Identity Crisis (5 page)

1. You have grotesquely huge boobs. Which super-cool career will you choose?
   
2. Hooters Girl (gross)
   
3. Victoria Secret model (grosser)
   
4. Stripper at the Golden Banana (grossest)
   
5. La Leche League lactation leader (ewwww)
   

You'd think boobs would at least give you an edge with getting a real live boyfriend, but all they've gotten me are snickers and stares and rude comments from total jerk-offs. Like the time in eighth grade when Tyler Walters asked me if sleeping on my stomach was like being on a seesaw all night. Ha ha. Or guys like Cooper, with one item on their agendas. Thank god beach season was over and it was fall, a season where you could safely layer on the slouchy sweaters and hoodies without looking like a freak.

My phone pings, interrupting my thoughts. It is Maeve, finally checking in after tryouts.

MaeveRose
: so?? tix??

KnuckLise99
: nope. mom decided to crash car instead.

MaeveRose
: !!!!!???

KnuckLise99
: long story. drama.

MaeveRose
: seriously no tix? r u ok?

KnuckLise99
: pretty much suicidal.

MaeveRose
: don't u freakin dare leave me all alone at dullsville high!

KnuckLise99
: jk. how were tryouts?

MaeveRose
: good i think. list up tomorrow.

KnuckLise99
: you'll so make it.

MaeveRose
: fingers crossed! gtg. so tired . . . mounds of homework. need to crash.

KnuckLise99
: me too. nite.

MaeveRose
: nite.

After I tell my mom I'm going to sleep, I get in bed and close my eyes. I settle in with my music, thinking how Viggo obviously wants more than something superficial with a girl like Skye, and really, he's only two years older than me, and if only I could find a way to get to that concert and lock eyes with him, I just know we'd connect for real. But even Viggo Witts's silken voice has a hard time easing me off to sleep tonight, with the drumbeat of Declan's last words pounding through my mind.

All morning, I've tried not to panic about messing things up with Annalise. What if Eva asks me in math class how last night's conversation went? What if she logs on after school and sees for herself? My only hope is to get things back on track—before she gets a clue. But how?

Luckily, the perfect person to ask races into World History. Tori. The queen of placating the bruised egos and hurt feelings she's left in her wake. She's forever telling us about the latest pageant kerfuffle, like the contestant who accused the winner of cheating by getting her whole Pom Squad to “like” her photo in exchange for a shot at being co-captain.

She exhales loudly and slides into her seat like it's home plate, seconds before the final bell rings. Her perfectly highlighted locks are limp from sweat, and her clothes look like they were crumpled up in a locker for the last hour. Which they probably were. Even a wreck, with her long honey-blond hair and longer spray-tanned legs, most girls I know would still take looking like Tori D'Fillipo on P.E. day.

“Gym?” I murmur sympathetically, as half the guys in the room swivel their heads to check her out.

“Deitrich made us run, like, a hundred laps around in the rain,” she says, panting slightly. “It was brutal.” It's only the second week of school, and Tori still hasn't gotten over the indignity of getting stuck in first-period gym. To her, it's a disruption in the natural order of things, like blush before foundation. “She wouldn't even let us stop to get a drink of water. I mean, isn't that like, a human rights violation, or something?”

I'm guessing she means waterboarding, but I just nod my head. At least the scheduling gods blessed me with a late-day gym class.

“I can't stand her. Seriously. That stupid whistle. Like what are we, dogs? And those shorts she wears. And her untouched roots.” She swivels her head, looking around the room for our absent history teacher. “Where's Gewirtz?”

I shrug and tell her she must be late.

Tori slumps, now annoyed she made the effort to arrive on time.

“Plus, I can't look a mess. Auditions are after school today!” She eyes me curiously. “Sure you're not trying out?”

I shake my head vehemently. “No way.” Performing in
High School Musical
, getting up on stage, even for a part in the chorus, sounds like
my
idea of a war crime. Pure torture. Tori shrugs and pulls out a compact, trying to fix her smudged eyeliner, and asks to see my homework. I pull it out and silently pass it over to her.

“So, do you think your mom might have some new product soon?” she says as her eyes quickly scan my work, double-checking her own answers.

I nod and tell her I think so, knowing next season's product line should be arriving any day, and my mom always brings home some extra samples for me and my friends.

“Can you tell her I could really use some lotion? The fall air is so drying. Actually, there's something else I wanted to ask her. Eva and I came up with it last night.”

This is news. I feel a sudden stab of insecurity that they'd been chatting without me while I'd been busy romancing Annalise. How often do their late-night discussions exclude me?

“Do you think her company would consider sponsoring my pageant?” Tori asks, her blue eyes lighting up with excitement. “They could, like, offer samples as prizes, and I could do some product placement, like, suggest their stuff to the losers, that sort of thing?”

It sounds like the worst idea I've ever heard, pushing cosmetics on dejected beauty pageant losers, but what do I know? Maybe it's pure evil genius.

“I'll ask,” I say, feeling slightly off-put, but mostly relieved the topic of conversation wasn't me and all my shortcomings. Sometimes, I wonder whether Tori would still be my friend if my mom sold medical devices instead of makeup. Or if I weren't helping her from failing history.

“Great!” She rewards me with a toothy beam. “She's the best.” Her phone buzzes. “Hold on,” she says, pulling it from her pocket and checking the screen. “Ugh,” she rolls her eyes. “These needy pageant girls are driving me nuts with their whining.” She doesn't reply, shoving her phone back into her skin-tight white jean skirt. If Tori had a motto, it would be:
if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
“Sometimes, I just want to tell them, ‘You lost. Get over it.' You know?”

Then why do it?
I want to ask, but just nod instead.

“Oh! So how's the you-know-what going?” Her voice is loud, too loud, but luckily our teacher is still MIA and the room has grown as raucous as the monkey house at the Franklin Park Zoo.

I confess that things are not going well. I'm guessing Tori won't take my screw up personally, since this crazy project wasn't her baby, but Eva's.

She looks surprised. “Already? What happened?”

I hesitate. “Don't tell Eva, until I fix it, okay?”

“Oooh, intrigue.” She arches a dutifully waxed eyebrow and leans in. “I won't say a word, I promise.”

I wonder if I'm about to make a big mistake. Can I trust her to keep my secret? Especially since she's really more Eva's friend than mine. After the two of them bonded last fall at play rehearsals, Eva eagerly adopted Tori into our clique, never thinking to ask if I wanted to expand our cozy twosome.

Tori insists I spill it, so I tell her in detail how I blew my first online encounter with Annalise, trying to flatter her and instead somehow insulting her.

She shakes her head in disappointment. “Not good. You better win her back. Pronto.”

I ask how and she nods, Yoda-like, considering her words. “You know what always works, for hurt feelings?” she finally says. “You should try a sorry kitty.”

Whatever I had been expecting her to say, this wasn't it.

“A sorry—what?”

She pulls out her phone again and scrolls through her images. Eventually, she finds what she is looking for and shows me the picture on her screen. A small white kitten sits adorably tangled in a basket of unraveled yarn twisted like a multicolored bowl of spaghetti. The kitten looks apologetically at the camera, as if it wishes it could mew something. And in fact, the caption reads “I'm Sorry.”

I shake my head, pretty sure I'm not
that
desperate. Besides, what if Annalise is a dog person? I'm looking for the grand gesture, the thing that will win her back, convince her she was wrong about me. The Declan me, that is.

“Try it,” she insists, tapping out a message, sending it to me, then quickly jamming her phone back into her bag as our history teacher, Ms. Gewirtz, finally bursts into the room, breathless and holding a stack of pop quizzes fresh from the copier, eliciting a collective class groan. “Never underestimate the power of a sorry kitty.”

At lunch today, I finally debrief Maeve on the complete fiasco of how my mom didn't get us the concert tickets. The car crash. The dead phone. The StubHub ripoff pricing structure.

“Mon Dieu!” she says, lapsing into Conversational French, her last class before lunch. Madame LeFouge requires all her students to speak French exclusively all period long, and sometimes the habit sticks. “Quel dommage!”

“English, por favor,” I have to remind her. “Yo no hablo French.”

“Sorry, sorry.” She stabs her french fries with a fork and pops one in her mouth.

“So do you want to come over today after school?” I ask, sipping my chemical-laden no-cal sports drink, which I've grown addicted to now that our school bans sugary sodas. “Maybe we can search craigslist for cheap tickets?”

“Love to but . . . no can do,” she says, her face breaking into a wide grin. “Practice starts today!”

“What? Did you—”

Her face beams as she nods, relishing the surprised look on my face. “Yup. Made the team!”

“That's awesome!” I say, giving her a hug. “Way to bury the lede.” I can't believe she let me go on and on about the concert ticket debacle with news this huge.

She mimes a pretend spike over an imaginary net. “I totally rocked the tryouts! Are you in awe of my awesomeness?”

“I am,” I say, knowing how hard it is for a sophomore to break onto a team, even though Coach Deitrich had practically begged her to try out after seeing Maeve's volleyball skills in gym class last year. “I'm not worthy.”

I jokingly bow down to her, although part of me feels a sinking sensation. Team sports mean practice every day after school. When will I see her now? It's bad enough that all winter, her family goes skiing every weekend up in New Hampshire, leaving me solo when all the girls in our class are having sleepovers or going skating at the Ice Palace. And ever since she was ten, Maeve has gone off to some sleep-away camp in Maine, leaving me stuck on my own all summer. And now, she's not even going to be free to hang out after school, like, ever? It's hard relying on only one best friend, especially when she doesn't have all that much free time for you. It's exponentially worse when everyone seems to think that talking to you will somehow rub your pariah fumes onto them.

To be honest, this year hasn't been so bad so far. The summer break seems to have reset most people's memories of last year's rumors. Maya Gomez asked me to sign her petition to run for student government. Even Tess McDonohue, one of Eva's crew, whose locker is next to mine, asked to borrow a pen during the first week of school, thanking me without a single trace of snottiness in her tone.

I think again of Declan and his comment on friends:
yeah, i need to get me some of those. interested?
For some reason, I hadn't mentioned Declan to Maeve, even though part of me is curious to know what she'd think. That he was an online creep I was right to defriend? Or, more likely, that he'd been trying to compliment me, and I flipped out like a psycho. But I'm embarrassed to admit to Maeve that I even care. Which I don't. It was just some random guy I chatted with on some random night. Besides, what's the difference? I'll probably never hear from him again.

I'm not sure I even want to.

Then after school, he pings me:
hey, are you still mad?

Delete. Next. Easy to ignore.

And again, the next day.
I didn't mean to piss you off.
But this time, his words come attached to a photo of this adorable white kitty tangled in a basket of yarn, with her paws begging for forgiveness, and the caption “I'm Sorry.”

My fingers pause. Really? A sorry kitty? On what planet did he think
that
would work? Guys can be so clueless about females. Delete. Then, the next day, he pings me again, a long message with a small file attached. Instead of trashing it right away, I read what he says. Twice.

DecOlan
: look. i'll try one more time and then leave you alone forever. <> i totally take back what i said—you look like you spend all your weekend nights home alone. you're most likely a shut-in. and a hoarder. with a huge goiter. and really gnarly chin hairs. there. feel better?

I have to laugh. Like, true, laugh out loud laugh. Something about his sense of humor gets to me. Maybe I was too harsh. Anyway, Maeve is off at practice, so who else do I have to talk to? I am this close to writing him back, but before I can think what to reply, he is typing again.

DecOlan
: now, before you delete this, make sure you check out the file.

DecOlan
: i got it just for you.

Just for me? Curious, I go ahead and click on it.

Up pops an audio file titled “Inner Beauty,” and when I push play, my ears almost fall off my head. It's Viggo Witts, singing a song I've never heard before in my life, which I didn't think was possible. From the lyrics and the file name, though, I recognize instantly what it must be: the unreleased single from their upcoming album! The one he was talking about in that video clip. But how did Declan get this? Ignoring the teensy detail that I'm still supposedly mad and never talking to him again, my fingers sputter over the keyboard.