Getting REVENGE on Lauren Wood (2 page)

“What are you doing?” Lauren asked. She looked around to see if anyone had noticed that she was stuck sitting next to me, the dork.

“Well, it’s not like he doesn’t know we were checking him out. We can’t act casual now.”

“Oh God, he’s coming over here. Do I look okay?” Lauren gave her teeth a quick wipe with a finger in case there was any hot lunch caught in there. I looked her up and down. She looked the way she always looked to me.

“Hey.” The good-looking waver guy stood at the end of our row, his hands in his pockets. He smiled and I felt my stomach
turn over slowly, but in a good way, not in a hot-lunch-gone-bad kind of way. Lauren giggled but didn’t say anything.

“Hey,” I answered back as it seemed one of us should say something.

“I’m Tyler.”

“Helen, and this is my best friend, Lauren,” I said, and Lauren gave another giggle. She was doing this thing with her eyes like she had something in them; they were fluttering up and down spastically. It must have had a hypnotizing effect because Tyler was staring at her with a sort of vacant smile on his face. With everyone identified we seemed to have run out of things to talk about. I looked down at his T-shirt and felt myself break into a smile. It was the logo for the Sundance Film Festival.

“Movie fan?” I asked.

“Yeah, you?” he asked, breaking eye contact with Lauren.

“Uh-huh. I love old movies best, all the
Bringing Up Baby
or
The Philadelphia Story
stuff.”

“I’m into more current stuff. Sort of edgy. The Coen brothers … stuff like that.”

“Curtiz was better,” I countered.

“Who?” he asked.

This guy thought he was into film and he didn’t know Curtiz? Puh-leeze.

“Director of
Casablanca
,” I answered.

“
Casablanca
? Could you pick something more out of date?”
Lauren interrupted. We both looked over at her. She gave her hair a toss.

Tyler laughed as if she had said something profoundly amusing.

“So what kind of movies do you like?” Tyler asked Lauren.

“Romances,” she said, doing the fluttery eye thing again.

“How can you say you’re a film nut if you don’t like
Casablanca
? That’s like saying you love ice cream except for vanilla.”

Both of them looked at me, but neither spoke. It seemed like everyone had agreed to act like I hadn’t said anything at all.

“Nice to meet you, Lauren.” Tyler smiled at her and then looked at me blankly.

“Helen,” I reminded him. “Nice to meet you too.” I felt my face flush. Someone at the front of the gym was testing the microphone, calling out for people to take their seats.

“I should go.” Tyler leaned over and took my pencil from my hand. “Here’s my number. Why don’t you guys give me a call if you want to catch a movie sometime.” He scribbled his number on the top of my sheet. I looked at it like I had never seen a phone number before. I certainly had never seen one that a boy had given me. I might have to frame it.

“Yeah, okay,” I mumbled, my face turning bright red.

“We’ll see you around,” Lauren added, and he gave her a nod before heading back to his friends. I watched him walk away. I turned around to see if Lauren noticed how nicely his jeans fit, and she was staring at me with her lips tight and thin. Uh-oh.

“God, Helen, why don’t you throw yourself at him?”

“What?”

“You knew I liked him, but you practically attacked him when he came over.”

“You like him?”

Lauren cocked her head to the side and then looked away. “Whatever.”

“I was just talking to him.”

“You like movies? Why, I
love
movies. Let me bore you with all the stuff I know about stupid old movies,” Lauren said in a high squeaky voice.

“Sorry.” I tried to think of where I went wrong. I could tell she was annoyed with me, but it wasn’t like I brought up movies out of nowhere.

“Just forget it.” Lauren crossed her arms and stared out at the gym floor. “You have to cut that out.”

“Cut what out?”

“Acting like a total dork all the time. We’re going to be in high school, so it wouldn’t kill you to act normal once in a while. I mean, it’s one thing to like all that weird stuff, but you don’t have to brag about it any time we meet someone.”

“Old movies aren’t weird. It’s not like I like taxidermy or something.”

Lauren sighed. “Talking about taxidermy is weird too. It’s like you don’t even know what normal is.” We sat there not talking until the band began playing the Lincoln school song and
the assembly officially started. I risked glancing over at Tyler one more time. He was staring in our direction, and I turned away quickly as if I had been caught doing something wrong. I don’t know why I bothered. He was looking in our direction, but the only person he saw was Lauren. People always liked Lauren. I was the bonus item, what people got for free when they hung out with her.

The assembly went on forever. If one more person got up to tell us how many opportunities awaited us during the next four years I was going to stick a sharpened pencil in my ear.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I whispered to Lauren.

“Thanks for the update.”

“Seriously, I have to go. Come with me.”

“Not now.” Lauren pointed toward the stage. Lincoln’s cheerleading squad was doing a routine. “We should try out in the fall.” She rummaged through the stack of handouts for the one that gave the details on the cheer squad.

I looked at Lauren as if she had announced that she wanted to take up cattle roping. We weren’t exactly cheerleader material. Cheerleaders do not have thighs that rub together, and Lauren, who didn’t have the same thigh issues, suffered from near terminal clumsiness. She couldn’t do a cartwheel without falling over.

“Are you kidding?”

“What? We could be cheerleaders.”

“Have you ever noticed that the cheerleaders are the most popular girls in school?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re not the most popular girls.” I hated to be the one to point this out to her, but you’d think she would have noticed by now.

“My mom says high school is completely different. It’s like a fresh start.”

I rolled my eyes. Fresh start, maybe. Complete life do-over? I don’t think so.

Lauren went back to watching them intently, as if her life depended on memorizing the dance routine. I slipped past her, leaving her to her cheerleading daydreams.

The bathrooms under the bleachers doubled as the girls’ locker room. The room smelled like a mix of chlorine, mildewed towels, and Secret deodorant. I pushed a stall door open and sat down. As soon as I was seated the stall door started to creep back open. I kicked it shut and it flew right past the latch and swung out into the bathroom. Great, one broken latch and now I was on display for the entire locker room. This was exactly the kind of thing that schools should give you a warning on but don’t.

Suddenly I heard someone laugh. I finished as fast as I could and yanked my skirt back down, trying to look casual. I waited there for a moment, but no one came into the bathroom. I took a few steps toward the sinks, and the voices and laughter got louder. There was a door leading to the pool, bolted from the locker room side. I pressed my ear against the door. The voices were coming from there for certain.

I slipped the bolt open, the click sounding very loud in the empty bathroom, but the voices on the other side didn’t change. They hadn’t heard anything. I pulled the door open slowly and peered through the crack.

Holy. Shit.

There were soap bubbles everywhere; bubbles spreading like a foamy blob across the tile floor. The swimming pool was covered in a frothy concoction, like a giant latte. At the back of the room near the diving board a group of seniors stood pouring bottles of lemon yellow dish soap into the water. They were laughing, and Matt Ryan, who I knew from the local paper as the school’s star athlete, was standing back trying to capture the whole thing on his camera phone. He was the one who saw me. He winked at me then pressed his finger to his mouth, in the universal symbol for
shhh
, and I knew I should pretend I never saw a thing. I shut the door quietly and slid the bolt closed.

“What are you doing?”

I jumped and whirled around to face Lauren.

“There are a bunch of seniors dumping soap into the pool.”

“Get out!” Lauren walked past me and slid the bolt back on the door.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to know about it.”

“Duh.” Lauren pulled the door open and peered through the crack. She gave a tiny squeal and shut the door. “It must be the senior prank.”

Senior prank was a long-standing Lincoln High tradition.
Each class tried to come up with a way to outdo the class before. I figured by the time we were seniors we would have to come up with something worthy of making CNN, like kidnapping the prime minister of Canada.

“They must have dumped at least a dozen bottles of soap into the pool,” I said.

“We should go. The assembly is almost over, and we don’t want to be caught down here.” Lauren took off. Once we were in the hall I looked behind me. There was a wall of bubbles pressing against the frosted glass window in the door that led directly to the pool. I jogged after Lauren.

The whole thing seemed funny. It was a prank after all, a joke. Just good clean soapy fun. I thought I was pretty cool to be in on it, especially considering I wasn’t even officially a freshman yet.

The school administration took a dimmer view of the situation. Apparently dish soap and pool filters are a bad combination. Then there was the fact that one of the school janitors slipped on the soapy pool deck and fell, pulling his knee all out of whack. Rumor had it he was suing the school in some kind of worker’s compensation case for millions of dollars, but that part might not have been true. What was a fact was that the school administration was on a mission to find out who was behind the whole thing.

The day after my birthday party an article appeared in the Sunday paper saying the seniors responsible had been caught.
The paper showed a photo of Principal LaPoint looking stern with his arms crossed over his chest. He was quoted as calling those caught the “ringleaders,” like it was a major crime versus a senior prank. He was forbidding those four students from attending either prom or graduation. He wanted to withhold their diplomas altogether, but apparently the school board wasn’t willing to go that far. There were quotes in the paper from people around town, most of whom thought the punishment was too severe, although there were a few who seemed to think the death penalty might be in order.

The first hint I had that anything was wrong, that the story would involve me at all, was on Monday morning. I was wearing a new soft white short sleeve sweater that I had gotten for my birthday. I was in a good mood until I got to my locker.
snitch
was written in black marker across the door. It was underlined three times. I walked up slowly, my finger extended. The ink looked still wet, but it was dry. It didn’t smudge. I heard someone laugh and turned around to see a group of girls looking over from across the hall before they scurried away, still laughing. As I walked to math class I noticed it—everyone was staying far away from me. An invisible force field between me and the rest of the world. No one got closer than a few feet. It was like I had developed leprosy over the weekend.

I was walking into the classroom when someone bumped hard into my back. My book and papers went flying to the
floor. I whirled around and Bill from my math class stood there looking at me.

“What?” he asked, his voice flat. I could hear his friends laughing.

I bent down to pick up my stuff. No one said anything to me in math. I hadn’t been the social butterfly before, but this was different. I felt people staring at me, but when I looked around, no one would meet my eyes. My stomach felt hot and tight, and I wanted to throw up. Even Mr. Grady, our teacher, seemed annoyed with me. The whole morning was like that. I kept trying to find Lauren, but she wasn’t in English or at her locker between classes. When I saw her standing in the lunch line getting her food I had never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life. I had to fight the urge to run over to her.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

Lauren looked at me like she had never seen me before. It was like I was stuck in a weird sci-fi movie.

“What do you want?” she asked holding her tray between us like a barrier.

“What’s with you? I need to talk to you.” I touched her elbow. Lauren yanked away and her tray lurched, slopping orange red ravioli sauce onto my new sweater. We both looked down at the spreading stain. Everyone else in the cafeteria was gaping at us.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Lauren? Why are you mad at me? Why is everybody mad at me?”

Someone standing in line gave a disbelieving snort.

“I didn’t think you would ever do something like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Tell on the seniors. I mean, it isn’t just you; by telling, you make our whole class look like a bunch of losers. We all have to fit in at Lincoln High next year, and now we’re going to be known as part of the class that ratted out the most popular seniors. Everyone will connect us with what you did. It was just a prank, Helen.” Lauren’s voice was so loud I was pretty sure everyone in the cafeteria could hear her.

“But I didn’t tell,” I said softly.

“There’s no point lying about it now. Everyone already knows.”

I felt a hot rush of tears in my throat choking off what I was going to say. I walked stiffly out of the cafeteria as kids yelled things after me. I didn’t even stop by my locker; I walked straight out of the school and went home. I peeled off my ruined sweater, stuffed it under the bed, and crawled in. When my mom came home I told her I was sick.

I stayed home sick for the entire week. It wasn’t even lying. I felt awful. I didn’t want to eat anything and even though I was tired, I couldn’t sleep. On Friday I went over to Lauren’s house. I had to find a way to make things right. I could live with everyone else being mad, but I couldn’t stand to be on the outs with my best friend. Lauren was in the backyard with a guy I didn’t
recognize. They were both wearing sweats. I stood at the gate and watched. He was spotting her, helping her learn how to do a cartwheel.