Jeremy tripped and dropped the box. Hats went flying everywhere.
Nice.
“How thoughtful of you, Mrs. Anderson,” Mrs. Ames said, as Jeremy crawled around gathering up baseball caps and colorful sombreros. “But I don’t thint Alexis is the Hat Day type.”
Case closed. Mrs. Ames headed out of the gym.
Mrs. Anderson turned to me, all the peppy rah-rah gone from her voice. “What to do with dear Alexis?” she asked, scanning the room. “Why don’t you . . .”
As long as I was far away from Mrs. Anderson, I’d be fine.
“. . . go help Pepper.”
Pepper?!
“She’s not even in this class,” I protested.
Mrs. Anderson looked triumphant. “Well, Alexis, all of the cheerleaders are helping out today. So why don’t you check in with Pepper and tell her you’ll be thrilled to do anything she needs.”
Thrilled is not the word I would choose.
“It’s not straight!” Pepper said. Her flaming orange hair was mostly tucked under a ridiculous floppy magenta beret, but one stray lock looped down and covered her left eye. She glared at me with the right eye.
I heaved a huge sigh. “Pepper. I swear. The banner. Is straight.”
We’d been on opposite sides of a plastic WELCOME HOME, ALUMNI! banner for probably five minutes, and every time we had it in place, Pepper backtracked and decided it wasn’t good enough.
“It doesn’t look right,” she whined.
“That’s because you’re looking at it with only one eye,” I said. “You have no depth perception.”
She sniffed and rolled her eye.
Let’s get something clear: Pepper Laird is a cheerleader. As such, she is used to bouncing in place and holding her arms in the air for long periods of time.
I, Alexis, am not a cheerleader. In fact, I’m sort of an anti-cheerleader. So while Pepper is out there working on her biceps and triceps and glutes, I am slumping under the bleachers with the rest of the outcasts.
But no way was I going to admit to Pepper that I couldn’t take it. I dropped my half of the banner. “Forget it,” I said. My arms burned as blood poured back through the veins. “This is moronic. I’m not going to do this.”
“We have to!” Pepper said. “And you have to help, or I’ll tell Mrs. Anderson.”
Oh, she definitely would. And then I’d have to face Mrs. Ames for the second time that day. And her goodwill and ability to see a shred of potential in me would probably be all used up.
I settled for doing some arm stretches and making a very angry noise in Pepper’s direction.
“You freak,” she said.
This was not a new concept to me.
“You and your stupid pink hair”—not new either— “and your whole freaky family.”
That part was new.
Because whatever forces separated Pepper and me in the suffocating world of Surrey High School, one thing bound us together, and that was family. Sisters, to be specific. Kasey had been best friends with Pepper’s sister, Mimi, since fourth grade. They were the kind of friends who argue more often than they don’t, but they were still glued together.
“Grow up,” I said. “Leave my family alone.”
Pepper stood up straighter. “As long as your schizoid sister leaves Mimi alone, I’m fine with that arrangement.”
Confusion must have overtaken annoyance in my expression.
“Her arm,” Pepper said.
Mimi had broken her arm at our house, about a month before, but it was an accident. She’d been running down the hall and slipped on a rug as she turned into Kasey’s room. That kind of thing just happens.
Although, come to think of it, we hadn’t seen much of Mimi lately.
“Yeah, so?”
“Your sister broke my sister’s arm,” Pepper said.
“Oh, please.”
“Mimi told me the whole story. She won’t tell our mom because she says she feels bad for Kasey. But I think she’s afraid because your little sister is a violent maniac.”
Okay, so I’m not popular and friendly and I don’t have any friends. But I wasn’t about to let someone stand there and talk smack about my baby sister—who, yes, is sensitive, but, no, is not a violent maniac.
I took a step toward Pepper. She flinched, but she didn’t back away.
“Face it, Alexis. Kasey is a whack job.” She narrowed her eyes. “All my sister tried to do was touch one of her stupid dolls. . . .”
Pepper went on ranting, but I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t back down, but suddenly I didn’t feel like fighting about it either.
Because that one word—dolls—seemed too right.
A lot of people are avid collectors of things you or I would consider stupid, or at least silly—rocks with googly eyes glued to them and seashells for feet. Candles shaped like animals or mythical creatures.
For Kasey, it was dolls.
I don’t even remember when it started. Years ago. Long enough for Kasey, using her meager allowance, every dime of birthday or Christmas money, and who knows what else, to amass dozens of dolls.
And if my sister were ever capable of hurting someone, it would be to protect her precious collection.
Pepper grabbed her end of the banner. “Let’s just do this so I can get away from you,” she said.
“The feeling is mutual,” I said.
We hoisted the banner once again.
“Stop—it’s perfect,” said a voice. I turned to see who had spoken.
Oh, great.
Megan Wiley, poised, self-assured, cocaptain of varsity cheerleading, even though she’s just a sophomore— oh, and my own personal nemesis, more on that in a sec—studied our sign, then sauntered over with a hammer and nails. She hammered both sides into the wall without another word.
Here’s the deal:
I speak up in class, I get sent to the office. Megan speaks up in class, she’s a “strong, assertive model student.” I post a few flyers saying that the vending machines on school property are a sign that our school district has sold out to the corporate-industrial establishment, I get (what else?) Saturday detention. Megan starts a campaign to serve local foods in the lunchroom (oh, and could we pleeeeeease maybe get rid of the soda machines?) and the local newspaper does a write-up about her.
She’s like me, only not. Not like me at all. She’s the golden girl and I’m . . . tarnished.
So forgive me if I hate her a little.
Pepper stalked off while I scanned the gym for a seat that would hide me from the roving eye of Mrs. Anderson, then paused and turned back around to look at the sign (which was, mercifully, straight).
“HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS.”
SURREY ALUMNI
HOMECOMING SCHOLARSHIP BANQUET
WELCOME HOME, ALUMNI!
A few feet away, Megan was looking at it too. Our eyes met.
“I’m not sure I’d give money at a fund-raiser if they couldn’t bother to have it someplace nicer than a high school gym,” she said, turning away before I could answer. Her gaze lingered on the canvas, and I suddenly noticed that she was almost not even wearing a hat. Just a devil-horn headband left over from last Halloween.
“Mm,” I said, and walked away.
I guess, in her own way, Megan really is different from the rest of them.
But I still hate her.
ONCE UPON A TIME, I had a best friend. Her name was Beth Goldberg. Beth and I got in lots of trouble together, but back then, people called it “mischief” and went a little easy on us. Apparently, when it’s two people, it’s quirky and funny, but when it’s a person doing the same stuff on her own, it’s rebellious and antisocial.
I’d always assumed that Beth and I would be friends forever. But then in the middle of eighth grade, the Goldbergs went through the World’s Nastiest Divorce.
Beth went a little nuts.
I don’t blame her. When her dad got involved with his twenty-one-year-old dental hygienist, Beth
got involved with the junk-food aisle at the grocery store. She carried processed snack cakes around the way toddlers carry teddy bears. She gained, like, twenty pounds, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. I figured she’d get back to her usual weight once the shock wore off.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only person who noticed.
May 14 was “Fun and Fit Day” at Surrey Middle School, so the gym was full of booths set up by local health clubs and doctors and dentists and sports leagues, all trying to entice us not to end up as couch potatoes. That part was fine. What wasn’t fine was when the whole school sat down to watch the eighth-grade cheerleaders’ program on physical fitness.
They had a PowerPoint presentation, and it started out okay, if a little stupid. . . . Finding their misspelled words made it kind of fun, actually: “veggetables” and “carbhohydrytes,” and don’t forget to eat plenty of “protene.” Beth and I sat there and laughed. Good times.
Then came the next segment. You know those DO and DON’T pages in fashion magazines? Like, “DO try belting your hideous $900 fuchsia sweater with a ridiculous $400 belt” and “DON’T leave the house with your underwear on the outside of your pants.”
The cheerleaders did that—only they used pictures of kids from our school.
“DO exercise regularly”—insert photo of several cheerleaders looking really pretty as they pretend to lift weights.
“DON’T sit on the sidelines in gym class.”
The picture that went with this one had a black bar over the kid’s eyes, just like in a magazine, but everyone could tell it was Javier Delgado, who’d been overweight since kindergarten.
That’s when most people started laughing nervously.
And that’s when Beth and I stopped laughing.
“DO eat lots of fresh produce.” A shot of Kira Conroy and Megan Wiley daintily eating a salad outside the lunchroom.
“DON’T go back for seconds in the lunch line.”
And there it was.
A picture of Beth.
Yeah, there was a black bar over her face, but it was obviously her. She had her favorite rainbow-striped sweater on—the really expensive one from Nordstrom, the one she loved to wear even if it was tight and sometimes rode up a little to show off her new Twinkie stomach.
Beth didn’t want to come back to school after that. She got out of her mom’s car a minute before first bell, ate lunch in the main office, and got special permission to leave five minutes before final bell. Probably because Mrs. Goldberg and Javier Delgado’s mom threatened to sue the pants off the school board.
The cheerleaders got a slap on the wrist. A bunch of us started a petition to keep the high school from letting them on the junior varsity squad. We had hundreds of signatures, including a lot from teachers and parents. The JV coach at Surrey High agreed and barred the whole team from tryouts.
But then the varsity cheerleaders decided to stand up for their sisters. And they invited just about the whole troupe to skip JV and join their team.
That was right around when Beth and her mom put their house on the market and started packing up to move to Florida.
So now, not only did my best friend leave, but the cheerleaders and their mindless followers assumed I was personally responsible for the petition (which, yeah, I was) and started being openly rude to me—shutting doors in my face, leaving nasty notes on my desk and in my locker, making fun of me when I could obviously hear them.
That’s when I began keeping really quiet in class, and finding ways to show the other kids I wasn’t afraid of them—like staring them straight in the eye when they looked at me, taking a step toward them when they talked to me, or walking right up to them and getting in their personal space if I heard them say my name. Saying the meanest things I could think of whenever I had the chance—repeating rumors, embellishing them. I found out that Kira Conroy had been arrested for shoplifting at the mall, and made sure everybody knew about it. The girl who’d had five beers on New Year’s Eve and peed her pants, the girl who tripped and fell off the stage at the Miss Teen California pageant—I shared those stories the moment I heard them.
All’s fair in war, right?
So suddenly I wasn’t a nobody anymore.
I was a somebody.
Somebody everyone was afraid of.
Since Megan Wiley was the captain of the cheerleaders, the school withheld her Student of the Year award. Seeing how she’s always been star of the student body and undisputed queen of the cheerleaders, I can only imagine the whole Fun-and-Fit presentation was her idea in the first place. And it’s not like she’d break formation and say otherwise, even if it wasn’t.
Beth and her mom moved the Saturday after the last week of school. We tried to stay in touch—we really did. But I guess going to a ritzy private school changes your priorities. All I know is that we swore we’d talk once a week, and it took about three months for that plan to dissolve into nothing. When Beth started talking about going on the Zone diet and wanting a Prada purse (pardon me, bag), I knew that was the beginning of the end. And when I dyed my hair pink last year, it was the end of the end. So.
Since Beth left, I haven’t really had a best friend.
I guess I don’t have any real friends at all.
I mean, there’s Kasey. She’s thirteen—two years younger—so if you believe the greeting card commercials, we should have this special bond or something. We get along all right, but once she hit middle school, I started to feel less like her friend and more like her security blanket.
There was a time when we used to hang out—Kasey, me, Beth, even Mimi—goofing off and watching movies. But gradually, my formerly funny and cool sister morphed into a neurotic, oversensitive, doll-obsessed mess. Now our vibe is pretty much “big bad sister protecting timid little sister.” So until the greeting card companies start making cards that say “YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN THERE WHEN I WAS EITHER SCARED OR BORED,” our relationship doesn’t measure up to Hallmark’s standards.
There’s one group I hang out with at school, but their attitude is getting tiresome. My secret name for them is the Doom Squad. Everyone assumes they’re morbid and strange, so they do their best to live up to the hype. Some of them are really nice, and I think they could be okay . . . if they would just stop trying so hard.
I mean, just because you don’t want to be a cookie-cutter clone doesn’t mean you have to wear a spiky collar and dress like a vampire wannabe. In the first place, I’m too lazy to put that much effort into my appearance, and in the second place, I’m really paranoid about wearing nonmatching blacks, so I usually end up in jeans and a T-shirt.
After history, I stopped by my locker. Lydia Small, who might as well be the Doom Squad poster child, wandered up and rested her forehead on the locker next to mine. She spends a lot of time and energy trying to give people the impression that she’s too emo and gothic to be interested in anything. Still, I did notice she was wearing a wedding veil that she’d shredded and glued a bunch of plastic spiders on to.
Lydia is rude and overbearing and pretentious, and to be honest, there are actually several people I’d rather hang out with than her. But she’s the one who always seems to appear out of thin air. And because of her big old attitude, people tend to do what she says. So when she walks over at lunch and says, “Move, worm,” to whoever’s sitting next to me, they move.
In spite of my misgivings, Lydia and I had been hanging out a little lately, going to see movies, people-watching at the mall, ending up next to each other at lunch. She was drawn to me, like a moth to a porch light. In fact, sometimes I suspected it was my ambivalence about her that made her so eager to hang out.
She wasn’t best friend material, but I was getting used to having her around.
“You won’t believe what Pepper Laird just said to me,” I said. Lydia was quiet for a second. I waited for her to say something sympathetic.
“Ugh,” she said. A fair start. As I drew in a breath to elaborate, Lydia widened her eyes. “Sabri
na Woodburn dyed her hair black. Who does she think she is, Morticia Addams? She’s in marching band . . . What a wannabe.”
“Weren’t you in Glee Club until the middle of last year?” I asked.
Lydia sputtered. “That’s totally different.”
“Sure,” I said. “Keep telling yourself that.”
Now, see, if somebody talked to me that way, I would tell them exactly where they could put their opinion, and then I would assume the friendship was over. But Lydia just pouted and looped her arm through mine.
We started walking toward homeroom together. As we passed a group of cheerleaders, Lydia stuck her tongue out at them and clicked her tongue piercing against her teeth.
They drew back in a scandalized herd. “Oh, that is so mature,” one girl said.
As we kept walking, the crowd seemed to thin a little. I spotted Megan Wiley leaning up against a locker, talking seriously to a girl in a pink cowboy hat who was crying so hard her mascara ran down her cheeks. The girl was Emily Rosen. I had Spanish with her. She was nice.
I planned to drag Lydia right past without stopping, but she saw the tears and came to a screeching halt.
“Heeey, Em!” she called.
“What are you doing?” I asked under my breath, as both Megan and Emily looked at us.
“I hear you had a big night with Rory Henderson,” Lydia said sweetly. “Gonna have to give that promise ring back to your daddy, huh?”
Emily’s face froze for a moment, and then she was bawling again. I clamped a hand on Lydia’s arm as Megan shot a dirty look in our direction.
The only thing that saved us was the swaggering arrival of Rory Henderson himself. Rory’s only popular because his dad is a rich lawyer and his mom used to be the weather girl on channel twelve. He’s not really good-looking, and his entourage is made up of goons who laugh at everything he says, even though none of it is funny.
“Hi, Rory, you big stud!” Lydia cooed, and he gave her a half-second of a smile. She dissolved into giggles. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Megan glaring.
“God, Lydia, you’re so obnoxious!” I hissed.