The Good, the Fab and the Ugly

by Compai

  The paper slipped along the wall and smacked to the floor. “Whoops!” Charlotte smirked, still pinching the final tack between her fingers.

  Melissa swept her design from the floor and pressed it to her hip. “Just so you know” — her dark eyes flashed — “you’re siding with someone who decorated her bag with gravel!”

  “Oh, she did not,” Charlotte laughed, sidestepping to examine Petra’s design. Within half a second, the laughter died on her lips. “Oh.”

  “What?” Petra defensively folded her arms.

  “What do you mean ‘what’?” Melissa scoffed. “You realize there’s a difference between runway and driveway, right?”

  “She’s kind of got a point, JLo.” Charlotte locked eyes with Petra and cringed. “The rocks that you got? They’re kind of just rocks.”

  “I know they’re kind of just rocks,” Petra imitated her. “That’s the whole point.”

  “Okay, that point? Is crazy,” Melissa informed her.

  “Oh, is it?” Petra flushed, leaping to her feet. Inside the recycling bin, a glass bottle shifted with a fragile-sounding chink. “How is decorating my bag with stones any less crazy than decorating yours with gold? Who’s to say gold is any more valuable or . . . or worthy than any other random rock you happen to pick up?” Her tea-green eyes filled to the brim and wavered, glassy and bright. “What idiot decided that gold, or diamonds, or pearls, or any of that crap is worth anything at all?!”

  At that, she stormed from the room, nearly colliding with a stunned Janie, who stood clutching an assortment of candy bars, a bottle of iced Peach Oolong tea, and a half-eaten bag of Potato Flyers. She staggered backward as Petra squeezed past her, tearing down the corridor, the cheerful jingle of her gypsy belt in contrast to the dramatic sound of sobbing.

  “What happened?” Janie gasped, spewing potato flecks.

  “Nothing!” Charlotte and Melissa chanted in unison.

  “But . . .” Janie’s eyes darted toward the door.

  “Look,” Melissa snapped. “None of the designs work, okay? End of story.”

  “None of them?” Janie’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “What do you mean?”

  “Apparently,” Melissa huffed, as if never in her life had she had to say something so absurd: “My Trick-or-Treater is tacky.”

  “And mine” — Charlotte bobbed into a sarcastic curtsy — “is worm genocide.”

  “Right.” Janie swallowed, sucking the salt off her finger. She noticed neither of them so much as considered her design, which remained on her desk exactly where she’d left it — ignored. She figured now was not the time to bring it up. The tension in the room was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. Or maybe dip it with a chip? (Her mouth watered at the thought.)

  “The Hallow-Winston Carnival is now in two days.” Melissa expanded her hands on either side of her frustrated face. “And I have worked very hard to have promotion ready. I do not want to promote something that’s just not going to happen, you hear me?”

  “Okay, listen,” Janie attempted to calm her down. “I’m sure if we just take a moment to think this over, we can come up with a . . .”

  The bell rang its hysterical interruption, and all along the hall, doors swung open, striking the walls in a succession of hollow thuds: boom-boom-boom-boom-ba-ba-boom. After a second of silence, a clamor of voices rose up and swelled, surging the corridor like water.

  And so before Janie could say “compromise,” Melissa and Charlotte were swept up by the tide.

  Hallow-Winston Thursday had arrived at last, and — thanks to the united efforts of the Student Council — the Showroom had completed its transformation from a glossy parking lot to a hay-choked, peanut shell–infested, soon-to-be bass-thumping carnival ground. Among other things, this meant those popular students whose daily right it was to park in the Showroom were forced to park underground, with — as they so charitably phrased it — “the rest of the cave dwellers.” Their exodus forced a certain segment of said cave dwellers from their allotted spots, which in turn forced a second segment of cave dwellers from their allotted spots, until, at last, there came that pathetic last segment of cave dwellers with no place to park at all. Among this sad sector, yellow parking passes were distributed, entitling them to reserved spaces at the Yum-Yum Donuts down the street. As they lugged their bulging backpacks the three-and-a-half blocks from Yum-Yum to campus, their superiors zipped by in Audis, Porsches, Range Rovers, and BMWs, and assailed their poor sensitive ears with explosive honks, cackling laughter, and howlingly expressive WhoooOOOOO’s.

  If you’d asked him last year, Jake would have said his future on Donut Trail was guaranteed, and perhaps it would have been, if not for Charlotte’s sudden and frankly discomfiting interest in his sister. To his and Janie’s mutual relief, they got a spot underground, on the top level even, their banged-up sedan sweetly slotted between Bronwyn Spencer’s dark red Porsche Cayenne and Marco Duvall’s ridiculously tricked-out black Escalade. Their SUVs were ginormous, bulging well over their respective double yellow lines, and forced him and Janie to squeeze from their cracked car doors, suck in their stomachs, and shimmy their respective ways to freedom.

  It had been a small price to pay.

  “Jake,” Janie called after her brother, who, as usual, refused to wait for her. “Elevator’s this way?” She gestured to the stainless steel double-doors, only a few feet away from the car.

  “I’ll take the stairs,” he explained as the elevator clicked into place, sounding its customary bing! Janie watched her brother steam ahead and sighed. He’d been taking the stairs all week, and she had yet to understand why.

  It was weird. Jake used to confide in her about everything.

  “Where is he?” the bespectacled Tyler Brock asked as she squeezed into the crammed six-by-six-foot cube of space. She shrugged, and he tilted outside, stopping the doors jarring kuh-klunk. “Dude,” he called to Jake’s retreating flannel-clad back. “Elevator!”

  Jake’s already hunched shoulders tensed, but he ignored his friend and continued to walk.

  “Come on, dude!” Tyler persisted while his fellow passengers groaned with impatience. “Don’t deprive me of my one pleasure in life. Please?”

  “Man,” Jake sighed a few seconds later as the elevator doors glided shut. He glanced at Tyler and shook his head. “Aren’t you sick of this yet?”

  The grinning Tyler caressed his scraggly excuse for a goatee, and shook his head while a thoroughly mystified Janie looked on. “What are you guys talking about?”

  “Dude feeds off my misery,” Jake ruefully explained under his breath. The doors sighed to a stop and shuddered open, depositing its passengers into the thick of Locker Jungle. Because upper classmen stored their stuff in their cars, Locker Jungle was a seventh, eighth, and ninth-grade stomping ground. They buzzed around and cackled, oblivious to outsiders — that is, until they spotted her brother. In that moment, Janie noticed, their eyes, like, glinted — like yellow-eyed bats in a dimly lit attic.

  “Get ready,” Tyler warned as a redheaded eighth grader stepped boldly forward.

  “Hijake!” she cheeped, alerting the rest of her glittery-eyed comrades. Jake lifted his hand in greeting, and they dissolved into fits of shrieks and chirping:

  “Hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!”

  “Make it stop!” Tyler swiped the air around his head and shrunk to his knees, screaming, while Janie spun around, hiding her laughter in her hands. “For the love of all that is holy, make it stop!”

  Jake smiled, always happy to amuse — even at the expense of his own dignity. Ever since he’d made out with that girl Nikki, he’d become something of a cult figure among seventh- and eighth-grade girls, most of whom were desperate kissing virgins, and all of whom seemed to be thinking, if he did it with her, would he do it with me? Jake took the stairs to avoid them, but mostly to avoid Nikki, who — even though he hadn’t responded once — had continued to text-stalk h
im for, like, two weeks. The first thing he did when she came back to school was take her aside and explain, in as kind a manner as possible, she needed to back the hell off. The thing was, she did, and, after an initial wave of relief, he felt guilty. Really guilty. More and more, he let Tyler bully him into these trips to Locker Jungle in hopes that he’d run into her, and, if not apologize, at least, you know. Say hey.

  Just so she wouldn’t think he hated her.

  “You’re going to the carnival, right?” Janie asked him, once Tyler and the cheeping bats dispersed for the rafters.

  “Where else would I be?” Jake frowned, rising on the scuffed toes of his Converse. He glanced around, scanning the aisles.

  “I don’t know,” Janie mused. “Ditching?”

  Jake scowled, falling back on his heels. “Would you just, like, let that die?”

  Janie cocked an eyebrow. “Just promise you’ll come to the POSEUR booth.” She shifted her brown canvas Manhattan Portage tote to her hip, digging through it. “My shift is two ’til three.”

  “Sure,” Jake absently replied, back to scanning the lockers. Of course, now that he was looking for her, Nikki was never around.

  Where could she be hiding?

  The Girl: Molly Berger

  The Getup: Oversized black-and-white MC Escher T-shirt from the MOMA gift shop, purple cotton leggings from the Gap, and orange Crocs (with nifty frog-charm gibbets).

  Some people could disappear and nobody ever noticed. Eighth grader Molly Berger was one of these people. She was the kind of person who blessed herself when she sneezed. She walked on the balls of her feet, her posture disconcertingly erect, craning her long neck like a leaf-seeking dinosaur. Her vocabulary gravitated toward old lady words, like “prudent,” “sensitive,” and “fragile,” which may have explained her devotion to delicate and useless things, like sea dollars, decorative bath soaps, antique thimbles, and maple-syrup candies shaped like Amish women. Choosing one of her crushable collections to bring to school, she’d arrange the items about her during lunch, sitting on the desolate cement stoop outside the computer lab. In keeping with Longstanding Dork Tradition, she always ate alone.

  And then, out of nowhere, Nikki Pellegrini asked to sit with her.

  “Why?” Molly looked up at her, squinting, and Nikki shrugged, struggling to smile. Because I have no other options! (It was all she could do not to scream it out loud). All this week, Carly and Juliet had refused to eat with her. “Sometimes we just need to be alone,” they’d explained, annoyed. Which makes perfect sense, Nikki thought, considering they were eating lunch together, while she was eating alone. She’d hovered around other groups of girls in hopes some kind member might take pity, but they too ignored her (in her presence, they’d grow quiet, communicating solely by eye contact). Not that Nikki blamed them. Everyone knew she was Melissa Moon’s primary suspect (Venice had wasted no time spreading the word). Who’d want to be seen with someone that not one but two popular sophomores happened to hate? It was social suicide.

  As was eating lunch with Molly Berger when everybody else was at the carnival. But, at this point, what’d she have to lose?

  “It’s just . . .” Molly grimaced, stabbing her strawberry-milk box with a stiff white straw. To her left, a horizontally cut turkey sandwich sat neatly on a flattened paper bag. To her right, a collection of small- to medium-sized geodes sparkled purple in the sun. “I don’t think it’s right,” she explained, after a gasping sip of milk, “to ask to eat lunch with me as a last resort.”

  “What makes you think you’re a last resort?” Nikki asked, attempting innocence.

  “Well, because you’ve been ostracized.” Molly shrugged, taking a gigantic bite out of her turkey sandwich. Off of Nikki’s blank look, she continued, “That means you’ve been rejected in the most extreme way possible.”

  “I know what it means,” Nikki lied. A nearby drinking fountain buzzed awake and shuddered, and she shifted her weight from one leg to the other, exhaling a short, impatient breath. “So, can I eat with you or not?”

  Molly winced. “I guess.”

  Nikki swallowed a sigh of relief, mounting the cement steps to the computer lab stoop. “Just a moment,” Molly ordered, popping the latch of a blue-and-gray tackle box. One by one, she wrapped her geodes in sage-green velveteen cloths, packing them inside. Nikki gestured to help, but Molly rejected her offer, hulking over the stones like an overprotective bird. “I’d prefer it if you’d just let me handle them,” she explained in a strained tone. “These stones are very fragile.”

  “Oh.” Nikki’s hand retreated. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Molly resumed loading the stones. When the last one was safely tucked away, she locked the tackle box and set it to the ground, sliding it to the plaster wall with the side of her orange Croc. Satisfied, she looked up at Nikki and smiled. She kind of had a pretty smile if you could ignore the glob of mustard in the corner of her mouth.

  “So,” she said, once Nikki assumed her place next to her on the stoop. She lowered her voice to a confidential level. “Did you do it?”

  “No,” Nikki sighed, peering into a humid baggie of baby carrots. “I don’t know why everyone thinks I did.”

  “I think it has something to do with being a slut,” Molly offered. Nikki gasped, her cornflower blue eyes wide with shock.

  “What?”

  “Not that being a slut means you’d vandalize contests.” Molly ripped into an apricot fruit leather and shrugged. “I mean, that’s like saying, ‘that girl’s obese so she’s more likely to rob banks.’” She snorted with laughter. “Absurd.”

  “But who says that?” Nikki trembled. “Who says I’m a slut?”

  “I don’t know.” Molly tore into her fruit leather and chewed. “People.”

  “But I’m not!” Nikki wailed.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Molly leaned back in her seat and flinched. “I’m not a dork. Does that prevent anyone from saying I’m a dork?”

  Before she could think better of it, a small yet combustible word escaped Nikki’s lips. “But.”

  “But what?” Molly huffed in two hot puffs of strawberry-milk breath. Nikki shook her head, reverting her gaze to her baby carrots. “No,” she persisted, crossing her blotchy pink arms across her oversized M.C. Escher t-shirt, “what were you going to say?”

  “Omigawd-uh!”

  There — in the center of a nearby alleyway, her eyes fixed to the two unlikely lunch companions in appalled horror — stood Carly Thorne. Juliet stood off to one side, her hand clapped to her mouth, and Venice Whitney-Wang leaned against the cinderblock wall, a fuchsia-legging leg kicked behind her, and Dita sunglasses glinting in the sun. Carly closed her mouth, remoistened her lips, and opened it again.

  “You’re eating lunch with her?”

  The world around Nikki seemed to ripple. All she wanted to do was leap to her feet, run toward Carly, and hug her forever. But, in respect for Molly’s feelings, she restrained the impulse.

  “Aren’t you going to the carnival?” Juliet frowned in confusion.

  Nikki beamed. “I just thought —”

  “Not you,” Carly interrupted. “Molly.”

  Nobody moved except for Venice, who lowered her leg to the ground. A sparrow fluttered down to the cinderblock wall, hopped once, and cocked its sleek feathered head in interest.

  “I don’t see the point of carnivals,” Molly started to explain. “They —”

  “Why are you doing this?” Nikki blurted, interrupting Molly’s sure-to-be tedious observation. Her eyes danced between Carly and Juliet, wounded and bewildered. “You guys are supposed to be my friends.”

  “It’s not like we haven’t tried.” Carly folded her arms across her padded chest and stared at the ground. “But it’s kind of like, you’ve made it impossible.”

  “Seriously, Nikki.” Juliet flashed. “This isn’t all about you.”

  “That is so not fair,” Nikki pleaded against all better j
udgment. Nothing annoyed her friends more than accusations of unfairness. Sure enough, Juliet rolled her eyes, readdressing Molly.

  “You want to go on the Moon Bounce?” she asked. “I think there’s this new rule, like, you have to go in pairs of four.”

  “Really?” Molly furrowed her brow in thought, stuffing the remains of her half-eaten lunch into a brown paper sack. One crushed milk box, two mustard-stained husks of sourdough bread, a semi-gnawed fruit leather, and two wax-sealed Baby Bell cheeses later, she replied. “Okay.”

  “But we were going to have lunch!” Nikki reminded her, desperate beyond all reason.

  “We can have lunch tomorrow,” Molly informed her, stuffing her bulging paper lunch sack into her backpack. “If you so desire.”

  Nikki grabbed her by the bony elbow. “I hope you realize,” she croaked with emotion, “they’re only asking you to go on the Moon Bounce to make me feel bad. It’s not ’cause they actually like you.”

  Molly drew herself up and gazed down the length of her narrow nose. Her skin had the blanched quality of uncooked macaroni. Her nostrils were so pink they glowed.

  “You know what?” Her pale eyes winked with disdain. “You’re a really mean person.”

  Before Nikki could defend herself, Molly pivoted the toe of her orange Croc and propelled her wedgie-butt toward the New Nicarettes. The three girls walked slowly, bumping into each other, laughing, taking their time, and Molly loped in their wake, squinting at the sky, and oblivious to her blue-and-gray tackle box, which — in what had to be a historical first — she’d left behind.

  With a shuddering breath, Nikki lifted the box into her lap. She popped the latch, lifted the light plastic lid, and pinched aside a corner of sage-green velveteen fabric, revealing a small corner of the gray stone. She hesitated, bracing for Molly’s frantic return, before lifting the geode from its folds of velveteen. She liked the way it sat inside her palm, the eggish shape and dense weight of it, the way the purple crystals glittered in the sun. She turned the stone over and examined the rock shell, an ordinary gray, scarred in places by more ordinary grays. Before long tears spilled down her cheeks, raining like lemmings from the edge of her chin, splattering to the quiet asphalt, and dissolving everything in sight, even the geode, which she continued to turn in her hand until both sides looked the same.