Promiscuous (5 page)

Eyebrows raised, I step further into the stall and close the door behind me. When I get a good look, my face feels like it’s been lit on fire. There, on the inside of the door, in bright blue permanent marker are these words:

LARGE MARGE, YOU CAN HURL ALL YOU WANT BUT YOU’LL ALWAYS BE A HEIFER.

“I’m going to fucking kill her.” I reach for the door, planning to march out into the gym and rip out all of Becca Foster’s hair, in front of the entire aerobics class. In front of Coach Tailor. This is one of those moments when I really and truly do not give a single fuck what people think.

But Margot stops me with a hand clawing at my shoulder. Her voice is high with panic.

“Tash, please don’t do anything,” she pleads. “Please. You’ll only make it worse.”

I huff and puff murderously for a few more minutes, but deep down I know she’s probably right. It will only make things worse, and not just for me. Plus, Becca is the kind of girl who would totally pretend like her ass-ugly face is the result of my attack, then sue me for every penny I don’t have to pay for much-needed plastic surgery.

“Fuck this noise,” I finally say, when my rage-induced blindness passes. “We’re cutting and getting coffee.”

In spite of her obvious torment, Margot sniffles hopefully. “With whipped cream?”

I can’t help but feel like crying. Her obsession with food is beginning to eclipse her. I can only hope that when we get away from all of this high school bullshit, she’ll finally start to heal. But for now, all I can do is use the last of my cash to buy her a mocha frappe with extra whip cream and secretly pray that she doesn’t barf it up fifteen minutes later.

CHAPTER FOUR

After skipping aerobics, Margot and I got back to campus just in time for our second most hated class: elementary physics. In my opinion, anyone who schedules a class that requires so much equation before 9:00am is an asshole of monumental proportions. Seriously. Monuments should be erected to their assholery.

Thankfully though, my ploy to distract Margot from the Bathroom Stall Slander Incident seems to have worked, because she barely even flinches when we walk in and see Becca in her usual seat in the front. When Becca doesn’t bother to turn around, Margot seems to relax a little bit. So do I.

Please
, I pray silently to the great spaghetti monster in the sky.
Please just let her hold it together through the rest of today. Then we’ll go home and I’ll sweet-talk Nana into buying us some wine coolers and we’ll all get trashed and play Bingo at the community center with a bunch of elderly Jews. And tomorrow, Margot can change in a different bathroom stall. Amen.

Let’s get one thing straight here. I don’t really believe in a higher power. But I do believe in karma, or something like it. And if there’s anyone who deserves a pass, it’s Margot.

About halfway into Mr. Hamburg’s lecture on something scientific, my stomach growls. Loudly. I wriggle around in my seat, trying to lull it into silence like it's a living creature instead of an organ.

"What's wrong with you?" Margot whispers, eyes wide like she thinks I'm about to spontaneously combust or something.

"Sharon made eggs this morning. I was too skeeved out to really eat anything else."

"Seriously? Has she
met
you?"

"I know, right? Bitch didn't even have the decency to throw in some bacon."

Margot adopts that facial expression that reminds me of a sad panda bear. "Meat is murder, you know."

"Yeah I do," I whisper back, unrepentant. "That's why I love it. I eat murder for breakfast every day, because I am metal as fuck."

I stare her down with a completely straight face, watching as the corners of her lips tug downward slightly. She's trying not to laugh.
Ha. I win.

Turning back to the front of the class, I elbow her in the ribs. My humor dies a little bit when I feel the muted crunch of bone on bone through her thin sweatshirt, but Margot giggles and I forget why life is a cesspool. But only for a moment.

A few rows in front of us, Butterface Foster shifts in her seat, finally deigning to cast a sub-zero glance at Margot. I can practically feel the air wake from her bitchy smirk as it flies past me and decimates its target. Margot's laugh dies instantly, cut off in its prime. She slumps down in her chair, staring at the front of her shirt as her skeletal hands tug at it fitfully, trying to cover rolls of fat that aren't even there. Fuck.

I stare at the back of Becca's head, imagining flames shooting out of her perfectly curled, shining locks of hair. Or maybe blood dripping down. Possibly even chunks of brain matter. Honestly, I don't think I've ever been closer to straight up murdering someone in the middle of class before. Becca Foster is the cause of everything that's wrong with my best friend, and possibly the universe. For as long as I can remember, she's been the Voldemort to our Hogwarts. The Sauron to our Middle Earth.

And yeah, once again I can feel you judging me, wondering if I’m making this up. Typical teenage girl overreaction, you’re thinking. High school drama magnified by hormones and self-centeredness.

Or maybe it’s our fault. Like, what did Margot and I do to Becca to make her loathe us so publicly? You're probably thinking there's some kind of back story, like maybe we used to be friends in middle school, and then one of us puked on someone at a slumber party, or stole the other one's boyfriend.

Nope. Sorry. For us to be friends, we'd have to live on the same planet. And we don't. Because girls like Becca are from a planet where teenagers drive Range Rovers with heated leather seats. And Margot and I are from a planet where Spam is considered part of the poultry food group.

And yet, she feels the need to take from us. Attention, self-esteem, peace of mind. Whatever she can get her flawlessly manicured hands on, really.

The worst part of it is, I can't do anything to stop her. Not as long as Margot keeps giving her power by caring what she thinks. I can threaten her all I want, but at the end of the day, Margot will still keep looking to her with that same desperate hope in her eyes, like an underfed puppy watching for some tacit sign of approval. Or a morsel of human compassion. And even though I know that neither of those things will come, Margot is so goddamned forgiving of everyone but herself. So she'll keep throwing up every day, until Becca Foster stops glaring.

Unless the fates are kind, and I manage to run into Becca some night in a darkened, deserted alleyway. Lately, I've been fantasizing about that more and more. I can't help but feel like prison might be worth it.

If I got caught, that is.

"Hey Natasha," a soft, deep voice whispers, from behind me. A chill of excitement runs through me, and I flinch, slightly. My reaction annoys me so much that I take my sweet ass time turning around to glare menacingly at the speaker.

"What?"

"Sorry." Student Body Vice President Grant Blue's smile is sheepish, and yet somehow he manages to be both earnest and adorable at the same time. "Could you grab me my pen?"

I raise an eyebrow at him, tamping down any attraction I feel with sheer force of will. "What do I look like, your goddamned attaché?"

"Uh, no." His eyebrows push together, and now I have to add contrite to the dazzling mix of adjectives. "I dropped it...accidentally. It's right by your foot."

I sigh, roll my eyes, and then slowly reach down to pick up Mr. Perfect's damn pen. I hand it over without further comment, feeling like a douche and a half for raining on his perpetual nice guy parade. Fucking Captain America lookalike boy next door types. They'll get you every time.

When I turn back to face the chalkboard, a tingly feeling starts at the back of my neck.

Stop staring. I can feel you staring.

 To distract myself, I flip through my textbook until I find an illustrated page. Then I get busy transforming the lame diagram of inertia—seriously, why in the hell do you need a diagram to show an object not moving?—Into a castle surrounded by the shattered bodies of dead dragons.

Correction,
inert
dragons.

By the time my epic illustration is finished, physics is over. The bell rings, and I stand up and move three seats to the left, waving goodbye to Margot as she hauls hipbone to her next class—trying to avoid a run-in with Becca and company in the hallways, probably. My next class is Pre-Calculus, in the same room, with Mr. Bogart. Ain’t life grand?

While I wait for the rest of the science kids to file out, and the math students to file in, I take the opportunity to stretch out my legs and pop my back. It’s ridiculous to think that I could still be growing, at my height, but the leg cramps still happen occasionally. Or maybe I’m just out of shape.

“Nice tits, Skangly.”

I immediately drop my arms and hunch forward over my desk, eyes darting toward the source of the latest Cro-Magnon commentary on my rack. I didn’t see him come in, but I should have. Trent Gibson is one of the only guys in our class—besides Grant Blue—who manages to make me feel normal-sized. But in Trent’s case, it’s not just his height that makes me feel better about myself, it’s also the fact that his pea-sized intellect makes me feel like a damn genius. Especially when it comes to pre-calc, which I admittedly struggle with. Trent is what we at Guthrie High refer to as a ‘super senior,’ which I guess is supposed to be a nice way of saying ‘too stupid to graduate the first time around.’ I’m convinced the only reason he’s not in special ed is because he’s been the captain of the wrestling team for going on five years now—and it’s the only sports team at Guthrie to ever win a state championship.

“Your mouth is moving, Gibson,” I mutter, rolling my eyes. “You might want to lock that shit down.”

But instead of calling me a bitch or whatever and stalking off to his usual seat, Trent laughs. His worn camouflage pants, black army boots and thermal t-shirt suggest that he came straight to school from hunting, or maybe holding up a bank. I can smell the sour, cloying stench of chewing tobacco on his breath as he slides into the desk directly behind me. He’s quickly joined by his equally thick-headed wrestler friends, Joe Scofield and Alan Budge, and before I know it, I’m surrounded on three sides by about seven-hundred pounds of stupid.

Awesome.

“Hey Tasha,” Trent whispers, leaning forward until I can feel his greasy heat on the back of my neck. I clench my muscles to prevent a shudder from rocking my body.

“It’s Tash,” I hiss through gritted teeth. “And by the way, don’t fucking talk to me, beef brain.”

My eyes stay glued to the front of the room, because I cannot afford to deal with this shit today, not on top of everything else. My nerves are still raw from the whole Becca thing, and I am already choking on the stench of Trent’s body odor. Smells have always been a trigger for me, not just for migraines, but memories. Bad ones.

Locking down my facial expression into a look of cold irritation, I sweep my eyes across the classroom, searching for an empty seat. But I’m shit out of luck. The bell rings, and the last one gets taken by a girl who looks like she’s twelve years old. I don’t recognize her, so she must be a new transfer, one of those kids who gets bumped up a class two weeks into the term because they’re too smart for the curriculum they’re supposed to be taking. That happened to me once, in sixth grade English. But after I saw the looks I was getting from the eighth grade guys, I quickly backslid, on purpose.

Damn overachieving freshman
. I glare at the back of her head, then lean further over my desk, wrapping my fingers around the front edge until my knuckles turn white. I’m trapped here now, so I might as well grit my teeth and bear it.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Trent says, not bothering to lower his voice, even as Mr. Bogart waddles fatly into the classroom and heaves himself onto the chintzy metal stool next to the projector. “You’re the one who was sticking them out there. If you didn’t want me to look, you shouldn’t have waved them in my face. Hey, what size bra do you wear, anyway?”

I try to ignore the feeling of maggots slithering over my flesh, eating holes in my shirt, digging into my back—somehow, it’s the exact opposite of how I felt when I thought Grant Blue was staring at me. The smell of unwashed armpits seems to grow stronger, damper. I can’t help but remember Doug, the perverted father at my first babysitting job. My sinuses feel violated. A dense, electric throbbing starts to form behind my right eye.

Slowly, carefully, I reach into my backpack and pull out my Pre-Calculus book. I set it carefully on my desk, then glance at the page numbers Mr. Bogart is writing on the overhead projector. Two-hundred thirty-five through two-eighty. Taking a deep, silent breath—through my mouth, of course—I meticulously flick through the pages a few at a time, until I reach 235.

“I heard you blew James Gardener at the race track this summer,” Trent says, loud enough for his buddies—and anyone sitting in the surrounding desks—to hear. I don’t even know who that is, and people are saying I sucked his dick.
Seriously?
My face begins a slow burn, but I stare determinedly at the numbers in my textbook, even though they don’t make any sense. “Did you let him motor-boat you, too? I bet you’d be really good at that.”

Joe and Alan chuckle appreciatively, and the girl in front of me covers a nervous giggle with her hand, pretending it’s a cough halfway through.

Blood in the water, I remind myself. I can’t show fear. It will just make it worse. I can’t afford to let them see me cringe.

“You’ll never find out.” I make sure to say it loud enough for my fellow students to hear, but quiet enough that Mr. Bogart can remain blissfully unaware of what’s going on in his classroom right under his nose, as usual. “Unlike you, I don’t have sex with farm animals.”

The girl in front of me turns to look at me, with an expression of shock mixed with disgust. I can’t tell if she’s horrified by my comment, or the fact that I made it in the middle of class. Either way, it’s not half as bad as what I could have said.
What? This is me keeping it PG-13
, I open my mouth to tell her, but that’s when Trent pokes me in the back with his finger. Hard.