KissnTell

Chapter 9

EVERYTHING CHANGES

Vaughn

In the weeks following the incident at Xander Carrington's, the spoiled monsters at Cranbrook unleashed a wave of terror the likes of which we'd never seen.

Everywhere I went there was some obstacle. Once Miller Toff tripped me in front of all the water polo guys, including Xander, and everyone laughed. Another day at lunch, Ava Goldmann and Wes Huntley walked by holding a big plate of refried beans, wondering why they looked so familiar. "Oh, that's right," Ava said, "they spewed out of Vag's ass."I was relieved they didn't pour them all over my head. Changing in the locker room, after gym class, despite my cowering in the corner like the hunchback of Notre Dame, Stella and Odette repeatedly created a whole hullabaloo about my boobs, or lack thereof. "They're like nasty mosquito bites!"Stella would shriek. To top it all off, some nameless douchebag trashed my iPod, which took me a year to buy after saving and saving, ripping it from my grasp and hurling it onto the hardwood floors. So my whole life, walking from class to class, heading to and from school on the bus, was set to the nagging sound of my aching soul, as opposed to the rebel sound of Lorde.

Sometimes I thought I would fold. I really did. I wanted to shut down, click off the emotional side of my brain and become a teenage sociopath. You know the kind who seems super meek and incapable of anything threatening, but secretly steals the neighbors' cats to torture them? The kind with a promising life of serial killing ahead of them? Except that, simultaneously, something else was happening at Cranbrook, and I think probably unrelated to the diarrhea fallout: the small percentage of students who kind of liked us treated us better.

The Monday after Xander's party, Angie Ryu and Lucy Sung from the strings section in band complemented my hair and invited me out for Pinkberry after practice. Since then, we'd been chatting between classes and had become pretty friendly. Teddy Singer, who played clarinet and stood right next to me in orchestra, actually asked me out! He tapped me on the shoulder, squishing his legs together like he was holding in pee, his mouth twisted up. He said, "Wanna eat French fries and ketchup after this?" Maybe my standards were too high, but Teddy Singer had this weird milky breath, so I told him I didn't want any romantic activity to ruin our friendship.

Anais was a little unnerved that people would act so differently just because we changed our hair and makeup. I, on the other hand, ignored whatever depressing implications about the superficiality of mankind these little pockets of happiness conjured and clung for dear life to the silver lining of the dark and stormy cloud that was my life. I was pretty now! And at least some people liked me.

"How much longer are you gonna Bogart my laptop?" Anais whined. "I have homework to do." It was a Wednesday, nearly two weeks after Anais's sixteenth birthday/the worst day of my life. We had made it through half the week, and I was crashing. I had stopped over at her place to unwind and dreamily scan Perez Hilton before heading home to face my parents.

"Just let me procrastinate for ten more minutes," I groaned, clicking to enlarge a picture of Dakota Fanning wearing skinny jeans and cool boots at some nightclub. She looked slender and fresh-faced and happy. She made me think to myself, I want to be like that. Then something clicked: maybe I already was like that. Dakota Fanning was basically our age. She went to high school. Maybe she even got tortured in high school. The only difference was, it didn't matter if she got tortured, because she was Dakota Fanning. She had other stuff going for her.

She starred in movies, got to meet all kinds of cool people at the coolest places. I turned to Anais, who sat on the carpet, surrounded by books, studying her daily planner.