Project Paper Doll (23 page)

Unless you were Rachel, there were only two places you could flee to before the start of classes: the school office or the bathroom. After our less-than-successful visit with the principal the other day, I was betting that Jenna had chosen the latter.

The girls’ bathroom immediately off the gym was quite possibly one of my least favorite places in all of my experience. And lest you have forgotten, I spent a goodly amount of time trapped in a secret room underground.

This bathroom was rarely used except during this pre-start to the school day and by those professing “emergencies” during P.E. It was small, dimly lit, and reminded me of a dank prison cell with its fractured gray tile floors and graffitied walls.

I pushed open the door quietly, wrinkling my nose at the overwhelming stench of industrial cleaning supplies.

The lone stall door, bearing the mark of someone’s early morning boredom in the form of a huge swooping heart with “Maddy + Josh 4EVA,” was closed. The muffled sounds of sniffling came from behind it, along with a piercing stream of harsh thoughts.

…so stupid, ugly, fat, no wonder you’re such a loser. God, you should just kill yourself
.…

Uh-oh.
I tapped on the stall door hesitantly. “Jenna?”

“Oh my God,” she wailed. “What do you want? To dig the knife deeper into my back?”

I flinched. I deserved that, I guess. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.” I made a face at my own words. Obviously she
wasn’t
anything near okay.

Jenna whipped the door open suddenly and so hard it collided with the metal stall wall with a loud smack.

I took a startled step back.

“Do I look okay?” she demanded, emerging with her face flushed and shiny with tears.

“Jenna, I am so sorr—”

“You know, I was your friend,” she said, advancing on me and pointing with her hand full of wadded-up toilet paper. “Even though you’re freaky and weird and you can never go out anywhere and I think your dad keeps you locked up in the basement or something.”

My face grew hot, hearing her say it like that. It was not far from what was once truth.

“All the strange restrictions and messing up words and not understanding random stuff that even little kids get.” Jenna threw her hands up in the air.

My whole face was on fire now. She’d never said any of this before. And she’d hidden it well because I’d never picked it up in her thoughts, other than the occasional “huh, that’s weird” kind of a moment. “I’m sorry it was so difficult,” I said stiffly.

She picked at the toilet paper in her hands, separating the cheap two-ply into thinner single sheets. “My mom said that I should aim higher, but I defended you,” she said over a hiccup. “When I picked you to be my friend, I thought, Here’s someone I can trust. She doesn’t care about being popular. She doesn’t even care about being normal. Next to her, I’ve got a shot at being noticed instead of always being second best.” She raised her gaze to the ceiling as if reenacting the realization.

A yawning emptiness opened up inside me. Zane had been right. Jenna was my friend, but only as long as it was on her terms, as long as I stayed in the little box she’d put me in, the obedient (and slightly weird) friend. The second things changed in a way she didn’t like, she called it all off.

How had I missed that? Had I been that desperate and lonely?

“Now you’re the one all best buds with Rachel, and you don’t even like her,” she raged.

“Are you angry that Rachel chose me, a freak, for
special
attention?” I demanded, with extra emphasis on the “special” because Jenna, of all people, should know how much Rachel’s definition of that varied from the rest of ours. “Or is it that she chose a freak over you?”

Jenna’s eyes widened, but she rallied quickly. “You don’t even appreciate what you’re being offered,” she said. “Your dad
wants
you to stay home all the time.”

I frowned, not making the connection. “What exactly do you think I’m getting?” I asked.

“The perfect life! Once you’re in, you’re good. You never have to worry about people liking you or fitting in or being alone on a Friday night or your mom telling you that you just must not be trying hard enough,” she said in a longing voice.

Dr. Mayborne strikes again.
Jenna’s mom was worse than I’d realized. “Yeah, being popular, a solution for all the world’s problems.” I sighed, thinking about what I knew about Zane and how Rachel treated him. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

“You’re still going,” she accused.

I stared at her in disbelief. “Yeah, because Rachel is trying to set me up, and I’m not going to let her get the best of me,” I snapped.

She sniffled and looked up, hope lighting her face. “Really? That’s all?”

I clamped my mouth shut. I shouldn’t have said anything. It was too much of a risk. “Forget it.” I started to turn away.

“You know it’s not real with Zane, right?”

I froze, then faced her. “What?”

She didn’t seem to hear me. “It can’t be. It just can’t be,” she repeated softly, as if trying to convince herself. “People like him don’t choose people like you.”

I jerked back as if she’d hit me. She wasn’t wrong, exactly; I couldn’t deny that. How often would someone like Zane Bradshaw choose someone like me? Not very. But I couldn’t believe that a person who was supposed to be my friend would say that.

She looked like the Jenna I knew—pink cheeks, scattered curls, overly careful attention to her accessory selection—but not. All of this had started because I’d broken the Rules to defend her against Rachel. But apparently that had been a huge mistake. Jenna was
nothing
like who I thought she was. Yeah, I’d lied about who I was during the course of our friendship—it couldn’t be helped, given what I had to hide. But I’d done my best to be as honest as I could. She, evidently, hadn’t bothered. She wasn’t a true friend. She never had been.

My eyes stung with tears, which surprised and infuriated me. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to stop them, and headed for the door. I could feel the walls of the room pressing in on me.

“No, Ariane, wait!”

I paused, my hand on the door, and glanced at Jenna.

She dabbed under her eyes with the shredded toilet paper without looking at me. “So, um, do you think you can get me in at Rachel’s tonight?”

I closed my eyes. Any hope I’d ever had of our being friends again died a swift and painful death. Some part of me wished we could go back to before, when I didn’t know what I meant (or didn’t mean) to her. But now that I knew, there was no forgetting, no getting past it. Zane had said I deserved more; I wasn’t so sure about that. I just couldn’t handle one more person seeing me as
something
, useful or not, instead of
someone
.

I opened my eyes. “Bye, Jenna,” I said, and walked out.

B
Y FIFTH HOUR,
there was still no sign of Ariane. I’d figured it wouldn’t take her long to seek me out once Rachel had delivered her “invitation” in the only way that Rachel could: condescendingly. Which Ariane would take as a personal challenge and respond the only way she knew how: by saying yes.

But instead…nothing.

No texts or phone calls. No hissed conversations in the hall. Not so much as a glare in the distance, which would have required my seeing her, and I hadn’t. But Ariane had to know why I did what I did, right?

After confirming again with Rachel at lunch that the encounter had gone as I’d expected (“Yes, Zane, for the twelfth time, she said she’ll be there. God! What is your problem?”), I went looking for Ariane.

She let me find her at her locker. I say “let” because the first seven times I’d walked past, on my way to class, the drinking fountain, etc., she hadn’t been there. She might have been avoiding me, or maybe I just had crappy timing.

“You sicced Rachel on me,” she said, her attention focused on trading out her books. She was so cold and distant compared to last night.

I rolled my eyes, jamming my hands into my pockets. “You didn’t give me a choice. Would we even be having this conversation if I hadn’t?”

“It doesn’t change anything. I can’t…we can’t…” She avoided looking at me. “You know that.”

“I don’t know that,” I said in exasperation. “Because I still have no idea what’s going on.” I paused, waiting for her to fill the silence with some kind of explanation. But she stayed quiet, concentrating on what she was doing at her locker.

Okay, fine, if that’s how we’re going to play it
.… “It does change something,” I pointed out.

Ariane glanced up at me sharply.

“You’re going to the party tonight when you weren’t before.”

She gave me a sour look. “Because you manipulated Rachel into manipulating me.”

I snorted. “Yeah, that was a real stretch of my abilities.” The two of them had done all the work themselves—I’d just given Rachel the idea.

I thought I saw the start of a smile before she shook her head. “What do you want, Zane?”

“Look, I just want…” Actually, I hadn’t stopped to think about
what
I wanted. Only that I didn’t want it, whatever
it
was, to end with last night. “I want to see this thing through,” I finished lamely. “Don’t you?”

“Without sounding too self-pitying, it absolutely does not matter what I want.” She shut her locker and turned away from me.

I followed her. “It matters to me.” I winced at the supreme cheesiness of the line even though it was the truth.

And it worked. She looked up at me directly for the first time. Her eyes were bloodshot and more swollen than last night—it must have been hell to put in her contact lenses this morning. “That,” she said quietly, “is why I should be putting as much distance as possible between us.”

I sighed, tired of trying to understand her enigmatic answers. “Look, you’ve got secrets. Fine. I understand.”

She gave me a wry smile.

I sighed again. “Okay, no, I don’t understand, but my point is you can trust me. You don’t want to talk about it? Fine. But don’t cut me out.” I stuffed my hands into my pockets again, feeling absurdly vulnerable.

Ariane cleared her throat. “Because it’s a challenge.”

“No,” I snapped, frustrated. “Because you are the most interesting person I’ve met. Ever. Because you take my side without weighing whether that’s best for you or not. Because you’re real and you don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

And what I couldn’t make myself say out loud: Because I want to be
that
guy. I want to be the person you trust. To be worthy of someone who really knows me instead of being their second—or last—choice.

I’m not dumb. I didn’t miss the parallels between this situation and my mom. Ariane had a secret, just as my mom had when she was planning her escape; and this time I wanted to be included, taken along instead of left behind.

But even knowing that some of this was driven by the forces of my past didn’t change how I felt.

“If you knew the truth, you wouldn’t be so quick to sign on,” Ariane said as we dodged people—and curious glances—in the hall.

“So tell me,” I said.

“You know I can’t,” she said, exasperated.

I grinned smugly. “Then I guess I get the benefit of the doubt for now.” I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

“This is only for tonight,” she warned, but I could feel her relaxing into my side.

And if she wanted it to be just for tonight, that was fine. After the party was over I’d work on getting her to agree to tomorrow or next week. I wasn’t into her because she was a challenge, but I certainly wasn’t afraid of the challenge she presented.

“And we’re not going to the party together. We just happen to be going to the same party,” she said with a sniff.

I raised my eyebrows. “Yeah? How are you going to get there?” I asked, betting she hadn’t gotten that far yet. Rachel’s house was on the other side of town.

She stopped, genuinely startled. “Damn.”

“I’m guessing a taxi might attract attention that you don’t want.…” I shook my head in mock seriousness.

She glared at me. “Don’t gloat. It’ll stunt your growth.”

I laughed, surprised. “I don’t think that’s how it works. And besides, even if it did”—I gestured at the height difference between us—“I think it’s a little late for that. For me, at least.” I frowned. “You, on the other hand, are apparently the gloatiest of all gloaters.”

She pursed her mouth. “Funny.”

I bumped her hip with mine—well, her side, thanks to that height difference. “You just don’t like it when I’m right.”

“No, sometimes I wish you were right all the time,” she said, her gaze distant.

I could feel her mood veering off into the melancholy gloom I’d found her in. “Come on, walk me to class and I’ll let you lecture me about the debilitating effects of drinking coffee as an infant or of not eating my toast crusts.”

“Your parents gave you coffee?” She sounded aghast.

And I couldn’t resist. “Straight from the pot into a bottle.” I held my hand up in an “I swear” gesture, struggling to keep a straight face.

She believed me for about a half second. Then she shoved me. “Shut up.” But she was smiling. And that was all I wanted.