CHAPTER 1
“Are you going to eat your banana?” Jenny was staring mournfully into the purple Container Store lunch sack that her mom had packed for her that morning.
We were in our usual seats at a small table tucked in the corner of the cafeteria, near the window that overlooked the faculty parking lot. The table sat six. Two chairs had been dragged away for a cluster of boys who had their Game Boys wired together and were getting down and dirty with some game or other.
The other two chairs were empty. I expected they’d stay that way. It’s not that Jenny and I weren’t popular. (Well, we weren’t, but that’s not the point.) It’s just that we were average. And we’d been snagging this table for ourselves for the last two years. I edit the school newspaper, and Jenny’s our weekly columnist, so we usually had articles and pictures spread all over the place.
Jenny also writes the Waterloo Watch, an anonymous blog that’s hugely popular. But I’m the only one who knows about that. And since Jenny can’t reveal herself as the brains behind the Watch, she’s gotten no coolness mileage out of the blog at all.
Which is too bad, really. Because at the moment, the whole school’s all hyped up with this Voice of Waterloo contest to pick a guy or a girl who’ll be the on-campus reporter for a news segment one of the local television stations is starting.
The Waterloo Watch has been running a poll, but I hardly needed to see it to guess who was winning. Either Stephen Wills or Tamara McKnight. Why? Because only one month ago they were elected homecoming king and queen. And, honestly, the student body just isn’t that imaginative.
Even so, Jenny swears that we have a shot, too. Her theory is that because we control who’s in the news, that makes us cooler than the kids in the popular cliques.
“We have the power,” she’s always saying. “And that makes us sooooo much cooler than Stephen Wills and Tamara McKnight and their whole crowd.”
Um, whatever.
It’s sort of like the whole tree-falling-in-a-forest thing: if you’re popular but nobody knows, are you really popular at all?
I’m thinking the answer is no.
I passed Jenny the banana, then shoved my uneaten tuna sandwich back into the sack and crumpled it up. I so wasn’t up for food right now.
“So why aren’t you eating lunch?” I asked, nodding toward her lunch sack. “Nothing good in there?”
“Peanut butter.” She made a face. “My mother’s sole purpose in life is to torture me. She knows this stuff is loaded with calories. I’ll be the size of a blimp if I eat this.”
Since Jenny was about as big around as Lindsay Lohan after a fit of bulimia, I wasn’t terribly worried about her impending blimpiness.
“Trade?” she asked, starting to peel the banana.
I shook my head. “Can’t eat. Nervous.” I’d missed first and second periods in order to audition for one of the drill team’s replacement slots, and I was counting down the minutes until the faculty advisor posted the names of all the girls who were getting a callback.
“I still can’t believe you actually auditioned,” Jenny said, since I’m not exactly the drill team type even though I’ve taken dance and gymnastics since I was three years old. “My mom wanted me to, and I told her I wouldn’t even consider participating in such a sexist, antifeminist ritual.” Jenny’s all about sniffing out and eradicating sexism.
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, you know.” Just so the record’s straight, the drill team hasn’t ever been a huge ambition of mine, but right now I’m all about rounding out my transcript. I’ve got the academic thing down with my grades and three years of AP science and math classes. And I’ve got the leadership thing down with the school paper. All of which sounds really good if you’re chatting with your grandparents, but I knew my application needed more. I needed something on there that proved I didn’t have to be the one in charge. Colleges like to see that you’re a team player. That’s very, very important. All the how-to books say so.
Even my mom (who’s a pain about most things) is totally behind my crusade to up my college appeal. My mom’s a trial attorney, and her motto is that you can never be too careful or too prepared. Which was why she made me take my SATs early, and then apply to a ton of in-state schools so I’d have something lined up if the Shangri-la of higher education turned me down.
Now I’ve got conditional acceptance letters and one early admission invitation from four schools in Texas. But those are only my backup plan. My Shangri-la is the Tisch School at NYU (with UCLA and USC running close behind). True, I hadn’t informed my parents of the whole Tisch Is Nirvana plan, but that was just a minor oversight. Because no matter how much my parents might be gunning for me to be a doctor or a lawyer, I just didn’t see that happening. Instead, I was going to make great movies. I saw myself as the next Steven Spielberg, but without the scraggly beard and baseball cap. Or the next Coen Brothers, only without the sibling. Or Sofia Coppola. Only with, you know, a plot.
Whatever. The point is, I want to get accepted to Tisch, and that meant I was doing everything—everything—to make sure my application was so stellar that there was no way they could turn me down. (Technically, I think they can now turn me down for being dead. Which sucks. And which is why Stephen Wills was going to pay big-time. But while I was waiting for drill team callbacks that day, I was still blissfully alive and unaware of my impending vampiness.)
I needed a perfect college application, and that meant extracurriculars, and that meant drill team.
Which is why I was totally stressing about whether I’d made the team.
“I hate this,” I told Jenny. And I did, too. I always know how I did on tests and stuff. But right then, I had no clue what was going to happen, and it was making my stomach jump around in a really unpleasant way.
“So, are you too nervous to eat anything at all?” Jenny asked, and this time when I looked up she was holding a chocolate cupcake with a single candle. “Happy birthday!”
“Oh, man!” Honestly, I thought I was going to cry. “No one else remembered.”
“No one?” Her tone was bland, but I knew she understood. My parents divorced six months ago. You’d think I would have suddenly been their priority, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Instead, they just shifted me between Mom’s house and Dad’s apartment and tried to pretend like everything was normal. Let me clue you in here: everything was far from normal. Very far.
“Whatever,” I said, running my finger over the icing and then sucking it off.
“Maybe they’re waiting until tonight. Your dad said he was getting you a car, right?”
“Sort of. Maybe. I’m not sure.” A few months ago, my dad got me a part-time job in the lab of a nearby hospital where he has privileges, and last weekend he came into the lab and dropped some pretty heavy hints. But this was my dad we’re talking about—a man who can remember the diagnosis of a patient from fifteen years ago, but can’t remember to buy milk—so I knew better than to get my hopes up.
“Hmm,” Jenny said.
“Hmm,” I agreed. Then I took another fingerful of chocolate.
Jenny looked around the lunchroom, as if expecting my dad to drive a Mini Cooper into the room at any second. “Beth!” she whispered, whipping back so fast her pony-tail smacked her in the face. “Ladybell just got here!” Ladybell is the drill team coach and—yes—that’s really her name.
My stomach quit doing flips and started doing jazz hands, fluttering so much that I thought I’d barf up the tiny bit of frosting I’d just ingested. This is it, I thought. Fail, and my application’s screwed.
Even worse, it would be the first time I’d failed at anything at school.
And honestly, I wasn’t really sure I could deal with that.