Pretty Crooked (9 page)

As we watched, I expected to see him zero in on the pack of girls in skimpy dresses standing near the gazebo, but he walked past them and kept on going to where Tre was sitting. He and Tre exchanged some sort of greeting and Aidan sat down with him. These two were friends?

Then, without warning, he turned to look in our direction, as if he sensed us watching him. Cherise waved nonchalantly, and I wanted to hide, but what was I going to do, jump behind Cherise?

He waved back, and he was looking right at me. I smiled through the glass.

“He’s got it bad for you,” Cherise said.

“Naw,” I said, blushing. “He’s a player.”

Still, when he got up from the wall, and seemed to be headed in our direction, I gripped the window ledge for support. I tried to catch a glimpse of myself in the glass. Did I look okay? He was coming closer.

Before he got to the house, he turned, though, and stopped to talk to someone else, a guy that I’d never seen before.

Oh well. Maybe I scared him away
.

I let out a soft sigh that I told myself was relief.

“Must be that time!” Cherise exclaimed, interrupting
my thoughts. “Here comes the ritual chugathon.”

Outside, people were cheering as a kid in a Prep hoodie gulped down a cup of beer and started on another.

“Let’s go dance and then we’ll check on Kellie,” Cherise said.

She took my hand and guided me back toward the living room, where the moving crowd had swelled and was going crazy. I’d always wondered what these kinds of parties were like. This was the first time in my entire history of moving from town to town and school to school that I’d been invited to one. Now here I was in Kellie Richardson’s house, at the epicenter of Valley Prep social life. I let the room and all the sensations in it—the lights, the moving bodies, the music—take over.

Life couldn’t get better than this, could it?

CHAPTER SEVEN

“COULD THIS BE any more painful?” I asked out loud, to no one in particular.

We were running laps around the school track. It was at least one hundred degrees—I could’ve sworn I saw shimmering mirages of puddles on the asphalt ahead. I was sort of getting used to the dry heat, but it still made me feel like one of those spotted geckos I’d seen tucking in between rocks on the side of the road. Hiding until nightfall wasn’t really an option, though, as Ms. Lonergan, our pixie-haired, windbreaker-clad teacher, urged us on periodically with her whistle and cries of, “Keep it moving, people—stillness kills!”

I hadn’t participated in much physical education in the past, unless you counted the halfhearted attempts at dodgeball and square dancing my public schools called gym class. Valley Prep, with its walls of trophies, regulation-size golf course, and spalike locker rooms
with saunas and Jacuzzis, was on an entirely new level of sportage. I thought I was in good shape from all the biking, but apparently running required a different set of muscles because I was finding it difficult to keep up.

“Tell me about it.” Mary Santiago answered my call, panting and clutching at her side. Her dark hair was pulled high in a ponytail elastic, but now some damp ringlets were sticking to her neck, and her smooth cheeks were reddened in blotches. We were about the same height—short—so we fell into step easily next to each other. “I have a serious cramp.”

As soon as she said it, I felt a stitch pulling at my right ribs. If it was the power of suggestion, it was an exceptionally painful, exceptionally persuasive suggestion. “Oh no,” I said. “Is that what that is?”

“No slacking, ladies!” Ms. Lonergan yelled from the bleachers.

“But we have cramps,” Mary said.

Drew Miller, a peripheral member of the Glitterati, snickered as he ran by us, his bristly shaved head pink with the exertion. “Get some Midol. Better yet, get some Vicodin and share it with me.”

“Not that kind, idiot,” I said.

“Then walk with your hands over your head,” Lonergan said. “But keep it moving. I’m looking for an eight-minute mile.”

Eight minutes
? Had the spandex squeezed too much blood to her head?

Mary and I walked as the others kept jogging. Her friend Sierra passed us, slowing down. “You okay?”

Mary waved her on. “You can keep going. I’m just taking a break.”

Sierra gave her a skeptical look but continued on.

“I think I hate running,” I said, wiping my face in the crook of my elbow.

“Me too. We should try out for volleyball, because I heard they don’t make you run so much. You know, if you play a team sport you don’t have to take gym.”

This was news to me. “But I don’t know how to play volleyball.”

“How hard can it be?” She kicked at some gravel on the track, sending it flying across the ground. “People play it in bikinis. I’d give up a body part to never have to do another suicide sprint.”

“I’m with ya there,” I said.

“Plus my college counselor said it would be good for my record. Colleges like the whole team-sport thing.”

“You met with a counselor already? I haven’t done that yet.” At VP, where everyone was destined for academic greatness, you were supposed to start planning for college from day one, but as far as I knew, the official college conferences started in October.

“I asked if they could see me in the first week. I didn’t want to lose any time.” She shrugged, looking a little self-conscious, like I would think she was a nerd. Actually, I was impressed. “I came here to work—my school
in Phoenix didn’t have such a great track record. And if I want to keep my scholarship, I need to do really well. Like three-point-five or better so I can get into college, and then medical school, hopefully.”

I nodded, feeling a pang of guilt. Mary seemed so driven about her future and I really hadn’t given the matter much thought. My mom, of course, had a grand plan for me involving an East Coast college with a leafy campus and a mountain of turtleneck sweaters. All along, I’d been telling myself that I was so busy just settling in that I wasn’t ready to deal with the bigger picture, that I had plenty of time to worry about college or my future. But the real reason was that I couldn’t bear to imagine starting over in yet another new place—especially without my mom.

“I mean, if the whole doctor thing didn’t work out, I wouldn’t mind being a costume designer for TV.” She made a couture pose with sucked-in cheeks. “I’m obsessed with
Project Runway
. I wish Tim Gunn was my father.”

I cracked up, imagining him working VP’s halls. “I don’t know if he’d come to your volleyball games.”

“Seriously, I love him. I love clothes. These girls here are so lucky. Most of them never wear the same thing twice. I know because I’m watching. Even you. Like that shirt you’re wearing today. It’s awesome.”

“Thanks,” I said, my guilt fermenting as I looked into her earnest heart-shaped face. There was no jealousy, no
hate, no ickiness in it at all, and somehow that made me feel worse about my sudden reversal of fortune—our fancy house, the tuition to this school, all of my recent purchases. It was the injustice that struck me. So I was lucky and Mary wasn’t. Were we both just supposed to accept that?

“Where’d you get it?”

“Neiman Marcus,” I said, pulling absentmindedly at my gym shirt, which was the same as hers, a white polo.

She whistled. “Nice if you can afford it.”

“It was on sale,” I added, which wasn’t true. Why was I so uncomfortable all of a sudden? “My friend kind of talked me into it.”

“Which one was it? You can say. I know you hang out with those girls Nikki and Cherise and Kellie, right? I heard that girl Kellie has two different cars.”

“I don’t know,” I said, never having heard this myself.

Ms. Lonergan blew her whistle again and everyone dropped back and headed for the locker rooms. We’d completed the mile in a record thirteen minutes—that was a record for lame slugs, maybe. Ms. Lonergan advised us to practice after school.

“Practice? Yeah, right,” Mary said, when we’d walked away. “So I guess you were at Kellie’s big party last weekend.”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved the conversation was moving away from clothes. “It was cool. You guys should’ve gone.”

“No, no. Not my scene.” She shook her head quickly just as Sierra was joining up with us.

“What are you guys talking about?” Sierra asked, looking at both of us suspiciously through her heavy-lidded eyes.

“Willa’s friends. The Glitterati. Willa, you know Sierra, right?” Mary asked.

I’d met her that day in the lunchroom but even if I hadn’t, I would’ve known who she was, as I did most people at Valley Prep. It was almost embarrassing to pretend you didn’t. But if Sierra remembered meeting me, she did not seem particularly friendly. In fact, there was some twisted-up sneering action happening on her face.

“Ah, yes, the Glitterati,” Sierra said slowly, trilling out the syllables.

My face must have shown my bewilderment because she broke out into a sarcastic expression of shock. “Don’t tell me you haven’t read the Buzz blog.”

“Once or twice,” I stammered, feeling her accusing gaze like a laser. So they
did
know about it. Why was she looking at me like that? It’s not like I wrote anything on there. It’s not like I even followed the thing.

But that didn’t matter. If I’d seen that stuff written about me, I’d think everyone was against me. I would be totally humiliated. And that’s what I could feel radiating off Sierra now, hot and prickly.

“So you know that your friends have been writing nasty stuff about us since the first day of school.” She
flung a towel over her shoulder and stared me down, her brown eyes almost daring me. My heart was pumping faster than when I was on the track. “If you took your head out of your ass long enough, you’d see that people laugh at us in the hallway. Or maybe you’d have heard that Alicia was crying the other day in the girls’ room after someone called her a Busted to her face and shoved her.”

Her words were like a slap. I pulled in a breath. I hadn’t heard that about Alicia. Could it be true? Even if it was, it wasn’t my friends. There was no way. I’d be the first to admit that Kellie and Nikki made snooty comments sometimes, but they would never go out of their way to torment someone or incite violence. And Cherise had made it plenty clear that she was not a fan of the Buzz. My brain was working quickly trying to process this information and make sense of it. No. It couldn’t be.

Meanwhile, Sierra was still glaring at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I think you’ve got it wrong. I really doubt it was them that wrote any of that…”

“No,
you’ve
got it wrong.” Her eyes narrowed and she pointed an accusatory finger at me. “I know it’s them. Those girls are raging
bitches
.”

Okay, that really,
really
burned. I looked at Mary, hoping she would say something. She seemed more reasonable than Sierra, who clearly had a chip on her shoulder.

“We’re pretty sure,” Mary said, almost apologetic.
“They act all phony to us in front of other people but I can just tell by the way Kellie looks at me, like I’m something on the bottom of her shoe.”

“I don’t know, you guys. They’re totally nice people.”

“That’s because you fit in with them,” Sierra said. “You’re white like they are, and rich.”

“I’m not rich,” I said, dialing the combination to open my locker. It was too complicated to explain my situation, but I’d never been a rich person, and I still didn’t think of myself that way. “And that’s ridiculous. I mean, Cherise isn’t white.”

Sierra smiled ironically. “You can be white without being Caucasian, you know? Anyway, I’m just saying. Maybe you don’t know them like you think you do. Maybe it’s time you open your eyes.” She slammed her locker shut with a metallic clang. “Unless, of course, you don’t really want to see.”

Sierra huffed off to the shower, leaving Mary and me standing there, facing each other over the center bench of the locker room.

“I’m sorry she’s acting like that,” Mary said. “She doesn’t mean anything.”

“But it wasn’t me,” I said, flopping down on a bench, confused and defeated, battling a swirl of emotions that included sympathy for all they were going through, hurt that Sierra had basically called me a clueless gringa, and a tiny bit of feeling sorry for myself that I was being falsely accused.

“I believe you. It’s just—Sierra and Alicia and I have been friends for a long time. I convinced them to come here with me, and Sierra really didn’t want to. Her dad’s been out of work. They’re struggling to get the books she needs. She just looks around and feels out of place, you know?” Mary unwound her hair from her ponytail elastic, so it fell full and fluffy around her face. “And then all this stuff with the blog. She’s threatening to transfer. I keep telling her to stick it out, that none of this is gonna matter when we’re at college, or ten years from now, when we’re living in our own fancy houses in the Valley.”

“It won’t,” I said, but I heard the hypocrisy in my own words. Why should I tell her to suck it up and wait for a better life when I was all about the here and now—parties at Kellie’s, giggling lunches in the dining hall, and afternoons at the mall? But I deserved to be happy, too, didn’t I? It wasn’t my fault they were unlucky, was it?

Mary ran a brush though her hair in even strokes. “I know. We just need to be patient, is all.” She smiled at me, but her smile seemed to catch at the edges. “It’s just high school, right?”

Friday mornings at Valley Prep began with assembly. It went like this: The headmaster, Mr. Page, got up in front of everyone and said some things. Then the Head of Upper School, Mrs. Fields, got up and said some things. Then the mic was turned over to the student council president to make announcements about upcoming meetings. And
then it devolved into general chaos as everyone and their brother with a club or cause jumped in.

As far as I was concerned, assembly was actually a pretty good time. At least it ate up a nice chunk of minutes between first period and lunch.

On this particular Friday I was running late—I’d overslept—so when I rolled into the auditorium, there were only a few seats left. I spotted one next to Tre Walker and sat down. He was wearing an orange hoodie and fiddling with his phone, which was not allowed during assembly or any class at Prep after there had been some cheating episodes a few years back. But I’d seen lots of kids sneaking them anyway. It was a rule that was only rarely enforced, it seemed.