Laura Ruby - Good Girls

He’s never forgiven me for it.

Today he’s got some Japanese comic book that you read backwards. Not that he’s opened it yet, because he’s too intent on pissing me off. Sometimes he sat near Kimberly Wong and made her so nervous that she would forget which math problem she was on. And sometimes it was Renee Ostrom, sure to be voted most likely to become a starving artist, who would whip out a piece of paper and draw a quick sketch of Chilly with arrows sticking through his head, or a knife in his heart, or his face shattered in Picasso-like pieces.

Chilly spends about five minutes trying to provoke me when the bell rings. I’m glad that we’re not allowed to talk in Mrs Sayers’s study period, and the room is silent except for the scratchy whisper of pages turning. We all hear Cindy Terlizzi’s phone when it starts to vibrate. In unison, everyone says, “Phone!”

“Miss Terlizzi,” says Mrs Sayers, who is shelving books in her persnickety way. The edge of every book touches the front of the shelf. “You know that phone is supposed to be turned off when you arrive at school.”

“Whatever,” says Cindy Terlizzi. When Mrs Sayers gives her a look, she says, “I know.”

“Well then, turn it off,” Mrs Sayers snaps. She picks up the end of her long scarf and flings it around her neck, waiting for satisfaction.

Cindy digs around in her bag for the phone and flips it open with a flick of her wrist. She presses a few buttons and the phone chirps like a sick bird. We all know she’s probably getting a text message and is counting on the fact that Mrs Sayers’s own phones are of the rotary or perhaps even the tin-can variety.

“Off!” says Mrs Sayers.

“That’s what I’m doing,” Cindy says, tsk-tsking, like Mrs Sayers is just old and grumpy and wrinkled and can’t understand modern communication devices. She glances back at the phone in her palm as if she can’t quite believe the message she’s reading and slaps her hand over her mouth. Then she looks up. Finds me. Smiles.

She’s too busy smiling to pay attention to Mrs Sayers, who, I have to say, is ferret-fast when she wants to be. She swoops down on Cindy, scarf flying like an aviator’s, and snatches the phone. “What a clever little gadget,” she says.

“Hey!” says Cindy. “Give that back!”

Mrs Sayers peers down, one eyebrow rucked up. She starts punching random buttons and the phone whirrs. “Very nice,” she says, passing it back to Cindy.

Cindy scowls. “You erased it!”

Mrs Sayers says, “Oh, my! Did I? I’m so very sorry. I hope it wasn’t important.”

Behind Mrs Sayers’s back, Cindy sticks out her tongue but says nothing. Mrs Sayers glances my way and I know that whatever was on Cindy’s phone was about me—probably about the party, about Pam, about Luke. Well, they could have him. They could all get in line.

Of course, Chilly doesn’t miss any of it. He’s turning from Cindy to Mrs Sayers to me, me to Mrs Sayers to Cindy. He opens his mouth to say something icky and nuclear and obnoxious, but I cut him off: “Speak and you die.”

Chilly gives me his signature “Who, me?” look and opens his mouth again when Mrs Sayers says, “Yes, Mr Chillman, please do spare us all. I can’t promise you death, but I can promise detention, which I’ve been told is a bit like dying very, very slowly.”

Everybody goes back to not reading, not studying and not thinking, except for me and a couple of other geeks who think grades are important. At first I can’t concentrate, but as the minutes tick by I settle into it, settle into me again: the me who thinks about grade point averages and college applications and various possible futures. I consult my assignment notebook and measure how many days till the final draft of my Much Ado About Nothing paper is due, worry about my history test, calculate how many hours I’ll have to study for the next calculus exam. It’s soothing, the measurements and the calculations and even the worry. Luke is still there, of course, in the back of my head, doing some sort of jock dance of the veils, but I know that he’ll fade eventually, taking all his hot boy voodoo into the past.

Finally the bell rings and I’m free of Chilly the Soul Chiller and Cindy Terlizzi, Demon Queen of Text Messaging. As I’m running to my next class, Pete Flanagan, one of football players, blocks my path.

“Hey, Audrey,” he says. His expression is weird, smirky and knowing, which is kind of funny, because Pete really is a rockhead and knows so very little.

“Hi, Pete,” I say. I sidestep to go around him, but he moves with me. I notice that there’s a bunch of rockheads piling up behind him, all with the same smirky yet stupid expressions, like a bunch of monkeys who’ve just figured out where all the bananas are.

“Want to go out sometime?” he says.

“What?”

“Go out. Come on, you and me.” He jerks a thumb to his friends. “Well, you, me and some of my boys.”

I’m at a loss. This kind of thing hasn’t happened in a while. When we were freshmen, clique warfare was rampant. It was considered necessary and maybe even fun to seek out and terrorise everyone who was not exactly like you in the school. I thought most of us, even the football players, had grown out of that. Guess not.

“Sure, guys,” I say. “Anytime.”

They all let out a whoop as I push past them. Morons.

I motor towards the gym. Out of the corner of my eye I see a finger pointing my way and hear someone laughing, but when I turn, all I see is a row of backs. I start to get a weird feeling, of the weight of eyes, of newly focused attention. In gym, as me and Joelle are pretending to concentrate on the basketball drills, Jeremy Braverman, who has said all of three sentences in three years, says, “I love how you dribble those balls , Audrey,” over and over again, until Joelle gets shrieky and hysterical and beans him in the head with one of them. I get a note in French class: “Sur vos genoux!” On your knees! I turn around to see who wrote it, but no one will meet my eyes. The French in my book blurs into incoherent babble. Did Luke blab to his stupid friends? Did he tell them what we did? No. No! He never talks about his hook-ups. Don’t ask, don’t tell, he’d say. That was always his deal. So what was going on?

By lunch I can’t take the snickering and the weirdness. I make Ash take us to the McDonald’s just to get out of the school. “I think someone’s spreading rumours about me. I’m getting all these looks. It’s making me crazy.”

Ash steers the car around to the drive-through window and orders us fries and Cokes. “Really? I haven’t heard anything,” she says. “Maybe Pam Markovitz is shooting her mouth off. You know what she’s like. And she was so jealous of you at the party on Saturday. Pathetic.”

“What should I do?” I say.

“Oh, who cares about a bunch of ho’s and dumbheads?” Ash tells me. “They’ll be babbling about something else by sixth period.” Because I forgot to bring cash, she pays for the fries and Cokes and pulls out of the parking lot.

Just as I’m about to open the white bag, my own cell phone buzzes and I scratch around the floor for it. I flip open the phone and check the screen. “Picture mail,” I say.

“Maybe Joelle is sending some of the shots she took at the party,” says Ash, smashing a fry into her mouth. “I don’t know why she bothers. They always suck.”

An image pops up and I scroll down to see it. At first I don’t understand what it is. And then my insides turn to ice.

“Ash,” I say.

“What?”

“Someone took a picture of me.”

“Yeah, so?” She looks down at the phone, frowns. “What is it?”

“It’s me, Ash. Me and Luke. We were…” I trail off, staring at the screen. Luke’s head is cut off, but the pale skin of his chest and hips glows in the dark, and his hands clutch fistfuls of the bedspread. Between his knees, a cascade of waist-length blonde hair striped with black.