Confessions of a Hater

by Caprice Crane

“Thanks for that, Grace,” I said. “I’m eating a fucking burrito with no guacamole or sour cream and she wants to throw a Let’s Get Type-Two Diabetes party.”

  “Shut up, you’re rocking an eight-pack and bitching about extra calories,” Dahlia protested, punctuating her point with a three-chip barrage.

  “Sure, AI party,” Anya said. “Can I be Simon Cowell?”

  “He’s not even on the show anymore,” I said, “but, yes, I’d expect nothing less.”

  “I like this,” Emily said. “You guys?”

  “I’m game,” I said. And it was decided. A simple party with a karaoke machine and some good vibes was the move.

  Word spread around school that we were having a party, and by the end of that day, it looked like we were going to have a full house. I’d told my mom we were having a study session/sleepover and, well, technically it was half true. I was sleeping over at Xandra’s—all the girls were—we just weren’t studying.

  We all chipped in and bought alcohol—for the record, there’s just no “legal age” when it comes to most stores. (Sorry, parents. I’m sure you’re totally shocked, seeing as how you were all getting hooked up by the corner store when you were sixteen too. Sure helps that most of the attendants are only a couple of years older, they’re making minimum wage and they’re easily swayed by a couple of pretty girls and a ten-dollar tip. Which is not to say I’m promoting underage drinking. I’m just saying it happens. Buying alcohol when you’re underage is as easy as taking candy from a baby—which, aside from the fact that it’s probably not all that difficult, is a cruel saying. What kind of monster are you that you want to take away a poor baby’s candy? Buy your own candy, asshole!)

  So, yeah, we put together a pretty good collection of booze, while also agreeing upon some ground rules: Cut off anyone who’s overindulging, an unfortunate reality at any teen soiree, and collect car keys as needed, just like John Cusack was the key master in Say Anything: “You must chill! You must chill! I have hidden your keys! Chill!” (One of my dad’s favorite movies, and later one of mine as well.)

  Grace and I spent all of Friday and part of Saturday together baking cupcakes, which was actually really fun (though I ate so much frosting I almost hurled), and the end result was about 150 cupcakes that looked good and tasted even better. (We’d know; we started with 156.)

  Decorating was less about beautifying and more about hiding the china and the expensive stuff. We’ve all seen Risky Business (another of Dad’s faves), and not that there were any insanely expensive crystal eggs—or hookers expected to arrive—but we didn’t want to take a chance and get Xandra in trouble. The idea was to minimize all possible risk while creating the best party space possible.

  By eight we were all there, waiting for our first guests to arrive. It was me, Anya, Grace, Kura, Dahlia, Xandra and Emily, hanging out in the kitchen, eating Doritos, playing Celebrity.

  For the uninitiated, Celebrity is a game in which you have two teams of however many, and each member of the team writes the names of ten different celebrities on ten different slips of paper. Then they’re all folded up and placed into a hat or a bowl or some such receptacle. When the game starts, one person will pick a name from the hat and give clues about who the celebrity is while the teammates have to guess. Each team has one minute to guess as many names as they can and when the hat/bowl/planter/fishbowl/what-have-you is empty, whichever team got the most right is the winner.

  We’d played three rounds when we noticed it was eight forty-five and nobody had arrived.

  Great, I thought. Skyler got the whole school to pretend they were coming and then bail on us.

  But I didn’t dare say that out loud. This is being a leader, I told myself. Do what Noel would do. Stay strong. Never show fear. And burn down Skyler’s fucking house if—

  Which is when the doorbell rang.

  Oh thank God.

  But when I got to the door it was only Chris and Andy.

  Now, don’t get me wrong, Chris and Andy were two of our favorite boys—certainly mine and Emily’s—but did they really count as party guests? Technically, while they straddled many groups of friends, they were also kind of part of ours.

  But in the end … who cared? We had everyone we knew well right there. Everyone we liked. Did we need the drama and the judgment and people looking around, inspecting our party and @imatotalfuckingbitch tweeting “Lame Sauce!” whatever the hell that meant? No. Sure the boys were outnumbered, but when do boys ever bitch about that? (Maybe the gay ones, understandably, but not these two.) All that meant was that we wouldn’t do too many duets.

  So just like in Risky Business when Tom Cruise’s character says, “Sometimes you just gotta say, ‘What the fuck?’” we just said, “Fuck it! This is our party, and we’re gonna make the most of it, eat a shitload of cupcakes—call this my cheat day for the next month or so—sing our asses off and have a good time.” Sure, it was kind of the opposite because in Risky Business the party got out of control, and in our life, this party was more controlled than a church picnic, but the sentiment was the same.

  And so we ate, and we sang, and we danced, and we had fun. A lot of fun.

  But then another thing happened. People started arriving at the door. Much to our nerdy and punctual surprise, the party wasn’t a flop. It was just the opposite. Pretty much everyone came. Turns out that being late isn’t just fashionable—it’s how parties work. Want to get your party cranking at eight? Better start that fucker at five. Soon the door was opening and closing so often people didn’t even bother ringing the doorbell or knocking. There were people we knew, people we didn’t (we were all inclusive with the invite, seeing as how that was what we were all about), and by eleven, the place was jam-packed.

  Once the party started filling up, everyone was having a fun time, but it wasn’t exactly “blowing up,” whatever that means. That all changed with one brilliant observation by Anya. Looking over the karaoke catalogue, she noticed that only about two percent of that sucker ever gets used, and there’s a ton of crazy shit in there—everything from old pop standards to traditional country music to hardcore thrash metal to Motown to Southern rap—you name it, it’s in there. But people were just singing the songs they liked (or at least knew the words to). The usual suspects.

  So Anya turned everything on its head. She declared that Karaoke Night was over—and “We Pick It” Karaoke Night was about to start. Here’s the deal: Everyone had to perform at least one song, but the singer couldn’t pick the song. The crowd got to pick. And of course, the crowd picked what (they assumed, at least) would be the weirdest thing for that person to sing.

  First up was sweet little Sammi Wu, a straight-A student and all-around perfect daughter, who was required to sing “Get Low” by Lil Jon, a song where the rapper goes on about “till the sweat drips off” his private parts, and—believe it or not—it gets even nastier in places. (Google it if you’re curious.) A macho ROTC student named Eric Bryant ended up with “My Neck, My Back” by Khia, a female rapper who goes on about the many places on her body she demands to have licked—and her neck and her back are only the beginning, trust me. Just like Sammi, he gave it his sincere best effort, and it was hilarious.

  After that, it was on, with everything from a girl who never listened to anything but Black Eyed Peas (I know, and I’m sorry) wrestling with Hank Williams, Sr., and a girl whose record collection started and ended with Taylor Swift doing her best with a tune by a band named Cannibal Corpse. It was all awesome (yes, for real awesome), and everyone at the party was totally losing their minds. They were recording everything and uploading it to YouTube on the spot.

  But it got even better when the “performers” surprised everybody, like when Dante Lopez took the stage. (His real name was Carlos, but everyone called him Dante, because he played bass in a death metal band, was covered in ink from head to toe and had so many piercings he was practically bionic.) We tossed Dante a Clay Aiken tune … and he totally fucking killed it!
r />   He wasn’t the only one. We had the goth chick who turned out to be a secret Toby Keith fan, nailing “I Love This Bar,” every line just perfect. Then there was D’von Jordan, the starting tailback on the football team, and more than a few of us assumed he wouldn’t have a clue about a Florence + the Machine song, and of course he totally crushed it. Seriously, everyone there lost their minds on the spot.

  There were a few more like that, and a lot more humiliating but funny failures, but overall, it was totally epic. Everyone got into it, the trash-talking was all in good fun, and it just turned into the weirdest and most hilarious “concert” ever.

  Before the party was even over, some of the performances were blowing up on YouTube. Performances were getting shared and liked on Facebook pretty much in real time and anyone who wasn’t at the party sure as hell must have wished they were.

  It couldn’t have been better. I found myself bonding with people I never would have had the courage to even speak to a year ago, and the other Invisibles were doing the same. Everything was different. It was beyond amazing.

  And then sometime between one and two a.m. the cops showed up!

  Yes, I know this sounds über-dorky, being excited about having the cops come to break up your party … but for me and the Invisibles and especially Xandra, who is drawn to drama in all shapes and forms, having a party so successful that the cops had to break it up was a badge of honor. (It helped that her super-cool uncle Christian—yes, that’s his name—came by to smooth it over with the cops, which was no surprise because he stuck around to drink and flirt with every teen girl who’d talk to him for even five seconds.)

  Nothing too totally insane happened. No one got married to a stripper, no one stole anything from Mike Tyson, and there was no sequel party that just repeated the exact same shit that happened at the first party. But it was still kick-ass, everyone got home safely (if somewhat the worse for wear) and it was a massive success that was the talk of the school come Monday.

  You could just tell how much things had changed that next week at school: We had finally secured our place. The lines between who was popular—hell, what popularity even meant—were officially blurred.

  Our little group has always been …

  —NIRVANA

  “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

  CHAPTER

  17

  Spirit Week was fast approaching. The theme was “candy,” but each day was going to have a specific motif and the students in each grade had designed their own color and candy-themed T-shirts for Friday.

  The freshmen were Kit-Kats. Their red T-shirts had pictures of Kit-Kats with the caption, GIVE US A BREAK! WE’RE ONLY FRESHMEN! The sophomores chose white, and the standard Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar was our candy, but our shirts showed it nestled between graham crackers and roasted marshmallows. Our slogan: YOU KNOW YOU WANT S’MORE OF US. The juniors went the obvious route: green shirts, Junior Mints. Their slogan: MINTY FRESH WITH ONE YEAR LEFT! Not their best work, IMHO. (You’d think juniors would be the most spirited of all, but they seem distracted by all the shit that goes on right in that sixteen-seventeen range that they half-ass a lot of this school stuff. Wonder if we’ll be like that next year. Probably.)

  As for the seniors, they chose black shirts with silver Hershey’s Kisses. Slogan: KISS OUR ASS GOOD-BYE!… Well, that was the first caption, at least, as in it lasted for all of first period. After that, Principal Dash put out an announcement that any seniors wearing the shirt needed to either cover up “ass” completely with masking tape or, preferably, change shirts if possible. More than a little bitching commenced from the seniors, but almost all complied by lunchtime, probably not wanting to do anything that risked their upcoming graduation.

  Of course, that struck me as massive dumbassedness, and maybe material for an Abby Invisible down the road—hopefully with enough details changed that the administrators wouldn’t notice until after it published. I can turn on my TV any time of day and hear fifteen words worse than “ass.” I can go on the Internet and find stuff in ten seconds that would make Lady Gaga blush. What exactly was West Hollywood High shielding us from?

  Like Anya would say to me later, “They don’t give a shit what we wear. They’re just terrified that some soccer mom who watches Fox News and The 700 Club religiously will lose her shit if the school let her kid wear a shirt that says ‘ass.’”

  A day later, the seniors were sporting a new Hershey’s Kisses shirt around school, one that simply stated “KISS US GOOD-BYE.” Well, that was the new official shirt. Once off campus, a number of daredevil seniors could be seen at local malls, coffee shops or fast-food joints wearing the Super-Special Senior Spirit Week Variant T-Shirt, which pictured West Hollywood burned to the ground and the caption: PRINCIPAL DASH, KISS MY ASH. As an artist, I had to admit some appreciation for that one.

  Speaking of artistry, I was busy working on my latest cartoon, content in the knowledge that the rest of the Invisibles were finishing up work on the website. Everything at school felt like it was happening in Technicolor and I was totally cataloguing the random bullshit that goes down day to day at school for the strip. I’d overheard Skyler in the locker room talking about her hair appointment and inspiration struck.

  In the opening frame, the Popular Shallow Girl “Tyler” is sitting next to her friend “Maddie” at lunch. Abby Invisible is eating lunch by herself off to the side. Tyler asks Maddie when she’s getting her hair done for the underage club that night. Maddie replies that she’s looking forward to it—“It’s only ten dollars to get in tonight!”—but she’ll just be styling her hair at home.

  Tyler says that’s the worst thing she’s ever heard, and she starts rambling about how she’ll be at the salon for three hours after school: “Nico is giving me highlights here, lowlights there—I call them all ‘hotlights’ though, because they make you feel hotter.”

  Maddie says that must cost a lot. Tyler says, “Oh, it’s only two hundred dollars—just this week’s allowance.”

  Next frame, Maddie walks away with the thought bubble “Jeez…”

  Next frame. Off to the side, Abby chimes in, “I’m sure your hair will look amazing for the club, Tyler.” Tyler replies, “Oh, I can’t go to the club. I’m out of money.”

  Then we have a completely silent frame showing the two characters, followed by the final frame, as Tyler turns to Abby: “Hey, can I borrow ten dollars?”

  I showed it to Chris during lunch and held my breath for his verdict.

  “It’s very funny,” he said, but he hit me with a little side-eye as he did.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What?” he replied, playing dumb.

  “I saw that look.”

  He weighed his reply for a second. “Hope I never piss you off enough to end up in one of these.”

  “Hey!” I said, feeling slightly hurt. “I’d never.”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  It’s funny how paranormal romances had been all the rage for the past decade. Forget navigating a relationship with a vampire or werewolf—it was hard enough to have a relationship with a normal human boy!

  “You’re not fodder for my comic,” I said, then raised my eyebrows. “I have much better uses for you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, smiling, leaning closer. “Like what?”

  “Full-time kissing partner,” I said.

  “I like that one.” He leaned in and kissed me sweetly; we both smiled.

  “I’m glad.”

  “Hey, I have something for you,” he said, reaching into his pocket.

  “What?” I said, trying to angle myself to get a better view of his hand.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  I tried to maintain my smile so it didn’t get too unwieldy as I closed my eyes. He took my hand and placed something in it, then he closed my fingers around it.

  “Okay, you can look now.”

  I opened my eyes and my hand. In my palm was a silver chain with a guitar pick on i
t, and on the pick was an engraved I PICK YOU with a little heart underneath.

  It was the most adorable thing I’d ever seen.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said, now certain that I was in full-gums-mode, but there was nothing I could do. I was too happy. “This is the cutest thing ever! Where did you get this?”

  “I’m not telling,” he said. “You like it?”

  “Love,” I said, and if he wanted to read into it he could go ahead and apply that word to how I felt about him too.

  He smiled. “I’m glad.”

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked. “Because if it’s an anniversary or something—clearly I screwed up.”

  “No occasion,” he said. “I just saw it and thought, ‘Too bad neither Hailey or I play guitar because that would be a damn cute gift if one of us did,’ and then I thought, ‘Fuck it! We don’t have to play guitar. I still pick you, dammit!’”

  I laughed and leaned in to give him a kiss, and then I spun around, pulling my hair up and out of the way.

  “Help me put it on,” I said, and he obliged, and I was happy. Really freaking happy.

  “I pick you too, in case you’re not sure,” I said.

  “You better!” he said with a smirk, and I wondered to myself if this was the way people in love songs felt. I might not play any instruments, but I could definitely come up with some super-cheesy romantic lyrics right then.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Dahlia ratcheted up our plan to a new level of virtual viciousness by creating a Web application designed to deliver an emotional gut punch Skyler’s crew would never see coming. Proving that even her amazing tech skills were virtually outweighed by her creativity, she’d created a What Kind of Dog Are You? application that allowed people to answer a few multiple-choice questions to find out their answer. Seems innocent enough, right? Kind of like one of those Australian dingoes, those really cute wild dogs who look all cuddly and sweet, but they’re not anything like cool domesticated dogs like Benji or Beethoven or Air Bud, so if you catch the wrong one in the outback, it will tear out your throat or eat your baby or tear out your baby’s throat while eating you, and long story short, you should really just think twice before petting a dingo.