The Rules

  I pushed open the door quietly, wrinkling my nose at the overwhelming stench of industrial cleaning supplies.

  The lone stall door, bearing the mark of someone’s early morning boredom in the form of a huge swooping heart with “Maddy + Josh 4EVA,” was closed. The muffled sounds of sniffling came from behind it, along with a piercing stream of harsh thoughts.

  …so stupid, ugly, fat, no wonder you’re such a loser. God, you should just kill yourself.…

  Uh-oh. I tapped on the stall door hesitantly. “Jenna?”

  “Oh my God,” she wailed. “What do you want? To dig the knife deeper into my back?”

  I flinched. I deserved that, I guess. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.” I made a face at my own words. Obviously she wasn’t anything near okay.

  Jenna whipped the door open suddenly and so hard it collided with the metal stall wall with a loud smack.

  I took a startled step back.

  “Do I look okay?” she demanded, emerging with her face flushed and shiny with tears.

  “Jenna, I am so sorr—”

  “You know, I was your friend,” she said, advancing on me and pointing with her hand full of wadded-up toilet paper. “Even though you’re freaky and weird and you can never go out anywhere and I think your dad keeps you locked up in the basement or something.”

  My face grew hot, hearing her say it like that. It was not far from what was once truth.

  “All the strange restrictions and messing up words and not understanding random stuff that even little kids get.” Jenna threw her hands up in the air.

  My whole face was on fire now. She’d never said any of this before. And she’d hidden it well because I’d never picked it up in her thoughts, other than the occasional “huh, that’s weird” kind of a moment. “I’m sorry it was so difficult,” I said stiffly.

  She picked at the toilet paper in her hands, separating the cheap two-ply into thinner single sheets. “My mom said that I should aim higher, but I defended you,” she said over a hiccup. “When I picked you to be my friend, I thought, Here’s someone I can trust. She doesn’t care about being popular. She doesn’t even care about being normal. Next to her, I’ve got a shot at being noticed instead of always being second best.” She raised her gaze to the ceiling as if reenacting the realization.

  A yawning emptiness opened up inside me. Zane had been right. Jenna was my friend, but only as long as it was on her terms, as long as I stayed in the little box she’d put me in, the obedient (and slightly weird) friend. The second things changed in a way she didn’t like, she called it all off.

  How had I missed that? Had I been that desperate and lonely?

  “Now you’re the one all best buds with Rachel, and you don’t even like her,” she raged.

  “Are you angry that Rachel chose me, a freak, for special attention?” I demanded, with extra emphasis on the “special” because Jenna, of all people, should know how much Rachel’s definition of that varied from the rest of ours. “Or is it that she chose a freak over you?”

  Jenna’s eyes widened, but she rallied quickly. “You don’t even appreciate what you’re being offered,” she said. “Your dad wants you to stay home all the time.”

  I frowned, not making the connection. “What exactly do you think I’m getting?” I asked.

  “The perfect life! Once you’re in, you’re good. You never have to worry about people liking you or fitting in or being alone on a Friday night or your mom telling you that you just must not be trying hard enough,” she said in a longing voice.

  Dr. Mayborne strikes again. Jenna’s mom was worse than I’d realized. “Yeah, being popular, a solution for all the world’s problems.” I sighed, thinking about what I knew about Zane and how Rachel treated him. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

  “You’re still going,” she accused.

  I stared at her in disbelief. “Yeah, because Rachel is trying to set me up, and I’m not going to let her get the best of me,” I snapped.

  She sniffled and looked up, hope lighting her face. “Really? That’s all?”

  I clamped my mouth shut. I shouldn’t have said anything. It was too much of a risk. “Forget it.” I started to turn away.

  “You know it’s not real with Zane, right?”

  I froze, then faced her. “What?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “It can’t be. It just can’t be,” she repeated softly, as if trying to convince herself. “People like him don’t choose people like you.”

  I jerked back as if she’d hit me. She wasn’t wrong, exactly; I couldn’t deny that. How often would someone like Zane Bradshaw choose someone like me? Not very. But I couldn’t believe that a person who was supposed to be my friend would say that.

  She looked like the Jenna I knew—pink cheeks, scattered curls, overly careful attention to her accessory selection—but not. All of this had started because I’d broken the Rules to defend her against Rachel. But apparently that had been a huge mistake. Jenna was nothing like who I thought she was. Yeah, I’d lied about who I was during the course of our friendship—it couldn’t be helped, given what I had to hide. But I’d done my best to be as honest as I could. She, evidently, hadn’t bothered. She wasn’t a true friend. She never had been.

  My eyes stung with tears, which surprised and infuriated me. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to stop them, and headed for the door. I could feel the walls of the room pressing in on me.

  “No, Ariane, wait!”

  I paused, my hand on the door, and glanced at Jenna.

  She dabbed under her eyes with the shredded toilet paper without looking at me. “So, um, do you think you can get me in at Rachel’s tonight?”

  I closed my eyes. Any hope I’d ever had of our being friends again died a swift and painful death. Some part of me wished we could go back to before, when I didn’t know what I meant (or didn’t mean) to her. But now that I knew, there was no forgetting, no getting past it. Zane had said I deserved more; I wasn’t so sure about that. I just couldn’t handle one more person seeing me as something, useful or not, instead of someone.

  I opened my eyes. “Bye, Jenna,” I said, and walked out.

  BY FIFTH HOUR, there was still no sign of Ariane. I’d figured it wouldn’t take her long to seek me out once Rachel had delivered her “invitation” in the only way that Rachel could: condescendingly. Which Ariane would take as a personal challenge and respond the only way she knew how: by saying yes.

  But instead…nothing.

  No texts or phone calls. No hissed conversations in the hall. Not so much as a glare in the distance, which would have required my seeing her, and I hadn’t. But Ariane had to know why I did what I did, right?

  After confirming again with Rachel at lunch that the encounter had gone as I’d expected (“Yes, Zane, for the twelfth time, she said she’ll be there. God! What is your problem?”), I went looking for Ariane.

  She let me find her at her locker. I say “let” because the first seven times I’d walked past, on my way to class, the drinking fountain, etc., she hadn’t been there. She might have been avoiding me, or maybe I just had crappy timing.

  “You sicced Rachel on me,” she said, her attention focused on trading out her books. She was so cold and distant compared to last night.

  I rolled my eyes, jamming my hands into my pockets. “You didn’t give me a choice. Would we even be having this conversation if I hadn’t?”

  “It doesn’t change anything. I can’t…we can’t…” She avoided looking at me. “You know that.”

  “I don’t know that,” I said in exasperation. “Because I still have no idea what’s going on.” I paused, waiting for her to fill the silence with some kind of explanation. But she stayed quiet, concentrating on what she was doing at her locker.

  Okay, fine, if that’s how we’re going to play it.… “It does change something,” I pointed out.

  Ariane glanced up at me sharply.

  “You’re going to the party
tonight when you weren’t before.”

  She gave me a sour look. “Because you manipulated Rachel into manipulating me.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, that was a real stretch of my abilities.” The two of them had done all the work themselves—I’d just given Rachel the idea.

  I thought I saw the start of a smile before she shook her head. “What do you want, Zane?”

  “Look, I just want…” Actually, I hadn’t stopped to think about what I wanted. Only that I didn’t want it, whatever it was, to end with last night. “I want to see this thing through,” I finished lamely. “Don’t you?”

  “Without sounding too self-pitying, it absolutely does not matter what I want.” She shut her locker and turned away from me.

  I followed her. “It matters to me.” I winced at the supreme cheesiness of the line even though it was the truth.

  And it worked. She looked up at me directly for the first time. Her eyes were bloodshot and more swollen than last night—it must have been hell to put in her contact lenses this morning. “That,” she said quietly, “is why I should be putting as much distance as possible between us.”

  I sighed, tired of trying to understand her enigmatic answers. “Look, you’ve got secrets. Fine. I understand.”

  She gave me a wry smile.

  I sighed again. “Okay, no, I don’t understand, but my point is you can trust me. You don’t want to talk about it? Fine. But don’t cut me out.” I stuffed my hands into my pockets again, feeling absurdly vulnerable.

  Ariane cleared her throat. “Because it’s a challenge.”

  “No,” I snapped, frustrated. “Because you are the most interesting person I’ve met. Ever. Because you take my side without weighing whether that’s best for you or not. Because you’re real and you don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

  And what I couldn’t make myself say out loud: Because I want to be that guy. I want to be the person you trust. To be worthy of someone who really knows me instead of being their second—or last—choice.

  I’m not dumb. I didn’t miss the parallels between this situation and my mom. Ariane had a secret, just as my mom had when she was planning her escape; and this time I wanted to be included, taken along instead of left behind.

  But even knowing that some of this was driven by the forces of my past didn’t change how I felt.

  “If you knew the truth, you wouldn’t be so quick to sign on,” Ariane said as we dodged people—and curious glances—in the hall.

  “So tell me,” I said.

  “You know I can’t,” she said, exasperated.

  I grinned smugly. “Then I guess I get the benefit of the doubt for now.” I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

  “This is only for tonight,” she warned, but I could feel her relaxing into my side.

  And if she wanted it to be just for tonight, that was fine. After the party was over I’d work on getting her to agree to tomorrow or next week. I wasn’t into her because she was a challenge, but I certainly wasn’t afraid of the challenge she presented.

  “And we’re not going to the party together. We just happen to be going to the same party,” she said with a sniff.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Yeah? How are you going to get there?” I asked, betting she hadn’t gotten that far yet. Rachel’s house was on the other side of town.

  She stopped, genuinely startled. “Damn.”

  “I’m guessing a taxi might attract attention that you don’t want.…” I shook my head in mock seriousness.

  She glared at me. “Don’t gloat. It’ll stunt your growth.”

  I laughed, surprised. “I don’t think that’s how it works. And besides, even if it did”—I gestured at the height difference between us—“I think it’s a little late for that. For me, at least.” I frowned. “You, on the other hand, are apparently the gloatiest of all gloaters.”

  She pursed her mouth. “Funny.”

  I bumped her hip with mine—well, her side, thanks to that height difference. “You just don’t like it when I’m right.”

  “No, sometimes I wish you were right all the time,” she said, her gaze distant.

  I could feel her mood veering off into the melancholy gloom I’d found her in. “Come on, walk me to class and I’ll let you lecture me about the debilitating effects of drinking coffee as an infant or of not eating my toast crusts.”

  “Your parents gave you coffee?” She sounded aghast.

  And I couldn’t resist. “Straight from the pot into a bottle.” I held my hand up in an “I swear” gesture, struggling to keep a straight face.

  She believed me for about a half second. Then she shoved me. “Shut up.” But she was smiling. And that was all I wanted.

  ONE MORE NIGHT. JUST ONE. It won’t make that much of a difference.

  That’s what I told myself over and over again throughout the rest of the afternoon and with every step on my way home. Zane had offered me a ride, but since I was already acting in direct defiance to my father’s wishes, I didn’t want to push my luck. Or fate or karma or whatever.

  My guilty conscience was already working overtime, making me jumpy. Since talking to Zane, I’d been on high alert, waiting for my phone to chirp with a text from my dad telling me I was busted (if he was monitoring the security camera feed, that was more than possible) or that we needed to run.

  But so far, my phone had remained silent. So much so that I’d taken it out of my bag and turned it off and then on again to make sure it was working.

  Now, on the sidewalk, I tensed every time a car passed, expecting the shrill screech of tires and brakes, and either my very angry father or a GTX retrieval team to storm into my path.

  But all was quiet except for regular traffic and the same dumb black van from this morning. This time, though, it zoomed past me. It had a large white banner on the side, proclaiming DORIS THE FLORIST, TULIPS ARE BETTER THAN NONE!

  It made me edgy, but if it was a front for GTX and they knew who/what I was, they wouldn’t have been wasting their time driving around.

  I was being paranoid. I was pretty sure.

  Approaching our house, I couldn’t help but notice it had an abandoned air to it—the empty driveway, the curtains pulled tight. But that had to be my imagination, my fear that my father would be taken and hurt because of my actions. Right?

  I hurried up the walkway and, with shaking hands, managed to get the key in the lock. Once inside, I peeked into the kitchen, half convinced that the table and chairs would be turned over, dishes shattered on the floor. But everything was as I’d left it. My single spoon and bowl in the drying rack. No one had been here since I’d left this morning, as far as I could tell.

  I let out a relieved and guilty breath. My father was probably still at work, though he’d put in more than his required hours this week. He was watching out for me again—as always.

  I looked at his chair, where he’d sat last night, drinking away his disappointment in me.

  Was it worth all of this?

  I bit my lip. I’d have the rest of my life to follow the Rules. I just wanted one more night off to put Rachel in her place.

  I retreated to my bedroom, dropped my bag on the floor, and climbed onto my bed, sinking into the fluffy comforter and pillows. But they offered no relief, no feeling of escape or safety. If anything, they felt claustrophobic, surrounding me too closely.

  I stared up at the plastic stars dotting the ceiling and realized for the first time I’d recreated the outside in here. Stars overhead, a blue sky on the upper part of the wall, the darker sandy color of the earth below it. Guess that answered the question of how scared I was of life, even as recently as three years ago. I’d brought the outside in rather than venturing out on my own.

  Frustrated, I fought my way off the bed and started pacing the length of my room, as I’d once walked my GTX cage.

  I stopped in front of my closet and yanked open the louvered doors. If I was going to go through with this tonight, I needed some
thing to wear. And from the second Rachel had challenged me to show up, I’d known what it should be.

  At the back of my closet, shoved behind all the grays, whites, and earth tones, a pink shirt screamed like a neon sign.

  Jenna had given it to me last year for my (Ariane’s) birthday, annoyed by the lack of “happy colors” in my wardrobe. The color listed on the tag was “dusty rose,” which sounded awful if you thought about it literally; but it was a pretty, soft pink fabric.

  The style was a deep V-neck with the material gathered slightly under the chest for emphasis, which was good because I needed all the help I could get. Then it descended into deliberately ragged layers, one on top of the other. It was fashionable and shouted, “Look at me.”

  It was much too flashy for my regular wardrobe, so I’d never worn it. And, I realized suddenly, Jenna probably never expected that I would. She preferred me as I was—pale, colorless, bland, nonthreatening.

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I shoved my other clothes to the side and pulled the “dusty rose” shirt off the hanger.

  It was as pretty as I remembered, the fine fabric catching on my fingertips. Jenna had spent serious money on this gift. And suddenly I wanted to wear it, wanted to prove her wrong. That I could be someone who would wear this shirt and be comfortable in it. That I wouldn’t just be the freaky girl whose only purpose was to make average girls look better.

  I pulled my gray Henley over my head. The air felt too cool against my skin, and I shivered.

  Then I squirmed my way into the new shirt—it was tighter than most of the other things I wore. And for good reason. I turned to look at myself in the mirror. As I’d suspected, the crisscross of the fabric in front aided in the appearance of a B-cup, and the layers of ruffles below the chest created the illusion of someone with more distance between breasts and hips.

  I backed up a step or two for a better look. It made me appear taller, too. Not that I would resemble any definition of that word standing next to Zane, but the illusion was more than I had otherwise. Pair it with another of my favorite jeans—maybe the ones with the Swarovski crystal designs on the back pockets—and I’d be set.