by Kieran Scott
“She’s right, you know.” Faith Kirkpatrick walked up behind us. The very sound of her voice made my shoulders clench. “And I happen to think you two fit right in.”
She was wearing a tight black turtleneck and black pants, a glittering pink star drawn at the corner of her left eye. Her blond hair was slicked back in a ponytail, and a Chanel purse dangled from the crook of her arm. Just looking at her standing there all high and mighty made me want to punch something. Was she in the car that night when Jake and the Idiot Twins and some unknown driver had left our old lawn jockey on our front step? Had she seen where I was living now? Was that why she had that particularly amused smirk on?
I hated myself for even going there. Hated myself for feeling ashamed that she and the others had seen how far my mom and I had fallen. I should have been—and really was—more pissed about the fact that my mother had cried over their stupid prank. That she’d been forced to spend hours on the phone with the condo board—whose strict exterior decorating codes we’d unknowingly violated—over the weekend trying to explain that it wasn’t ours.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Mrs. Thompson was somehow convinced that the drama club’s presence should be mandatory. Thanks a lot for that,” she said, sneering at Annie. “So I’m doing face painting. Want a goatee? It would be an improvement.”
My face flushed with heat.
“Or you, Annie? I could do a whole white face thing,” she said, waving a hand in front of Annie’s face. “Might actually camo the zits for once.”
Annie opened her mouth to respond, but I beat her to it.
“Enough! When the hell did you become such a psychotic bitch?” I blurted.
Faith’s jaw dropped as David guffawed. A few people around us turned to stare as they walked by, their candy apples momentarily forgotten. Maybe what I’d said sounded harsh, but Faith deserved it. Annie was a nice person—a person who had welcomed me back here even though we’d never been that close, a person who’d helped me get a job and hung out with me at school and invited me to her house even though no one else wanted to be seen with me. She didn’t deserve to be torn down by her former best friend.
“What? Speechless? Don’t have an answer?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. “Because I’m curious. Do you remember the actual date and time of your supervillain transformation? Was there a scorpion sting involved? A toxic spill? Or maybe you were the victim of one of those organ-snatching rings. They drugged you and you woke up in a tub full of ice with no heart?”
“Screw you, Ally,” Faith said, narrowing her eyes.
“Right back at ya, Faith.”
I couldn’t believe that Faith Kirkpatrick and I were snipping at each other. She was supposed to be a sweetheart, a churchgoer, the person who saw the good in everyone. When exactly had her soul turned black?
“Okay, okay, let’s walk before this gets ugly.” David looped his arm through mine and yanked me away from Faith. Annie followed after us, stunned.
“You have a mean streak, Ally Ryan,” she said. “Not that I don’t approve.”
“She deserved it,” I exclaimed, throwing out my hands as we approached the hot chocolate booth. “You guys, seriously. What the hell happened to Faith? She used to be Miss Congeniality, and now she’s like Jigsaw on crack.”
“It happened in February of freshman year,” Annie said, holding on to her hat as the wind kicked up. “Right around when you moved away, now that I think about it. One day she’s perfectly normal, the next she’s mocking Becca Gray’s Hello Kitty binder and screaming at me at Spring Fling about how I’m a loser with no friends.”
“Really?” I said, swallowing hard.
“Yep.”
We inched forward on the line, but my mind was not on hot chocolate. Suddenly, it all made sense. All Faith had ever wanted was for Chloe and Shannen to accept her, but they’d only hung out with her because of me. Once I was gone, she must have been desperate to hang on to them. Desperate enough to drop her few Norm friends and do it in a way that would impress the Cresties. Like bitching Annie out in public and mocking Becca to her face for something Chloe and Shannen thought was lame.
It was my fault. My leaving had turned Faith to the dark side. God. No wonder everyone around here hated me. I had never realized how much my dad’s actions and their consequences had affected everyone. Even Annie. Suddenly this hot gush of anger surged through me and my jaw clenched. I wished he was there right now just so I could tell him to his face how much he’d messed up my life. But he wasn’t. And wherever he was, he was happily oblivious to all the misery he’d left behind—which just pissed me off even more. It was so not fair. He should be the one suffering, not me. He’d screwed over our friends, torn us from our home, and then left us without explanation, and my mom and I were the ones who had to deal with it all.
“Oh my God. Shannen Moore,” David said under his breath.
I didn’t even realize my fingers had curled into fists until he spoke, bringing me back to the now, and they unclenched. Sure enough, Shannen was cutting purposefully across the field, headed straight for Faith’s booth. My heart dropped at the sight of her. I knew she had to be involved in the lawn jockey debacle. “Prank” was her middle name. I’d learned some of my best stuff from her. But everything we’d ever done had been harmless—swapping people’s front porch jack-o-lanterns the day before Halloween, rearranging all of Chloe’s mom’s books in the library, stealing the ladder from Hammond’s boys-only tree house while he and the Idiot Twins were still up there (and returning it three hours later when they were starving and really had to pee). We’d never done anything overtly cruel to anyone, least of all each other.
“God, why don’t you just say hello to her? Or even better, ask her to the Harvest Ball like you’ve been whining about doing for three years?” Annie suggested, holding down the pleated skirt of her jumper-style dress as the wind kicked up again. “This is getting pathetic already.”
“No.” He shook his head. But then his eyes suddenly filled with hope. “You think I should?” he asked me.
I didn’t. Not even a little bit. Shannen may have had a tough exterior when I knew her before, but these days that exterior was also frozen over by a thick layer of ice. But who was I to rain on anyone’s lifelong crush parade? I knew better than anyone that Shannen had her good qualities. She just hadn’t been exhibiting any of them lately.
“Sure. Go for it,” I said, crossing my fingers behind my back in hope.
David was buoyed by my tentative confidence. He stepped out of line and cleared his throat. “Hey, Shannen.”
She paused. Her eyes flicked over him, then me. “What?”
“Um, yeah, I was just wondering. . . . Do you have a date for the Harvest Ball?” he asked in a rush.
I sent Shannen telepathic messages. Please just don’t humiliate him. Please, please, please be the kind person I know you’re capable of being.
“Actually, I do,” she said. Then miraculously she gave him a kind smile. “But thanks for asking.”
Then she glanced at me quickly, turned, and walked away. For that split second it was as if we were friends again. As if she understood me. As if she cared about someone other than herself. Something other than her insular clique.
“Ouch,” David said.
“Bitch,” Annie added under her breath. She whipped her notebook out of her pocket and furiously started making notes.
“Sorry.” I patted him on the back. “It could have been worse, right? I mean, she already had a date, so . . . you were just . . . too late.”
“Yeah, right,” David said, looking at the ground as the line inched forward. He leaned down and plucked a small leaf from the laces of his Skechers, then shredded it into tiny pieces. “She doesn’t like me. She’s never gonna like me. I should just get over it already.”
“I know! Why don’t you two go to the ball together?” Annie suggested, so excited by the idea she bent at the knees and brought he
r pad and pen to her mouth in her fists.
David and I looked at each other. “Uh . . .”
“Come on, please? Someone has to be my Logan Pincus buffer,” Annie begged. “If you guys are there together, then you can both buffer me.”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t even planning on going,” I said.
“Come on, Ally! Please?” Annie begged. “It’s your fault I have to go with the guy in the first place. You owe me!”
I sighed as David looked at me. “We could look at it as community service.”
“Datebuffers-dot-org?” I joked, tilting my head.
David laughed and let the tiny pieces of his leaf flutter away on the breeze. “Let’s do it.”
I hesitated for just a second but didn’t even give myself a chance to think about why. It wasn’t as if anyone else was an option anyway. Especially not now.
“Sure. Why not?” I said. “It’ll be fun.”
ally
Jake Graydon was staring at me. He was cocked back in a chair in his blue suit and dark orange tie, some sophomore girl in a low-cut dress nibbling on his neck, and he was staring at me. Why? Why was he looking at me like I was the gravy and he was the biscuit? Had we not locked eyes just the other night in the OVC parking lot when he was making his getaway? Did he not know that I knew he was an asshole of the first order?
“Would you ever marry outside your religion?” David asked me.
I tore my eyes away from Jake and looked at David. His arms were around my waist, and mine were around his neck as we slow danced under the disco ball at the center of the gym floor. In all the Jakesession (my new term for my quite unhealthy and completely inexplicable Jake obsession), I’d forgotten what we were doing here.
“Are you making an offer or just asking one of your non sequitur questions?” I joked.
David frowned in thought, turning me in a slow circle. He looked adorable in his gray suit and blue tie, all clean shaven and gleaming from aftershave.
“The latter. Wait. I always get that wrong. Is it the latter or the former . . . ? Whatever. The non sequitur one,” he said. “What are you, anyway? Religionwise.”
“Evangelical. But honestly, it’s never been a big thing with my family, so I guess I would marry outside my religion,” I said. “But it would be weird if my husband didn’t want to celebrate Christmas.”
“I’m with you. Anyone messes with my eggnog habit and I’ll bust their ass,” David joked.
I laughed. We’d turned in a full circle, and my gaze went directly to Jake again. I wished he wasn’t here. I was having a perfectly nice time with David, Annie, and Logan—both of whom were sitting at a nearby table while Annie took copious notes on Crestie behavior—until Jake had arrived fashionably late with his latest victim. Ever since then I’d known exactly where he was at any given moment, and I’d been nothing but tense.
What the hell was my problem? Practically all I thought about was Jake. Half the time I fantasized about bumping into him in the hall and ripping into him for the lawn jockey prank. Telling him about how my mom had called some junk-hauling place, and they’d said it would cost two hundred bucks to pick the thing up and dispose of it because it was so heavy. Two hundred dollars! Money we did not have. Didn’t he realize that his actions had consequences? In my fantasy he would be chagrined into speechlessness and I’d walk away all triumphant while he hung his head in shame.
The other half of the time the very same fantasy ended up with him grabbing my arm as I tried to walk away, pulling me to him, and kissing me half to death.
I was in serious need of some therapy.
“So, I have a question,” David said.
We’d turned so that Jake was no longer in my line of sight. Slight reprieve. “Let me guess. Would I ever name my first born after a planet?” I joked.
“Close,” David said. “Would you go out with me?”
I stepped on my own foot and sort of slid sideways. “Wait. What?” My heart was pounding a mile a minute. He had to be kidding. He was kidding. Right?
He looked around, dropping his arms from my waist. “Um . . . do you really need me to say it again?” he asked, his smile beseeching and adorable.
I swallowed hard. He was serious. “I thought you liked Shannen.”
David shrugged one shoulder. “That was stupid,” he said. “That was, like, the unattainable stupid crush. But you . . .” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he looked at me, his gaze steady. “You’re, like, extremely cool. Pretty much any guy in this room would kill to have a girlfriend like you.”
My heart melted into warm mush. Could he possibly be any sweeter? What girl in this room wouldn’t kill to have a cute guy say that to her? I took a deep breath and considered David. Sweet, fun, adorable David, who was growing more uncertain and vulnerable by the second. What was stopping me from saying yes?
“Hey.”
We both turned. Jake Graydon stood in front of us, jacket unbuttoned, hands slipped casually into his pockets. Hotter than any normal person had the right to be.
“Um, hi,” David said ironically. Not that Jake would get the tone, considering he had no idea what he’d just walked in on. “What’s up?”
Jake gave David a baffled look. “Uh, actually, I came over to see if I could, you know, cut in or whatever.”
I snorted a laugh. “Yeah, right.”
Jake colored slightly. “What?”
“No, you cannot cut in,” I said slowly. A thrill skittered over my shoulders. He was finally giving me my chance to reject him. To make him feel the way I’d felt when I saw him peeling off from my house with the Idiot Twins cackling in the backseat. I still had no idea which one of his friends was driving the car, but it didn’t matter. Jake had been there, defiling my home, rubbing my downfall in my face. And now he was asking me to dance?
“But I—”
David slipped in front of me, facing off with Jake. “She said no thanks. You can walk away now.”
My heart fluttered. David was defending my honor. But as much as I appreciated the gesture, I wasn’t about to let him speak for me.
“I’ve got this, David,” I said, stepping around him. I looked up at Jake, lifting my chin. Annie and Logan were suddenly there at our side, as if a brawl were about to break out and they were ready to throw down. “I’ll dance with you,” I told him, “after you give me the two-hundred dollars you owe me.”
His brow knitted. “What?”
“Two hundred dollars. That’s what it’s going to cost to have the lawn jockey you and your friends left on my doorstep hauled away.” I folded my arms over my green H&M dress—the one I’d bought for last year’s Holiday Dance in Baltimore. The good thing about moving to a new school? All your clothes are brand new again. And even if it cost one tenth the amount of Faith’s black strapless, I still thought I looked pretty good in it. “I assume you have the cash.”
Jake blanched. “I . . .”
“No? I’ll take a check,” I said obnoxiously. “I do know where you live in case it bounces.” I held out my hand flat, waiting.
“I didn’t know,” Jake said. He looked away. “I didn’t think it’d be that big a deal.”
I narrowed my eyes as my heart started to soften. It was so Jakesessed it wanted to take that meager nothing of an apology and run with it. But I wouldn’t let it. My brain had some pride, even if my heart didn’t.
“Come on, David. I’m over this dance,” I said, taking his hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
Confused, David followed me toward the door nonetheless. Jake, much to my surprise, came after us.
“Wait.” His hand was on my arm. I turned around. “Look, I’m . . . I’m sorry, okay?” he said quietly. “We shouldn’t have done it. But it’s not like it was my idea—”
“No? Then whose was it? Tell me so I can ask them for the cash,” I said.
Jake looked away again, his handsome face turning a deeper shade of red.
“Fine. I’ll expect the money in the morning.”
I twisted around on my heel and walked off, David, Annie, and Logan jogging to catch up.
“Are we really leaving?” David asked. “Should I get the coats?”
“Yeah. I mean, if it’s okay with you guys,” I said. “This is lame anyway, right? I say we hit the diner.”
“I’m all over that,” Logan said. He smacked David in the chest with the back of his meaty hand. “Let’s go.”
The two of them loped off toward the lobby, where the makeshift coat rack had been placed. I kept moving for the door, wanting to put as much space between me and Jake as possible.
“Okay. That was weird,” Annie said, clutching her notebook in one hand, her pumpkin-shaped purse in the other.
“What?” I asked, both fuming and exulting. I’d finally gotten to tell him off, but somehow, I was still pissed.
“In all the months I’ve been documenting Jake’s every move, I’ve never seen him (a) go after a girl who’s walking away from him or (b) apologize for anything.”
I paused with my hand on the metal door. “Really?”
“Really,” she said, whipping the notebook open to jot something down. “Clearly you’ve had some kind of positive effect on Jake Graydon.”
I swallowed hard and looked across the room at him. He was rejoining his friends and his date, as if nothing had happened. Apparently it wasn’t a huge effect.
“Here you go, milady,” David said, holding out my mom’s black wool coat to me.
“Thank you.” I slipped my bare arms into the warm sleeves. “Let’s go. I’m starved,” Logan said, shoving open the door and barreling through it ahead of Annie. She rolled her eyes and went after him before it could slam in her face. As hard as he’d worked to win this first date, he wasn’t exactly gunning for a second.
“Um . . . shall we?” David said, tilting his head.
“Yeah,” I replied. My stomach was clenching and unclenching as I remembered what we’d been talking about before we were so rudely interrupted. Jake was clearly a jerk, and David was clearly his polar opposite. Maybe the key to breaking the Jakesession was to replace it with something else. Something real. Someone who actually cared about me.
