Pretty Crooked (11 page)

“It means that maybe you and I are just different.”

Cherise’s face dropped and I could feel her hurt as acutely as my own. This was about more than the other girls for her—this was an old wound that was just ripped open.

The waiter came back to take our plates. “All finished?”

I let him take my pizza. I’d lost my appetite. I was numb with grief as I watched the scene unfold around me. It was all slipping away—I was losing everything I’d been so thrilled to have just a few minutes earlier.

“So we’re still going to Armani, right?” Cherise asked, breaking the silence. The question was supposed to be directed at all of us, but Cherise was focused on Kellie, offering a peace branch. “Then back to my house?”

They looked at each other, and I saw something in Kellie’s face harden. “Yeah, I don’t think so. I should probably get going.”

“But what about the records I wanted to play for you?”

“I’m not really in the mood for your music anymore, Cherise. I feel like this shopping trip is suddenly not fun
at all
.”

Kellie was right about the latter, at least. We settled up the bill and split up to go our separate ways. Dread
weighed on me with every step as I realized that things were probably never going to be the same—or at least not like they had been. I couldn’t unhear what I’d just heard. I couldn’t get the image of Kellie’s face, twisted up in spite, out of my head.

Cherise and I made our way back outside to the walkway between shops and I squinted at the sudden brightness. It was sunny, as it was every single day in Paradise Valley, but for some reason the light searing through the cloudless sky came as a painful surprise.

A high-pitched grinding sound was the first thing I heard when I opened the front door. My mom was crouched on the floor in her office; her back was to me but I could see she was surrounded by boxes of documents. The paper shredder was going at full blast, shooting sheets into even strips of ribbons. A knee-high pile of them had accumulated on the floor, while several plastic bags filled with paper remnants sat neatly bundled around the room.

“What’s going on?” I shouted.

“You scared me!” she practically shrieked, whipping around.

“That’s because this machine is so loud. What are you doing?”

“I’m just organizing my files!” she yelled, too loudly this time. She looked harried, her hair all over the place, and she was wearing the same old sweatshirt and cargos
I remembered her wearing the day before.

“It looks like you’re destroying your files!” I yelled back. “Can you turn that thing off?”

She turned off the shredder then and stood up, wiping paper dust on her pants. “What’s up? You look upset.”

I exhaled a despairing sigh as I leaned against her desk for support. “I just found out that some of the people I’ve been hanging out with are secretly a-holes.”

“Your new friends? What’d they do?”

The story came flooding out with a new swell of anger. “They’ve been writing stuff on this stupid blog about these other girls. Making fun of the way they look, calling them names. They call them The Busteds because they’ve been ‘bussed in’ from a poorer neighborhood and they’re on scholarships. I just don’t get it. The other girls didn’t
do
anything to anyone. They’re just not rich.”

Her phone rang. She scowled at it and stood up to leave the room. “Hang on. I need to take this call, okay, honey?”

“Fine. Whatever.” I made sure she could see that I was pissy. This was starting to become a theme; she was always busy lately. And I really needed to talk to her just now. Why couldn’t she just let it go to voice mail?

“I’ll be right back. I promise.”

I wasn’t going to wait around. I went into my room and tried to focus on my reading for Comp, but I was all
balled up inside with rage and sadness and confusion.

A few minutes later, she knocked on my door. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” I said in exaggerated monotone.

“Don’t be mad at me, Willa. I’m sorry we got interrupted. It was—business.” She sat down on the edge of my bed and twisted her hands together. Now that I could see her closer I noticed that her sweatshirt was loose. Had she lost weight? And her skin looked dry and dull. Perhaps she was still adjusting to the Arizona climate. “So about these girls. Maybe you’re being too sensitive. Maybe it was just a joke?”

“I’m not,” I insisted. “And it wasn’t.”

“Well, maybe you should try to stick up for them, then. Tell the bullies that you won’t stand by and watch,” she suggested.

“It’s so much more complicated than that, Mom. I can’t just tell them not to do it.” She was trying to help, I got that—but I was frustrated by her simple answers.

“Why not? I saw a thing about this on TV and they said that bullying usually happens because everyone else just stands around and watches. It’s the bystanders that have to speak up.”

“This isn’t some
Dateline
special. Just forget it.” She might have been younger and cooler than most other mothers of kids my age, but she still sometimes acted like a clueless middle-aged adult. I was starting to regret that I’d brought it up with her at all. What could she
possibly say that would make the situation any easier? Nothing.

Time to change the subject. “Who was on the phone, anyway?” I asked. “Was that your art dealer?”

“Who? Just now? Yeah, he just wanted to touch base about another sale,” she said, chewing on her thumbnail.

“So that’s good news, huh?”

“Uh-huh,” she said absently. Then she picked up the shopping bags I’d dropped in front of my closet. “What’s all this? Did you go shopping again today?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. Lately I’d been stowing bags away so she couldn’t see them, but there was really no point in trying to hide it from her anymore. She’d see me wearing the clothes eventually. And maybe she’d already noticed the emptying safe.

I looked at the bag and thought of the new purchases inside it. The memory of the afternoon came flooding back, a sickening tint shading everything that had originally seemed fun and innocent. So this was what guilt by association felt like.

She looked at me with concern. “It’s a little much, Willa, isn’t it?”

Yes. It was. I could see that now.

The senior bonfire at Valley Prep was supposedly a tradition that dated from the school’s founding in 1952. Valley Prep was full of traditions that harkened back to a time when you could only get into this school if you
had a trust fund and your dad’s name was Biff. That was before they let people like Sierra and Mary and Alicia in.

It was them I thought of the day after I found out the truth about Nikki and Kellie. I was considering skipping the bonfire altogether. I didn’t want to spend another night partying while they were being tormented and laughed at. If that was what the Glitterati were about, I wasn’t going to be a part of it.

All afternoon and evening I’d stalled and stalled, taking a shower, painting my toenails, and brooding while looking out the window in my bedroom. But then there was Cherise to think about. She’d texted me multiple times, wanting an ETA on when she could pick me up. I didn’t want to punish her. She’d done nothing wrong. In fact, she was the best friend I had here.

I needed to do something to help the Buzz victims, something to try to change things. I grudgingly thought about my mom’s suggestion. She was right about bystanders. I’d been too quiet at the mall. I should have spoken up more instead of letting Cherise do all the talking. I could try confronting Kellie and Nikki myself, couldn’t I? A small part of me had already started to fantasize that they would actually listen and apologize for their wrongs and then things could go back to the way they were before.

The more rational part of me knew that was probably too much to ask for, that it would never go down like that. But what was the worst that could happen?

I knew the answer to that: It was what had happened to Cherise over the past twenty-four hours. Kellie and Nikki had been giving her the cold shoulder in school—I saw them barely acknowledging her in the hallway before homeroom. Cherise seemed to take it in stride, talking to them anyway like nothing had happened. Maybe she was used to this kind of thing. Maybe it would just blow over.

So I could go and act like I didn’t care. I could actually try to make myself not care. I could stay home and keep brooding. I could go and try to tell them how I felt and hope that it would somehow influence them to stop doing what they were doing.

Yes, I had options, but none of them were any good.

By the time Cherise was at my door in her Kellie-approved bonfire outfit of a gingham plaid shirt and denim shorts, I had a burning pit in my stomach.

“Nikki and Kellie just texted me—they’re on their way, too,” she said as we walked to her car. She seemed upbeat, like nothing was bothering her. How could that be? It was eating me up inside. “Are you going to Nikki’s after?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“What’s your deal? You seem really tense.”

“I kind of wanted to talk to you about them.”

Her face glowed in the light of the dashboard, the slope of her forehead accentuated by the headband holding back her curls. “What’s up?”

“The ValleyBuzz stuff. I’m just really bugged by it.”

Cherise nodded slowly, but she didn’t look completely surprised. “I know. I am, too.”

“Did you know they were posting on there before yesterday?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. I mean, I wondered. But I was trying to ignore the whole thing.”

This bothered me. I personally would’ve wanted some warning before I got involved with this crew. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t want you to look down on them. I wanted you to hang out with us.” She sighed and fiddled with the car’s air-conditioning vents. “It’s effed up. I know. But they’re not that bad.”

Not that bad? To who
?

We pulled into the parking lot where the tower of wood had been stacked and set aflame. The smell of charred bark wafted through the warm night air, and a crescent moon hung overhead like a burned-out bulb. It was already crowded, students milling everywhere wearing Valley Prep football jerseys with the scorpion mascot. Others had on senior T-shirts:
CLASS OF 2012: GAME OVER
. One of the class officers, wearing flip-flops and a tie, was shouting into a megaphone.

“Well, what should we do?” I asked Cherise plaintively as we got out of the car. I felt like we needed some kind of plan before we saw everyone.

“
We
should do
nothing
,” she argued, almost with
force. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But I thought you were really against this. I talked to Mary and Sierra the other day, and they know it’s Kellie and Nikki. If we don’t do anything and it gets out, people will think we were in on it. I think we should say something.”

She shook her head. “I’m telling you, Willa. I already said something. And you saw what happened. What good would it do?”

We headed toward the marshmallow-and-hot-dog table, where we loaded up on marshmallows on sticks for roasting. We held them over the fire and watched them suddenly puff up, then go brown and soft.

On the other side of the woodpile I could see Mary and Alicia standing at the edge of the fire. They were apart from the crowd as usual, and Sierra was nowhere in sight. Mary had her hands on her hips and she was wearing jeans and a fitted button-down. Alicia, who was tiny, was similarly dressed down, like they were trying not to call attention to themselves. Still, they’d shown up, and good for them. Other people—myself included—might have avoided school functions at this point.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to Cherise, suddenly struck by the urge to clear the air with them, and let them know they had my support.

Before Cherise could say anything, I marched over to where the girls were standing.

“Hey,” I said.

“How’s it going, Willa.” Mary wasn’t smiling like she usually did. Now she regarded me like I was a spy or something. Like I was there to mess with them. Of course she did. All of her experience so far at Valley Prep had taught her to think like that. But my intentions were good. She would see that, right?

“So what are you guys up to?” I tried to sound normal and friendly, but inside my head, the moment felt big and important, like a critical scene in a movie.

“Just roasting marshmallows,” Alicia said. Then she added, a bit snarkily, “Like everyone else here.”

I chose to ignore her tone. “Are you guys going to the game tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said. “I have to work.”

“Probably not,” Alicia said, shrugging.

“But you came tonight,” I said, smiling encouragingly. “That was good.”

“Why
wouldn’t
we?” Alicia asked. “We’re not hermits.” This was going all wrong. I was trying to be sincere and friendly but instead I was implying they were social mutants. Ugh. The last thing I wanted to do was insult them.

“I don’t know. I mean, you just made it sound like you weren’t exactly rah-rah Valley Prep,” I backtracked.

“We’ve got nothing against the school. Hell, they’re paying for our education,” Mary retorted. “But football is stupid.”

“I don’t even know who they’re playing,” I admitted.
Could I be any more of an idiot right now
? “But it’s supposed to be a big game. You should go.”

“Hi, guys. Can you excuse us for a moment?” Cherise said as she grabbed my elbow. I should have been thankful for the emergency rescue, because I was bombing, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to say what I really wanted to say and I watched them over my shoulder as Cherise dragged me away. “What were you doing over there, Willa?”

“I’m just talking to them.”

“That’s not cool,” she hissed. “Look, the girls are going to be here any minute. You saw how Kellie has been icing me out since yesterday.”

“So?”

Cherise confronted me with her hands on her hips. “So, do you want her to do that to you? You just got here. Do you really want to deal with that? And do you really think those girls want to be friends with you, anyway? They know you’re not one of them. Believe me, it’s better just to let it go. It’s not our fault what happened. But it’s not our problem, either.”