“But we’re talking total humiliation hot zone-”
“Massive meltdown territory, but does she seem upset? Negative. You know she’s, like, loving every minute of it.”
“I don’t know,” the tall one said, now perched on the sink, fiddling with her nails, which were painted cotton candy pink and so long that they almost curled back toward her fingertips. “Maybe it was some nobody, like, you know, some bitter loser who wanted-”
“As if.” A laugh floated out of the stall. “How would some loser know all of that? No, it had to be-”
Finally, Miranda couldn’t help herself. “Did you ever think that maybe-”
“Uh, excuse me?” the brunette said, glaring. “Were we talking to you?”
The shorter girl burst out of the stall and quickly slathered on a layer of hot pink lipstick. She didn’t bother to look in Miranda’s direction-or make a move toward the sink. “Was she, like, eavesdropping on our conversation?”
“Whatever. Forget her.”
“Her who?” the other girl cackled as she pushed through the girls’ room door, the brunette following close behind.
Miranda and Beth stared at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter. “Were they for real?” Beth asked in wonderment.
“Oh, yeah, like, totally, I mean, you know, whatever,” Miranda said, giggling. “For reals, dude.”
“And that makes us the losers?” Beth asked, grinning.
“Apparently.” Miranda stuck out her hand to shake. “Nice to meet you, I’m nobody. And who are you?”
“Someone who would never walk out of this bathroom without washing her hands,” Beth joked.
“I think we’re missing the key point here,” Miranda said, trying to stop laughing. “Did you hear the way they were talking about ‘her’?”
“Harper,” Beth filled in.
“Right. Obviously. Like she was this pathetic nonentity, desperate for attention…”
“Humiliated,” Beth said, raising her eyebrows.
“Pitiful,” Miranda added, shaking her head.
“Defeated.”
Miranda grinned and slung an arm around Beth’s shoulders. “And all by a pair of bitter nobodies. Who would’ve thought?”
The curiosity-seekers had been swarming Kane all morning-and by lunchtime, it seemed half the school had surrounded him, desperate for insider information and some notoriety-by-association. Outwardly, he smiled, preening under the attention. But underneath, he was fuming. It was Beth. It had to be. No one else could know some of the things she’d printed, the few secrets he’d been foolish enough to share.
That was the worst of it: the realization that he’d brought this on himself. After swearing to protect himself, he’d left himself raw and exposed.
Not again-never again.
After spotting the flyer, Kane had quickly started his own campaign of disinformation; judging from Kaia’s and Harpers animated smiles and the naked curiosity of their eager disciples, it seemed the girls had chosen to do the same. They sat at separate tables, each the center of a small whirlpool of people, flowing past to catch a moment with the stars. The horde surrounding Kane was, of course, the largest.
“She begged me to take her back,” he confided to the second-string point guard. “It was getting pathetic. I mean, tears is one thing-you know girls. But when she started showing up at my house in the middle of the night? It’s not like I wanted to call the cops…”
“Let’s just say, I now have a pretty good idea of what it must feel like to kiss a cold, dead fish,” he confided to the sympathetic blonde from the cheerleading squad.
“And the smell… you know, she works at that diner, and all the onions, the grease, the sweat…” He shook his head, and the busty freshman patted him sweetly on the shoulder. “It was nauseating. I have a very delicate stomach, you know, and sometimes…”
“Sure, she couldn’t get enough of it,” he bragged to the gawky junior who managed the basketball team. “But what was I supposed to do? She was-well, let’s just say Adam’s pretty lucky he never made it to home base.”
He almost felt sorry for Beth. She was like a dolphin, playing at being a shark. Which was a dangerous game: You were likely to get eaten.
The note the teacher had handed her had been short and sweet: Report to my classroom. Now.
Okay, maybe not so sweet.
“Jack,” Kaia said simply, stepping into his empty classroom and closing the door behind her. “Bonjour.”
Powell was perched on the edge of his desk, fingering a red sheet of paper. Kaia recognized it immediately, with little surprise.
“You said you’d stopped seeing him,” Powell said coldly, placing the flyer carefully down on the desk. “I thought I’d made my position perfectly clear: I don’t like to share.”
Kaia strode toward him and took a seat at one of the desks in the front row, aware that his gaze was glued to her long, tan legs, barely covered by a green suede miniskirt.
“Do you really want to discuss this here, Jack?” It was a violation of every rule he’d set for them, and it stank of desperation.
“There’s nothing to discuss.You told me you’d stopped. You told me you wouldn’t, with-that. And now I read…”
Kaia laughed. “Are you going to believe some piece of trash you probably confiscated from one of your clueless freshmen? Just how gullible are you?”
Powell’s skin turned slightly red, whether in anger or embarrassment, Kaia couldn’t be sure. She could put him out of his misery right now, confess to the dalliance with Reed, and suggest he find himself another student to play with-or maybe even pick on someone his own age. But Kaia wasn’t quite ready to finish things, and she certainly wasn’t going to let some loser with a printer and a grudge force her hand.
She got up and walked slowly to the door, as if to leave, then paused with her hand on the knob. “Do I really need to defend myself?” Kaia asked. “Or can we stop this game and play another…?”
Powell hopped off the desk, walked toward her, and then did something he’d never done before on school grounds. He touched her.
Placing his hand over hers on the doorknob, he turned the lock.
“We can table this for now,” he told her, his lips inches from the nape of her neck, his fingers digging into her skin. “You’re a smart girl, Kaia. You know better than to screw this up. Take this as a warning.”
He pulled her roughly toward him, and she let him, hyperaware of the people in the hallway, just on the other side of the door. Only a few inches separated them from discovery, a thought that turned her on far more than Powell’s hands roaming across her body.
Yes, Kaia was a smart girl, and she almost always knew better. She just never acted on it.
Where was the fun in that?
The whispers flew back and forth over Miranda’s head. No one thought to ask her what was true-most likely, no one thought of her at all.
Without Harper, I’m invisible, she thought, pushing around the soggy food on her tray. She had no appetite. Not when Harper was at the center of an admiring crowd, soaking in the attention. Miranda had just given her more of what she loved the most. From across the room, Miranda couldn’t see the self-satisfied grin on Harper’s face, but knew it was there. And she couldn’t hear the spin Harper would put on everything to cast herself in a good light-but she knew Harper would. A spotlight. It all seemed so obvious now, that this was how their feeble plot was doomed to end.
Teaming up with Beth, blandest of the bland, to take on Haven High’s dark queen? What had she been thinking?
Beth wasn’t as bad as Miranda had always thought, and was probably undeserving of all the hours she and Harper had put into mocking her behind her back. (Miranda had long ago perfected her Beth imitation, which never failed to send Harper into uncontrollable gales of laughter.)