Getting Caught (4 page)

“Chill. You look like you’re coming down from a crack binge or something. I’ll watch your e-mail. If you don’t move, you’re gonna have a meltdown.”

“You have to refresh it at least once per minute.”

“I know,” he says, exasperated. “I swear, sometimes I have to save you from yourself.” He gingerly picks me up by the elbows and removes me from the chair.

I stare, testing him. He stares back. I know he’s not going to mess with me. So finally, I sigh in relief and throw myself down on my bed as he takes my chair. My eyes were starting to hurt anyway.

“You can be my aide-de-camp,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow.

“
An officer who receives and transmits the orders of a general,
” I recite.

“Okay, at least half of them I already knew. They had words like
alcoholism
, and
parallel,
and
enormity.
You know, every day vocabulary.”

We have this conversation at least once a week. It’s the only thing that makes me feel better. My brother knows this, and he knows I have his entire argument memorized. But he goes through it all again anyways. “Peyton. Look at me.”

I prop my elbows up against the green plaid comforter and look across the room at him. He’s much more relaxed, sitting in that chair, than I was. Sometimes I wish I could just float through life like he does, even if he doesn’t have any direction. “You’ve got valedictorian in the bag. You’re class president. You got twenty-two fifty—soon to be twenty-four hundred—on your SATs. You’re in all AP courses. You volunteer at the senior center. You’re in the musical, science club,
and
the honor society. And you’ve been working on your application and admittance essay for a year. I think you’ve got it covered.”

“Thank you,” I say, plopping back down on the bed. I stare at the ceiling. It’s completely blank. My entire room is a boring display of white walls, neutral colored carpet, and golden oak furniture. It should have posters and CDs and a vanity piled high with makeup.

It should look more like Jess’s room, just across the lawn. She always had all these bizarre indie rock band posters. I loved to tease her about them and act like they were totally lame, but secretly I thought it was sort of neat, how passionate she was about music.

Of course, that was before she got weird, with a thousand different dyes in her hair and fishnets on her legs. I bet if I peeked over the fence, into her room right now, I’d see her sacrificing a live animal to the devil or something. Which is why I keep my blinds shut.

I wonder, briefly if I should try and go do something. But then I discard the thought. There’s no way I can do anything without obsessing over the computer.

“That’s a new one.” My stepmom has never stuck with one kind of art for more than a month. So far she’s done watercolor, oil, pencil, ceramics, stick-and-string-sculpting, something weird with shards of glass and tiles, and even a week of welding class. She’s decent at everything she tries, but she never sticks with it long enough to master it. It drives me insane. “Where’s it at?”

“Donelli’s,” he says, grinning at me. “Brownies.”

“Um, okay. Maybe,” I relent. Donelli’s is the local framing shop. I would rather cut off my own hands than voluntarily go to one of Tina’s shows, but Donelli’s does have brownies to die for, so it may be worth the torture.

Plus, I know my brother is definitely in because he has a thing for the front-counter girl. It will be okay if we both go. Hopefully we’ll remember to pretend we’re there for the art.

He clicks the mouse again, but this time he doesn’t immediately say, “nope.”

I sit up abruptly and stare at him.

“It’s…” He doesn’t finish his sentence before I’m shoving him, rolling chair and all, out of the way. I click on the email, and it immediately brings up a link and a password to use on the results site.

“Ohmigod,” I say, so rushed that it sounds like one word. My hand is trembling as I try to type
succeed
into the password box. I think it comes out as
sucede
, so I have to backspace and try again.

After a long moment, I’m about to scream in agony at my computer. It’s as if the Internet itself has stopped working. And then the page starts loading, and I curse the day Tina downgraded our broadband speed just to save ten bucks a month. Some of the banner ads and background have loaded, but there is not one piece of pertinent information.

By the time it pops up, I’m not even aware of my brother sitting next to me. All I can see is a computer screen, and four simple digits:

2370

“Twenty-three seventy!” I shout, jumping up. I trip over the leg of the swivel chair and fall backwards. Thank God Tina installed plush carpet right after she moved in. “Twenty-three seventy!” I kick my legs up and down and look like a complete loser, as if I’m doing a bizarre form of Pilates.

He beams. Skating is the biggest thing in his life. No matter what we do, he’s not having any luck with getting a job. It’s probably the economy, or whatever, but he also has this one teensy-weensy blemish on his record—thanks to
some
former best friend who shall remain nameless—which keeps popping up, destroying his chances of ever getting an adult life and moving out of our house.

Jess wants to ruin my life, just like she ruined his. And that’s why this prank war will not end until
she
loses. Because that’s what she deserves after the shit she pulled.

“Not quite, but thanks. And at least you can send in that Harvard app now.”

I stop moving and just stare at him. The excitement deflates into pure angst. “Oh, crap.” How am I going to let go of the application? How will I ever get the nerve to put it into that big blue mailbox on the corner?

He looks right at me, one side of his mouth lifted in a half smile
.
“Red alert,” he says in a fake walkie-talkie voice. “We have just moved to a level-three meltdown.”

I smack him on the shoulder. “Shut up.” But I still grin back at him, because somehow he makes my neuroticism seem funny. Once he leaves, it’s just me and the crazy voices in my head that tell me nothing is ever perfect.

“You’ve been working on it forever, right? And you already have your transcripts, and the essay, and the SAT people forward the scores for you. ”

He crosses his arms across his chest, and it makes him look even bigger than he is. Did he start going to the gym? I really have no idea what my brother does with his days. “Yes. Print it out, and I’ll drop it at the post office.”

“But I have to reread it!”

“No, you don’t. There’s gotta be a point that you let it go. So it’s today. After today, it’s out of your hands and you can stop being such a freak about it.”

“But what if I could make it a little better?”

“You can’t make it better. Just different.”

“But what if different
is
better?”

He rolls his eyes. “Print. It. Out.” He pushes the chair in front of me and nearly puts me in it. I take a deep breath and open the file and click print before I can change my mind. Thirty seconds later, he’s taking the stack of paper off the printer and walking out of my room.

I consider running after him and ripping the paper from his hands. Except I know he’s right. Now I have every last piece of the application, and it’s time to let it go. So I just listen as his footsteps descend the stairs, and then as he slams the front door. When his car starts up, I let out a long, slow breath and listen to the broken exhaust pipe as he drives away.

Now my fate is in the hands of a complete stranger. And I’ve never been so scared in my life.

Chapter Six

Jess

In Hollywood, there’s something really cool and mysterious about being the loner. Just look at the Lone Ranger. Or James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
. Or Paul Newman in
Cool Hand Luke
.

Of course, in high school, the words “loner” and “freak” are interchangeable. If you don’t slide yourself into a clique by day two, life is more like navigating the wilderness with a broken leg and no food.

In a blizzard.

With a pack of wolves chasing after you.

The leader of the pack today, meaning the greatest offender to all those who prefer to keep to themselves—Miss De Frisco, my gym teacher—has recently finished a badminton demonstration in which her fake boobs nearly spilled out of her Reebok sports bra just enough to hold every male student enraptured. Then she turned to us and uttered the words that have been the bane of my existence ever since I swore off friending anyone my age:

“Pair up!”

Everyone looks around. Some people, like Peyton and Bryn, just go on prattling about meaningless things like guys and nail polish and rehearsals for the school musical; they know they’re partners without even having to ask. Others begin to shuffle about, grabbing onto each other’s arms as if they’re staking their claim. Nobody, and I mean
nobody
, even dares to make eye contact with me. I don’t even bother to move. I know that any leftover soul will be mine. Probably someone with a hygiene issue stemming from an inability to reach his or her most vital body parts while showering. Or one of the ESL students. And I’m totally okay with that. Really, I am.

“Hill, do you not have a partner?” Miss De Frisco finally asks, taking in my fishnets and gym shorts. Okay, it isn’t the most attractive look ever. In fact, it’s straddling the line between normal fashion and attire Halloween costume. Last year I might have cared, but I guess I’ve matured. Plus, once attendance was taken and demonstrations were done, I knew there’d be, at most, only fifteen minutes of actual badminton going on. It just didn’t seem worthwhile to make the full change.

I check the clock. Only twelve minutes until change time. I wait for Miss DeFrisco to announce the name of the fellow freak who will be my partner-in-fitness for the next dozen minutes.

Instead, she hands me a racket and says, “Great. You and your partner are at net nine.”

I trudge across the polished hardwood, checking the clock again. Even if I were the least bit athletic, I would still hate gym. More time is spent changing in and out of clothes and socializing than actually getting exercise. It’s a total waste of time. Time I could be spending putting the final touches on the prank I’m going to play on Peyton next week. Maybe that’s why the sight of her face doesn’t make me want to retch as much as usual. In a week she’ll know a humiliation unlike anything she’s experienced before. And I can’t wait.

“You serving?” a deep voice behind me asks.

I whirl around and come face-to-pectorals with Dave Ashworth. I swallow the last calm, unstressed breath of air I have in my mouth, and suddenly my heart starts beating overtime.
Chill, Jess. Remember, it’s all in the reaction.
But I can already feel myself reacting. Badly.

The day started off like a red-letter one. I tried to dye my hair platinum last night but realized this morning I missed a section and had a bunch of old red dye poking out behind my ears.

And now I have to play badminton for the next impossibly long eleven minutes with
the
Dave Ashworth, who could probably earn a full-ride scholarship for any sport in his sleep. And I have to do it while wearing fishnets under my gym shorts. Unreal.

“Uh, you can,” I finally choke out, cheeks burning as I shuffle, head down, to the other side of the net.

At times like this, it’s easy to believe that a year or two ago I was one of those girls who had drawn her heart on her sleeve with permanent marker. I cried or panicked over the tiniest thing, and I’m sure I would have been labeled the class freak long before if I hadn’t grown up as Peyton’s best friend. At one time she protected me. Back then, she was a lot less judgmental. These days, she’s just like the rest of the school. Her jokes were just the beginning of the humiliation I’ve endured. So in the past few months, I’ve worked very hard to steel myself, to ensure I don’t give them the satisfaction of a red face, of a trembling lower lip, of tears. My clothes were never in style, so instead of trying to compete with the A-list, I gave up and started dressing like a rebel. After all,
rebel
sounds much cooler than
freak.
Everything else came naturally; people just assumed I was tough and didn’t give a crap. I’ve found the more people think you’re a slacker, the easier it becomes to slack off.