“No, I came with Val and Ezra. They’re in the movie. In the movie theater.”

“Oh. That’s nice they let you tag along with them,” she says.

Addison and her boyfriend, who’s at the local junior college but creepily still comes to all the Ashland events, snicker to each other, and I feel heat creep up my cheeks.

The mom I bumped reappears. “Hey, they charged me a refill fee for the popcorn. Three bucks. You’re paying for it.”

I’m not hallucinating: everyone in line is staring at me. My mouth turns into a cotton swab. Sweat beads behind my ears. When I go to my ten-year high-school reunion, they’ll introduce me as that tagalong girl who spilled a child’s popcorn.

“Nice one, Rebecca,” Huxley says.

“We used to be friends!”

She nestles herself against Steve’s broad chest, and he closes his arms around her. That’s her response, and I get it loud and clear. Other girls in line hug their boyfriends, so grateful they’re not me.

I hand over the money and get this old woman out of my life. Forget the bathroom. I race back into the theater.

I stumble down to my row and find Ezra and Val making out. I guess they couldn’t wait to get rid of me. I tap Val’s shoulder, but she’s too entwined with Ezra to notice. I’m standing in the aisle. Yet another batch of my classmates gawk at me. “Sit down!” one of them hisses.

These two aren’t budging. I sit in the empty row behind them. I try to concentrate on the movie, but all I can see are my best friend and her boyfriend slobbering all over each other.

We used to be friends.

Tears well up in my eyes. Thank goodness I’m in the dark. Val and Ezra’s quest to gobble each other’s faces off overtakes my peripheral vision, but finally, the action on-screen wins out. The two remaining astronauts fight the evil queen, whose tentacles swirl around voraciously. She chases them through the spaceship, and because of all the brains she’s sucked out, she knows how they’ll think. She’s smarter, faster and completely ruthless. But because of their small size, they can squeeze into a rescue pod, blast off, nuke their spaceship and kill the queen. This stupid movie totally transfixes me, opens up a new worldview in my mind. I feel like I’m right there with the astronauts, and I want to cheer at the top of my lungs when the spaceship blows up. It’s like divine intervention that I came to see this movie on this night.

I have to vanquish the evil queen.

11

I don’t have to do any thinking for Huxley and Steve’s gossip dossier. As soon as I get home from the movies, I race up to my room and dig out my notebook. Everyone at school, including teachers, knows their history. It’s an essential part of the social curriculum. I create from memory, the words spilling out faster than I can write them down. My pen whips back and forth on the page.

I combine their dating histories, because they’ve only ever been with each other. How adorable...and boring.

Huxley Mapother & Steve Overland


Dating History:

• Fall 7th grade (Huxley)/Fall 8th grade (Steve)–present

º Steve—new student, played football. Huxley—nice and normal, then met Steve and became popular and demonic.

º Eating lunch together by end of second week.

º Were seen at parties together by mid-September.

º Publicly confirmed relationship with article in school paper = the decline of modern journalism.

º PDA Level = ELEVATED

• Held hands in school, kissed in the hall, nothing obscene.


Confirmed rumors:

º Winter sophomore/freshman: Steve—Got so drunk off tequila that he threw up on Huxley.1

º Fall junior/sophomore: Huxley—went on acai-berry diet and dropped 6 lbs before homecoming coronation.

º Fall senior/junior: Huxley and Steve window-shopped for wedding rings.


I stop writing. My hand is shaking. After over four years together as the top couple in school, do they really have no other rumors? No fights, no scandals? Huxley is a master of controlling her PR; you would never guess that Steve’s family is scheming to rip them apart. In a school of fifteen hundred kids, why is there so little gossip about the biggest couple? Their relationship cannot be as perfect as it seems.

* * *

Diane and I form a battle plan over leftover pizza the next night.

“I hate that the middle of the pizza never gets warm in the microwave. The edges are burning, but then the middle is still ice-cold,” she says. But she eats it anyway.

My gossip dossier and yearbook are laid out on the dining table. My parents are at a bar mitzvah tonight, so we don’t have to plot in private. “We have a better chance of getting Steve to dump Huxley. There’s no way she would ever dump him.”

“I’m not so sure. He’s not going to be a big football star next year. His sex appeal is going to drop.”

“He’s going to Vermilion for her,” I say. “And she’ll probably join him when we graduate.”

“That’s bleak.”

“Never underestimate the power of a whipped guy. He has a breaking point. She doesn’t.”

“Dammit!” Diane wipes a clump of sauce off her sweatshirt. A red splotch covers the g in Rutgers. Just one of many. “And since his family hates her guts, he’s probably looking for any excuse to get rid of her. Now you need to work this angle, try to talk to his parents maybe.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. I leave families out of my break-up schemes. I do have some ethics, despite my line of work. I pace around the room, careful not to knock into any of my mom’s antique vases.

“What if he thinks she’s cheating on him?”

“I doubt she would cheat on him, and he knows it.” Huxley’s face circles in my mind. Why would anyone break up with her? I think about all those picturesque moments she and Steve share during school. Her life is like a movie, every detail staged so that girls can aspire to be her. If you are her friend or boyfriend, you have to know your lines. And as I learned, if you don’t fit the part, you’re cut.

“What if she thinks Steve is cheating on her?” I ask.

Diane chugs the last of the Coke. “He wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, but if we make her think he’s cheating?”

Diane puts down all food and drink and gives me her undivided attention. “Go on.”

“If Huxley suspects he’s cheating, she’ll freak out and try to assert more control over him, which I think could drive him over the edge. But it has to be long term, a slow build. If we try anything easy, like a dirty text, she’ll see right through it.” My mind is in overdrive, imagining the possibilities.

“That could work, but who would be the other girl?”

My mind grinds to a halt. No girl in school would dare go after Steve. They know he has Property of Huxley Mapother stamped on his forehead. And I don’t hate any girl enough to make them the unsuspecting other woman. My memory wanders to seeing Steve on his first day of school. So cute, so charming, so tall. He had no awkward prepopular phase like Huxley. There’s no way she was his first girlfriend. It’s not humanly possible. Guys like him don’t sit on the market. There had to be someone before her, someone he left behind in Leland, his old town.

“His ex-girlfriend,” I say.

“He has one?”

“They always do.”

We go upstairs to Diane’s computer to look at the photos in Steve’s Facebook profile, but I don’t have access. I’m not cool enough to be his friend in any context. All I can see on his page is his main picture: he and Huxley cuddling by a lake at sunset. It may seem like one of those candid pictures, but Huxley probably waited all day to get that shot.

“Great,” I say.

“I have an idea,” Diane says. “It’s a bit old-school, though.”

* * *

“They keep this stuff?” I ask in a hushed voice.

“Yeah. It’s public record. All towns have them,” Diane says at her regular volume level. The librarian at the reference desk shushes her.

The smell of old books stirs in the air, and I feel smarter just inhaling it. A giant clock hangs on the back wall, as if the Leland library is a timepiece for an old giant. Diane’s finger scans shelf after shelf of town records until she finds bins labeled “Yearbooks: James Whitmore Junior High School” on the bottom.

“Of course they’re on the bottom,” I say. It takes both of us to pull the bin onto the floor. We scramble through Leland history until we find the relevant year.

I immediately flip to Steve’s yearbook photo, for proof that I chose the correct book and to check out how young he looks. When I see his buzz cut and chubby cheeks, I laugh, even though he looks adorable.

Diane and I turn through pages of sports teams and clubs and faculty, all things I would care about if I actually went to this school. I’m amazed at how dated the pictures and people look after only five years. Then again, it has been five years. That’s almost one-third of my life.

We reach the “Out and About” section. Real candid pictures of students around school. I can instantly tell who’s popular by how many shots they’re in. Steve pretty much has his own section. Multiple photos feature him and a lithe blonde with big eyes and a warm smile that makes me believe she’s as friendly as she seems.

Angela Bentley.

A picture of the two of them eating at lunch sews it up for me. He’s picking pepperonis off his pizza and putting them on hers. She’s ripping off her crusts and placing them on his plate. It seems so routine for them. They give each other fake suspicious looks, hamming it up for the camera. “Angela and Steve: cutest couple ever!!” reads the caption. I have to agree.