Could anything possibly be worse than staying the way I was, the school doormat all over again?
I stood up, and I looked at Bitzy and Norris. The voice that came out of my mouth hardly sounded like my own. “I’ll say something. Just tell me who it is.”
Things have been a lot different since then.
Whatever Norris had this time, it had to be big. He was slouching with his thumbs slung in the belt loops of his jeans, trying to be nonchalant, but he was glowing like a lamp.
“So tell me already,” I said. I leaned into my locker, shifting binders and papers in search of my geography book.
“Right.” Norris leaned back against the wall and cocked his head. “You know that freshman class on the other side of the math office? There’s that group of girls—Brenda and Carady and them—always yakking so loud you can hear them halfway across the school? Kind of cute, though, especially that one, Doreen.” By spring, Norris had picked up all the new kids’ names, even though there were three hundred of them. He remembered the cute ones particularly well.
I rummaged through my mental files. Brenda and Carady and Doreen. Yes. Playing with the hems of their skirts around Mr. Travers as if a glimpse of thigh might earn them bonus marks on their next math test. Not that they did much of their work themselves. When it came time to throw together their weekly assignments, they sucked up to a geeky girl named Lisa until she let them copy. I bet they didn’t yak too loudly about that when Mr. Travers was around.
Norris was gazing off into space, no doubt lost in thoughts of dimpled cheeks and curvy hips. “Right,” I said, calling his attention back. “What’ve they done now? Ragged on Lisa again?” As soon as they’d gotten what they needed from their school-smart but otherwise clueless dupe, the girls found it very entertaining to imitate her pigeon-toed walk and throaty voice to anyone within laughing distance. Real gracious to the person who kept their grades up.
“Worse. They were—” Norris frowned. He stared at the floor, scuffing his foot against the linoleum like he was trying to kick-start his memory. For new stuff, he had his shaky moments, but he did better than Paige. He could hold on to things for a few days sometimes. From what I’d seen, the longer a person’s been dead, the better they remember their afterlife. Don’t ask me why. Maybe practice makes perfect.
“Yesterday afternoon,” he said, slowly, “yeah, in the computer lab, I just wandered in ’cause I heard them giggling, and they were all around this one computer, whispering and stuff, looking over their shoulders like they were afraid someone would catch them. Mrs. Richmond wasn’t there. So I went on over to see what they were doing. They had one of those pages up, you know, where people put up pictures of themselves and talk about things they like and write comments to their friends—”
“Like a blog?” I supplied.
Norris shrugged. “Sure. Anyway, I guess this one belonged to that girl Lisa. There were a bunch of drawings up, kind of cool, really, and poems, and that kind of thing. And Brenda was writing comments about them. Really awful stuff. Saying dog piss looked prettier and she was a complete moron if she thought she could be an artist, making new poems using some of the same words but throwing in swearing and dirty stuff. . . . And they were laughing the whole time. Then Mrs. Richmond came back, and they shut it down real fast.”
A chill washed over me. My thoughts flickered back to the comments I’d seen on my own computer screen, years ago: “What a backstabber! How did you manage it—made up some story, or maybe stayed after class . . . ?” “Ugh, and then going after your friend’s guy. Could you get any more pathetic?” All anonymous, of course. But I’d known who’d set them talking.
“Sounds like it’s worth looking into,” I said, keeping my voice steady. Lisa wouldn’t have a clue who’d done it, any more than she knew about the teasing that went on when she wasn’t around. And she worried about enough things without getting harassed by her so-called friends. Norris had once spotted her sobbing at her desk, clutching a test on which she’d gotten just a few points short of a perfect 100 percent. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ve got another one,” Norris said. “Caught some more loonies trying to protect themselves from your psychic powers.”
“Oh, yeah? What were they up to this time?”
“Magnets,” he said. “Supposed to mess with your mental energy, or whatever. I figure they’re just mental. The bunch of them, Theodore and Sandy and them, were trying to glue these little magnetic squares into their hats. And then the vice principal came along and reminded them they’re not supposed to wear hats inside. So there goes that brilliant plan.”
I laughed. “Hey, at least they’re stretching their brains a little. Anything new with the tech squad?” A bunch of seniors had decided I had to be using wires, and spent all year searching the classrooms for bugs. So far all they’d found were centipedes.
“Nah, haven’t seen them in a while. Maybe they’ve finally realized the beauty of what you do. I mean, really, you’re doing the school a service, and the entertainment value—it’s sweet all the way through.”
“Hey, it’s as much you as me.”
Norris shook his head. “You’re the general, Cass. I am honored to be your lowly lieutenant.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “There’s some seventies war movie showing at the discount theater on Saturday. You want to go?” War movies weren’t really my thing, but it was worth the ticket price to see how wrapped up Norris got, and to hear the excitement in his voice afterward.
“That’d be cool,” Norris said, casually, but I saw a glint in his eyes. Then his gaze drifted. “Look, here comes the giggle gang now.”
“Hurrah.” I turned to watch.
Brenda, Carady, Doreen, and a couple of other girls who hung out with them were sashaying down the hall, passing a tube of lip gloss from hand to hand. Mouths shined to maximum glare, they congregated in a semicircle in front of their lockers. The way giggles erupted through the group, you’d have thought making it to school was an act of high comedy. I propped myself up against the wall on the other side of the math office door and made like I was fascinated by my geography book.
As their amusement subsided, they fell into a deep debate over which of the actors in their favorite TV show was the sexiest. I peeked at them over the top of the book, and a sharp pang hit me in the chest. We’d have looked that way, in junior high: me and Danielle and the others, standing around our lockers, gossiping about some movie star breakup or new dress style. Laughing and leaning together, voices squealing.
My throat choked up with longing, and my eyes felt like they were about to overflow. I blinked quickly, gritting my teeth and shoving the memories away.
God, I had been so stupid. To think we were talking about important things. To think the fact that we were talking like that, together, meant anything at all.
And here I was, still missing the way things had been. Even stupider.
A few words slipped out of the chatter and snapped me back to reality.
“Can you believe . . . that assignment—”
“I know, it’s so insane.”
I edged a little closer. Assignment time meant playing friends with Lisa time. Could they really smile to her face after ripping her up like that yesterday?
It looked like I was about to find out. A tall girl in a long, loose skirt was shuffling down the hall toward the row of lockers. Her shirt was buttoned wrong and her bangs stuck up in several different directions. I caught myself wondering if she owned a mirror, then remembered my conversation with Paige that morning. Maybe Lisa just had other things she thought were more important.
There was something different about her today, though. She walked slower, her shoulders slumped, and as she passed the other girls and came up to her locker, I could see puffiness around her eyes.
Then Carady called out, “Hey, Lisa!” and Lisa’s face brightened so much you’d have thought she’d just been announced valedictorian. She smiled shyly, her shoul
ders straightening as Brenda and the others sauntered over and a knot of doubt formed inside me. Would it really help her, knowing the girls she obviously admired had been the ones attacking her? Or would it just make her even more miserable?
She deserves to know, I told myself. And they deserve to know they can’t just get away with it.
The girls had gathered around Lisa, Doreen playing with Lisa’s stringy hair, Carady patting her arm, Brenda going so far as to offer the sacred lip gloss. Lisa blushed as she slicked it on. They were all smiling, smiling with lots of teeth.
“So, Lisa,” Brenda said, simperingly, “you wanna hang out with us after school today? Maybe we could check our assignments, and then go grab some fries or something. It’d be so much fun.”
Translation: The other girls would copy down Lisa’s assignment, making enough small mistakes so it wouldn’t be completely obvious, and then they’d all suddenly realize they had really important things to run off and do.
But there was Lisa, beaming, her mouth already opening to say she’d love to.
I set my book down on the floor and walked up to the circle. “Funny,” I said, “that’s not the way you were talking yesterday.”
The girls fell silent. Brenda crossed her arms over her chest, her jaw twitching. These days, my reputation had its benefits. They knew who I was. Cass McKenna, that crazy girl who knows the dirt on everyone.
“Who was talking to you?” Brenda said, rolling her eyes, but her voice wavered and her friends giggled nervously.
“I’m talking to you,” I said. “And I think it’s pretty strange that you’re being so friendly with Lisa here after what happened yesterday. Or do you always expect favors from people you bash?”
Lisa’s gaze darted from the girls to me and back again, her expression showing nothing more than confusion.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Brenda said. “We’re friends. We help each other out. Right, Lisa?”
“Yeah, of course,” Lisa mumbled.
I raised my eyebrows. “I guess you need your memory jogged. ‘My dog’s piss looks better than this.’ ‘You’re a moron, not an artist.’ Ring any bells?”
A little cry slipped from Lisa’s mouth.
“You’ve got no proof,” Brenda snapped. Suddenly all her friends were finding the floor inexplicably fascinating.
“We could take a walk down to the computer lab and see if the one you were logged in to yesterday has a certain blog in its browsing history,” I offered.
Doreen broke then. “No!” she whined. “We’re sorry, really, we won’t do it again. Just don’t tell the teachers. My mom—”
“Shut up!” Brenda said, too late. Lisa slammed her locker shut and hurried away from them, her shoulders trembling. “Lisa!” Brenda called after her.
“Leave me alone!” Lisa yelled back, and threw open the door of the bathroom to stomp inside.
Brenda spun around. “You better watch your step,” she said to me.
Like it was my fault she was a lying, cheating snob. I gritted my teeth. “Maybe you should watch yours.”
The anger in her face faltered. She had no idea what else I might know.
No one was willing to take that chance.
“Oh, my God!” one of the girls exclaimed as I walked away. “How are we going to get the homework done now?”
Norris was hovering back where I’d left him, grinning his face off.
I picked up my geography book. “Enjoy that?”
“Oh, yeah. Pow! Pow!” He took a couple of boxer jabs at the air. “If you weren’t a girl, I’d have to say, ‘You are the man .’”
“Thanks.” I stared at the aluminum locker door with its splotches of dried gum and permanent marker. Would things be better now for Lisa? Or would the girls find some way to make nice and she’d fall for their act all over again? Sometimes people backed off. Sometimes it worked. But sometimes they just got smarter about their lies.
I glanced toward the washroom door. Lisa would be bawling her eyes out. Then the warning bell rang, reminding everyone they had five minutes to get to class, and I shook the uneasiness away.
“I’d better get going,” I said.
“Course. You’ll come by later?”
I glanced at Norris, and he dropped his gaze. “Not that it’s a huge deal if you don’t,” he added.
“Norris,” I said, “I’ll hang out with you whenever you want. You’re practically the only person with any sense in this entire school. What’s going on? You not talking to Bitzy?”
“She’s not talking to me,” he said.
“No? What, did you call her fat again?” He ducked his head, and I groaned. “Norris, you know how she feels about the F-word. You want her to stop talking to you for good? It’s going to happen if you can’t stop crap like that from coming out of your mouth.”
Norris grimaced. “She was getting on my case about the locker room. It’s not all my fault.”
I shook my head at him. “Well, you’re going to have to start finding better ways to argue. I’ll see if I can talk her down. But you’ve got to go apologize. And next time, you’re on your own.”
CHAPTER
3
Because of the Lisa incident, I had to postpone my usual check-in with Bitzy until lunch. Coming down the hall toward the gym, I heard her mumbling before I saw her. “Where is she? Where is she already?” The girl was a little impatient. I scooted around a bend in the hallway, and there she was, bobbing up and down on her toes by the gym door and blazing light through her leotard.
Bitzy claimed she was a born ballerina. She couldn’t stay in one spot without stretching out her legs or spinning around in a pirouette. For all that practice, she wasn’t exactly the most graceful person I’d ever encountered.
“Cass!” she shrieked as I walked over. She hurtled across the hall to me. One of the gym teachers barged right through her, and she didn’t even blink. I met her eyes and shot a look at the pay phone in the alcove beside the trophy case. She followed me over.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!” she whispered the whole way there, punctuating it with little squeals of excitement. She lifted her arms over her head and tiptoed the last few steps, adding a wobbly twirl at the end, the scent of lemon-polished wood drifting with her. The tip of her ponytail sparkled. Either Bitzy had stumbled onto the juiciest gossip known to mankind, or she was about to go supernova.
Still, the first thing she said when I picked up the phone was, “Norris is such a perv. You know he was hanging out in the girls’ locker room again? Somebody oughta pound him.”
I shifted the earpiece so the dial tone droned into my hair, and pretended I was talking to someone on the other end. “You know, Bitz, from what he’s said about his dad, I think he’s been pounded plenty already.” Heck, the guy was dead, and staring at half-naked girls fed his hormones about as much as Bitzy’s avoidance of the cafeteria shrank her waistline. “It’s just a habit,” I added. “He can’t help it.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” she said. “He . . . he was really nasty to me.”
I grimaced. I couldn’t argue with that. “Yeah, he mentioned that. But you know sometimes Norris talks more than he thinks. You guys have been sharing the school for how many years now?”
“I was here first,” she said. “And I’m not going to put up with people talking mean about me anymore.”
“You’re right. He really shouldn’t talk to you like that. I told him to cut it out. And he seems sorry.”
“Yeah?” Bitzy’s voice softened. “Well, I still don’t feel like talking to him today.”
“Hey, that’s up to you.” Maybe if Norris got a couple more days of the cold shoulder, he’d remember to watch his mouth next time. I relaxed back against the wall. “So what’s the big news?”
Bitzy’s face brightened up like I’d flicked a switch. “Oh, Cass, you’re just going to die. It’s got something to do with her.”
Her? Danielle.
Bitzy kept talking
, but I hardly heard her.
Just thinking of Danielle gave me the same feeling as years ago, on a trip to Florida, when a wave had dragged my feet out from under me and smacked me into the sea bottom: the current roaring past my ears, my chest aching with held breath. Memories crashed over me: tossing popcorn at each other on sleepover nights, giggling our heads off trying on bikinis in the mall, teasing each other’s hair into crazy dos . . . and then my stomach sinking as my name echoed out of the PA system one late winter morning in seventh grade. Me going to the statewide debate competition—not her. Me going with the guy she’d had her eye on all year, the guy she’d joined the debate team for in the first place.
There were a few hours when, amid the congratulations and the high fives, I’d thought maybe my terror was unreasonable. She was my friend. She’d be happy for me. I’d talk her up to Cameron, and we’d all be happy. Ha ha ha.
Even the terror hadn’t prepared me for how fast and how hard it came. The images were like glints of broken glass: her sneer against the bronzed shine of her hair, the notes crinkling from hand to hand around my desk, the backs turned with hers in the middle, tallest. The heel of her shoe crushing my toes in the hall; the pop bottle emptied over the contents of my locker, which only she’d had the combination to. The words scrawled in handwriting I knew almost as well as my own, on the bathroom wall for everyone to see—CASS IS A SKANK.
And that had just been the beginning.
Because a teacher had picked me over her? Because I’d accidentally grabbed a piece of her spotlight? The unfairness of it, even four years later, made my throat tighten. I coughed and sucked in air.
“Cass?” Bitzy was saying. “Hey, Cass? Dontcha want to hear it?” She hopped from side to side like she was about to pee her pants.
I breathed and swallowed, breathed again. The crashing feeling washed away. The phone had slipped down to my shoulder. A couple of girls stared at me as they flounced by, and I brought it back to my mouth. “Course,” I said. “Spill it.”