What If... All Your Friends Turned On You (27 page)

“It's going to look fabulous, because we're going to look fabulous,” Coco said. “I call this bed.” She set her bag down on the best bed in the one empty room in the suite. “Two of you are going to have to sleep on the couch.”

Cecily took the other bed in Coco's room, and Sasha took the empty bed in Ali's room, which left Haley to share the pullout couch in the common room with Whitney.

“What's on for tonight?” Coco asked Ali.
“Cocktail party? Dinner at a nice restaurant? Maybe a frat blowout?”

“There's a party at Zeta Psi,” Ali said with a yawn. “I suppose it wouldn't be too mortifying to be seen with you there. You could blend in with the clueless second-semester transfers.”

“Thanks for the warm welcome, Ali,” Coco said sarcastically. “It means a lot to us.”

“Hey—you invited yourselves up here,” Ali said. “It's not my responsibility to make sure you have a good time. I'm a busy college student. I've got fashion magazines to read.”

She buried herself in the latest glossy while her little sister and friends threw open their bags and started pulling out clothes.

“Let's get dressed for the party,” Coco said. She held up two dresses: one a simple blue sheath, the other a micro-mini baby-doll number. “Which dress screams college sophisticate? And don't be wrong.”

“Oooh, the baby-doll!” Whitney said.

“I like the sheath,” Cecily said. “But only if you dress it up with jewelry—maybe an armload of bangle bracelets?” She unzipped her jewelry case and jangled a stack of metal bangles.

Ali sighed and slammed her magazine shut. “You know what? I think I'll do my reading in a café somewhere. Have fun without me.”

“Aren't you going to get dressed for the party?” Haley asked.

“Uh, hello?” Ali said. “It's just a stupid frat party. I don't need three hours to get ready for that.”

“Don't listen to her,” Coco said. “She's trying to make the party sound lame so we won't stay in her stupid dump of a suite longer than necessary. Now, on to hair accessories …”

The girls spent hours dolling themselves up to their idea of the height of sophistication with clothes, hair and makeup. Just before they left the suite to grab some dinner, Haley caught sight of herself in the mirror and paused. She'd never worn so much makeup before.

“Are you sure all this eyeliner looks okay?” she asked the room in general.

“It looks amazing,” Coco said. “Stop worrying. It looks like a lot in this harsh dorm light, but at a nighttime party your eyes will seem smoky and mysterious.”

“All right,” Haley agreed, and out they went into the New Haven evening.

First stop, Mory's, the venerable Yale club. They walked in but a bouncer stopped them just inside the door. “Can I see your student IDs, ladies?”

“We left them in our dorm,” Coco lied as she tried to breeze past him. He blocked her with a beefy arm.

“Sorry, Mory's is for Yale students, alumni or faculty only,” he said. “And besides, if you girls are thinking about going to the bar, I'd forget it. You're obviously way too young to drink.”

Coco tried to finesse this by laughing coyly. “Aren't you sweet. Did you hear that, girls? This adorable young man actually thinks we're teenagers!”

The bouncer rolled his eyes. “You are teenagers. See you in a few years.” He gently pushed them toward the door. They found themselves out on the cold, hard street, unsure of where to go next.

“We're not meeting Ali at Zeta Psi until nine,” Coco said.

“And I'm starving,” Whitney said.

“What about Pepe's Pizza?” Sasha said, nodding at a pizza joint down the block. “New Haven is supposed to have the best pies on the planet.”

The line at Pepe's was out the door, but the girls had time to kill, so they waited. Whitney complained about hunger pangs the entire time. At last they got a table and sat down to share a large mushroom pie.

“This is such a waste! After all our hard work dieting, we're ingesting empty pizza calories?” Coco said, half disgusted, though not so much that she couldn't devour a yummy slice.

“Who cares? It's delicious,” Haley said.

At nine o'clock they trooped across campus to the frat party. They passed roving gangs of students laughing, partying, having fun. They also passed the library, where, through the windows, they could see other students hard at work.

“Look at those grinds,” Coco said. “Don't they
know that the whole point of college is partying? They're missing all the fun!”

By the time they found Zeta Psi the party was in full swing, but there was no sign of Ali. “Who cares?” Coco said. “We don't need her. Now point me to the college boys.”

The house was old and worn—Haley could see the remnants of parties gone by on the scuffed walls and scratched furniture. Most of the partygoers were gathered around a bar in the basement that smelled of stale beer. “You can definitely tell boys live here,” Haley said.

The crowd was fairly preppy, with boys in jeans and button-downs and sweaters and girls in jeans or leggings and sexy tops and sweaters. Very few girls wore dresses, and Haley began to understand what Ali meant when she'd said it was “just a stupid frat party.” In her silver miniskirt and heavy eyeliner, Haley suddenly felt as if she'd dressed for a costume ball.

A guy with a long neck poking through his argyle sweater took one look at the girls and broke into a big grin. “Hey look, the jailbait's arrived,” he announced. A few of the Yale girls glanced over at the Coco crowd and rolled their eyes. To Haley's dismay, Coco didn't seem to pick up on the signals: everyone at the party saw through them immediately. They were obviously still just high school girls.

“Those old hags are just jealous of us,” Coco said.
“Let's go steal some boys from under their wrinkled noses.”

“They're only a couple of years older than we are,” Sasha protested as Coco sashayed into the fray. Trailed by her posse, she bypassed the boy who had called her jailbait and infiltrated a group of intellectual types by the bar.

“As I see it, Gide is a direct descendant of Dostoyevsky,” a guy with a shaved head said. “Except instead of condemning the morality of Nietzsche's so-called superman, he is actually making a case for moral emptiness.”

“You've got it all wrong,” a guy who was chewing on an unlit pipe said. “Sure, Gide makes a case for gratuitous murder, but then he dismantles it.”

Coco tried to interject. “Gide is French, right? See these shoes?” She held out her delicate foot shod in an expensive designer shoe. “They're French too. I got them on my last trip to Paris.”

The bald guy stared at her in disbelief. “You're not in my Modern Literature class, are you?”

“Modern literature?” Coco said. “No. I'm taking old-fashioned literature.”

The guys laughed. “She's joking, right?” the pipe-chewer said.

Coco laughed along with them. “Will you get me a drink, please? I'd love some champagne.”

“Sorry, we only have beer and … beer,” the bald guy said.

“Okay, beer, then,” Coco said.

The pipe-chewer laughed. “How old are you—twelve?”

“All these girls look like kids to me,” a guy with short dreadlocks said.

“We're not twelve,” Whitney said. “We're freshmen. We just look dewier and more bright-eyed than usual.”

“But we're very experienced,” Coco said suggestively.

The guys burst out laughing again. “How many times have you heard that?” the bald guy said. “Come on, tell the truth: you go to Notre Dame High, right? Or is it St. Francis?”

“Don't let them have anything to drink,” the pipe-chewer said. “We could get arrested just for talking to them.”

Three beefy lacrosse types intervened. “What have we here?” said a guy with a blond buzz cut. “Hello, girls. Why are you wasting your time talking to these eggheads when you could be making out with us?”

“Yeah,” said a thick-necked guy with an earring. “Can we give you girls a tour of the house? Have you seen the weight room?”

“The weight room?” Whitney said. “No, we haven't seen anything like that yet. Come on! Let's go on a tour!”

“Let's get these girls some beers,” the third lacrosse player said.

“Finally,” Coco said. “Let's ditch the nerds, girls.”

They started to follow the jocks upstairs. Haley had a bad feeling about this, but Coco was obviously so humiliated by the intellectual guys that she was looking for a way to salvage the night—even if it meant hanging with these beefy boys who were not her type and clearly trouble.

“Wait a second,” she said to Coco, trying to stall. “Shouldn't we look around for Ali?”

“I'm right here.” Haley turned to find Ali just walking into the party. She surveyed the situation her little sister had gotten herself into and shook her head. “Uh-uh. Tyler, just exactly what do you think you're doing with my little sister and her moronic friends?”

“This is your sister? I didn't know that, Ali,” the blond buzz cut named Tyler said.

“She's my sister and she's only seventeen,” Ali said. “She's off-limits, guys. They all are.”

“Seventeen? Gosh, I figured she had to be at least eighteen,” Tyler said insincerely.

“We were just giving them a tour,” the thick-necked guy said.

“Yeah—a tour of your bedrooms,” Ali said. “Come on, Coco. Let's get you girls out of here before you do something you—and I—will regret.”

“Ali, you're ruining our big college night!” Coco said.

“Aw, look, I think she's going to cry,” Tyler said, mocking Coco.

“Coco, you idiot, I'm saving you from the worst night of your life,” Ali snapped. “Trust me. These guys are a semester away from being arrested for date rape.”

The girls went back to Ali's dorm and spent the rest of the evening playing Scrabble, except for Coco, who refused to play and sulked in her room the whole time.

“This is all your fault,” she kept saying to Haley. “That grandma-mobile gave our whole trip bad vibes.” Haley watched as the other girls nodded in agreement. It wasn't fair. How was she entirely to blame?

The next morning, after a cafeteria breakfast, they piled into the Gam Polly sedan and drove back home to Hillsdale. “It doesn't matter that nothing actually happened last night,” Coco said. She sat in the front seat, next to Haley. “The important thing is that we went to Yale. We can tell the kids at school whatever we want. The key is to make Spencer squirm with jealousy, and to keep our stories straight. So, if anyone asks, we went to a little cocktail party at somebody's fabulous off-campus apartment. Let's say the party was thrown by a British
heiress, and I totally hooked up with an earl whose name was …”

“Earl?” Whitney suggested.

“That's too lame to even shoot down,” Coco said. “No, his name is Jeremy and he's gorgeous and rich and crazy about me….”

As Coco yammered on, spinning an elaborate fantasy weekend out of their disastrous night at Yale, Haley thought about Hillsdale and what awaited her there. She felt a sudden, nostalgic pang of desire for Reese Highland. There was nothing so special about those college boys, she realized. They were just like the boys she knew, only a few years older. The only boy who seemed special to her then, who seemed truly different from the average slobbering, hormone-crazed Y chromosome, was Reese. Why had she worked so hard to push him away? Lately, there had been talk around school that Reese hadn't even done anything in Nevis. And yet Haley had never given him the chance to explain. Was there any way to salvage what they'd once had? Was there any way to undo the damage and bring him back?

“No matter what happens when we get home,” Coco was saying, “we've got to keep freezing the boys out. After what they did to us, they deserve to suffer as much as possible. We've got to keep twisting the knife.”

“Right,” Cecily, Sasha and Whitney agreed.

“Right,” Haley echoed. But was it?

The Yale trip was a bust. Coco's obviously disappointed she doesn't have a college hookup story to go home with, but that won't stop her from making one up—one so good the truth could never equal it. But lying about her conquests is not Haley's style
.

She faces a choice about Reese. Should she stick with Coco and her friends and stand her ground? Should she keep freezing him out even though her feelings have thawed? If you think it's the principle that counts here and Reese deserves more punishment, turn to,
LONELY ONE
.

Or maybe you think that by now Haley is tired of listening to Coco's crackpot theories. Maybe she's sick of playing by Coco's rules and wants to follow her own heart for a change. If you think she should get her
PRIORITIES STRAIGHT
.