Project Paper Doll (10 page)

And even if they hadn’t been, there was no way he’d use the GTX-donated system to bust Rachel. I didn’t need to hear his thoughts to know that. Still, it worked to my advantage in this case. I let out a breath.

“Look, girls, most of the time, these things end up being a misunderstanding. A joke that went too far, as Rachel said.” Mr. Kohler steepled his hands on his desk, attempting to project wisdom and confidence. “It will all blow over in a few days.”

At least, he was hoping it would. He was worried. He didn’t want the Maybornes to force the issue. That would make things awkward. There was all this emphasis on preventing bullying these days.…

…We’re raising a generation of wimps.

Lovely.

“I’m going to talk to Rachel again and make it very clear that all jokes are off, okay?”

Jenna looked weary. “Fine.” She dabbed at her face with a tissue.

“Wait here while I get passes for you.” Principal Kohler levered his bulk out from behind his desk and headed to the outer office.

“Will your mother fight for you?” I whispered to Jenna. “He’ll take that seriously.”

“Are you kidding?” she said. “My mom was literally Miss Popularity. That was her yearbook title and everything. She won’t understand.”

I frowned. That, at least, explained Jenna’s obsession with Rachel and breaking into the “elite” crowd. I’d been in the car with Dr. Mayborne once or twice before, to and from various shopping excursions with Jenna. She gave a constant stream of gentle-sounding suggestions—“Wearing your hair back would give you a slimmer look, Jenna.” “A longer skirt would be more flattering to your shape.” “You know, I’ve heard that bronze is the new silver, which could really help add some color to your face.”—that would have worn down someone far tougher than Jenna just by the sheer volume.

Jenna tipped her head up toward the ceiling, blinking back fresh tears. “God. If I could only figure out what I did wrong.”

I stared at her. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You don’t understand.” Jenna shook her head, blond curls that had probably taken an hour to create sticking to her overheated face. “Rachel wouldn’t be nice to me only to turn on me.”

I would have gaped at her naïveté, but this was Jenna. “She would do exactly that,” I said, more harshly than I should have. “That was her intent in the first place.”

Which was, I guess, the wrong thing to say.

Her face crumpled. “Seriously? You’re supposed to be my friend and you say that? Like it’s impossible that she could have been genuinely nice to me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Ariane!”

“Not because there’s anything wrong with you,” I said quickly. I wasn’t explaining this well. I fumbled for the words to explain something that, to Jenna, would be completely foreign. “That’s how Rachel is. She only sees people in terms of what she can get from them.”

It made sense to me, as much as I didn’t care for it. It was how Dr. Jacobs viewed the world; though in his case, it was less about mean-spirited entertainment and more about no-holds-barred scientific advancement.

I glanced toward the outer office to make sure Principal Kohler couldn’t overhear. From the sounds of it, he’d gotten caught up in lecturing somebody about not using the bike racks for skateboard “stunts.” “But listen, it’s okay. I have a plan,” I said to Jenna, with another involuntary shiver of glee.

Jenna frowned at me. “What kind of plan?” She paled. “Is this about getting back at Rachel?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything, she cut me off, her hand up. “Look, I wish I was more like you, Ariane. That I didn’t care about being alone and not having a life.”

Stung, I straightened up. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about being alone or lonely. I just had to be careful in how I went about resolving the issue. I didn’t have a choice in that.

“But I want a life, and I’m not going to get what I want by pissing off Rachel.” She hesitated, then stood and slung her juice-stained bag over her shoulder. “Maybe we should take some time.…”

I realized with a harsh start that by “we,” she meant
me
. That
I
should give her time, a chance to mend the imaginary fences she thought she’d broken in her “friendship” with Rachel without the added burden of me, another outcast. After all, in Jenna’s mind, everything had been going great with Rachel until school started and the two of us, Jenna and I, were together again.

I swallowed hard against the unexpected lump in my throat. “Sure.” I forced the word out.

“It’s not forever, just until all of this gets straightened out,” she said, backing toward the door.

Which would never happen because Rachel wouldn’t change and Jenna would never see things the way they truly were. But I nodded, and Jenna smiled with relief. Then she turned and walked to the outer office. A second later, I heard her asking for a late pass to class.

I couldn’t move. My fingers were wrapped so tightly around the metal armrests of the chair, I was worried they might break. I should have been grateful. Jenna, as my weak spot, would cause only more trouble for me with Rachel.

But I wasn’t grateful. My chest ached with the hurt. Rachel had managed to win again, taking the only person I counted as a friend. And the worst part? It wouldn’t change things. Rachel would still abuse Jenna, gaining her trust and then turning against her. And if she sensed Jenna’s abandonment of me as a sign of my vulnerability, she’d probably take the opportunity to come after me again.

No. Just no.
Rage welled up inside of me, and the picture frames on Kohler’s desk began to jitter and dance.

Calm down. Breathe.
I clamped down on the anger and forced myself to release my death grip on the chair arms, letting my breath out slowly. But then the lightbulb in Kohler’s desk lamp gave with a quiet pop, followed by the delicate tinkling of broken glass, and something inside me eased, the built-up power released.

Shit.
With a quick glance toward the door—I could hear the slightly whiny voice of the skateboard dude protesting loudly—I stood up and swept most of the glass off the desk into the trash, then straightened the pictures that had vibrated out of place.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than doing nothing.

Which was pretty much the description of my plan. And I was going forward with it, Jenna or no Jenna.

I had to.

Rachel needed to see what it felt like to hurt, to lose for once. She and her grandfather had taken
everything
from me. Yes, it might save my life if I could regain control over the barrier in my brain and keep GTX from finding me. And maybe by keeping Rachel’s attention focused on me, I could protect Jenna. But those were justifications, excuses for doing what I wanted—no, craved—with a frightening urgency.

See, this was the problem with creating a freak like me. I had the drive to win, to crush competitors who had no idea what they were up against, combined with an advanced ability to predict, plan, and manipulate. And you could bury all of that under layers of civility and rules, but it wouldn’t go away.

It might have been my human side clamoring for blood, or my alien side looking for a chance to exercise strategic dominance over a lesser life-form. Either way, I was going to win.

M
Y WHOLE BODY ACHED
by the time last bell rang. The hallway around my locker had emptied out already—everyone dashing for the door as soon as they could—but I was moving slowly. The ibuprofen I’d snagged from Cami had worn off hours ago.

But it wasn’t just the remnants of the hangover dragging me down. All afternoon I’d had to watch Trey mooning over Rachel; Rachel gloating at having coasted through the lunch trouble with nothing more than a stern warning from Mr. Kohler; and Cami, Cassi, Jonas, and Matty talking about the same things, the same people, as last year. I was so tired of all of this claustrophobic inner-circle crap.

And yet I stuck around. What did that say about me? But what was I supposed to do, cut them off ? Join the goth crowd smoking behind the gym? Where else was I going to go?

“I’m in.”

Startled, I turned to see Ariane behind me.

I slammed my locker shut and pulled my backpack up over my shoulders. “You’re in what?”

“Your plan. The one you described this morning.” She looked fierce, ready to spit nails. I couldn’t blame her. But I couldn’t help her either. Not anymore.

“It’s too late for that,” I said. “You saw what happened at lunch.”

Her mouth tightened. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Zane, you coming, man?” Trey shouted from the other end of the hall, where he was waiting impatiently near the glass doors to the parking lot, car keys in hand.

“I’ll meet you at the car,” I shouted back. I turned to Ariane. “She’ll never believe it. She already knows you said no. Forget it.” There was no point in trying to fight. Just ride it out. Only another seven-hundred-odd days, right?

I started to walk away, but Ariane followed. “She’ll believe it because she wants to believe it. She wants the opportunity to crush me more than she wants to think it through.” I could hear the bitterness and disdain curling the edges of her words.

I stopped and looked at her. She wasn’t pleading; she was too angry for that. Her eyes, that strange muddled blue, held barely restrained fury. I’d never seen or heard Ariane this emotional about anything, except in telling me off this morning. She was half my size but looked ready to break someone’s arm off.

A flicker of interest in my original plan—and in this strange girl who made no sense—flared up again. “All right,” I said. “What did you have in mind?”

She didn’t sigh in relief or smile or say thank you, but the tension in her shoulders eased. “The same thing you proposed this morning. Bonfire Week.”

I frowned. “The activities fair starts in three hours.” Even from here I could hear distant echoing voices from the gym and the loud whine of what might have been a power saw as the various clubs set up their booths.

“I can be ready.” She raised her eyebrows, her gaze taking me in from head to toe. A small but mocking smile played on her lips. “Can you?”

I grimaced. I must have looked pretty rough. No more drinking on weeknights. “Fine. Yes. Then what?”

Her brows drew together, crinkling her forehead. “What do you mean?”

I felt the tiniest bit vindicated at having figured out something before her. “I mean, we can’t just show up at this stuff, the fair, the game, the bonfire, and that’s it. If it’s supposed to look legit, like we’re into each other for real—and trust me, Rachel would expect that of any scheme of hers—then we’ve got to take it an extra step.”

Ariane eyed me warily. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Do you walk to school?” I asked, ignoring the doubt in her voice. I waited for her to nod, though I already knew the answer. Trey and I had passed her often enough last year when we were coming in early for one thing or another.

“If I can get the truck for school, I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.” My dad usually drove his work car, an SUV emblazoned with
WINGATE CHIEF OF POLICE
. If he could have had it personalized with his name, he probably would have. That meant the battered Blazer that Quinn drove was sitting unused in the garage. I could have argued for the right to take it to school, but since Trey had a car, it wasn’t worth the fight unless I had a date.

“What? Why do you need to pick me up?” Ariane looked alarmed.

“The extra step,” I reminded her patiently. “School pickup, drop-off, lunch probably…”

Ariane made a face, whether in memory of today’s incident or the idea in general.

“But not at my house,” she insisted. “You can’t pick me up at my house.”

In spite of myself, I felt the first tendrils of intrigue uncurling. She didn’t want me at her house. Was it only me? Or everyone? “Okay,” I said slowly. “Then how do you expect me to pick you up for the fair tonight?”

“We could meet in the parking lot and—” she began.

“Because no one would notice that and call us on it?” I asked. “Try again.”

She scowled at me. “Fine. Two blocks from my house. Pine and Rushmore. But
don’t
wait on Pine, go around the corner.”

Uh-oh.
I cocked my head to one side, staring at her curiously. “Are you sneaking out?” Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her at anything outside of school, even regular extracurriculars like the fair tonight.

“No,” she said, too quickly.

Great.
“Look, I don’t know what your life is like right now, but mine kind of sucks and I don’t need more heat from my dad if your dad decides to get pissed about—”

“It’s fine,” she said. “He won’t even be home. I just…I just don’t want to answer a bunch of questions about what I’m doing if someone sees the truck in the driveway and mentions it to him.” She shifted uncomfortably, avoiding my gaze.

Oh, she was so lying. Maybe not about her dad being gone, but about the sneaking out? Most definitely. But Wingate was a small town; no way we would stay a secret for long, which meant all of this would come raining down on my head at some point.

I hesitated, then shrugged.
Oh, what the hell.
My dad already hated me, what was one more reason for it? Hey, if her dad was Mark Tucker and this ended up making him cranky, maybe my dad would be pleased at having struck a blow at his mortal enemy.

“Fair starts at seven,” I said. “What time do you want me to—”

“Quarter to. And don’t be late,” she added.

I resisted the urge to salute, figuring she might not take it well. I pulled my phone from my pocket. “What’s your number?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why?”

She was going to fight me every step of the way, even though this was her idea. This time, anyway. “How else do you want me contact you?” I asked slowly, as if to a child.

She frowned and made no move for her cell.

“Second thoughts already?” I asked, fighting disappointment. This was maybe the most interesting thing that had happened in months. I’d proposed my plan to her this morning out of anger and spite. I thought she’d go for it, and when she didn’t, I thought better of her for it. And now…now she was coming back to me. I hadn’t counted on that, and found I liked her even more for surprising me yet again.

She stuck her chin out. “No.” She dug into her pocket and handed me her phone. I typed in my number.

“Here.” I handed it back. “Call me.”

She nodded and started to turn away.

“No.” I snagged the edge of her bag to stop her, careful not to touch her directly. She’d been ready to bolt this morning whenever she thought I might make direct contact. “Now. So I have your number.” You’d have thought she’d never exchanged numbers with someone before.

Her cheeks turned a pale pink. “Fine,” she muttered.

She hit
SEND
on her phone, and as soon as mine rang, she hung up.

I typed her name in and saved it. “You know this could all blow up in our faces if Rachel catches on,” I said, tucking my phone into my pocket. I found there was a part of me, bent on self-destruction, that was more than a little eager at the prospect, but I felt I had to warn Ariane. “If you think she’s bad now…”

“She won’t like it, but she’ll believe.” Ariane sounded absurdly confident.

I sighed. “Your funeral.”

“Yes, it will be,” she said solemnly.

Okaaaay.
Before I could respond to that—I wasn’t even sure what I would say—she turned and walked away. Her backpack—a plain green canvas rather than the pink sparkly or shiny black bags I was used to seeing from Rachel and her lot—pulled at her shoulders, and on the right side, where the neck of her shirt was bunched under the strap, I caught a glimpse of a square white edge. The bandage I’d seen last year.

My curiosity sparked to life again. Maybe tonight I’d start getting some of the answers I wanted. The missing pieces that would make her make sense.

When Trey dropped me off at home, I didn’t retreat to my room as usual. Instead I cleared a space on the kitchen table and set the stage with my laptop open and books around it. I loaded and ran the dishwasher, but I didn’t empty it. That would have been pushing it.

The trick to managing my dad was doing so without letting him catch on. There was an art to it. I’d watched my mom do it on my behalf for years. It meant choosing your words carefully, picking the right time, and positioning the situation and the desired action in a way that would make sense to him, right or wrong.

But after everything that happened last year, I’d been too pissed and confused to bother putting what I knew into practice. But now I wanted the truck, wanted to be able to pick up Ariane, enough to play his ridiculous game.

I was out of practice, though. I just hoped it would be enough.

If he kept to pattern, he’d show up between five thirty and six, and one of us would dig into the freezer for a casserole that some woman—either grandmotherly or looking to date my dad, it varied—had dropped off for us. Since my mom had left, my dad made a point of being home for dinner. Couldn’t have people whispering about the poor neglected son left at home alone all the time, even if he was the “other Bradshaw boy.” Appearances were everything to my dad.

I played at working on my homework—there was never very much in the first week anyway—while I waited and watched the clock. I’d be cutting it close for picking up Ariane, but it was a calculated gamble. If my dad had had a bad day, calling and interrupting him at work would trash my chances.

Killing time, I Googled Ariane. Yeah, it was a little stalker-y, but mostly I was just trying to find out what everyone else knew about her that I’d ignored or completely missed in the haze of last year.

Except it turned out Ariane Tucker was a ghost. Well, not really. But maybe as close to it as you can get and still be alive. In more ways than one.

There were lots of Ariane Tuckers in the United States, but they were the wrong age and/or living in the wrong place. This Ariane, the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old one in Wingate, Wisconsin, didn’t show up at all. She didn’t have a Facebook page or a Tumblr. No Twitter or Formspring either, as far as I could tell.

Then I tried searching her name in combination with the man I was guessing to be her dad, the infamous Mark Tucker.

Two listings came up. The first was an obituary from the archives of a newspaper in a small town in central Ohio. Dated from about ten years ago, it was for an Abigail Tucker, thirty-eight. She’d died in a single-car accident, a collision with a concrete bridge abutment on an icy night.

So Cami had been right. Ariane had come here after her mother’s death. And Ariane
was
definitely related to the hated Mark Tucker. Interesting.

Then the second-to-last paragraph, right above the details for Abigail Tucker’s funeral, caught my attention.

Mrs. Tucker is survived by her former husband, Mark Tucker. Ariane, the couple’s six-year-old daughter, struggled valiantly in experimental treatment for a rare form of cancer, until several weeks ago when…

I clicked for the next page, but got a 404 error,
PAGE NOT FOUND
. I tried again and got the same result.

I sat back in my chair. Cami said Ariane had been sick, but no one had ever mentioned that it was
this
bad. It sounded like she’d almost died. And then after surviving all of that, she’d had to deal with the fact that her mom was never coming back.

My mind immediately summoned up an image of the note on the kitchen table—a lone square of white paper on the polished wood—that Sunday morning. I’d stumbled in to find the kitchen empty and pristine. All the mess from Quinn’s graduation party the night before had been cleaned up and put away. Not so much as a streamer remained on the wall. My mom must have been up for hours to get everything restored to normal in time for the next day, my birthday.

I’d been stupidly pleased. It was hard enough to have your birthday in the shadow of another big event, especially something for Quinn, but it would have been even worse if we’d been eating birthday cake on graduation plates, beneath balloons and banners that had been put up to celebrate him. Talk about proof that you’re second best…

My mom, though, of all people, knew how it worked in our house. We were on the same side (or so I’d thought). She’d always done what she could to soften the blow of my father’s disapproval.