection, the one that enabled us to find each other instantly on a crowded football field or during a school assembly, no matter what else was happening around us, snapped just like that.

  Only I didn’t know it.

  So this morning, instead of doing my usual people watching while I stand in junior hall, making mental notes about who’s likely to make the cheerleading squad out of nowhere and who’s going to wish they were invisible by the end of the month, I’m facing my new locker, messing with a combination lock that doesn’t want to work, and I’m about two deep breaths away from tears. Everyone’s staring at me as they walk past, and even though I’m used to people staring at me because of how I look, today I just don’t want to deal.

  I glance at the card with my new locker combo on it again, then try to dial the numbers once more, wishing I could disappear inside my locker, just for a few hours, and stare at nothing but the cold, dark metal.

  Then I realize that even doing that won’t give me peace. If I get the stupid lock open, it’s not like I can put Sean’s picture in the back anymore without looking totally pathetic. At least, not once everyone learns that he dumped me cold while having breakfast at Pour la France in the main terminal of DIA, less than an hour before he hopped on the plane.

  Who ends a relationship of two and a half years in an airport over scrambled eggs and French toast?

  I feel Amy Bellhorn approaching before she speaks, and I will myself not to exude the aura of a red-eyed, horribly depressed dumpee.

  “Chloe!”

  “Hey!” I turn toward her, trying to sound equally excited. Since she’s my best friend, I know how much she loves the first day of school—even more than I usually do. I give her a big happy-first-day-of-junior-year smile before focusing on my locker again. “What do you have first period?” I ask, sounding chipper enough to deserve an Oscar, given how I feel. “I’m in honors English.”

  “Mr. Whiddicomb or Mrs. Gervase?”

  “Whiddicomb. You too?”

  “Yep! This rocks…. We can catch up. So how’d things go with Sean before he left? Did Darcy and Joe give you any time alone together at the airport? God, you must be missing him like crazy already. I’d have called when I got my class schedule, but I knew you two wanted to spend as much time together as possible and then I was clothes shopping to get ready—”

  “Thanks.” I haven’t told anyone about the breakup yet, not even Amy. I know I’ll probably tear up the minute I say Sean’s name, and I definitely will once anyone asks the how did it happen? question. No way do I want to go on a sniffly, ugly-ass crying jag on the first day of school.

  I need to get myself to the point where I can talk about it, at least to Amy, without getting worked up before the first word even leaves my mouth, or else I’m going to be the topic of gossip today, and I hate being the focus of people’s attention. It gives me the creepy crawlies, even when it’s good attention that has nothing to do with my appearance, like when I get a high grade and the teacher puts it on the board, or when I make a killer return during a tennis match.

  Amy puts a hand on my arm. “Hey, Chloe, you doing okay?”

  Even though I mentally scream out no, I give Amy the best smile I can manage. “Okay enough. I think I just need to make it through this first week without him.” Really without him.

  “I’m here if you need to vent, you know.”

  I feel my jaw locking, so I just nod.

  She apparently gets that it’s time to change the subject as I give the lock a final, unnecessarily rough yank, because she tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, then pulls her schedule out of a notebook and holds it in front of her. “So let’s compare. Who else did you end up with?”

  I put a few items from my backpack into the empty steel locker, then pull out the schedule that came in the mail last week and hand it to her. “Pretty much everything I wanted. I ended up with Schneider for chemistry, though. Sixth period.”

  “Ouch. I managed to get Cooper. Fifth period. Apparently she’s only teaching the one chem class this year too.”

  Lucky her. “That’s when I have independent study. It was the only hour where Mrs. Berkowski could sponsor me, so I couldn’t change it.” I make a face. “Figures that’s when Cooper would have chemistry. The one hour I can’t be there.”

  It’s not that one teacher’s cooler than the other. Mr. Schneider just has a way, way tougher grading curve than Ms. Cooper and everyone knows it. Well, except college admissions officers, which is really the problem.

  As we walk toward the gym, where they’re having an assembly to update us on all the usual first day of school stuff, Amy stops walking and looks at me. “You know, you really look awesome, Chloe. Cleopatra exotic, you know? Especially since you were out in the sun and got a little more color.”

  I didn’t take any extra time with my hair or clothes today, even though normally I would have because everyone does on the first day back (whether they’ll admit it or not), so I just shrug and keep walking. Amy falls in beside me. In an insistent voice, she adds, “No, really. I think you got even b
etter looking over the summer. Like, scary beautiful.”

  “Oh, please. It’s not like you didn’t see me all summer. And I know what you’re trying to do, so shut up already.” I hear the “scary beautiful” thing all the time from Sean. Correction: used to hear it all the time from Sean. It was his phrase. I know she’s using those exact words to try to make me feel better, but I really don’t want to hear it now.

  Besides, being pretty got me ostracized back in sixth grade for a while, even though Amy’s probably forgotten all about it.

  “Remember back when we were in middle school?”

  I shoot her a look like, What, you reading my mind? but she continues: “On the first day of seventh grade? You hid out in the bathroom before homeroom because you got that awful haircut the day before and you didn’t want anyone to see.”

  “Oh, yeah. Conveniently forgot about that.” I told everyone how much I hated that haircut, then went to a different beauty shop the next night and had them recut it so I looked normal again.

  What I didn’t tell anyone—especially Amy—was that I got the bad haircut on purpose, over serious objections from my dad and the horrified stylist.

  “Thanks so much for the memory, though,” I say as we pass two panicked-looking freshmen. “I’m surprised you didn’t take pictures.”

  “Oh, never,” she says, all fake funny, because that’s precisely what she did, threatening to publish them in our junior high school yearbook. It was her one and only foray into an organized activity that wasn’t sports-related, and she got tossed off halfway through the year for skipping meetings so much. Needless to say, none of her work made it into the seventh grade section.

  I wonder sometimes if it would have made things any better for me if she had gotten those pictures printed, just so people could see that I’m not always perfect, that I’m not always pretty, and that I cry over stuff just like anyone else.

  Probably not, though. Once people get an impression of you, it’s hard to shake. I learned the hard way that getting a bad haircut to make yourself ugly—at least temporarily—isn’t enough to do it. The whole episode just ended up making me feel worse.

  As we enter the gym and scan the bleachers for open seats in the juniors’ section, she says, “Well, I was just thinking things have changed since then, you know? And how it’s a good thing you have a boyfriend, even if he is a zillion miles away. Otherwise, every girl in school would hate you based on looks alone.”

  Clearly, she doesn’t know how much I don’t want to remember middle school, or she would never say this to me. I mean, I know I’m not ugly, or even average. I have good hair, I’m tall, I don’t gain weight easily, and I’ve never had a single zit. Not a one. It’s not that I’m egotistical about it either. It’s just a fact of life. A blessing of genetics. And, believe me, pretty girls know they’re pretty, even the ones who are smart enough to be modest about it and pretend they don’t know what they look like.

  And I know why they do it. Let me tell you: Pretty sometimes sucks.

  WANTED

  Single Teen Reader in search of a FUN romantic comedy read!

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  Available from Simon Pulse Published by Simon & Schuster

  Seven Sins.

  Seven Books.

  Seven Teens …

  … all determined to get what they want, when they want it. No matter the cost or the drama.

  LUST ENVY PRIDE WRATH SLOTH GLUTTONY GREED

  SEVEN DEADLY SINS BY ROBIN WASSERMAN

  Commit the third sin in this juicy series!

  From Simon Pulse Published by Simon & Schuster

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Aimee Friedman is the New York Times bestselling author of South Beach, as well as its sequel, French Kiss. She graduated from Vassar College in 2001 and has since belonged to not one but two fabulous book groups. Aimee was born and raised in New York City, where she still lives and works as an editor.