“Okay, so a lot.” She leans toward me and lowers her voice. “But I kind of have to make an example out of you, you know? I can’t have the other girls thinking I’m going easy on you or they’ll never respect me when Jenkins is away. I thought you’d understand.”
I don’t care if it sort of makes sense and we’d probably suck a lot of ass if it weren’t for Bianca going extra hard on us in place of our absentee coach—I consider her paddle brush as Way #33 to kill her.
“So,” she continues, “did you hear everyone’s going to In-N-Out Burger?”
“Yeah, I heard something about that.” I tighten the towel around my chest and move past her, wet feet slapping against the gritty tiles. I can guess where this is going.
She follows me. “Devon’s coming too.”
Ding, ding, ding!
Bianca leans against the locker next to mine and pretends to check her hair for split ends while I pretend to be really interested in the contents of my bag, because I just don’t know what to do when she gets like this. I thought she’d be over Devon by now. We’ve been best friends since the first grade, and he’s just some guy. Some sickeningly hot, captain-of-the-football-team guy.
But if I’m being honest, there was friction between us before Devon ever came along. Things got a little weird around the time Bianca became morbidly obsessed with popularity and dragged me along on her mission to become high school royalty.
Supposedly it’s normal; Mom says friends can drift apart as they get older, as their interests change and their personalities develop.
This is bullshit, of course. Bianca’s the person who pushed Stacey Miller in the first grade after she told me my hair was ugly, and then offered me half of her banana sandwich. She was there for me when Grandma died when I was eight and I thought the world was ending. She’s the girl who dressed up in fur hats and muffs with me when we were eleven and traipsed around the mall pretending to be my Russian sister. Who gave me the giant collage of pictures of us for my fifteenth birthday last year, a collage that was (and still is) so awesome it had me both spitting Coke out of my nose and tearing up. We’ll always be best friends. This is just a little rough patch. And since she shuts down any attempt to talk about it and won’t admit there’s even a problem, I’m left with Door #3, which is to ride it out until she gets whatever this is out of her system.
Still. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
“What about Sebastian?” I ask. “He going too?” Sebastian is a friend of Bianca’s older brother who she’s had a mambo crush on since forever. He’s got an acne problem (as far as I can tell from the pictures), but he’s older and plays lacrosse, so I guess that makes him awesome. He’s her date for homecoming.
She dismisses my comment with a wave. “Like he wants to hang out with a bunch of high schoolers.”
Someone should tell Bianca she’s in high school.
“Anyway, it’s too bad you’re working,” she says.
“Yeah, too bad.” I yank my denim miniskirt and white tank on over my damp body, then put on my new suede fringe boots.
“You should just pull a no-show,” Bianca says.
“And get fired?”
“So what?” she retorts.
“Well, I kind of like not being poor.” I tear a brush through my dark blond hair even though I’d rather just get out of here—brushing isn’t optional when you have as much wild curly hair as I do—then lean into the little locker mirror to apply mascara.
“I know … I bet it’s because you secretly love working at that voodoo shop.” She circles me, pretending to stir a cauldron.
For someone who claims that every single thing we do needs to be carefully calculated, that one misstep could thrust us back into loserdom, she sure likes to remind people about my quirky mom.
She affects a high-pitched, nasal voice “Eye of newt and toe of frog, tail of rat and hair of dog! Oh, and a pinch of Bianca’s toenail clippings for good measure!” She throws her head back and cackles.
The locker room roars with laughter.
“God, your mom’s crazy,” Bianca says.
Oh no, she didn’t just utter the C word. So what if I woke up at three a.m. to find Mom digging up the backyard by headlamp while chanting locating spells because her witchcraft bible was missing? That was one time! Six years ago! And lots of people practice witchcraft—hello, it’s called Wicca. And so what if she thinks aliens exist? Eccentricity is practically a requirement to live in L.A.
But as much as I’m dying to do it, gouging Bianca’s eyes out with my Maybelline Great Lash mascara brush probably won’t improve the situation, so I laugh too.
“Well, have fun, loser.” Bianca pokes me in the shoulder. “Call me later, okay?”
“Course.” I send her a smile and sling my messenger bag over my shoulder, sliding on my favorite pair of oversized white shades.