Getting REVENGE on Lauren Wood (9 page)

“Justin Ryan the football player?” Brenda asked.

“Duh,” Kyla said.

“Three years. You know there are Hollywood marriages that haven’t lasted as long as our relationship.” Lauren gave a giant suck on her straw, making an unpleasant slurping sound. “Do you know how many other people I could have been going out with in that time? Plenty. Guys ask me out all the time and even guys who haven’t asked—I can tell they totally would if they thought they stood a chance.”

“Totally,” Bailey assured her.

“I’m sorry he broke up with you,” Brenda offered.

Lauren spun around and Brenda took a step back.

“Let’s be really clear about something, Justin did NOT break up with me. I broke up with Justin. I caught him lying to me and the one thing I will not tolerate is lies.” Lauren punctuated each word with a point of her finger. I noticed even from across the hall that her manicure was chipped and one nail was broken off completely.

I gave a snort; apparently she was fine with tolerating her own lies. Karma’s a bitch, bitch.

“If you can’t trust them, dump them,” Kyla offered, and then gave her head a shake before grabbing her own smoothie off the counter. “I still can’t believe it. He worships you. What the hell is worth so much to him that he would lie about it?”

“It doesn’t matter what he lied about. The point is, he lied. The individual lie is unimportant. Would you stop trying to pump me for information? All anyone cares about is the nasty details.” Lauren chucked her smoothie at the trash can. The cup
hit the side, bounced off, and crashed to the floor. It spread pink smoothie goo across the floor. “My pain is not for everyone’s amusement.”

I couldn’t speak for the others, but I was finding her pain quite amusing. Lauren stomped off without a look back. The three of them watched her go for a beat and then looked down at the oozing pink smoothie. Bailey was the first to act, grabbing a fistful of napkins from the counter and sprinkling them onto the floor, tapping them down with the toe of her shoe. Kyla took a step back as if she didn’t want to be connected to the mess. Brenda asked the counter attendant for a roll of paper towels and began helping Bailey.

“We’re supposed to be her best friends,” Kyla grumbled. “Wanting to know why she broke up with her boyfriend of three years is not exactly pumping her for information. She acts like I was trying to waterboard her.”

“She’s just upset,” Bailey said, tossing a wad of soggy napkins and paper towels in the trash.

“There’s being upset and then there’s being a bitch.”

I nodded behind the earring rack. Kyla was starting to catch on. I could have told her stories that would make her think calling Lauren a bitch was a compliment.

“We should go after her,” Bailey said.

Kyla tossed her hair. “No thanks. I can think of better ways to spend a Saturday. I’m going to go look at makeup. Are you coming?”

Bailey chewed on her lower lip, looking down the hall where Lauren had disappeared.

“Forget it,” Kyla said, and started to walk in the opposite direction. Bailey looked ready to cry. Brenda finished mopping up the rest of the smoothie, throwing another large handful of paper towels into the trash, and then wiped her hands off.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” Brenda said.

Bailey looked at her as if she had forgotten Brenda had been there at all.

“Thanks for helping me clean up,” Bailey said.

“No problem.”

Bailey started to walk after Lauren and then stopped.

“Did you get a haircut or something?” Bailey asked, looking at Brenda as if she had never seen her before. Brenda’s hand wandered up to give her new hair another pat and then nodded.

“It looks nice,” Bailey said before heading off after Lauren. I waited a few seconds and then came up behind Brenda. She jumped when I touched her arm.

“Where did you go?” she asked, whipping around.

“Sorry. I didn’t want to run into them.”

“Well, thanks for letting me wander into that little scene by myself.”

“She liked your hair. Did you notice that?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

I stood looking down the hallway for a beat. There was something about the whole scene that felt wrong. I should be thrilled
Lauren and her boyfriend were busted up. She could say she was the official “breaker upper,” but the fact was, from her perspective, Justin cheated on her. He picked someone else. She should be unraveling, falling apart.

“Did you notice Lauren wasn’t that upset?” I said.

“She threw a smoothie.”

I waved my hand, dismissing it. “Drama. Lauren is an actress. She knows the importance of a good use of props.”

“That smoothie was no prop. She seemed upset to me, and her best friends think she’s upset.”

“One of her friends thinks she’s upset. The other one thinks she’s being a bitch.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “Did you notice that she wasn’t even crying? Her eyes weren’t red either. No stuffy nose. And if they thought she was really upset, would they have brought her to the mall? Doesn’t that seem weird?”

“What seems weird is how you’re acting about the whole thing,” Brenda said.

“What? Admit it, Lauren Wood can be a real cow. Isn’t there even a teeny-tiny part of you that sort of enjoys that things are falling apart for her?” I held my fingers and thumb close together and squinted through the hole.

“She’s not a friend of mine, but I wouldn’t want to see something bad happen to anyone.”

I rolled my eyes. “She’s not your friend because she would never be your friend. She can’t get anything from you, which renders you useless in her book. She wouldn’t do a thing to help
you out if you needed it, and if she had something to gain by hurting you, she’d do it so fast you wouldn’t even see her sneaking up with the knife.”

“What did she do to you?”

My lower lip started shaking and out of nowhere I felt like I could burst into tears right in the center of the mall food court. “It doesn’t matter.” I gave my eyes a wipe. “Let’s go get the yoga DVD.”

“Sort of seems like it does matter.”

I took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling, trying to pull the tears back into my eyes using willpower. “Forget the whole thing,” I said. Brenda had crossed her arms and was looking at me. “As a friend, I’m asking you to drop it.”

“Lauren isn’t my friend, but it doesn’t seem like you’re much of a friend either. You don’t tell me what’s going on, you don’t tell me what’s important to you, and you don’t even want to be seen with me. As soon as we run into someone, you run off. In fact, the only thing you tell me is what to do.”

“That’s not fair. It isn’t that I don’t want people to see us together, it’s just …” My voice trailed off. She was right. I couldn’t afford to be seen with her. My popularity was still too tenuous.

Brenda looked away from me and then started to gather up her shopping bags. “Thanks for coming with me to get my hair cut and all the shopping advice. I should head home.”

“What about getting a yoga thing?”

“I can manage it on my own. You don’t have to hold my hand every step of the way.”

“Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll see you around.”

“And if I’m really lucky you’ll even be able to acknowledge that you know me.”

“It’s not like that,” I protested.

“Just because you don’t want it to be like that, doesn’t mean that isn’t exactly what it is.” Brenda hiked up her bags, then turned away.

Chapter Sixteen

When we were in third grade, Lauren and I had a thing for Nancy Drew books. We would pretend to be Nancy and her best friend Bess, the crime-solving duo. (Care to guess who got to be Nancy and who was stuck being boring Bess?) We decided we didn’t have to pretend. We would open our own detective agency, Wood & Worthington Incorporated. Her name had to go first. After all, she pointed out, it was only fair to go in alphabetical order. We made agency letterhead and business cards on Lauren’s dad’s color printer. We passed out our cards to neighbors and posted a sign at the Meijer’s and waited for the cases to pour in. Not too bad for being eight and a half. Our first mystery, the Case of the Missing Library Book, came from my mom.

My mom was missing a copy of
Veggie Fun
, a vegan cookbook. It was a high-stakes case, because every day that it went unfound the library was raking in another day’s fine. Lauren
leaned back in my desk chair, balancing one of her pink, glitter spiral notebooks on her lap.

“We should make a list of suspects,” Lauren said, spinning the pen between her fingers.

“It could be Ms. Tarton’s dog, Peanut. He’s always burying stuff in the backyard.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Lauren wrote Peanut down in her notebook with a big number one by his name. “Does Peanut have any history with books? Any witnesses who might have seen him chewing on a book or something?”

“Not sure.” We went back to thinking. Crime solving was a lot more work than it looked like in the books.

“Has he bitten anyone?”

“Peanut? No. He’s a really nice dog. Plus he’s a wiener dog so he’s only like six inches tall. I’m not sure he could bite anything important. He goes to the hair salon most days with Ms. Tarton, so he’s not even around most of the time.”

“Remember what Nancy says—just because someone looks like they’re innocent doesn’t mean they are.” Lauren waved her finger in my direction. I tried to picture Peanut as a hardened criminal. We each went back to trying to think of another suspect. One thing our neighborhood was missing was nefarious characters. “Maybe we should do a stakeout and try and see if there are any clues.”

A stakeout seemed way more fun than hanging out in my room, so we went prowling around the neighborhood. We ended
up in the park that backed up to the Tartons’ backyard. Peanut was wandering around the yard, barking at birds as they flew through the sky. Peanut was nothing if not an optimist. We got down on our hands and knees so we could sneak up closer to the fence and observe him at close range. It was possible that if he didn’t know anyone was watching, he would disclose the secret lair (or hole) where he had hidden the library book.

The leaves rustled as we crawled forward. Lauren looked over her shoulder and gave me a face to be quiet. I almost started giggling because she looked just like her mom did when she would stomp down the hall to Lauren’s room and beg us to “Please keep down the volume. This is a home, not a trailer.” We weren’t really sure what being in a home versus a trailer had to do with anything, but we would always shush up. Lauren’s mom wasn’t the kind of parent who liked to tell you something twice. That was when it happened. I took another crawl forward putting my hand down in a pile of mud brown leaves. I felt a sudden hot pain in the palm of my hand.

I yelled out and yanked my hand back. Peanut let out a howl and ran over to the fence near us, barking his alert. Sticking out of the palm of my hand was a large carpenter nail buried into the flesh. I knew it was bad, but I knew it was really bad when I saw Lauren’s face. Her eyes were wide and she looked a bit nauseated. I pulled the nail out with my other hand and blood welled up and poured down my wrist.

“Oh my gosh,” I cried, looking at all that blood, my blood.

Lauren whipped off one of her shoes and scrambled to get her sock. She wound it around my hand, squeezing slightly. I’m not sure they covered sock triage in Girl Scouts, but it worked.

“It’s going to be okay. We’ll go get your mom.”

“She’s going to be mad at me.”

“No she won’t.”

“Yes she will,” I said, somehow sure this would be the case. I started to cry in tandem with Peanut’s howls. I felt a fresh wave of pain with every beat of my heart. Lauren looked around on the ground, kicking at the piles of leaves and then bent down to grab the nail. Without hesitating she stabbed herself in the palm. Her wound wasn’t as deep as mine, but it was longer and it started to bleed instantly. I stopped crying and looked at her in shock.

“Now we’re in trouble together,” Lauren said, grabbing my hand, the bloody sock between our palms giving a squishy noise as we shook. “And we’re also blood sisters. That’s better than real sisters because we did it by choice instead of just being born that way. So you don’t ever need to worry about stuff, because I’ll be there. I’ll figure out something with your mom. And then someday you’ll do something for me.”

I remember thinking at that moment that there was no one cooler than Lauren. I was sure she would be my best friend forever. Heck, we were blood sisters. Of course, in fairness, at that age, I thought Pop-Tarts were the height of good cuisine, so it’s clear I wasn’t a great judge of quality.

My mom drove us both to the emergency room for tetanus
shots. Lauren was in the front seat telling my mom this elaborate story to explain how we both managed to puncture our hands at the same time. My mom didn’t seem to be buying it, but she wasn’t mad either. She had washed each of our hands out at home and wrapped them in clean dishtowels for the trip to the hospital. I was hoping for stitches because I thought they would make me look cool. I sat in the backseat holding my arm in the air the way my mom had told me too. My mom braked quickly when someone cut in front of her in traffic, and the missing library book slid out from under her car seat.

Case solved. Whatever happened between Lauren and me was still a mystery.

Chapter Seventeen

I lay on my bed, tossing a tennis ball up into the air and catching it. Just another exciting Saturday night. I couldn’t tell if the plan was working. Lauren didn’t seem to be unraveling as much as I had hoped. I wasn’t looking to put her in a bad mood. I had total destruction more in mind. I rolled over on the bed and clicked through my phone list. I hit the speed dial for Kyla. She picked up almost instantly.

“Hey, what’s up? I heard that something happened at the mall,” I said.

“Lauren threw this fit in the food court. I mean I love the girl, but sometimes, the drama, you know?”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Lauren and Justin broke up.”

“Really?” I tried to get the right amount of shock in my voice. “So was she really upset? Brokenhearted and all that?”