Good Girls Part 2

It's not for me. It's like I was trying to be someone else.

Trying to be him."

Ash considers this. "I'm not sure that's such a bad idea. To try to be like guys. Look at them. They just do whatever they want and n.o.body cares. Why shouldn't we be like them?"

I sigh. This is not the Ash I've known forever. The Ash I knew used to be totally and completely in love 22 with Jimmy-poet, guitar guy, future rock star. They went out for a year and a half, until he had some sort of schizoid b.u.t.thead attack and cheated on her with a freshman girl with shiny Barbie hair and enormous Barbie b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Since then, it's all she thinks about. How free guys are. How they go after what they want, how they get it, how happy they are doing it. How hooking up is so much better than having a boyfriend, how it can keep you from getting hurt.

But I know that's not true, and I know better than to bring up Jimmy. After Jimmy, Ashley became Ash and Jimmy became a ghost. He might as well be dead, even though his locker is right down the hall from ours. "This particular prodigy doesn't have time for Luke DeSalvio or any other guy," I say. "This prodigy has to keep her grades up so that the colleges come knocking with the big bucks."

Ash smiles. "My list is up to six now. I've got Rutgers, Oberlin, NYU, SUNY, Sarah Lawrence. I'm hoping that they'll ignore my math grades. And my chemistry grades. And that D I got in cooking freshman year ."

"I still don't know how you managed a D in cook- ing."

"Mrs. Hooper had us make mayonnaise. How is that cooking?"

"You said six colleges."

23 "I'm also applying to Cornell." She gives me a know- ing look. "Bet that's your safe school."

I pull Ash's cup out of the holder and take a swig of cold, gritty coffee. "Nothing's safe."

First-period study, and Chilly's on an Audrey hunt. He lopes into the library and gives me a wicked grin. He sits in the seat across from me, his brows waggling, suggestive of G.o.d knows what. I ignore him, grab one of my books, and flip it open without really seeing it.

Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing. Blah blah blah, says Beatrice. Blah blah blah, says Bened.i.c.k.

Your lips are like worms.

"Nice party?" Chilly says.

"Fine." I try to make my voice flatter than a robot's in the hope that he'll leave me alone. No such luck.

"Did you hook up?"

"You have s.e.x on the brain," I say.

"I have s.e.x other places, too."

"I don't think you have s.e.x anywhere, and that's why you have to live vicariously through the rest of us," I say.

"Vicariously," he says. "V-I-C-A-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y. Is that one of the words in your SAT practice book? I bet you use flash cards."

"Is there a reason you always have to sit near me?

Isn't there anyone else you can irritate around here?"

"You're my favorite."

24 He props his chin in his hands and bats his nuclear- accident eyes. Chilly would probably be nice to look at if he wasn't such a jerk, but the jerkiness overwhelms every other thing, the jerkiness is like a great cloud of nerve gas that causes the eyes to roll and the knees to buckle and disgust to claw at the back of the throat.

When he first came to our school from Los Angeles in the middle of soph.o.m.ore year, the girls took notice. Tall, lanky, skin like coffee ice cream, those freaky blue-green eyes, a movie-star strut-what's not to like? I liked it, I'm embarra.s.sed to admit. Oh, he started out great.

Notes and gifts and all this attention that I'd never had from anyone. My mom called him "charming." But then Chilly started feeling more comfortable. He started opening his big stupid mouth. He took all the same hon- ors cla.s.ses that I did, but while I did hours of homework and studied every night, he seemed content to do the least amount possible. He almost never had a book with him. At least not one that he was supposed to. He made fun of me for my study habits, my friends, and my work on the sets of the school plays. He said that the only thing worth my time was him. I finally told him that if he wanted a pet, he should go out and get a poodle.

He's never forgiven me for it.

Today he's got some j.a.panese comic book that you read backwards. Not that he's opened it yet, because he's too intent on p.i.s.sing me off. Sometimes he sat near 25 Kimberly Wong and made her so nervous that she would forget which math problem she was on. And sometimes it was Renee Ostrom, sure to be voted most likely to become a starving artist, who would whip out a piece of paper and draw a quick sketch of Chilly with arrows sticking through his head, or a knife in his heart, or his face shattered in Pica.s.so-like pieces.

Chilly spends about five minutes trying to provoke me when the bell rings. I'm glad that we're not allowed to talk in Mrs. Sayers's study period, and the room is silent except for the scratchy whisper of pages turning.

We all hear Cindy Terlizzi's phone when it starts to vibrate. In unison, everyone says, "Phone!"

"Miss Terlizzi," says Mrs. Sayers, who is shelving books in her persnickety way. The edge of every book touches the front of the shelf. "You know that phone is supposed to be turned off when you arrive at school."

"Whatever," says Cindy Terlizzi. When Mrs. Sayers gives her a look, she says, "I know."

"Well then, turn it off," Mrs. Sayers snaps. She picks up the end of her long scarf and flings it around her neck, waiting for satisfaction.

Cindy digs around in her purse for the phone and flips it open with a flick of her wrist. She presses a few b.u.t.tons and the phone chirps like a sick bird. We all know she's probably getting a text message and is count- ing on the fact that Mrs. Sayers's own phones are of the 26 rotary or perhaps even the tin can variety.

"Off!" says Mrs. Sayers.

"That's what I'm doing," Cindy says, tsk-tsking, like Mrs. Sayers is just old and grumpy and wrinkled and can't understand modern communication devices. She glances back at the phone in her palm as if she can't quite believe the message she's reading and slaps her hand over her mouth. Then she looks up. Finds me.

Smiles.

She's too busy smiling to pay attention to Mrs.

Sayers, who, I have to say, is ferret-fast when she wants to be. She swoops down on Cindy, scarf flying like an aviator's, and s.n.a.t.c.hes the phone. "What a clever little gadget," she says.

"Hey!" says Cindy. "Give that back!"

Mrs. Sayers peers down, one eyebrow rucked up. She starts punching random b.u.t.tons and the phone whirrs.

"Very nice," she says, pa.s.sing it back to Cindy.

Cindy scowls. "You erased it!"

Mrs. Sayers says, "Oh, my! Did I? I'm so very sorry.

I hope it wasn't important."

Behind Mrs. Sayers's back, Cindy sticks out her tongue but says nothing. Mrs. Sayers glances my way and I know that whatever was on Cindy's phone was about me-probably about the party, about Pam, about Luke.

Well, they could have him. They could all get in line.

Of course, Chilly doesn't miss any of it. He's turning 27 from Cindy to Mrs. Sayers to me, me to Mrs. Sayers to Cindy. He opens his mouth to say something icky and nuclear and obnoxious, but I cut him off: "Speak and you die."

Chilly gives me his signature "Who, me?" look and opens his mouth again when Mrs. Sayers says, "Yes, Mr.

Chillman, please do spare us all. I can't promise you death, but I can promise detention, which I've been told is a bit like dying very, very slowly."

Everybody goes back to not reading, not studying, and not thinking, except for me and a couple of other geeks who think grades are important. At first I can't concentrate, but as the minutes tick by I settle into it, settle into me again: the me who thinks about grade point averages and college applications and various pos- sible futures. I consult my a.s.signment notebook and measure how many days till the final draft of my Much Ado About Nothing paper is due, worry about my his- tory test, calculate how many hours I'll have to study for the next calculus exam. It's soothing, the measurements and the calculations and even the worry. Luke is still there, of course, in the back of my head, doing some sort of jock dance of the veils, but I know that he'll fade eventually, taking all his hot boy voodoo into the past.

Finally the bell rings and I'm free of Chilly the Soul Chiller and Cindy Terlizzi, Demon Queen of Text Messaging. As I'm running to my next cla.s.s, Pete 28 Flanagan, one of football players, blocks my path.

"Hey, Audrey," he says. His expression is weird, smirky and knowing, which is kind of funny, because Pete really is a rockhead and knows so very little.

"Hi, Pete," I say. I sidestep to go around him, but he moves with me. I notice that there's a bunch of rock- heads piling up behind him, all with the same smirky yet stupid expressions, like a bunch of monkeys who've just figured out where all the bananas are.

"Want to go out sometime?" he says.

"What?"

"Go out. Come on, you and me." He jerks a thumb to his friends. "Well, you, me, and some of my boys."

I'm at a loss. This kind of thing hasn't happened in a while. When we were freshmen, clique warfare was ram- pant. It was considered necessary and maybe even fun to seek out and terrorize everyone who was not exactly like you in the school. I thought most of us, even the football players, had grown out of that. Guess not.

"Sure, guys," I say. "Anytime."

They all let out a whoop as I push past them.

Morons.

I motor toward the gym. Out of the corner of my eye I see a finger pointing my way and hear someone laughing, but when I turn, all I see is a row of backs. I start to get a weird feeling, of the weight of eyes, of newly focused attention. In gym, as me and Joelle are 29 pretending to concentrate on the basketball drills, Jeremy Braverman, who has said all of three sentences in three years, says, "I love how you dribble those b.a.l.l.s, Audrey," over and over again, until Joelle gets shrieky and hysterical and beans him in the head with one of them. I get a note in French cla.s.s: "Sur vos genoux!" On your knees! I turn around to see who wrote it, but no one will meet my eyes. The French in my book blurs into incoherent babble. Did Luke blab to his stupid friends?

Did he tell them what we did? No. No! He never talks about his hookups. Don't ask, don't tell, he'd say. That was always his deal. So what was going on?

By lunch I can't take the snickering and the weird- ness. I make Ash take us to the McDonald's just to get out of the school. "I think someone's spreading rumors about me. I'm getting all these looks. It's making me crazy."

Ash steers the car around to the drive-through win- dow and orders us fries and c.o.kes. "Really? I haven't heard anything," she says. "Maybe Pam Markovitz is shooting her mouth off. You know what she's like. And she was so jealous of you at the party on Sat.u.r.day.

Pathetic."

"What should I do?" I say.

"Oh, who cares about a bunch of ho's and dumb- heads?" Ash tells me. "They'll be babbling about some- thing else by sixth period." Because I forgot to bring 30 cash, she pays for the fries and c.o.kes and pulls out of the parking lot.

Just as I'm about to open the white bag, my own cell phone buzzes and I scratch around the floor for it. I flip open the phone and check the screen. "Picture mail,"

I say.

"Maybe Joelle is sending some of the shots she took at the party," says Ash, smashing a fry into her mouth.

"I don't know why she bothers. They always suck."

An image pops up and I scroll down to see it. At first I don't understand what it is. And then my insides turn to ice.

"Ash," I say.

"What?"

"Someone took a picture of me."

"Yeah, so?" She looks down at the phone, frowns.

"What is it?"

"It's me, Ash. Me and Luke. We were . . ." I trail off, staring at the screen. Luke's head is cut off, but the pale skin of his chest and hips glows in the dark, and his hands clutch fistfuls of the bedspread. Between his knees, a cascade of waist-length blond hair striped with black.

Ash pulls the car over to the side of the road and slams on the brakes. She grabs the phone. "Oh, G.o.d,"

she says. "Who took this?"

"I don't know."

31 "Where were you?"

"Upstairs in one of the bedrooms."

"Audrey, why didn't you close the freaking door?"

"We did!" I say. "Someone must have seen us go in.

Someone must have opened it."

"You didn't hear anyone? You didn't see anything?"

I try to think. The music was so loud-you could hear it coming through the open windows-and then there was the noise that Luke was making. "No," I say.

"I didn't hear anything. And I had my eyes closed. I guess Luke did, too."

"Schweinhund," she says. "Do you think he planned this?"

"Who?"

"Luke!"

"What? No, I . . ." My head is shaking no no no, but I'm not controlling my own muscles.

And then it hits me all at once. Cindy Terlizzi's slow smile in study. The pointing in the hallways. Pete and the rockheads. Jeremy Braverman, braver than he'd ever been before. "Ash, it's the picture." My stomach does liquid flips and I thrust the fries from my lap.

"Someone's been sending around this picture."

32 The Gauntlet The parking lot of the school. I don't want to get out of the car.

"Look," says Ash, "let's skip the rest of the day.

I don't care if we get in trouble. We can hit the movies or something."