All the Way (5 page)

“Hang on. No, never mind, I'm in the tub, I'll call you back,” I said to Ariel. Then I clicked over to Rachel. “Sorry, that was Ariel. Apparently Joey's written about me on his blog. I've got to get out of the tub and go see what it is. Call me after you read it,” I said.

I had to repeat his web address three times before Rachel finally let me go.

Then I rinsed my hair quickly and climbed out of the tub. I wrapped myself in the fuzzy fleece robe my mom gave me for Christmas and padded down the hall to my room.

My computer is slow to boot up, which nearly drove me crazy. Finally the page, Joey's Joint, came up on my screen.

Unbelievable. He had a picture of me on it! Where on earth did he get that?

Oh, yeah. It was cropped, but now I recognized it. It was an old yearbook photo from Woodward Baines.

Under the picture the caption read:
All the bases, all the time.

Oh. My. God.

The rest of the entry went like this:

Needless to say, I was in shock. I mean, total, utter, shock. Was he Satan or something?

The phone rang, jolting me out of my stupor.

“I can't believe this,” I said, seeing Ariel's caller ID. “I mean, is he totally insane? How can he write that stuff when nothing happened last night?”

“Nothing?” Ariel sounded like she wasn't about to believe
that
.

“Nothing!”

Ariel was silent.

“Okay, I kissed him a lot in the backseat of his car, okay? But that was totally it. I mean, totally. When he tried to feel me up, I pushed him off and got out of the car and freaking walked all the way home from the
lake
!”

“Oh my God,” Ariel said. “So he's . . . what? Just trash-talking you to make Molly jealous? I mean, why would he do that?”

“What do you mean why? It's just what you said—to make Molly jealous! Duh!” I practically shouted the answer at her. “Sorry . . .” I forced my voice back down to a normal human register. “I'm a little upset. This is the first date I've had all year. Why the hell did he have to go and write crap like this about me?”

“That's Joey,” Ariel said. “He never does anything in a small way.”

“Unbelievable. And he actually seemed
nice
last night,” I moaned. “Until he went all King Kong on me in the backseat. We were having a good time . . . I thought.”

I guess Ariel didn't know what to say, because she was really quiet. I got the feeling she thought I was a fool for expecting someone like Joey Perrone to treat me decently.

“What am I going to do?” I asked her.

“Tell everyone you know to spread the truth about what really happened,” Ariel suggested.

“Uh, right. So let me know when you've got that done,” I said. “Because you and Gina are about it.”

Ariel was quiet for a minute. “Look, don't you sit next to Isabel in English? What if you told her that Joey's just lying? Maybe she'd tell Molly, and then it would get around that Joey was just making it up . . .”

“Maybe,” I said, but I doubted it. The way Isabel was shooting daggers at me last night, I doubted she'd want to help me clean up my rep.

Right then I got call waiting from Rachel, so I hung up and went through the whole thing again with my best friend. It was weird, though. Rachel didn't seem to have any good ideas at all about how to handle it. How could she? She didn't know Joey or Molly or anyone at my new school.

“I'm going to call him,” I said after we'd hashed it through a few times. “I mean, I can't just let him say this stuff and get away with it.”

“You go, girl,” Rachel said. “Call me back right after.”

I ran downstairs to our kitchen—another disaster area, thanks to the renovation—and found a phone book so I could look up Joey's number. Then I went back upstairs, locked myself in my room, and dialed his house.

“Hello?” It was a little kid, a girl. Suddenly the thought of Joey having an innocent cute little sister made me feel like he'd not only trashed my reputation, he'd somehow damaged her life as well. I felt sorry for her.

“Uh, hi. Can I speak to Joey?” I asked.

“Hold on,” she said politely. Then I heard the phone drop with a clunk, possibly on the floor, and I waited for what seemed like five whole minutes. Finally he picked it up.

“Yeah?”

“Joey, this is Carmen,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said coldly. “I can read the caller ID.”

“Well, what do you think you're doing, writing about me that way on your blog?” I yelled at him, letting out all the anger I'd been trying to keep under control. “You know all that stuff you wrote is lies.”

“Just doing you a favor,” he said with a small prickish laugh.

“Ex
cuse
me?”

“Hey, take it as a compliment,” he said. “I'm just trying to make you look hot. You know—like everything you're not.”

“That's ridiculous,” I said, spitting the words. It sounded lame, but I couldn't think of anything else to say.

“You'd never get another date at Norton if people found out what a prissy little virgin you are,” he said nastily.

“Jeez!” I shouted at him. “How can you stand there and talk that way to me in front of your sister?”

He didn't answer. He just hung up on me.

Unbelievable!

I threw the phone onto my bed and then stomped around the carpeted room for a minute, fuming.

Well, at least I called him. That part felt good. I wasn't going to take this crap without putting up a fight.

I called Rachel back.

“Oh, no,” she said while we were talking. “He just posted another entry about you.”

“What?”

My throat felt tight. What now? I wondered. I dashed over to my computer and refreshed the page of his blog.

My throat closed up, and I choked back some tears, but I tried not to let Rachel hear.

“What an asshole,” Rachel said, cold as ice. When Rachel gets mad at someone, she
really
gets mad. You don't want to be on her bad list. “How did he know about your pig collection, anyway? You never even let
me
touch most of them.”

“I know,” I said, shaking my head and wishing I knew some horrible, painful, endless form of death I could inflict on Joey. “We got bored during the second half of the game, and started playing truth or dare. He asked me what one thing I'd sell my soul for. As a joke, I said it was my miniature pigs.”

My miniature pigs are seriously important to me. My dad gave me the first one when I was five years old, after he'd been away on a two-month-long trip. I told Joey that I'd do practically anything to keep from losing that pig.

“He's a real piece of work,” Rachel said. “I wish I were at Norton, believe me. You and I could slap him down in under a week.”

That much was true. Rachel was loyal, and when her friends were crossed she could get really spiteful. Right now I wouldn't have minded if she'd worked a little of her voodoo on Joey.

“Well, you're not, so I'm going to have to deal with it alone. I just wonder what will happen at school tomorrow. Do you think everyone will have read his blog? Do you think they'll believe it?”

Rachel was silent again. What could she say? She had no idea what life was like at my new school.

I was just going to have to wait and see. And face it all alone.

 

 

 

“Oh my God, Carmen, everyone's staring at you.” Ariel nudged me and mumbled under her breath as we walked through the hall to homeroom Monday morning.

“I know.” I pasted a semiconvincing smile on my face and kept walking.

This was exactly what I'd been afraid would happen, which is why I had gone out Sunday afternoon and bought a new little multicolored bolero cutaway cardigan at Urban Outfitters, to layer over my skinny turquoise knit top and jeans. I wanted to look so fabulous that I wouldn't care what Joey had written or what everyone was thinking. I'd just suck in my breath and walk through the halls and hold my head high, proud to be me, like nothing life-changing had happened.

It was a good act, anyway. I should get an Oscar.

“Uh-oh. Don't look now, but there he is.”

“Where?” I tried not to be too obvious about looking around.

Too bad she didn't warn me in time, because before I could spot him, Joey banged right into me a few feet away from my locker.

“Ouch!”

He didn't even say excuse me. He just let his burly shoulder smash into mine, and his heavy backpack swing into my ribs, and then kept right on walking.

What an animal. But I was sort of glad he didn't stop, because I could feel everyone in the hall waiting to see if I'd go off on him, waiting for the fireworks, waiting for me to either call him an asshole or fall all over him with more unleashed sexual passion or something. Instead, I just ignored him and opened my locker, like I didn't have a thing to say to him, like he was just a turd under my foot, not to be bothered with.

Two Oscars.

“Are you okay?” Ariel whispered, hanging at my side for moral support.

“I'm fine,” I lied, trying to be stronger than I felt right then, trying to make it true. My shoulder hurt, and more than that, my face was beginning to feel hot. I could tell a lot of people were staring at me.

Had they
all
read his Web page? And did they
all
believe what he said? Or did they know it was a bunch of lies, and they were waiting to see how I'd murder him?

Or maybe they were just staring because we'd been seen together at the game Saturday night . . . and now I was one of the people everyone thought of as datable.

Okay, so I was kidding myself with that last one. I like to call it “being optimistic.”

I grabbed my American Government book and hurried into Mr. Mori's class, bracing myself as I walked in the door. Guess who's in my Am. Gov. class?

Yeah. Molly. Plus two of her friends.

Luckily, Molly sits way in the back of the room, and I sit up front, so I didn't have to pass her. But Amber and some other girl who were closer to me started whispering. I heard the words
slut
,
wiener
, and
pig
and then a lot of snotty laughing.

Great. Now Molly's friends were making fun of my miniature pig collection?

Of course I wanted to melt into the floor or run out of there in tears. But I wasn't going to do it. I wasn't going to let them win.

I'm a quality person,
I kept telling myself,
a good student and a nice girl.
So nothing Joey Perrone said about me was going to turbo-sink my life.

That was before I saw the drawing on the board.

Someone had sketched out a cartoon of a bunch of little pigs in a house, staring out the windows, begging to get out. The speech balloons said, “Help us! Save us! Save us from Carmen! HELLLP!”

The icing on the cake was the sign over the door to the house. It had my last name: Salgado.

It was a pretty good drawing, too.

Wow. I couldn't believe how mean people could be. At that point, I was fighting back tears. I tried not to let anyone see.

I held my head up high and raised my hand four times in class—way more than usual—just to show everyone that I wasn't ashamed of myself or too embarrassed to speak or anything. But inside, I was seriously hurting. This whole thing was so unfair. How could everyone believe Joey and think I was the kind of slut he made me out to be?

Of course the answer was easy: they didn't know me. No one at Norton knew me well enough to know the truth except Arial and Gina. No one realized that I was so far from a slut, it wasn't even funny.

And in a weird way, I knew it was partly my fault. I hadn't really tried to fit in at Norton. I hadn't tried to make many friends. I had figured I didn't need them.

The rest of the morning was more of the same. Except that two of Joey's friends—Ryan and Matthew—gave me big smiles and said “Hi” when I passed them in the hall. But I knew that all they wanted was a piece of the action Joey had described on his blog.

By lunchtime, I was a wreck. Holding your head up can be exhausting.