Pretty Crooked (12 page)

“It is, though,” I insisted. “Don’t you see that? As long as we hang out with the Glitterati, it’s like we’re behind it.”

“You don’t know Kellie like I do.” Cherise pulled on her earring nervously. “It’s just easier to stay on her good side. I know it’s lame, but seriously. Trust me.”

What happened to the girl who once gave Kellie the
beat-down, I wondered? Or even the girl I’d glimpsed at the café? What had happened to Cherise over the years to make her so afraid? Whatever it was, it depressed me.

I stared up at the sky, where little trails of smoke seemed to be curling around the stars. I knew Cherise was saying what she thought was the truth, but I wasn’t sure I believed her.

“Hey, guys,” Nikki said, coming up from behind Cherise, her hair bouncing high in a ponytail. Drew Miller was with her in his lacrosse jacket, his scrawny shoulders not much broader than Nikki’s, though he always appeared to take up more room—maybe that was ego.

“Look what we’ve got. I swiped it from my dad. It’s an heirloom.” Nikki produced a square silver flask from the pocket of her suede jacket and handed it to Cherise. “Isn’t it pretty?”

Cherise took a swig, then passed the flask to me. I hesitated.

“It’s vodka,” Nikki said to me, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. In them, I glimpsed the gossiping snob I’d seen the other day, and my stomach soured. “Take it. It’s good.”

“No, thanks. I’m just going to stick with my marshmallow.” I turned back to the fire and let it toast over the flame. I was hoping it would sound like a rejection, but it came out silly and prudish.

“Little miss purity over here,” Nikki snorted. “S’mores
are like five thousand calories, you know.”

“I’m not on a diet,” I said.

Kellie emerged next to Nikki, teetering as usual on ridiculously high heels, and draped her arms around Nikki and Cherise. “Hey, byatches.”

Look who’s talking
. Everything she did seemed to be sinister now, especially the way she’d sashayed across the parking lot like she didn’t have a care in the world. No, changing her was hopeless. And so was pretending I didn’t care, because I was furiously pedaling through my angry thoughts as I stood there and watched her.

I was just going to have to give up the parties, the shopping, and everything else that went along with my Glitterati status. Pretty much exiling myself to social Siberia. But, hey, at least I’d be able to live with myself.

“Hey, Kellie,” Cherise responded brightly.

So I guessed everything was okay with them now? Just like that? A forlorn vision of me sitting alone in the dining hall flashed through my head. Would Cherise choose them over me if it came to that? I was afraid to hear the answer to that question.

A flame burst in my peripheral vision. When I turned back, I saw my marshmallow had caught on fire. I tried to extinguish it but it was too late—it had already turned into a lump of coal, so I threw the whole thing into the flames.

“Nasty,” Nikki said.

“This place is beat,” Kellie said. “I say we go back
to your house, Nik. Who are we still waiting for?” She twirled a lock of hair and frowned as she surveyed the crowd.

“You could ask those Busted girls,” Drew Miller said, snickering. “I think I saw them here earlier.”

“Did you see what they were wearing? It was like they walked here off the streets. Could they be any more ghetto?” Kellie said.

“Not everybody wears Jimmy Choos to a parking lot. And they’re not ghetto,” I said, unable to control myself. But it didn’t feel good. Because now that the anger had spewed out I feared it was going to engulf me completely.

“I’m sorry. Where do they live, then?” Kellie asked, fake-sweetly.

“I don’t know where
they
live. But
they
have names, you know.” My indignant rage sounded small and ineffectual out here in the open.

I could feel something pinching my arm hard. I looked sidelong at Cherise, who was giving me the eye, wordlessly warning me to cut it out.

“Oh well, thanks for pointing that out. See, I thought they were just nobody skanks.” Kellie turned back to Nikki. “Are we ready or what?”

Nice job. You really made your case
.

“Where’s Aidan?” Nikki asked. “I thought you invited him.”

“He was going to Scottsdale tonight, for some art thing,” Kellie said. And I remembered then that he
had asked me to go with him to that art thing.
What I wouldn’t give right now to be in Scottsdale
.

“Are you guys coming with us? I don’t know if Drew can fit all of us in his car…” Nikki’s voice trailed off.

“We’re coming,” Cherise said firmly, staring at me.

“If you guys can sit on laps, it’ll be fine,” Drew said. We circled around the fire, moving through the crowd. The light was primal and flickering, and it felt like we were on our way to an ancient sacrificial slaughter.

“Maybe you should just drop me off,” I whispered to Cherise. My mood was worsening and I saw no point in hanging out. I especially had no interest in snuggling up in Drew’s car like besties.

Kellie and Nikki and Drew had skipped ahead of us, passing the flask between them. On the other side of the fire, I could see Mary and Alicia, standing with Tre and holding steaming cups of hot chocolate. Alicia was telling them a story with animated gestures and the rest of them were laughing. It looked fun. I wanted to be over there.

Tre’s eyes locked on mine as we passed. They were a few yards away but I could feel his stare like something cold and precise, a thermometer or a bicycle tire gauge, reading me.

I was ashamed to be trotting off to Drew’s car with the rest of them, knowing that they probably thought I was going along with everything the Glitterati did, including the mean posts. They probably thought I’d
gone over to them earlier on some kind of stupid dare. I felt like a phony. And hadn’t I just sworn off hanging out with Kellie and Company a few minutes ago? Already I was copping out. Pathetic.

Cherise’s grip on my arm tightened. “C’mon, Willa,” she whispered back. “We don’t have to stay long.”

Drew had already started up his Beamer and was flashing the lights at us to hurry up. I knew what side I wanted to be on, and this wasn’t it.

Not knowing what to do, I waved good-bye to Trey, Mary, and Alicia. The girls didn’t even seem to see me. Tre gave us a nod, which only made me feel worse as we buckled into Drew’s backseat and sped out of the parking lot to the next big party.

CHAPTER NINE

MY MOM WAS out—volunteering at the art center, her note to me said. I flung my bag down, folded up the note, and poured myself a glass of lemonade. I was still in my pajamas, and I sank down into the couch in front of the television with my drink, bleary-eyed from sleep deprivation.

I’d spent the night at Cherise’s, where we’d stayed up until four, listening to her records on headphones. Her mom made us pancakes in the morning before Cherise dropped me off at my house.

It would have been a perfectly fine night if we’d just been hanging out there the whole time. But we hadn’t.

We’d stayed at Nikki’s until one thirty. It was really just a bunch of people playing drinking games. One of Drew Miller’s lacrosse thug friends spilled beer all over Mr. Porter’s felted casino table and Nikki had a melt-down and locked herself in her bedroom. Kellie spent
most of the night on her iPhone, texting with some guy from UA. At the end of the night, Nikki and Drew had hooked up, cringingly, on her living room couch in front of everyone. It was beat. Even Cherise agreed with me that we should’ve stayed in.

What haunted me most was that scene in the parking lot as we were leaving the bonfire. I felt like I’d made several mistakes. I should have let Mary and Alicia know the truth—that I knew. I should have confronted Nikki and Kellie right there and then and refused to go with them. Why did I care what they thought? Why was I such a wimp?

Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? I’d loved being part of the Glitterati over the past several weeks, and it was hard to shut the door on that and accept that it was over.

Even harder was knowing that by rejecting them, I was also opening myself up to ridicule. Who knew what lay in store for me in the hallways, or what kind of comments would end up on the blog? I wished I could just steel myself against it. I wished I was as tough as Mary and Sierra and Alicia, who, despite it all, seemed to hold their heads high. No, I was as soft as Kellie’s weekly manicured hands.

I rubbed my eyes and pulled our old afghan over my legs, letting its warm wool fringe hang over the edge of the cushion. Sometimes, on a weekend, my mom and I would have a pj’s-’til-five day. We’d set ourselves up on the couch, each taking an end with our feet crossing in
the middle, a bowl of popcorn set strategically between us on the floor.

It was a lot less fun on my own, and this being Saturday, there was nothing much on at all—a few cartoons for kids, some politicians on talk shows, and random sports like cricket and fishing. Robotically, I scrolled through the channels with the remote.

“This will change everything,” a short lady with dark hair proclaimed, so confidently that I stopped to see what she was talking about. “You’re going to be a different person.”

I propped myself up on my elbow and set the controller on my lap. It was one of those cable shows where someone gets secretly nominated by their friends for a makeover and a team of stylists shows up at the person’s house to ransack her closet.

The other woman was thin and attractive but dowdily dressed in a college sweatshirt and baggy shorts. She had tears in her eyes and her voice quavered as she said, “I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“Oh, but you are,” the host assured her. “Guys, let’s take Melanie on a little shopping expedition.”

The show flicked into a montage of scenes: Melanie walking down the streets of a city, which I assumed was New York. Melanie in a trendy store, frowning at a fuchsia-and-orange dotted sweatshirt. Melanie coming out of a dressing room in a slim-fitting navy pencil skirt and matching jacket. Melanie scurrying down
the sidewalk to another store. Melanie coming out of a dressing room in slightly flared jeans. Melanie piling up clothes on her arm to carry over to the register. Melanie emerging onto the street again with several bags of purchases.

“Well, let’s take a look at Melanie now,” the host said. “Melanie, come on out.”

Melanie appeared on the stage, wearing a flattering, sexy red dress and nude-colored heels, smiling broadly. Her hair had been trimmed and blown out so that it fell neatly on her shoulders, and her makeup, in strong neutral colors, highlighted her cheekbones and wide eyes.

When the crowd’s cheers died down, the host turned to her miracle makeover guest. “So, what do you think?”

“It’s just … incredible,” Melanie said, her face still registering the shock of her transformation. “I never knew I could look this way.”

The host nodded approvingly with a somewhat maniacal grin.

“But the best part is that I feel different.... I used to feel so bad about the way I looked but now I can look in the mirror and see that I’m letting the best part of myself show through. I’ve gotten a new job. I’m dating again. It’s a fresh start for me, and this new confidence—well, it’s really like being reborn.”

The show broke to a commercial and I lay back on the couch, thinking about clothes and how having Kellie lavish all that attention on my looks had made me feel
special. How it had improved my life in some small but essential way—for a time, at least, I could see so many more possibilities to who I was and who I could be. The new clothes made me feel like I could be a new person here, a popular girl, someone who blended in in all the right ways. And having control over that, in a place like Paradise Valley, where money was everything, was a different kind of power.

Then, the idea hit me all at once: If I could somehow give Mary, Sierra, and Alicia access to some nicer things, maybe they wouldn’t get teased as much. Maybe they’d feel more confident and fit in better at Valley Prep, or at least they’d have a choice. I’d be evening out the playing field, and then Nikki and Kellie wouldn’t be able to make fun of them anymore. It would be a chance to start over. To set things right.

I could be their fairy godmother, I thought gleefully, and make sure they had everything they’d ever need. Like the host of that show. I’d have to find a way to keep it secret, of course. It would look like charity, and no one would want to accept that from someone they knew, let alone another kid in school.

All it would take was some cash. Which they didn’t have—but I did.

I leapt off the couch and dashed into my mom’s room. Her gigantic closet was mostly empty—as I said, she herself was not much of a shopper—and the safe was just where it always was, under some shoe boxes on the floor.

I knelt down and tried the combination. I tugged on the door but the lock didn’t give. I tried it again, thinking I must have made a mistake. It had worked just a few days earlier. No go. I tried a third time. And a fourth.

“What are you doing in my closet?” my mom asked, her distrusting tone its own kind of alarm.

She’d startled me. My heart was racing, and I scrambled up to my feet. “I was just—what happened to the safe?”

“What do you mean?” She looked panicked, her brow creased and her eyes darting quickly as she came closer. “Is it gone?”

She plunged forward as if diving into a pool and pushed past me to look, so that I was pressed up against her hanging clothes.

“No, it’s here.” I showed her. “But I just tried it and couldn’t get it open.”

She surveyed the safe and patted the top of it, as if to prove to herself it hadn’t really disappeared. Her face relaxed a little as she turned back to me. “That’s because I changed the combination.”

“You did? How come?” I demanded.

She shook her head disapprovingly. “You’ve been abusing the system, Willa. I gave you the combination because I wanted you to have some freedom here, but I didn’t mean you could take out hundreds every week to spend on clothes.” She ran a hand over her hair. She had dark circles under her eyes, like she’d been up late
at a party, too. Her skin was as sallow as it had been the other day. “We need to be conservative about our spending for a while, now that I’m paying for this house and the tuition.”