Rebel, Bully, Geek, Pariah (4 page)

And she laughed at it.

“That's right,” Andi said. She linked an arm through mine. “And my friend and I wish you would go away.”

“I'm not going anywhere. This is
my
—”

“Yeah, yeah. It's your lame party. Oh, Georgia,” Andi sighed. “I liked you so much better when you just did what I told you to.”

Georgia huffed. “I never did anything just because you told—”

“I'm bored,” Andi said abruptly. She turned to me and waved a hand at the other girls as if flicking away a cloud of gnats. “Let's go find some more interesting people. There must be one or two here.”

Then, her arm still linked with mine, she dragged me away.

 

BEFORE

“I LOVE THE black strapless one, but Mark likes me in blue. He says it matches my eyes.”

“Please. Mark prefers you in
nude
.”

The two girls started snickering, and one let loose an unattractive snort. It was the only unattractive thing about either of them. I shifted in my seat behind them, trying not to listen in. In every classroom, every bathroom, every stairwell at Jefferson, all anyone could talk about was homecoming. It was like they'd all come down with the same sickness—diarrhea of the mouth—and all they could spew was football-game this and formal-dance that.

I forced myself to look away from the long, dark waves and the blond ponytail in front of me and flipped through my world history textbook, letting the words blur by until something caught my eye—a full-page color photo of the Roman Colosseum taken with a fish-eye lens, so its curves seemed even more dramatic and impossible. I folded the page as close to the binding as possible,
then tugged until it tore at the crease. The ripping noise echoed through the mostly empty classroom, and I was glad I'd beaten Mr. Spencer to first period.

The girls turned at the sound, surprised to find they weren't alone, and I wiggled my fingers up under my sun hat self-consciously. The one with the ponytail barely glanced at me, but Andi Dixon's eyes zeroed in on my textbook and the damage I'd done. Before she twisted forward again, I thought I saw one corner of her mouth twitch. It wasn't exactly a smile, but it was something like approval.

“Okay,” Ponytail said. “So you've got the limo covered, right?”

Andi tilted her head to one side, her hair moving like a waterfall. “I guess.”

“I mean, we can all pitch in, but I figured your dad would pay.”

“It's not that,” Andi said. “It's just—limos are so boring. Everyone will have one.”

“Exactly. That's why we—”

“What about a school bus?”

“Uh . . .”

“Or a monster truck!”

I smirked. Seeing these girls in their satin and tulle trying to climb out of a monster truck would almost make the homecoming dance worth attending.

Ponytail was quiet for a moment, then seemed to recover. “Well, we can work on transportation after we've worked out your date. Mark says Harry Sims is going to ask—”

“No,” Andi said abruptly. “Tell Harry to invite Alexia. He's a perv, and she puts out. They'll be perfect together.”

Ponytail turned her head, and I could see shock in the profile of her face. “But Harry's hot for
you
. And he's just hot,
period
.”

“So?”

A bell rang, and students spilled into the classroom, shuffling their feet and scraping the legs of their chairs against the floor. I found myself leaning forward, no longer trying to ignore the conversation in front of me. I didn't know Harry Sims from Harry Potter, but there was something electrifying about overhearing other people's secrets.

“So it's freshman homecoming,” Ponytail insisted. “It's our first dance. Who we go with is
everything
.”

Was it? This seemed like an important piece of information—something they should have included in our freshman orientation booklet, in between how many electives we could take and what kind of offensive T-shirts would get us sent home.

“But I don't like Harry,” Andi said.

“Okay, well, who
do
you like?”

There was a long pause before Andi answered in a low voice. “You know who.”

Unfortunately,
I
never got to know who, because Mr. Spencer charged in just then, clapping his hands and launching right into a lecture about ancient Egypt. I quickly folded my pilfered photo of the Colosseum and tucked it into my backpack. When I got home, it would go up on my bulletin board next to all the other pictures and postcards of places I'd rather be.

I have no idea whether Andi went to homecoming with Harry Whoever, but I know a week after the dance she and Ponytail started sitting on opposite sides of the classroom, and by the end of the year, the name on everyone's lips was no longer Andi Dixon but Georgia Jones.

 

4

I HEARD THE Barbies whispering behind us for a second before their voices were swallowed by the music. As soon as we were out of sight, Andi dropped my arm and reached into her jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes. She pulled one out and then tipped the pack upside down.

“Shit. Empty.” She tossed it into the nearest bonfire and lit her last smoke. She took a deep drag and squinted at me as she exhaled. “You're kind of a trip, huh?”

Was I?

I crossed my arms to keep my hands from crawling up into my hair.

“Are you going to give me the violin or not?”

“Depends,” she said, inhaling again. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Keep it.” I knew the words were true as I said them. The right thing to do would be to return the violin and hope for some kind of reward, but I doubted Pete's Pawn was in the business of
giving things away. And after all the trouble of chasing this thing down, it felt like I'd kind of earned it, even if I hadn't paid for it.

Andi laughed. “No you won't. You'll take it back, and I'll get in trouble. Can't do it.”

“The clerk already saw you,” I pointed out. “You're in trouble anyway.”

Andi dropped her cigarette butt and ground it into the dirt with her boot heel. “Tell you what, Worms—”

“Don't call me that.”

She looked up, surprised at the venom in my voice. “Okay,
Sam
. I'll sell you this here fiddle for whatever price you were planning to pay.”

I smirked. “I was planning to pay five dollars.”

She shook her head in mock disappointment. “Sorry. I don't play with liars.”

“And I don't play with thieves.”

A noise in the trees to my left cut off our argument. We were on the fringes of the party, next to the thicker part of the forest that led down to the river, and my heart galloped for a second as I worried what—or who—might be hiding in the darkness beyond the bonfires.

But Andi didn't share my fear; she bravely tiptoed into the woods toward the sound. I wouldn't have followed, but as she turned away from me to the trees, I saw the neck of the violin sticking out of her messenger bag. An invitation.

Take it now, while she's distracted.

It wasn't really stealing if it didn't belong to Andi in the first place, right? As the thought flitted across my mind, I realized it
was pretty much the same argument Andi had made back in the pawnshop. I inched up behind her, my hand stretching silently toward the violin. My fingers were only a whisper away from closing around the neck when Andi suddenly spun back to me.

“Shh!” she hushed me, even though I hadn't made a sound. She held a finger to her smiling lips, then pointed it straight ahead.

I had to squint to follow her finger. We were under the canopy of trees now, and my eyes were still flashing with the echo of firelight, so it took a moment for them to adjust to the dark. I heard what she was pointing at before I saw it. Someone was grunting up ahead. No—two someones. I could hear each of them breathing to a different beat—one labored and slow, the other quick and gasping. I heard fallen branches crunching beneath them, and as we crept closer, I could see them rolling over the ground, locked in an embrace.

Oh!
I looked away. I didn't want to see that.

Or did I? I peeked again, first with one eye, then the other.

The pair half tumbled, half skidded away from us down a slope, and now their embrace looked more like a choke hold. A huge boy—probably a senior—had his hands wrapped tight around the neck of a skinny kid who looked too small for high school. The forest shadowed their faces.

Unable to look away from the train wreck in front of us, Andi and I followed their rolling fight down the hill, slipping as the slope grew steep and treacherous, until finally they spilled out of the woods and into a patch of moonlight along the riverbank. Now that I could see them both clearly, I recognized the
older boy as York Flint—one of those obscenely good-looking guys who made himself ugly by always cutting people down. His friends thought he was hilarious, but personally I thought he was kind of an asshole. The smaller boy was familiar, too. I could never remember his name, just his face and his distinct mass of freckles.

It was hard to make out those freckles now, in the dark, but I could see enough to tell his expression was more pissed than panicked. He clawed at the hands around his throat, but they never moved, and I knew I should help, but I didn't know how. I looked at Andi, expecting her to shout, to step in, to do
something
—but she only cocked her head toward me and said, loud enough for the boys to hear, “Fifty bucks on the big guy.”

“What?” the big guy and I said at the same time.

“The big one,” she repeated, pointing him out in case it wasn't obvious. “York.”

He gaped at Andi and loosened his hold until Freckles's wheezing breaths sounded almost normal. Their rumble had come to a halt, the fight scene frozen in place.

Andi snapped at York, “Hey, keep a grip there! I've got fifty bucks on you.”

“She's kidding,” I said.

I had no idea if she was kidding, but Andi seemed like the kind of person you apologized for. Like Mama.

She looked at me with a gleam in her eye. “Or, better yet, I'll bet one violin against your fifty bucks.”

Tempting, but the smaller kid didn't stand a chance.

“Nice try,” I said.

“Hey, shut up!” York sat up and shook out his hands. Apparently, choking someone could make your hands tired. In that moment, the skinnier kid, his legs still pinned, sat straight up and smacked York's face. And not just once—he thrashed around with both hands, slapping York's cheeks over and over again, like he was tapping out a drumbeat.

Andi found this so hysterical she actually doubled over in laughter, holding her stomach, while I looked away, embarrassed for him.

York grabbed both of the flailing wrists in one hand and yanked them to the side. “Knock it off. Give me the keys.”

He wasn't slurring quite as badly as Tess had been, but I could still hear the alcohol in his voice.

The pinned boy responded by spitting directly into York's eye.

“Wow, nice shot,” Andi said, startled out of her laughing fit.

York rolled away, wiping his face. “Sick, man!”

Freckles scrambled to his feet and dug something out of the front pocket of his jeans. A second later, he was dangling a set of keys in front of York.

“These keys?” he taunted.

York bent forward and hunched his back, but before he could pounce, the other boy reared back and threw the keys with all the force his skinny arm could muster. We all held our breath for a moment—just long enough to watch the keys fly, arcing into the sky, glittering as the moonlight reflected off the metal, until they landed with a soft splash and disappeared under the water.

York opened and closed his mouth twice before he could finally make words. “You—you—” He grabbed his own hair with two fists. “I'm gonna—I'm gonna—”

“You're going to what?” Freckles taunted. “What are you going to do?”

York let go of his hair and waved his fists at the sky instead.

“I'm going to tell
Mom
!”

 

5

THE SKINNY KID with the freckles laughed, but it came out more like a groan as he rubbed his throat, which was red with marks from York's fingers.

“Yeah, you go ahead and tell Mom. Tell her I wouldn't let you drive drunk. I'm sure I'll get in a lot of trouble.”

“Shut up,” York growled.

Andi elbowed me. “You should have taken the bet. It kind of looks like the little guy won.”

The smaller kid dropped his hand from his throat and glared at Andi. “Could you not call me ‘the little guy,' please? My name is Boston.”

“I'm Sam,” I piped up.

Boston and Andi both cocked their heads at me like I'd said something strange.

“I thought we were doing introductions,” I mumbled.

“You're the girl with all the hats.” York flashed a grin that would have looked good on him if he wasn't all scratched up and sweaty from the fight. “Hat Girl.”

I tugged my newsboy low over my face, partly so he wouldn't see my surprise that he recognized me and partly to fight the urge to smile back.

Andi turned her attention to York. “I didn't know you had a brother.”

“I didn't know it was any of your business,” York spat back, his smile gone now.

I looked back and forth between the two of them, trying to remember if I'd ever seen them together in school. Maybe everyone just knew everyone but me.

York yanked his shirt up to wipe the sweat and dirt from his face, and my gaze caught on everything rippled and lean that had been hiding under that shirt. He wasn't exactly a Calvin Klein model, but I imagined boys didn't get built much better than this in River City. Maybe people forgive you for being an ass if you have abs like that.