One Night That Changes Everything

Chapter Five

I make my way back to Emily and Samantha, my head spinning from the warmth of the club and the buzz of the alcohol and the shock of what just happened. 

"What did he say, what did he say?" Emily asks. She's out of her seat and jumping around hopping back and forth from one foot to the other back and forth on her high sliver sandals.

"He said," I say "that  I have to ask that guy to dance."

"What guy?" Samantha asks. I point him out. 

"Oooh, he's cute," Emily says. "Lucky bitch." 

"That doesn't make sense," Samantha says obviously a little quicker on the uptake than Emily. "Why would they ask you to ask that guy to dance?"

"I don't know," I say, staring  at him. "maybe he's a crazy stalker or something, and they know if I ask him to dance I'll end up in a dumpster somewhere, killed and dismembered."

But as soon as the word are out of mouth , I realize that's not the reason. And that's because I remember something. Something from my purple notebook. Something I wrote last year, one night after Amy came home from Cure and it seemed like she had a really, really fun time. And that was, "Show up at Cure in a sexy outfit and ask the hottest guy there to dance."

And then I get it. The 318s have somehow decided to make me do the things that are in my notebook. All the things I'm afraid of. The things I've been writing since the seventh grade. And if I don't, they're going to post the notebook online, and everyone at school, no everyone with an Internet Connection, will know all my secrets.  For a second, it feels like my throat swallows up my heart, and my breath catches in my chest. There's only one thing left to do. I put my head in my hands ans start to cry.

8:03 p.m.

This whole thing is pretty much my own fault. I mean, if I hadn't been stupid enough to think that Justin Bieber really wanted to date me, then I wouldn't be in this mess. But when he showed up at my job that day, he looked so cute and he seemed so nice and I guess I wanted to believe it so badly and so I did.

I work part-time at a paintball park, so it wasn't like I'd never had a hot guy come in before. in fact, it seemed like all we got there were hot guys. Of course most of them didn't pay any attention to me, and a lot of them had, you know, rage problems which is why they were there playing paintball in the first place.

But something about Justin was different. The way he leaned against the front counter and talked to me, the way he asked me tons of questions about paintball even when it became obvious that he already knew what he was doing.

Of course I knew who Justin was- but I'd never actually paid much attention to him. He was the guy other girls drooled over, the kind of guy who'd go for my sister Amy. I never really let myself crush too much on guys like that- they were to be admired from afar, like a painting or an actor on TV.

After Justin played a round of paintball, he came back into the shop and spent the day with me, talking and laughing and getting me sodas from the snack bar.  And when he asked me what time I got off work and if I wanted to hang out, I said yes. So he took me out for dinner and even walked me to my door when he dropped me off. The next morning at school, he was waiting for me at my locker.

It was only six weeks later, when I started getting in my head a little bit, that I decided to go through his stuff one day when we were at his house, studying. It wasn't my fault that I was going crazy.  It was everyone else's. I could tell people at school couldn't figure out how someone like me ended up with Justin Bieber. And it made me all paranoid. 

So Justin was downstairs getting a drink of water or something, and i was supposed to be working on my history homework, but instead I decided to try and break into his email, and when I couldn't figure that out I went the old fashioned way and just started going through his drawers.