There were no music stores in town, but there was a small bookstore that sometimes sold CDs and DVDs, and I had a suspicion they might have some copies of Stonebury’s own celebrity. As soon as I walked into the store, I saw a small stack of plastic by the register.
The kid who rang me up nodded when I handed him my debit card. He had thick black glasses and a collection of hemp bracelets on his right wrist. “We’re almost sold out. In just two days.”
Unbelievable. I wondered if Jack knew this, and if he did, what he thought. The place that never cared about him when he was here, suddenly full of his biggest fans.
I walked to the park, where I sat on a bench and drew the CD out of my bag. I opened it slowly, the way he used to do when he was excited about something he’d found at his favorite record store in Kenmore Square. Now there was a CD with his own name on it, written in a font that reminded me of an old typewriter. The photograph on the back of the CD was of him walking down a city street, guitar strapped to his back, the sky open wide all around. The photographer must’ve used a red filter—stark white clouds stood out among a blackened sky—to make the picture more dramatic.
I slipped the liner notes out of the case and opened them. The words to all the songs were typed in the same old-fashioned font from the cover. I didn’t read them. Instead, I flipped to the back: all songs and music written by jack moreland. thank you to all of my friends and family who believed in me, especially my father, who gave me his love of music, and reid leblanc and travis whitmore—kerouacs forever!
I smiled at the names of Travis and Reid, of the Kerouacs. Were they still friends? I’d done an internet search for them last night, but nothing came up. What were they doing now? My chest hurt with not knowing.
After a while, I walked home. Sarah had still not returned, so I sat in the breakfast nook and put in my earbuds. I listened to the songs while turning the liner notes over in my hands. Celebrity Weekly was right. All of the songs—every single one of them—were perfect in their own way. What the magazine didn’t know was that each of them told a story, the story of him and me. It told another story, too, one that only I would understand. The story of the person I used to be.
I knew why he had done this. I had forced him to keep a secret for me, and now he was forcing me to keep his.
This perfectly formed, beautiful album about a spoiled, selfish, hurtful girl was my secret punishment. And I couldn’t stop listening.
Later that afternoon, when I finally turned off the music, I made a list. Not of songs, but of names:
people who hate me (or should and don’t know it)
1. fiona locke
2. talia roberts
3. sarah brady
4. jack moreland
Ugh. It was like a nightmare version of This is Your Life. I ripped the paper out of my notebook, folded it up as small as it could go, and hid it away in the drawer of my nightstand.
Chapter Three
Five Years Earlier
In this town everyone knows your name
Your face
I thought I knew girls like you
But you
Were not what I expected
— Jack Moreland, “Not What I Expected”
On the morning of the first day of my last year of high school, my three best friends waited by the curb. Amber drove, naturally. She had the nicest car, a Mercedes gifted to her by her parents on her sixteenth birthday. I still had no car. I didn’t need one when I could walk anywhere in town, according to my parents.
I slid into the shotgun seat. We kept to a rigid shotgun-schedule, and it was my turn in the rotation. “Hey!” I smiled brightly. I’d read once that if you smiled when you didn’t feel like it, it would actually make you feel happier inside.
Sarah and Lori greeted me from the backseat. “So what do you think?” Sarah was beaming.
Beside me, Amber sighed softly, and I knew what she was thinking. Not again.
The only thing Sarah did more than break up and make up with her boyfriend, Mike, was dye her hair. All summer she’d dragged us to Rite Aid to choose from boxes with what looked to me like the exact same hair color on multiple different models. Now her normally unfortunate orangey-red hair was streaked with ashy blonde, and I wondered if she’d been playing with the Sun-In again.
“Lori did it for me,” Sarah said. Lori was our amateur cosmetologist who dreamed of running her parents salon and spa one day. Her talents, though, were suspect. Neither Amber nor I would ever let her touch our hair.
Lori snapped her gum and nodded, her huge hoops swinging. “Looks pretty cool, right?”
I thought she sort of resembled a calico cat we used to have, but I nodded, too. “Very cool.” The two of them settled back into their seats and started comparing mascaras, and Amber turned her attention to me. She looked me up and down, curving her mouth into a smile. “Nice sweater,” she said.
She spoke so sweetly that anyone listening in on our conversation would have no idea that she was actually criticizing me. But I knew her tone all too well. I looked down at the soft green V-neck. It had fit perfectly a month and a half ago when my mom took me school shopping, but now it pulled the slightest bit around my waist. She was right. It looked really bad. But she was already backing out of my driveway and heading toward school. There was no way to change anything now.
The dread in my stomach deepened as the school came into view. Amber parked in one of the spots up front designated for seniors, and as we walked toward the entrance, she threw her arm around me. As we strutted into the building, I saw the way the other girls looked at me. Like they wanted to be me. I couldn’t blame them. From their vantage point, I had everything. And even though most days I hated the sight of these hallways and green lockers, hated the way every muscle in my body clenched as soon as I stepped inside as if preparing for battle, some days I loved the way these girls looked at me. They adored me and feared me at the same time, which meant I had power over them. That meant there was nothing any of them could do to hurt me. I was untouchable; invincible. Even if it hadn’t always been like this, no one remembered me any other way.
Before homeroom, everyone congregated in the cafeteria, waiting for the bell. The most popular senior kids always stood by the Coke machine. I don’t know why or how the tradition started; it just was, always. We made a beeline there, where Kurt Deloria and Mike Upton and Adam Dixon already stood. Adam was the most popular of all the boys. He was the best athlete, plus his dad owned a chain of snack bars that populated beaches from here to Maine, so he was loaded. His house was where everyone went to party.
The guys wore their maroon and silver basketball jerseys, also a first day of school tradition. They hugged all of us in turn—Amber first, then me, then Sarah, then Lori. We formed a half circle and watched the crowd.
“Looks like Fiona Locke still hasn’t learned what a brush is,” Amber said loudly enough for Fiona to hear. That was the point. Every high school class had their dorks, and every clique of dorks had that dork who was a bigger dork than the rest of them. For us, that dork was Fiona Locke. There was nothing decidedly wrong about her, mostly the frizzy mess of her beigey-brown hair. She’d been a target of jokes and pranks for what seemed like forever, like last year when we invited her out for coffee and then watched from the sidewalk outside of the diner as she sat there, waiting for people who would never show up.
Mike edged me out of the way to get to Sarah. She squealed as he lifted her off her feet, then begged for him to put her down. She pressed her lips against his. On my other side, Amber elbowed me, rolling her eyes. “So they’re back together?” I shrugged. They’d broken up and gotten back together roughly fifty times since sophomore year. No one could ever be sure.
“It’s so…sad.” Her upper lip curled as she watched them. In her eyes, though, I swore I saw something other than pity. It was there for only the briefest of moments, and then it disappeared. “Keep your tongue in your own mouth!” she shouted. Sarah and Mike pull
ed apart, Sarah looking like she’d be okay if the floor opened beneath her and swallowed her up.
I felt sorry for Sarah, as Amber had a great talent for executing the public embarrassment of others, but at the same time, it wasn’t even seven-thirty in the morning. I’d barely had a chance to digest my granola bar. Sarah looked at me and I offered her a small smile, the best I could do. The two of us had been friends for years before Amber came into the picture. Balancing my loyalty to Sarah with a strategic allegiance to Amber was tricky.
Adam Dixon quickly turned everyone’s attention elsewhere. “Hey, look. Jack Moreland and his traveling guitar decided to show up.”
Jack pushed his long hair behind an ear as he and his guitar came toward us. Even though we’d gone to school together since kindergarten, I don’t think I’d ever said five words to him. He was one of those kids you never noticed whether they were in class or not.
“God, I can smell him from here.” Amber waved a hand in front of her face. “Ever heard of a shower?”
That was one of her favorite insults. Last year, after a pop quiz in history, we had to exchange papers to grade them. Somehow, she’d ended up with Fiona Locke’s. Amber had waved the paper out in front of her, complaining that it smelled like unwashed hair. Our teacher said nothing, simply frowned in our direction. (This was the general reaction of teachers at Stonebury High. It was like they wanted to stay on our good side.) Fiona stared straight ahead. Her paper didn’t smell, but I’d acted like it did.
Jack reached us, crumpled dollar bill in his hand. The boys immediately formed a line that blocked him from the Coke machine, even Mike, though he seemed half-hearted about it. Not like Adam. He lived for this stuff, and Jack had always been one of his favorite targets. “Can we help you?”
Adam was the forward on the basketball team and built like one—more than six feet tall with broad shoulders and thick, muscular legs. He had huge eyebrows that nearly met each other in the middle, yet no one teased him for it. Jack had a typical guy-in-a-band look, skinny arms and legs and a hoop through his right eyebrow. He wore a black T-shirt with a blue and red flannel shirt over it.
“Excuse me,” Jack said.
“There is no excuse for you,” Kurt said. Everyone laughed. I didn’t want to, because it wasn’t really that funny, and because Kurt annoyed the hell out of me. But I did.
“So is this where you beat me up and steal my Coke money?”
That was funny. But I didn’t laugh.
“Maybe, if you want me to,” said Adam. “Do you want me to?”
Jack smiled. “Actually, all I wanted was a Coke.”
Adam hesitated, as if he wasn’t used to a reasoned, calm approach. “Do you know what year it is?” He tugged at Jack’s flannel shirt. “You know Kurt Cobain’s dead, right?”
When Jack didn’t react, Adam grew more annoyed. “Where are your boyfriends?” he taunted, right in Jack’s face. “Which one do you like better, the fat one or the blond one?”
He was referring to the two boys that were always with Jack, part of his band. I wished Jack would walk away, but he smirked. “You are an enlightened gentleman, you know that?”
Adam’s jaw twitched, and the next thing I knew, he lurched, and Jack was falling backward, nearly colliding with Fiona Locke and her friends.
“Are you okay?” one of them asked.
Wordlessly, Jack straightened himself. He pushed his hair behind his ears and reset his guitar to the correct position on his shoulder.
Please, please, please, go.
“A pleasure, as always,” he said to Adam and the rest of us.
“Run along to your boyfriends,” Adam called to his back.
Just another ordinary morning at Stonebury High.
…
The first week of school passed by in a blur of new teachers, a slog of homework, and a general haze of anticipation and anxiety. Saturday brought no relief—I was going on my first ever job interview.
I’d applied at Nona’s Café, a hole-in-the-wall place I found online, only because it was not located in Stonebury. All of my friends had jobs on Main Street, but I needed an escape. My parents seemed proud of me when I announced my intent to get a job in Riverdale, the blue-collar town to our west, where none of my friends ever ventured after the big mall there closed our freshman year. They weren’t proud enough to get me a car, though. I had to take the bus.
The city bus was not like the school bus. The outside was dinged and scratched and one side had an advertisement for a drugabuse hotline, and the inside smelled, for some reason, like cats.
Maybe I didn’t want a job in Riverdale that badly.
I was being a brat and a wimp. I couldn’t stand my friends for thinking they were better than everyone else, yet I was doing the same thing. I forced myself to make eye contact with the bus driver and smile. “Hello,” I said.
He wore tight blue pants that rode up to reveal the pasty white skin of his ankles. The look he gave me was half sneer, half leer, and I hurried past him to take a seat at the back of the bus.
I stared through the dirty window as we rolled out of Stonebury. As soon as we crossed the border into Riverdale, the landscape began to change. The streets were littered with cigarette butts and crushed coffee cups. There were no flowers sprucing up the medians. Even the sky seemed less blue. When the bus creaked to a stop in front of the seventies-style riverdale plaza sign, I hesitated before I stepped slowly off the bus. The strip mall was old and outdated, dirty and worn down, worse than I remembered. I headed toward the storefronts, picking up speed as I passed a couple of scruffy old men loitering outside of a tobacco shop. A few doors down was Nona’s Café. In the windows were Magic Markered signs that said hot lattes and bakery sandwiches 99¢!
I was surprised by how clean the café was inside. The floors and walls were the same dark cherry wood. There was a huge pastry case and, according to all the signs also written in black Magic Marker, everything was homemade. try our best-selling hazelnut! The place smelled like cinnamon and coffee.
Nerves fluttered in my chest as I approached the cashier. She was my age with jet black hair cut bluntly around her face. In her ears, small sparkly studs ran from her lobe all the way up. She had a piercing through her lip, and her nametag was sideways and faded, as if she couldn’t care less whether customers knew her name. Madeline.
She was writing something and did not look up. She held a marker over white printer paper with a half-written message. pumpkin spice coffee comi
She glanced up, sighing loudly. She had striking violet eyes framed with thick bangs. I assumed her eyes would be beautiful if they weren’t glaring at me. But they were.
She was the kind of girl who could definitely kick my ass. And enjoy it. Girls like this scared me, and I was not brave without my friends.
I had no choice but to try to disarm her with a smile. “Hello! I’m here for an interview with Darcy.”
Her mouth stayed put in a straight line. When she spoke, her voice was monotone. “Good for you.” She went back to her sign.
I stood there, shocked into silence. With customer service like this, no wonder the café was nearly empty. I was turning to leave when a woman, completely bald and with tattoos blanketing one entire arm, came rushing toward us. “Madeline! Honestly.” She sighed as the younger girl just shrugged. Then she turned to me, extending her arm. When she did, her bicep muscle flexed, and the dragon inked into her skin seemed to smile. “Hi. I’m Darcy.”
Darcy was the owner of Nona’s Café. Madeline was her niece, she explained, and had been helping her out for a while. But she’d started college courses and needed to concentrate on school, so they were looking for another part-timer. Madeline would be there for the first two weeks to help train, Darcy explained, almost apologetically. She gave me a tour of the café. There was the bakery case and the coffee bar, the seating area with wrought-iron café tables and chairs, and a corner tucked away near the bathroom with a shelf crammed full with used paperbac
ks, magazines, comics, journals, and postcards.
We took a seat in the café and she reviewed my resume. “Honor roll every year… Wow, you’re on a lot of committees, aren’t you? You like photography?”
I’d listed it under my interests because that was the way WikiHow advised beefing up a resume. “I took a class last summer at SCC for fun. I’m not that good.”
“It takes practice, like anything else.” Then she smiled. “I really think you’d be a great fit. You seem responsible. I can tell by looking at you. It’s in the eyes. Plus, you’ve ironed your sweater.”
I was happy she noticed. Wrinkled clothing was possibly my biggest pet peeve. It was right up there with my newest one, crooked nametags.
When she offered me the job, I happily accepted.
Darcy brought me over to the counter. Madeline had her back to us as she replaced a roll of paper towels. “Natalie will be starting next Saturday.”
Madeline swiveled around. “Her? I gave you Joey’s application.”
“Right, like I’m going to hire Joey. He thinks a latte is a car part.”
I almost laughed, but Madeline shot me a death stare, and I looked down at my shoes instead. Still, I couldn’t help smiling. A job! And one far away from my friends. It almost gave me hope that senior year wouldn’t be a complete disaster.
…
A week later, I was nervous as I got off the bus and walked into the café. You’ll be fine, I told myself. Everyone’s nervous on the first day. You probably won’t do anything more than observe.
Even so, I had to deal with the wrath of Madeline.
I would shadow her all day, Darcy told me, while my lovely trainer stood behind her, arms crossed, eyeing me as if I’d killed her dog. Darcy clasped my shoulder and the dragon winked at me. “Don’t worry. She’s not as scary as she wants you to think she is.”
Madeline turned her look of death on her. “What. Ever. Darce.” She sounded, strangely enough, just like Amber.
The Mean Girl Apologies Page 3
