Getting REVENGE on Lauren Wood (3 page)

“Keep your legs up, nice and straight.”

“I’m trying.”

“You can do it. It’s just a confidence thing. You think you’ll fall, so you do. Just believe, and then up and over.”

Lauren turned a perfect cartwheel. She gave a squeal and jumped into his arms. That’s when she saw me.

“Helen.”

We stood awkwardly looking at each other.

“This is Mark, my gymnastics instructor. My mom hired him.”

Mark made his excuses and left.

“Still thinking of trying out for cheerleading, huh?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I didn’t tell anyone, Lauren. You have to believe me.” The words came rushing out in one breath. My eyes burned and threatened to spill over. Lauren crossed her arms and sighed.

“Don’t start crying again,” she said, her voice sounding tired.

“Someone else must have told on them, or maybe one of them got cold feet and ratted out the others. Maybe together we can figure out who did it.” Lauren loved mysteries. I was hoping to convince her that this would be a fun one to solve.

“God, just give it up. No one else told.”

I looked at her and felt my stomach ice over. I felt things fall into place.

“You …” My voice trailed off.

“Me.”

“Why?”

“Do you remember when Principal LaPoint talked about how many opportunities we’ll have in the next few years?”

I nodded.

“I’m taking one of them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you know Emily Watson called me?”

“Who?”

“Emily Watson. She’s a junior. She’ll be a senior next year. She’s captain of the cheerleading squad. She was very appreciative that I was willing to tell who ratted out her friends. When I told her how I was scared that I wouldn’t have any friends since you were my best friend, she told me that I don’t have to worry. She’ll make sure I meet lots of people next year.”

“I didn’t rat out anyone. You did.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t a problem. The truth isn’t important. What matters is what people
think
is the truth. If I’m going to be somebody, then I need people on my side.” She looked over at me. “People who are in a position to get me what I want.”

I sat down hard on the ground, the air whooshing out me.

“But why?”

“There isn’t always a big reason why. It just is.”

“But you’re my best friend.”

“And you’re happy with good enough. You don’t care about dressing the right way or being invited to the right parties. You’re happy to rent movies on a Friday night. Not even new movies. You want to rent stuff no one has seen in like a hundred years. I want to go out. I want to be invited out. We were always second string, but now I have a chance to make the A-list.”

“And that matters so much?”

“Of course it matters.” Lauren tossed her hands in the air and paced back and forth. “My mom tells me that the friends you have in high school determine who your friends are in college, and then who your friends are for the rest of your life.”

“Well, my mom says you can’t buy friendship,” I countered.

“And your mom is a hippie who doesn’t even use deodorant.”

“She does too. It’s just that rock crystal kind.”

“Whatever.”

“So you’re just done with me? That’s it?” I could hear my voice getting tight and high. This wasn’t going the way I had planned. I had figured my problem would be convincing her I hadn’t told. I wasn’t prepared for this conversation at all.

Lauren sat down next to me and pulled a few strands of grass out of the lawn. We sat there quietly for a minute. “Nothing is forever, you know. Once I’m popular, we can be friends again and then you’ll be popular too. It will all be worth it.”

“What makes you think I’ll want to be your friend?”

“What makes you think you’ll have other options?”

Chapter Three

T he last two weeks of eighth grade were vile. Someone mashed spoiled tuna fish through the vents in my locker so that everything I owned stunk. A person in my English class smeared glue on my chair. No one talked to me, but everyone was whispering about me behind my back. People left mean notes in my books, and the janitor stopped even bothering to clean my locker door, since every time he did, someone else would write
snitch
across it. I stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria after someone spit on my food tray. For those last two weeks of school I sat in the back of the library during lunch and pretended to study. During gym class someone dumped my clothes on the wet shower floor, so I had to wear my gym uniform for the rest of the day. I cried every night. My parents talked to the school administrators, who said there was nothing they could do. I would have to “ride it out.”

My mom tried to convince me that it would be better next year and I would make new friends, but I wasn’t buying it. The
way I figured it, high school would be worse. Instead of having one hundred fifty classmates trying to make me miserable, I would have seven hundred. Unless you counted the other grades, in which case I would have thousands of people dedicated to making my life hell. I was certain that my reputation as a ratfink had spread to every school across town.

My parents are huge believers in karma. Actually, they’re huge believers in a bunch of stuff: chi, feng shui, the benefits of being vegan, the superiority of natural fabrics. They believe in everything from Buddha to fairies. Most of the time I shrug off what they say. They kept telling me that somehow things would just magically work out and the universe would take care of things. I was preparing for the idea that I may have to run away from home, when it turned out my parents were right. My dad was offered a job in New York. Thank god for karma.

Technically it wasn’t New York City, it was some town just outside the city, but it was still good enough for me. Heck, I would have gone anywhere, including remote Alaska. I just wanted to be as far away from Terrace, Michigan, as possible. We were moving. I was so happy, I didn’t even mind doing the packing. For once the universe seemed to have noticed what I needed.

From the time school ended until we moved at the end of July, I didn’t hear from Lauren once. I guess she was too busy focusing on mastering the intricacies of the perfect cartwheel to find time to say good-bye to her best friend. She might have forgotten all about me, but I certainly never forgot about her. Not for one single day.

Chapter Four

I’ ’d be lying if I didn’t admit that over the next three years, even from New York, I thought about getting back at Lauren somehow. But it was never anything specific. Once I dressed up a Barbie doll in a cheerleader outfit and tossed it into the giant wood chipper in the park. I grinned as the flesh-colored plastic sprayed out in tiny half-moon crescents onto the ground. Although I thought about it all the time, I didn’t think I would ever really do anything about the situation. Logistics alone would make it impossible. I lived halfway across the country from her. Revenge by mail didn’t seem that satisfying. Not to mention there are laws against sending anthrax. I hoped my parents were right, that karma would balance things out and Lauren would have some (or preferably all) of the following things happen to her:

1.
She would be permanently disfigured by a virulent acne condition.

2.
She would suffer some type of cheerleading accident involving choking to death on a wayward pom-pom.

3.
Her hair would fall out due to a shampoo manufacturer’s defect.

4.
All the lies she told would come back to haunt her by turning her tongue black.

But none of these things happened. I watched her from a distance by stalking her Facebook page. I told myself I didn’t care, but I couldn’t stop checking to see what she was doing. I kept waiting for something to go wrong for her, but nothing did. For the next three years she went from one success to another. She mastered the cartwheel the summer before freshman year and made the cheerleading squad. She started dating Justin Ryan, the younger brother of the popular Matt Ryan of soap bubble fame. Justin, like his brother before him, was the star of every team at Lincoln High and looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. Lauren was always posting pictures of the two of them, arms wrapped around each other. She was active with the drama club and a shoo-in to get the lead for senior year. She was always getting tagged in smiling groups mugging for the camera. She would be right in the middle, her giant, white horse teeth reflecting the camera flash. Her friends were always posting notes on her page about how she was their “BFF!!” and how her “party last night rocked!” Her friends used exclamation points for everything. She was at the top of the social ladder at Lincoln High.

It wasn’t like I didn’t have my own life. Things weren’t bad or anything. I loved New York. I wasn’t popular in my new school, but I wasn’t unpopular either. To be honest, I was one of those people that no one noticed. When I first moved I didn’t want to make friends with anyone. I felt like my whole life was one exposed nerve, and I couldn’t stand to have anyone close enough to touch me. By the time I wanted to make friends, everyone else had moved on. I already had the reputation of being a loner. I wore a lot of black but didn’t quite go far enough to be Goth. I didn’t play sports or an instrument. I liked art, but drawing isn’t exactly a group activity. I didn’t really put an effort into changing things. Once you’ve been classified into a certain role, it’s hard to make a change. Or maybe it just seemed easier to be by myself. I was friendly with a lot of people, but I didn’t have any true friends. Sometimes it sucked that there wasn’t anyone to talk to about things, but on the bright side, no one was close enough to screw me over either.

The only picture of me in this year’s yearbook was my standard school photo. No clubs, no sports teams, no student government. No shot of me surrounded by friends. In fact, it would be easy to forget I existed at all.

Three years after she stabbed me in the back, Lauren was the queen of Lincoln High, and the fact that she lied and destroyed my life to be popular didn’t seem to matter to anyone except me.

Sometimes karma does a shitty job of evening the score.

Chapter Five

I was lying on my bed reading my history homework. We were studying the French Revolution, and I was doodling Lauren’s giant teeth on the picture of Marie Antoinette being led to the guillotine. I sat up when my dad tapped on the door. He and my mom stood in the doorway.

“Hey, poppet,” Dad said, scratching his arm. My parents’ latest thing was clothing made from hemp. It was supposed to be super-renewable and great for the planet, but my dad was having some kind of allergic reaction to the whole thing. He kept breaking out in these red hives, but he continued to wear it. Saving the planet wasn’t supposed to be easy.

Dad looked at what I was reading and broke out a big smile. “Ah
liberté
,
egalité
,
fraternité
.” He took the book from my hand and flipped through the pages. He had majored in French in college, one of those degrees that might have been useful if, for
example, we lived in France. My mom took a step forward so she was standing right next to him. She tucked her hair behind an ear. It was so curly that it instantly sprung back out.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“We have some good news.” Dad rubbed his hands on his pant legs and my mom gave him a reassuring nod. “The school has approved my research grant.”

“Dad, that’s awesome!” The alternative school where my dad taught was always out of money, so for them to support anything was a big deal. Also, research wasn’t completely their thing. It was more of a live-and-let-live kind of place. His eyes shifted over to my mom.

“Your dad will have a chance to look into the role of meditation in healing. He might even have time to write the book he’s always talked about.”

“Okay.” I drew the word out slowly so that it was more of a question. My dad has talked about writing a book on alternative health care for as long as I can remember. He should be thrilled, and instead he seemed like he had come to break the news to me that he was going off to war or something.

“We’d be living at the Shahalba Center,” Mom continued. “It’s a chance to learn meditation techniques from the very best in the world.”

I had sudden insight into what was up. My parents wanted us to pick up and move to some granola hippie camp where
everyone would be praying to their muse, chanting, and eating a strict vegan diet. Great. Why couldn’t my parents be happy in the suburbs like everyone else?

“What’s the school like?”

My dad looked confused. “There isn’t a school.”

“How am I supposed to finish high school?” My parents are really smart, but not great at the common sense stuff. Maybe they thought colleges would accept me based strictly on how Zen I was, no high school diploma needed.

My mom sat down next to me on the bed and petted my knee. “The Shahalba Center is in the woods of Maine. It’s completely off the electrical grid.” My mom seemed thrilled by the self-sufficiency of the place, but I could already picture it was going to be a problem if I wanted to bring a hair dryer. My mom was a big fan of the all-natural look, but I didn’t go anywhere without my flat iron. “The center has a small farm and grows most of its own food. The closest school is almost fifty miles away.”

“So are we going to get an apartment or something halfway?”

My mom and dad exchanged another look, and my stomach went into a sudden free fall. I knew what they had in mind.

“No way.”

“We’ve talked to your grandmother and she would love to have you stay with her for the year,” my mom said, as if it were completely reasonable for me to consider moving back there.

“Do you remember what happened, what they did to me?
Do you honestly expect me to go to school there? Why don’t you ask me to move in with Lauren?”

“All this negative energy isn’t good for you.”

“It’s not random negative energy, Mom. I hate her. I hate Terrace. I don’t want to live there.”

“And that may be exactly why the universe is bringing you this opportunity. It’s a chance to heal, to come full circle.” My mom made a large circular motion with her hands, her silver rings flashing in the light.