“Right?” I said. “I bet Katniss Everdeen wouldn’t touch this shit. This is how you start the Hunger Games.”
We made a straight line to the trash, dumped our pizza, and then veered to the vending machines. Funyuns it was!
By the time we sat in our usual corner of the cafeteria, Holden had a contemplative look on his face.
“So I did some research,” said Holden.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Twelfth Night,” he continued. “Imogen is gunning for the main character, Viola, right? And knowing Imogen—being the drama nut and overachiever that she is—she’s probably going to get the part. Right?”
“Probably.”
“You, my friend, need to get the part of Duke Orsino.”
“Who the hell is Duke Orsino?”
“He’s the leading male role, and the guy Viola has a crush on the entire play.”
Already, I felt the social anxiety and early-onset stage fright crushing my insides. “Oh man. I dunno. I don’t think I can handle a role where I’m romancing it up with Imogen. I’ll probably forget all my lines and stress-puke.”
“No, see, that’s the thing!” said Holden. “Duke Orsino isn’t romancing it up with Viola. He’s romancing it up with Olivia!”
“Who the hell is Olivia?”
“I dunno, some chick. It’s, like, a love triangle. Viola is pretending to be a dude for some reason, and Olivia has a thing for Dude Viola.”
“Okay, I’m confused.”
“Have you ever seen She’s the Man with Amanda Bynes?”
“No,” I said. Which was a lie. I had watched She’s the Man at least thirteen times with Willow, before she disowned me as a brother.
“Oh…well, me either,” Holden lied.
I knew, for a fact, that Holden had a not-so-secret crush on Amanda Bynes. He inherited her entire filmography and every season of All That from his older brother, Nate—now graduated from college, working as a software engineer—who also had a crush on Amanda Bynes. It was a Durden family tradition.
“But allegedly,” said Holden, breaking the awkward silence, “Twelfth Night and She’s the Man are basically the same thing.”
I nodded ambiguously, because I think I understood what he was saying now, but I was still trying to pretend I hadn’t seen She’s the Man at least thirteen times. Essentially, I was aiming for Channing Tatum’s role as “muscular heartthrob and overall sexual male object.” Great.
Flash.
Suddenly, Holden was Imogen—sitting directly across from me, her enigmatic eyebrows knit together with deep concern. We were in a different corner of the cafeteria, and—most shocking of all—I had a half-eaten pizza in front of me. Right next to an open bag of pork rinds.
Shit. There was pizza in my mouth.
Peter, Bjorn, and John! Was there anything Wynonna was incapable of eating?
I swallowed the wad of chewed pizza under the greatest duress.
“It’s okay,” said Imogen. She leaned forward, extending a long, slender hand. Grabbed my right hand—Wynonna’s hand with the electric-blue nails—and covered it with her other hand. Squeezed it. I immediately felt my body temperature skyrocket. “You can tell me. Is it about Holden?”
I felt something move down my cheek.
I reached up with my free hand—the hand that wasn’t currently sweating like a storm trooper at a shooting range in Imogen’s grasp—and touched my face. I felt the lines of moisture.
I was crying.
Wynonna was crying.
There was a moment when the universe became perfectly synchronized. I obviously knew where Imogen sat at lunch, and Wynonna apparently knew where Holden sat. We didn’t even need to turn our heads. My gaze drifted to my two o’clock, and there was Ezra “Wynezra” Slevin, looking right back at me. Our eyes were interlocked, silently screaming, bloating out of our faces.
“Bathroom,” I blurted out. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Oh,” said Imogen. “Okay.”
She pulled her purse onto her shoulder and stood up.
What the…
“No!” I said. I shook my head desperately for emphasis. “No, no, no, no, no.”
“No?” Imogen looked confused.
I glanced at the half-eaten pizza in front of me.
“It’s the pizza,” I said. “Goes through me like a brick. Believe me, anyone and anything in the vicinity when this bomb drops—”
“Whoa,” said Imogen, in a way that meant “Stop, please!” “Okay. Message received.”
I stood up. And then I nearly tripped and biffed it. It was then that I noticed the shoes I was wearing—punk-style black heels with metal studs.
If there was a God, he clearly hated me. If not, I had the evolutionary luck of the dinosaurs.
“Are you okay?” said Imogen. She didn’t even wait for an answer. She jumped up, moved around the table, and grabbed me for stability—one hand on my arm, the other on my hip. Because hips were a thing I had now.
This was the part where I would have had a raging boner. However, since my equipment had been rearranged, I felt something very different happening downstairs, and it was kind of freaking me out.
“I’m okay,” I said—or tried to say, but my voice cracked. I didn’t even know girls’ voices could crack. “I think my heel broke.”
“Really?” said Imogen. She crouched down and examined my shoe—placing a hand on my thigh for balance. “It doesn’t look like it—”
“Nope, definitely broke!” I exclaimed. I fumbled desperately to undo the straps on my shoes, then pulled them off. Beneath them, I was wearing fishnets. I slowly scanned my wardrobe upward—a ratty plaid skirt and a Pat Benatar T-shirt. Okay, the shirt was admittedly kind of cool.
Once the deathtraps were off my feet, I stood up—heels in hand—and rushed in slippery stocking feet to the cafeteria exit.
“Ezra!” Holden’s voice sliced through the bog of chatter. “What the hell, man?”
Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder. Holden, however, was talking to the other Ezra, who also happened to be making a hasty exit.
Wynezra had mirrored my timing. We reached the hallway at the same moment, at which point I almost expected her to bolt in the opposite direction.
Instead, she grabbed my elbow and pulled me into the girls’ bathroom.
“Ow, ow, ow!” I said. “Hey, I’m not allowed in here! Or…well, one of us isn’t allowed in here.”
Wynezra shoved me into the nearest stall and locked the door.
“I’ve had it up to here with you,” she said. She raised her hand half a foot above her head, indicating where “here” was.
“You think I want this?” I shrieked. I raised her studded heels like a murder weapon. “I almost died in these things! Are you trying to kill me?”
“If it gets me my life back, then sure!”
Wynezra’s arms became rigid at her sides. Taut ropes of fury. Looking at her—at the hatred seething out of her teeth and nostrils—I realized this wasn’t even about the body-swapping.
It was about the notebook.
It was about her secret.
I bit my lip. “Look…I’m sorry about snooping—”
Wynezra gave a sharp bark of laughter. It sounded so totally like her, it was weird seeing and hearing it come out of my mouth. “Please. Why don’t you just get it over with?”
“What? Get what over with?”
“We both know where this is going. You’re either going to blackmail me or you’re going to go straight for the jugular and ruin my life. Well, I’ll help you make your decision.” She leaned forward, hands braced against the stall walls, until her face—my face—was only inches away. “I don’t bend to blackmail.”
She straightened herself, turned, and exited the stall.
“Wait,” I said.
Wynezra whipped around. “No! No waiting, Ezra! If you’re gonna do something with this big fucking secret, then do it already. I’m not gonna sit on my hands
, hoping it goes away. I’m not gonna get strung along by your twisted little scheme. Go ahead. Tell Holden. Go have a big fucking laugh over it. It’s not like I was planning on going to prom with that asshole anyway. I’m banned, remember? I don’t give a shit.”
“I can help you,” I said.
The words just sort of came out of their own accord. They had a collective mind, separate from my own.
“What the…” Wynezra reared back. “Did you listen to a word I said? I’m not getting strung along by whatever it is—”
“I’m not stringing you along,” I said. “As far as I see it, I don’t have any leverage over you. I don’t want any leverage over you. What I want is your help. I think we can help each other.”
Oh my god, why was I still talking?
My mouth had gone rogue. Mutiny was afoot.
Wynezra was silent for a long moment. The hard edges of her face did not soften. But the guard in her eyes did lower ever so slightly.
“What do you mean?”
“I like Imogen,” I said. I took a deep breath to quell the swift-approaching anxiety attack, closing in like the shark from Jaws with ominous theme music and everything. “I want to go to prom with Imogen. You and I both know I can’t pull that off on my own. I can barely talk to her—let alone ask her out. And then there’s the issue of her actually saying yes. But you know her. You know how to talk to her.”
“This sounds like blackmail,” said Wynezra. “What’s in it for me?”
“I know how to talk to Holden.”
The cogs and the gears behind Wynezra’s gaze were clicking into place. Rotating slowly to life.
“And you know how to talk to Imogen,” I continued, leaving a super-obvious trail of bread crumbs to my point. “And prom is just around the corner. So…”
Wynonna stared at me.
“Whaddaya say, Wynonna Jones? Are you down to clown?”
Wynezra’s mouth slithered into a great big devious smile. “I’ve been known to dabble in a little tomfoolery.”
Wynonna would help me get a date to prom with Imogen, and I would do the same for her and Holden. We would use this body-swapping curse to our advantage. When life gives you lemons, right?
Was it an act of blatant dishonesty toward our best friends? Yeah, sort of.
Could we live with that dishonesty on our consciences? Definitely.
There were so many flaws in the plan, however, it hardly functioned as a plan at all. For starters, if by some miracle we pulled this off, there was no guarantee that I would be me and Wynonna would be Wynonna when prom night arrived. For all we knew, we could get stuck going to prom with our best friends! And that was if we pulled this off. Which was unlikely. Especially with the first major disclaimer that came out of Wynezra’s mouth.
“I’ll help you all I can,” she said. “But I should warn you, Imogen already has a crush on someone.”
I had suspected as much. A girl like Imogen didn’t just not have a crush on anyone.
I took in a deep breath. Exhaled. Nodded.
“Okay,” I said, rather acceptingly. “Who is it?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“What? You have to tell me!”
“Psh! No, I don’t. I have to get you a date with Imogen to prom. And I will. At least, I’ll do everything in my power to do that. And I’ll tell you anything else you need to know. But I literally cannot tell you that. Imogen swore me to secrecy. She made me swear on my mom’s—”
Her words came to a dangerous halt.
“Anyway,” she said, “I can’t tell you.”
“Okay, well…” I said, “does she have a chance with him?”
“What makes you think it’s a him?”
My jaw dropped. “Is it a girl?”
Wynezra pursed her lips. She was clearly having a moral dilemma, deliberating whether or not to impart even the slightest hint of information.
“The person Imogen has a crush on…is a guy,” said Wynezra. “And no, nothing’s ever going to happen between them. So you can stop worrying about it.”
I let out a deep breath. Okay. Maybe this thing was doable after all.
“And, Ezra?” she said.
I glanced up from the infinitesimal hole in space I was drilling into with my mind.
“Don’t try to pry any details from Imogen about who it is,” she said. “Believe me, you’ll be opening a can of worms you don’t want to open.”
I nodded dismissively. “Yeah, sure. So we’re doing this Shakespeare thing, right?”
Wynezra sighed. “If I have to.”
At that moment, the bathroom door opened. In walked a girl whom I didn’t recognize. I gave a startled jump—then remembered that I was a girl. The girl who walked in, meanwhile, jumped at the sight of Ezra Slevin—especially the disgruntled I-hate-Shakespeare look on his face.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m leaving,” said Wynezra, and she walked out.
• •
My first item of business as Wynonna Jones was to kiss some serious Allegra Durden ass.
“You’re what?” said Principal Durden. Her elbows were propped up on her desk, fingers interlocked, eyes peering over the knot of fingers.
“Sorry,” I repeated. “I’m sorry.”
Principal Durden continued to stare at me like this was some Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario. Which it kind of was.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I want to do the Shakespeare thing,” I said. “I don’t want to be banned from prom.”
If Principal Durden’s eyes narrowed any further, they’d be sealed shut.
“Please?” I said.
“So…what?” said Principal Durden. She unraveled her knot of fingers and leaned back in her swivel chair. “Did some hunky boy come along and change your mind?”
No, I thought, but I might be taking your son to prom, so CAN IT, PRINCIPAL DURDEN!
I smiled politely. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”
Principal Durden gave a perplexed sigh. Then she reached into her desk and pulled out the Twelfth Night pamphlet. Handed it to me.
“You’ll be there?” said Principal Durden. “On time? For the whole thing? Your teacher will tell me if you’re not. Don’t think that because this class is off campus, the rules are more lax. If anything, they’re stricter.”
“You can trust me, Principal Durden,” I said. I offered a winning smile as evidence. “I’m a new person today.”
She didn’t seem to believe that for a second—but she gave a stiff nod regardless. I stood up and started to walk out.
“Wynonna?” she said.
I turned around. “Yeah?”
She was looking directly at my blue toenails, visible through my fishnet leggings.
“Part of our shoe policy is…you have to wear them.”
I sighed.
• •
The key to walking in heels was to walk slowly. Also, to pray silently to Every Deity Known to Mankind. (Or Womankind, as the case may have been.) I even made room in my prayers for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. As an “atheist schmuck,” I was taking a leap of faith in the form of the shotgun effect.
Turned out, heels were the least of my problems.
Wynonna and I exchanged locker combinations. There, taped to her locker door, I discovered her printed-out schedule. Wynonna put it there the very first day of school, and it hadn’t budged since, thank [insert Every Deity Known to Man and Womankind + Flying Spaghetti Monster].
That’s where my real problems began. Because reading Wynonna’s schedule was like cracking the Zodiac ciphers. Basically, it was the cell phone fiasco all over again.
Ditiagl Atrs & Pohotgarhpy
7:55–8:45 (Preiod 1)
Cialtin Kreiragn—Mdeia Lab
Aemrcian Sgin Lnagague
8:50–9:40 (Peirod 2)
Amnada Tomeoy—306
Boilogy
9:45–10:35 (Peroid 3)
Daune Anzazolne—207
Egnilsh
10:40–11:30 (Poired 4)
Cadncae Homles—215
Lucnh
11:35–12:20 (Preiod Lunch)
Gbolal Sduteis
12:25–1:15 (Peirod 5)
Annie Gruenwald—203
Preclauclus
1:20–2:10 (Pireod 6)
Jhon Mihceal—307
Seepch
2:15–3:05 (Peoird 7)
Aimn Lniedr—218
What.
The fuck.
Again, I was being real generous here, because some of these letters were backward, some were upside down, some were not even real letters. Either that, or we were borrowing from the Russian alphabet, with similar letters sprouting bizarre new appendages.
This was more than just drugs. Instead of speaking in tongues, she saw in tongues. The very words in front of her eyes were translated into the Adamic language or Alienese or whatever.
Fortunately, it was harder for Wynonna’s gift of tongues to screw up room numbers. Although this was probably less to do with the numbers themselves, and more to do with the fact that they weren’t strung together in long, hard-to-deal-with clumps.
First-period Media Lab was easy enough to figure out—Digital Arts & Photography. Fortunately, I didn’t really have to do anything. It was mostly just sitting in front of a computer, listening to Ms. Kerrigan talk about Photoshop and the fine line between artful enhancement and shameless desecration. From there, it was smooth sailing from class to class. All lectures, all day long. Given the circumstances, I was totally okay with this.
When the end-of-school bell rang, I wandered out of seventh-period Speech in a daze. Shuffled to Wynonna’s locker and packed Wynonna’s backpack. Before I could pull it on—or even shut the locker door—I was assaulted from behind by a gangly bundle of limbs.
“You’re doing Shakespeare!” Imogen squealed, approximately two inches from my left ear.
She hugged me from behind, pinning my limbs to my side. The physical touch alone would have been enough to paralyze me. But then there were her breasts, pressed precariously against the pressure points of my spine in the ancient Chinese art of dim mak—the touch of death.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.
She released me from her dim mak death hold—only to skip beside me and grab my hand.
Where I End and You Begin Page 8
