Claire shook out her arms, inspected them. No marks. Hopefully they’d stay that way. She bumped shoulders with Deirdre and asked, “Was that three or four totallys? I lost count.”
Deirdre swatted at her. “Shush! You’ll hurt her feelings.”
Claire doubted that. Heather had a happy-shield that was practically bullet-proof. Not that it was her intention to hurt the girl. She loved Heather. She loved all of the other members of The Five. She thought of them as her children, her prodigies.
She had formed the group way back in freshman year. It was her way of getting even with that bully Theresa Tunney and her two smarty-pants cronies. She couldn’t even remember their names anymore, although she’d never forget their taunts: Clarabelle, dumb bell, why don’t you go to hell? Pretty to look at, pretty to smell, but talk about smarts, she’s dumb as hell. They thought they were so smart. Well, she’d shown them, hadn’t she?
She proved that beauty could be just as powerful of a weapon as brains. The only criterion to be in The Five was that you had to be one of the most beautiful girls in the school—judged, of course, by Claire, who was unquestionably the prettiest of them all. The actual roster varied year-to-year, but it was safe to say that it would never include the likes of Theresa and her associates. They were not pretty at all. Not by any standard. And they never would be.
The Five quickly gained celebrity status. Girls pleaded with Claire for a chance to become a member. They begged her to expand the club to six or seven, or even ten. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d tell them. “You can’t have six or seven or ten members in a group called The Five.” Two years ago, someone else had tried to form a group called Everyone But The Five, but it quickly fizzled out. Nobody wanted to be a member of a club that excluded only those people who really mattered.
This year, The Five included Dee, who was making an encore appearance from last year, plus Simone and April, who were new as of last September; only Claire and Heather had been members since the very beginning. In fact, Heather had pretty consistently held the second position, at least until this year. But if her slipping in the ranks bothered her, she didn’t show it.
Claire had always held the top spot. It was hard work, not just being a member of The Five but being its top member, year in, year out. Competition was stiff and growing stiffer. Take Deirdre, for example. Claire had noticed how she seemed to be getting prettier, almost by the day. But it didn’t bother Claire. Dee had a long way to go to be on her level. Besides, graduation was only two months away. After that, The Five wouldn’t matter.
The thought saddened her a bit, made her feel a little nostalgic, but she was ready to move on.
There were girls who thought the whole idea of The Five was shallow. Maybe it was. But Claire didn’t care. Beauty was skin deep, right? How much shallower could you get? Besides, she knew that when it came to the important things in life, to getting what you wanted and deserved, sex appeal was much more potent than smarts. This had been true back in ninth grade, and it was even more true here in the twelfth. And if anyone ever needed any proof of how true this was, they needn’t look any further than Theresa and her cronies. Where were they now? Dwindled into obscurity, that’s where. No one remembered them anymore. In fact, for all Claire knew or cared, they might’ve left Edgemont ages ago.
Heather skipped over to where Simone and April had pulled on ahead. “Trevor James,” she sang. “James Trevor. I can’t decide which I like better—Hey, that rhymes! Trevor, better. It sounds so hot either way. Don’t you guys think so?”
Claire groaned.
Simone and April hadn’t had as much experience with Heather yet, which also meant they hadn’t had as much exposure to her, either. They were clearly not as sensitive to her absurdities as Claire was.
The three girls up ahead wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders and proceeded to plow down the sidewalk. They made Claire think of a drunken octopus trying to dance the can-can.
“What’s the deal with her?” Claire asked Deirdre. “I haven’t seen Heather like this since…you know. Before.”
Deirdre shrugged. “Sounds like she’s got a new crush. I think it’s sweet.”
Claire didn’t say what she was thinking, which was how much it sucked. She’d gotten used to the new Heather. She didn’t want the old one back.
“Yeah, but why now all of a sudden? Practically half the boys in school have been stalking her since the funeral, and yet she’d ignored every single one of them like they were…” She paused, suddenly struck by the horrible irony of what she was thinking and yet unable to stop herself from giving it voice: “Like they were lepers or something.” A wild bubble of laughter threatened to erupt from her lips. But that, she managed to suppress.
Deirdre’s forward motion came to an abrupt stop. She turned and gave Claire a shocked look. Her eyebrows rose until they disappeared beneath her trademark Katy Perry black-as-midnight bangs.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit insensitive, Claire?” she gasped. “I mean, you know how crushed Heather was when Dennis started falling apa…” Her lower lip quivered like Jello on a hot summer day.
“Okay, maybe lepers was a poor choice of words,” Claire quickly said. “I mean, I feel bad for her—and the Giffords, of course. What happened to Dennis was… It was…” She cringed at the memory of his last day on earth, sitting on the bench at Pongo’s, his muscles practically melting away before their very eyes. She shivered for real this time. “It was horrible,” she grudgingly admitted. “But you’re right, Dee, as usual. I should be glad for Heather. I am glad for her. It’s time she moved on with her life. It’s just that I’m…I don’t know.” And she really didn’t. She wanted Heather to be happy, and yet at the same time it was disappointing to see the girl revert back to the way she used to be. But Claire knew if she was to say any of that, it would just come out sounding petty and selfish.
“You’re jealous,” said Dee, matter-of-factly.
“No, I’m not jealous!” Although, maybe she was. Even so, it was beside the point. “It’s just a little unexpected is all, this change.”
“You’re jealous,” Dee repeated.
“I’m curious.”
Deirdre smiled. “Well, then I guess we’ll have to see what the big deal with this new guy is, won’t we?”
“Oh, boy,” Claire groaned. “I can’t wait.”
‡ ‡ ‡
As it turned out, they didn’t have to wait very long at all.
The group decided to head to Joey’s Froyo, otherwise known as The Hut. It wasn’t their standard après-school meeting-up point, but since the Health Department still hadn’t cleared Pongo’s Pizza for business, they couldn’t very well go there. Besides, pizza just held too many bad memories for all of them. It was where Dennis had fallen sick, the night his flesh seemed to melt right off his body. The last night of his life.
Claire didn’t think she’d be able to look at another pizza and not see Dennis’s face.
The official word on the street was that he’d gotten some kind of flesh-eating bacteria, but what kind of bacteria strikes so suddenly? And why just him and nobody else? They’d all eaten the same pizza. And why, since it had been over a month ago now, hadn’t they gotten the test results back from all the uneaten crusts the police had pulled out of Pongo’s trash? Claire made a mental note to ask April about it; her mom was the physician who’d treated him.
The seven of them were squeezed into a single booth: the five girls, plus Ralph (Dee’s boyfriend, to whom she was now hopelessly tongue-tied, and not in the figurative way, either) and Simone’s heavily-pierced, overly-tattooed, on-again, off-again boyfriend, Dustin.
Nobody called him Dustin; they knew him as Six, on account of his extra finger. Simone was actually quite proud of the midget digit, as she called it. She bragged about it as often as she could, usually whenever the girls talked about sex, which was a lot more frequently than the guys could ever realize, and a lot less openly than they might have want
ed. According to Simone, having that extra finger apparently gave a person some kind of supernatural sex powers or something. Claire believed it: in the privacy of their two am Skype calls, Simone could be quite convincing.
At the other end of the booth, Heather and April were still mooning on and on about the new guy. Their uneaten froyo sagged and melted forgotten in their cups. Claire, Simone and Six sat without talking very much, having both exhausted the usual topics and being careful to avoid any mention of the heated tonsil-boxing match going on next to them. Earlier, Simone had shot down Six’s attempt to engage her in a similar activity, and he was now brooding like a six-year-old boy who’d been told he couldn’t play spin-the-bottle with the older kids because it wasn’t a game where you tried to beat the other players.
At the moment, Simone’s attention was on her cell phone and the thousands of text messages she’d apparently accumulated in the twenty minutes it had taken them to walk to The Hut from school.
Clearly bored, Six turned to Claire and asked if she was going to the ball. The question would have been utterly ridiculous given that it was Claire they were talking about, except everyone seemed to know that she was currently unattached. It was a continued source of embarrassment for her.
Six extracted his extra pinky from Simone’s ear before leaning back in his seat. The satisfied smirk on his face couldn’t quite conceal the frustration he had to have been feeling. “Well?”
“Why do you want to know?” Claire snapped. “Are you looking?”
Simone didn’t seem to have heard, or, if she did, she didn’t react. Her thumbs were buzzing over the phone’s tiny keyboard like bumblebees and she had this glazed look in her eyes. She suddenly held the phone up and snapped a picture of Dee and Ralph in mid-snog, then went back to texting.
“Might be,” Six answered. “Are you interested?”
Claire’s eyes flicked between him and Simone. The girl was a machine. But was she really that oblivious to her boyfriend flirting with another girl?
“Sorry, Six,” Claire said, turning back to him. “Even if three-ways were my thing, they definitely wouldn’t include you.”
“Aw, dude, that’s harsh!” he complained. Even so, his eyes glazed over as he stared off into space. It was obvious to Claire what was going through his head at that moment. Well, she couldn’t blame him. The boy was only human after all.
“Besides,” she added, kicking him beneath the table, “since when do you dance?”
“Dance?” He straightened in his seat and smirked, like he’d been waiting for her to ask that very question. “I don’t do dancing.”
“Then why did you ask if I was interested in going to the ball?”
“Because…it’s a ball. Get it?”
Without looking up, Simone back-handed her boyfriend’s arm. “Behave.”
“I am behaving.”
“Convince me.”
Six scootched over and wrapped his arms around Simone’s stomach, then hiked them up until her boobs jounced. He started nibbling on her ear. Simone’s eyelids fluttered. “I said behave,” she purred, though it was obvious she had no plans whatsoever to stop him.
“Is it getting hot in here?” Claire grumbled. “First the Bopsie Twins over there, now you? It’s like my own little personal global warming factory. And look at my poor froyo. Total slush.”
“You’re jealous,” Six said, his nose buried in Simone’s hair. “You need a man. A real man.”
“I do not! And I wish you people would stop saying I’m jealous!”
But the truth was, she was jealous. Lately, her love life was a shambles. For the first time in years, she found herself in the most unlikely and unthinkable of all scenarios: single, the senior ball just two weeks away, all the decent-looking boys already taken. How could this be? She was the hottest girl in school and she might not have a date for the ball!
As if reading her mind, Simone looked up beneath her lidded eyes and said with a mischievous grin, “Poor Claire.” Her thumbs were still hovering motionless over her phone. With a start, Claire realized she could no longer see Six’s hands—not that she wanted to know where they’d disappeared to.
“I don’t need a man!”
“No, you just need to get laid.”
There are moments in every person’s life when it seems like the entire world has suddenly stopped talking all at once, when everyone is holding his or her breath and waiting, listening. There’s an almost spiritual texture to the moment, as if Time itself has stood still.
For Claire, this was that moment.
Simone’s comment rang out loud and clear. As if on cue, everyone in the entire Hut turned.
Claire could feel her face turning red. It wouldn’t have been quite so mortifying, but it was people she knew, kids from school, in her grade, kids who knew about The Five. There were appearances to keep up, and desperation was definitely not on the checklist!
But, as if that weren’t bad enough, there was one guy standing at the cashier that she hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it was because of the way he was dressed: worn jeans with holes in his back pockets and a flannel shirt wrapped around his waist like he was some kind of logger hick who’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in Edgemont by accident. He had a skateboard strapped to his backpack. But now Claire’s eye had caught the motion of his turning just as Simone spoke, and his own eyes had locked onto hers as if he was a compass and she was magnetic north.
Amusement danced across his face. His god-like face, Claire thought, before catching herself. And somehow, as she sat there, unable to look away from his piercing stare, somehow she knew that the stranger who’d just been informed, along with the rest of the world, what exactly it was that she needed, was the very same guy that Heather had been going on and on about since school had ended that afternoon.
“James Trevor.”
The name seemed to dangle in the air, expanding until it felt as if the entire place filled with it.
She barely managed to tear her eyes away from the boy’s face, away from his perfect blue eyes and his perfect nose, his high sharp cheekbones, his perfect rugged chin. The idea flashed through her mind that if there ever was a male counterpart to The Five, this boy would be that club’s undisputed leader. Except, that club wouldn’t be called The Five, would it? It would be called The One, because his beauty was so completely unmatched by anyone she had ever met before. It was almost…unnatural. Not even Dennis, when he’d been alive and at his most gorgeous, had come half as close to looking this hot.
The image of this boy’s face stayed with her in her mind’s eye, like an after-image of the sun seared onto her retinas. His hair was so…
What?
Absolute.
That was the only way to describe it. It was absolutely black, absolutely shiny, absolutely gorgeous. And next to the paleness of his skin, which seemed as flawless as a baby’s—
She realized that everyone was staring at her. Normally that wasn’t a problem, but her mouth was hanging open. She closed it. At least she wasn’t drooling.
The boy cleared his throat, drawing Claire’s gaze back to him, and suddenly here he was, not way over there by the cashier but standing right here, right next to her table. Right next to her! Just a split second ago he’d been standing twenty feet away, and it was like he’d zapped himself over to their booth, not moved—certainly not walked—but rematerialized. Here he was, and so was his… Okay, his crotch was right there in her face, not that there was anything to see or tell by it, since it seemed like a totally normal crotch, no different than any others she’d seen, not that she spent a lot of time looking at them, but—
Dear god! Stop staring at his crotch!
Claire wrenched her eyes back up to his face, and she realized he was even hotter up close. He didn’t just render her speechless, he had rendered her utterly senseless. It was as if every last bit of intelligence had been completely wrung from her brain, emptied it of everything so that she could fully appreciate
his beauty without preconception or bias. It was like a spoonful of wasabi on her tongue and he was sashimi.
Sashimi? What the f—?
Claire swallowed, and that seemed, somehow, to bring some sense back to her. Self-awareness, anyway. Of where she was and what was happening around her. And, strangely enough, knowledge that she needed to stop squeezing the cup in her hand or else she’d have froyo mush all over the place.
If there was any froyo left, that is. If the dryness in her throat was any indication, it had probably already vaporized away by now.
She tried to look away, but his eyes—how could you not look at them?—were impossibly deep, fathoms deep. Eons deep. And his incredibly long, perfectly perfect fingers. Wow. She wondered what Simone would say about such fingers, even though they numbered only the standard five; no midget digits on this boy. They were curled around what looked like a thirty-two ounce virgin Jamaican Rum and Mango Swirl, which had never been her favorite, though suddenly the flavor seemed so much more interesting than it had before. Only his nails showed any flaws, as if advertising that he was, indeed, a member of that race called boys and not gods: they were unmanicured, scratched, their edges roughened and dirty, like he’d been digging in hard clay.
He opened his impossibly red lips and out floated the most honeyed voice she had ever heard.
“Hey,” he said.
There might as well have been copper wire splicing the two of them together, for the million volts of electricity that seemed to course through her body, seemingly coming straight from him with the utterance of that single word.
A flurry of excited whispers and giggles began to grow around her, but Claire didn’t notice. The only thing filling her ears, besides the pounding of her heart, was that voice, that…wonderful voice.
She opened her mouth again, tried to speak, but her brain refused to cooperate, and what ended up coming out of her was, “Hechh.” Or maybe it was, “Crrchh.” Either way, it wasn’t the usual greeting she reserved for boys who dared to introduce themselves to her.
Flawless, a Claire Fontaine novella Page 2
