Such a Rush(47)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Does she know the whole school?” Grayson asked me quietly as we fell in behind her and Alec.

“Yes,” I said. “Molly’s so popular that she’s not even worried about being popular. I’ve never seen a popular person before who wasn’t trying really hard at it. But she’s rich and smart and interesting and she doesn’t give a shit.”

“She sounds perfect.”

“She is perfect,” I said. “I want to be her. Not be like her, but be her, like in a creepy roommate movie.”

He laughed, the genuine relaxed laugh I’d heard from him a few times. “I don’t know everybody. And I didn’t when I lived here, either.”

“Did Alec?”

“Yes,” he said as we walked through a huge front door into the party.

Molly was instantly surrounded by her friends, who screamed over her and wanted to know who she’d brought. She introduced Alec—didn’t they remember him? Didn’t they? And they did!

Didn’t they also remember Grayson? Maybe not. He was acting polite enough, though, so several girls who couldn’t fight their way into the circle around Alec settled for the circle around Grayson. Molly’s friends hardly noticed me, which was good. Their eyes might slide over to me, but they didn’t dare flare their nostrils or, worse, pointedly look me up and down. Not with Molly standing there. They went back to talking to Grayson.

I wished for a drink. I didn’t particularly want to get drunk. I definitely didn’t want to be hungover when I had an airplane to fly the next day. Grayson was right about that. But forced to stay here with these people, I would have preferred to nurse a beer in a corner and bond with some geek I hardly knew from history class, who was plastered. It was easier to make a good impression on plastered people. As it was, I stood in the same circle with Grayson, or sometimes with Alec, and listened to what these drunk girls had to tell them. I grinned so I wouldn’t look unhappy.

After several years of this, I snuck up behind Molly and whispered that I was going to find a soda. I was parched from my long, hot flights that day. “Come with?” I asked hopefully.

“No, I’m good,” she threw at me before turning back to Alec and the girls. Alec didn’t even glance at me. Grayson did, though, over several girls’ heads. He probably thought I was going to get wasted. I would let him worry.

I wandered through the crowd standing on the expensive hardwood floors and lounging with their feet up on the white sofas. I’d almost reached a wide doorway that I assumed led to the kitchen when Francie Mahoney herself caught up with me. She was about a foot taller than me even in my stilettos, and she had a tall friend with her. When she took me by the shoulder and rudely whipped me around against the wall, I had to fight down the urge to run between their long legs like a rabbit cornered by dogs.

“You’re here with Alec?” Francie asked me. “The cute one?”

I felt my brows go down, perplexed that she thought Alec was the cute one. I supposed I understood why she would think this. Alec had the face of an angel. A girl might think he was sexier than Grayson if she’d never seen Grayson move, walking with barely contained energy across the tarmac. “Yes,” I said.

“But I heard you were dating Mark Simon,” she said.

I wondered how she’d heard this. Mark was about as far as possible from popular, and her crowd did not keep up with his crowd. Only their own. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” she insisted. “I heard he moved into your trailer with you.” She smiled at me, teeth large and white, lips glossy red, but her words dripped sarcasm. It was hard to say which part of this scenario held more derision for her: moved into or trailer.

Girls like her slept with boys. They even slept over with them when they could get away with it. But they and their boyfriends would stay at home with Mommy and Daddy until they were safely ensconced in a college dorm. And girls like her did not live in trailers.

At school I avoided these girls by arriving late on the bus so I didn’t have to hang out before school, leaving early on the bus so I had no opportunity to hang out after school, and skipping lunch. It was unintentional but lucky that I’d neglected to turn in my homework throughout middle school and landed in the stupid classes, so I never encountered these girls in their college-track experience. In the unlucky event that I ran into them in the women’s bathroom, I played deaf.

But at school, they hated me only in passing. Now they wanted to take me down. I was in possession of the beautiful blond boy who had stolen their hearts long ago and moved away. They didn’t like it.

I couldn’t tell them the truth: “Yes, I shacked up with Mark Simon, and now I’m dating Mr. Popularity from another school.” Even “Yes, I had shacked up with Mark Simon, but now he’s moved out” sounded hopelessly trashy, and “It’s none of your business” would verify I had something to hide. Briefly I considered taking the offensive with “You are a bitch,” but these girls would tell everyone what I’d called them without explaining what the provocation had been, which would make me seem, if possible, more trashy.

So I squinted at Francie and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but what have you been eating? You’ve got something stuck in your teeth.”

She blinked at me, straightened, and inserted one manicured fingernail between her front incisors.

“Let me see,” said her friend, whose name was Tara, I thought. My only interaction with her was that she had tried to trip me with her tennis racket in the locker room in PE.

“Check in the mirror,” I told Francie. “It looks like gristle.” I stepped past her, which I could do easily now because she was headed to the bathroom. She must have suspected I was lying, but she wouldn’t waltz away through a party without verifying that.

“Your lipstick looks like blood,” Tara called after me.

I said something back to her that was a comparison between her own lipstick color and her twat. Molly would have been proud of me.

“Hey!” Francie said so loudly that I stopped, and so did everybody else around us in the grand living room.

“Don’t go into that kitchen,” she said. “The drinks are for invited guests only.” The two of them laughed and turned for the bathroom again.

I stood there in the passageway with eight people staring at me. I couldn’t continue on my path toward the kitchen, because one of these people might be a friend of Francie’s, or just an ass**le who would go rile her up and tell her I’d defied her order. Then there would be a bigger scene. But I couldn’t slink back to hover at Molly’s feet, either. Undecided, I stuck my chest out, then realized I was sticking my chest out.