Good Girls
Laura Ruby

For all my girls…and for everyone else’s

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Beg Me

The Photograph

The Gauntlet

A Beautiful Thing

Once More, with Feeling

I Am Hamlet

We Interrupt This Programme for a Special Report

Bad

The Other Audrey

Pay Up

Duck-Gilled Salad Servers

The Slut City World Tour

The Third Time (and Fourth and Fifth and...)

A Long, Cold Winter

Spring, Sprang, Sprung

Sinner, Repent

Love Hammer

Born Again

Here Comes the Bride(s)

Stars

Acknowledgments

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Beg Me

Ash says she’s the Dark Queen of the Damned. I say I’m the Empress of the Undead. My dad, passing by the bathroom where we’re getting ready, takes one look and declares us Two Weird Girls from Jersey.

“That’ll work,” Ash says.

Tonight, we’re Goth. We’ve got the layers of black mesh shirts, the cargo pants rolled up to the knees, the ripped fishnets, the combat boots, the white face make-up and the smudgy rings of eyeliner. Ash brought a can of black hair spray, but she’s already used most of it on her curly brown hair. “Not sure if there’s enough left for you, Rapunzel.”

“Shut up and start spraying,” I say. My hair is blonde, and long enough to tuck into the back of my cargoes. Ash blackens the strands around my face and puts skunky streaks all around the back. The noise scares Cat Stevens—aka Stevie, The Furminator and Mr Honey Head—who is watching us from his perch on the toilet tank. He jumps down and dashes out of the bathroom.

“What did you do to Stevie?” my mom calls. I hear her murmuring, “Poor baby kitty. Little marmalade man.”

After Ash finishes, we crowd the mirror. “We are so hot,” she says. And we are. Dark and freaky and brooding, the way vampires might look. I should like it more than I do. My black bra doesn’t fit right, and the straps dig into my shoulders. The fishnets itch. It’s a stupidly warm night and I’m already sweating. Plus, I’ve got on so much mascara that when I blink, my lashes spike my skin.

It’s different for Ash. She’s sort of Goth-y anyway, with her pierced eyebrow and sharp cheekbones and the German swearwords courtesy of her Deutsch grandma. I lean closer to the mirror. “I should have bought contacts. In the store, I saw these green lenses with slanted pupils, kind of like a lizard.”

Ash frowns. “You have the coolest eyes on the planet. Amber.”

“Right,” I say. “Like that stuff insects get caught in.”

“Plus,” she says, ignoring me, “you don’t get contacts for one Halloween party.” Ash blinks her own dark eyes, lush as melted chocolate. “And you can stop being so cranky, please.”

“Sorry.” I bite my lip. “Can you believe this is our last Halloween together?”

Ash’s hands fly up. “Enough with the ‘Can you believe this is our last whatever?’ stuff. It’s October. We’ve got like eight whole months of school left.”

“More like seven.”

“Seven, then.”

“Six if you count vacations,” I say.

“Audrey, the key word is ‘months’. Besides,” she says, digging her elbow into my side, “there are more important things to worry about right now.”

“Like what?”

“Like a certain person by the name of Luke DeSalvio, who I’m sure will be at Joelle’s tonight. You remember him.”

“Oh,” I say. “Right.”

“Listen to her!” says Ash. “Oh, right. Like you aren’t about to explode all over this bathroom.”

“Yeah, well. Like you’re always reminding me, it’s not serious. We’re just friends,” I say.

“With benefits,” says Ash, her voice low so my parents can’t hear it. “Anyone for tongue sushi?”

I smile but don’t answer. This is Ash, the girl whose name is always mentioned in the same breath as mine: AshandAudrey, AudreyandAsh. But there’s so much I haven’t told her and now I don’t even know where to start. What I do know: me and Luke aren’t friends, me and Luke aren’t anything. I had decided I would tell him this tonight, if the subject ever came up. But we never did do much talking.

“There will be lots of guys at the party,” I say. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll branch out a little.”

“Really?” Ash says. “Well, well. I guess someone’s got a brain in her head after all.”

Her phone bleats like a sheep and she grabs for it, looks at the screen. “Picture mail,” she says. She presses a few buttons and the image pops up. “My baby brother in his Spider-Man costume.”

I look over her shoulder. “Cute.”

“Please. The boy’s a demon from hell. Last week, he actually peed in one of the houseplants.” Ash tosses the phone back on the sink and shakes her head in the mirror. “The spray looks great on you, but it makes my hair look like ramen noodles.”

That makes me laugh a little. “Squid-ink ramen noodles,” I say.

“You have to get your parents to take you to normal restaurants once in a while. Pizza, anyone?”

“We go out for pizza. Of course, it’s the kind with a cornmeal crust and gobs of goat cheese.”

“Goats!” says Ash.

My not-quite-normal parents are waiting for us in the living room with two glasses of wine and a digital camera—the wine for them, the camera for us. Usually, I hate all the pictures. I don’t need anyone documenting my awkward teenage years. Tonight my dad insists and for once I’m OK with it, maybe because I don’t look much like me any more. My dad has us pose on the antique church pew against the yellow wall. He backs up and almost falls over the coffee table. My mom laughs and takes a sip of wine, shining and velvet in the light. They love this part, the part when I’m getting ready to go out but I haven’t left yet. I wonder if it will be hard for them when I’m off at college. Besides Cat Stevens, I’m all they’ve got.

“OK, girls,” my dad says. “Look Gothic!”

“Goth, Dad,” I say. “Not Gothic.”

“Sorry,” he says. “Ready? Say, ‘Goat cheese!’”

Because it’s my dad, we both yell, “Goat cheese!” In the picture, we’ve got the black hair, the white skin and the bruise-coloured lips, but we’re both grinning like five-year-olds. Ash takes one look at the picture and says, “We’ve got to work on our attitudes, girl. We’ve got to think dark thoughts.”

“Oh?” says my mom, intrigued. “What kind of dark thoughts?” She writes mystery novels, but the cosy kind with sweet old ladies, little baby kitties and lots of homemade cookies. Oh, and a murder or two. Death by knitting needles. Dark thoughts in sunshiny places.

Ash is doing her best to look creepy. “Madness,” she says. “Mayhem. Malice.”

I try to think of a dark thought, but the best I can come up with is mixed-up, sad stuff—Luke stuff, our-last-Halloween-ever stuff. I don’t mention it, though. I’m already an Empress of the Undead. I don’t need to kill everything else off, too.

After the pictures, my mom makes me promise to take my cell phone, which she seems to think will protect me from car accidents and evil, drunken boys bent on stealing my virtue. Yes, I’ll take the cell. Yes, I’ll call if I need anything. We say goodbye and we’re out the door. Ash has to drive because I’m still too young. I skipped a grade in grammar school and now I’m the only senior without a licence. Doesn’t help that the driving age in New Jersey is seventeen, probably the oldest in the country. At least my parents let me stay out as late as everyone else. I might be sixteen and three quarters, but my mom says I’m an old soul. Lately, I’ve been feeling like one. As we get closer to Joelle’s, I start to get this nervous flutter in my stomach that gets more fluttery with each block. I cross my fingers and whisper a teeny little prayer in my head: Please, God, do not let me make an idiot of myself tonight. Let me have a little fun.

It takes a while to find a parking spot, because everyone goes to Joelle’s Halloween parties. She’s had them every year since the seventh grade. Only strangers or losers show up without costumes, because they’ll be forced to wear one of Joelle’s tutus from her dancing days. When Ash and I walk in the door, I see only one guy with a tutu, a big fluffy pink one. He looks totally stupid, but that’s the point.

Joelle runs up to us, almost tripping over her long white dress. “Look at you guys!” Joelle shrieks.

“You’re so scary!” Joelle is dressed up as a goddess or whatever, with the gauzy dress and the gold armbands, shimmer powder on her face and these long curls in front of her ears. Ash says that Joelle always wears something that will make her look pretty rather than freaky. Joelle would never dress up as a mummy or a monster, or even a Goth chick. Joelle likes to look like Joelle, only more sparkly.

“So who are you?” Ash says.

“What do you mean, who am I?” Joelle shrieks. She’s a shrieker, especially when there’s a crowd. “I’m that tragic Greek heroine, Antigone!”

“Anti what?” says Ash.

Joelle puts her hands on her hips and stamps her foot. “Antigone!”

“Antifreeze?” says Ash.

“Antacid,” I say. “Ant spray.”

“Get thee to a theatre,” Joelle says. Joelle wants to be an actress. Joelle is an actress. Her mother has already pulled her out of school a bunch of times to do commercials, an off-off-off Broadway play and a spot on Law & Order.

Ash raises eyebrows that we’d darkened with pencil. “You guys spend enough time at the theatre, OK? Besides, you don’t look like a tragic Greek heroine as much as you look like an extra from Lord of the Rings.”

“You suck,” says Joelle, punching her in the arm.

“Who sucks?” Luke says. He walks over to where we’re standing in the hallway. He’s wearing black pants and a black shirt with a white paper collar. I suddenly feel like there’s not enough oxygen to go around.

“What’s up, Father?” I say.

He puts a hand on the top of my head. “My child, you are a sinner.”

Ash snorts. “You should know.”

“Hey,” says Luke. “I’m not a priest, I’m a pastor. Pastors are allowed.”

“Allowed what?” I say. Luke grins and my face goes hot. I’m glad that it’s dark and that I’m wearing the white make-up. But Luke can tell anyway. He grins even wider before he drifts off into the crowd again. My head feels warm where his hand was, like he’s excited my hair follicles. This is how I am around him. My brains dribble right out of my ear and I’m left with nothing but a body I can barely control. I’m actually a little surprised when my legs don’t scuttle after him and fling me at his feet. It’s happened before.

“He’s so cute,” says Joelle. “You guys are still, like, hanging out, right?”

“Depends,” I say. I watch as Luke starts talking to Pam Markovitz, who is dressed up like some kind of junkyard cat, chewed-looking ears and whiskers and everything. Luke reaches out and yanks her bedraggled tail. Again my dumb, brainless body reacts: hands contract to fists, stomach clenches as if around bad chicken.

Joelle sees where I’m looking. “Slut.”

“I heard that Pam gave Jay Epstein head at the movies the other night,” Ash says.

“Really?” I say. “Who said that?”

“Jay Epstein.”

“There’s a reputable source,” I say.

“Still,” says Joelle. “Everyone knows she’s been with, like, the entire planet.”

“What an unpleasant visual,” says Ash. “Gotta love how the leotard rides up her butt.”

“Luke doesn’t seem to mind,” says Joelle. She catches my face. “I mean, he’s really really hot, but it’s a good thing you guys aren’t boyfriend/girlfriend and all that.”

“Oh, please. Who needs a boyfriend?” says Ash. “It’s not like we’re gonna get married anytime soon. Anyway, like Audrey keeps saying, college is right around the corner.”

It’s not supposed to bug me that Luke’s such a player; everything’s supposed to be casual. But in our friends-with-benefits arrangement, it seems like he’s the one who gets all the benefits. “Any other hot guys here?” I ask.

“I hope so,” Ash says. “I haven’t hooked up in weeks.”

Joelle runs off to get us some “soda”, which means that there’s beer that we’ll have to hide from Joelle’s dad, who probably won’t come out of his office over the garage long enough to see anything anyway. Me and Ash follow Joelle into the den. All the usuals are there: tramps, witches, devils, football players dressed like cheerleaders, cheerleaders dressed like football players. “So original,” says Ash. There is a guy wearing a plaid jacket with a fish tank on his head. When we ask, he says, “I’m swimming with the fishies”. Red plastic fish are glued to the walls of the tank. His teeth make a white piano in his blue-painted face.

Almost immediately, Ash starts dragging me over to every reasonably cute guy who doesn’t already know us from school. Joelle runs around taking bad pictures with her digital camera. Luke goes from girl to girl, stealing witch hats and pretending to poke people with a pitchfork he’s stolen from one of the devils. As if it’s my fault that everyone thinks she’s a slut, Pam Markovitz huddles with Cindy Terlizzi on the couch, Cindy shooting dirty looks and Pam smirking at me. I ignore them, talking to this person and that person, trying to relax and have a good time, but I feel like I’m far away and watching everything on a TV screen. Ash is getting sick of me being so gloomy, so she flirts big-time with Fish Tank, looking to hook up. At random intervals, cell phones ring and jingle and sing, and people go all yellular, shouting over the music, “What? WHAT?”

I down the rest of my beer and go over to the cooler for another one. I don’t even like beer.

“Awwww. Why so sad? Where’s Mr Popularity?”

I turn and see Chilly. He’s wearing baggy jeans, high-tops and a T-shirt that says “Insert Lame Costume Here”. Apparently it was good enough for Joelle, because he’s not wearing a tutu.

“Who?” I say.

“You know who,” he says.

“I don’t,” I say. Chilly gives me the creeps. He has eyes like radioactive algae and a wormy mouth. We learned a word for wormy in biology. Anneloid.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” he says. “Don’t you have a few thousand tests to study for? Another foreign language to learn?”

“Croatian,” I say. “But I can do that tomorrow.”

“You are such a good, good girl. Doesn’t it kill you that you aren’t graduating number one?”

As of the end of last year, I was number four in our class and had to work my butt off to get that much. A lot of people think that I’m some kind of genius because I skipped a grade, but I don’t think I’m much smarter than anyone else. I’m just weirder.

“There’s eight months to graduation,” I say. “Anything can happen.”

“Nah,” he says. He takes a sip of his drink, not beer but ginger ale. “You’ll never catch up with Ron. He’s got everyone beat. And Kimberly would rather commit ritual suicide than let anyone take her number two. I forget who’s number three, but whoever it is, you won’t budge them.”

“You sleep through all your classes. What do you care?”

“I don’t care at all. My test scores will get me where I want to go.”

“Oh, I’m sure they will,” I say. I resist the urge to puke on his shoes. I cannot believe that I ever went out with him. I want to jam my finger into my ear and scratch the memory out of my brain.

He takes a step closer to me, his algae eyes scraping across my chest. “Wanna hook up?”

“No,” I say.

“Come on,” he says. “You’re free, I’m free.”

I think, You’re always free. I look around the room for Luke. A mistake, because Chilly snorts.

“Don’t worry about him. He’s already occupied.” Chilly touches my cheek with a sandpapery fingertip. “He won’t mind sharing.”

I slap his hand and walk away. I can hear Chilly laughing behind me and I wish I’d thrown my beer in his face or something dramatic like that. But the drama queen stuff is Joelle’s job, not mine, and Chilly knows it. It’s why he likes to bother me.

When I’m upstairs in the bathroom, I swig the beer and check my make-up in the harsh light. I look like the Empress of the Undead, if Empresses of the Undead are pouty and pathetic. What’s the use of planning a big break-up if the person you’re breaking up with is too busy yanking on tails and poking people with pitchforks? I suddenly do not want to be at this party at all. I wonder if I should call my mom and ask for a ride home.

I’m still trying to decide when I bump into Luke in the hallway. Before I know what’s up, he’s pulled me into one of the bedrooms and shut the door with his foot.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey yourself,” he says. He—or someone else—has taken off the white collar, so he’s all in black. He looks more devilish than the devils do. I think that if there is a real devil, he has golden hair and round blue angel eyes, just like Luke.

“What?” he says, because I’m staring.

“Nothing,” I say. “Look. I’ve got to go.”

“Come on! We haven’t even had a chance to hang out yet.”

“That’s because there are too many other kitties around here,” I say.

“You’re not jealous,” he says.

I roll my eyes, hard. He has one hand around my upper arm and he squeezes. He’s smiling, and I hate him for just a second. As usual, it passes.

“Let go,” I tell him.

“Is something wrong?”

I sigh. Everything is wrong. Maybe it’s the beer. Note to self: beer.

“Have I told you how amazing you look tonight?” he says.

I know when I’m being played, but the compliment cheers me anyway—that’s what kind of dork I am. “Thanks,” I tell him. He leans down to kiss me and I pull away. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Surprise. “Why not?”

“Just ’cause, OK?”

He doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me. My body is practically squealing with happiness. I’m sure he can hear it.

He tries to kiss me again and I turn my face. “What’s the matter?” he says, concerned for real now. His hand falls away from my arm.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you.” I take a deep breath. “I don’t want to do this any more.”

“Do what?”

“What we’re doing.”

He doesn’t answer. He tips his head and seems genuinely perplexed. It pisses me off.

“I don’t want to do what we do. I don’t want to…” I look for the right words. “I don’t want to be involved with anyone right now.”

He frowns—blinking, quiet. “But I thought we were cool,” he says, finally. “I thought we were just hanging out.”

“Hanging out. Yeah, I love that,” I say. What I don’t say: I love that we’ve hooked up at every party every weekend for the last two and a half months but somehow we’re not involved. I love that we go to the same school but I don’t get much more than a “hey” in the hallways, no matter how many times your tongue has been down my throat.

Of course, since I don’t actually finish the thought, since I haven’t said anything like it before, he has no clue what I’m talking about. I stand there, watching the expressions march across his face. I can imagine what he’s thinking: Did she just say something about LOVE? Does this mean we can’t hook up? Should I hook up with Pam Markovitz instead? What’s going on???

I almost feel bad for him. That’s what devils do: they make you feel bad.

I must be staring again, because Luke’s frown smoothes out. He’s got these perfect lips, full and pink. Pretty girl lips on a boy’s rough, stubbled face. I can’t help it, I think it’s hot. And he’s so close I can smell him. Warm and clean and sort of soapy-spicy. It’s a great smell. It’s a smell that can make you drunk. I wonder if I am. Can almost two beers make you drunk?

His frown is totally gone now, and mine must be gone, too, because he ignores what I said, reels me in and kisses me. I feel the press of his chest and the weight of his arm around my waist, all those heavy bones, and I think: OK, fine. But this is it. After this, no more dumb high school hook-ups with dumb high school boys, no matter how hot or soapy-smelling they are. I’m done with this. Done.

Maybe because he can sense it, or because he’s afraid I’ll change my mind, Luke takes his time, lips barely touching, barely brushing mine. The music thumping downstairs plays a heartbeat under my feet as the kiss goes from sweet to serious—slidey and sideways and deep. Like always, a thousand flowers bloom in my gut, my skin tingles everywhere and my brains sidle towards the door.

I don’t know how much time goes by before his fingers are crawling under my various shirts and he’s pushing me backwards towards the bed. Another not-so-good idea. On the bed, he could work me up, peel off all the layers till there’s nothing left to cover me and it’s too hard to say no.

I say, “No.”

He mumbles something against my collarbone, something beginning with “I—I want, I need, I-I-I.” It makes me so mad. Isn’t it enough that I turn into some sort of panting, slobbering wolf-girl when he’s around? I should let him see all of me? Have all of me? Just because he wants it?

I plant my feet and steer him around. I put my hands on his shoulders and sit him down on the edge of the mattress.

“What?” he says.

“Shut up.”

I drop down in front of him. I can’t make him listen or understand or care, and I don’t even want to. But I want to do something. Make him feel me. Make him beg me. Make him be the naked one.

And so, I do.

With Luke’s low groan in my ears and my eyes shutting out the world, I don’t hear the door open behind us, I don’t see the flash of light.

The Photograph

Ash is not a morning person. She is also not a neat person.

When I get in her car on Monday morning, there are old Styrofoam coffee cups strewn on the floor and one attached to her lips. Sheets of paper, crumpled napkins, and random changes of clothes—fresh and foul—litter the backseat.

Sticking to the dashboard is a quarter of a glazed doughnut, age indeterminate. Me and Ash have been friends since the sixth grade and she’s been driving me to school since the day she got her licence, so I’m used to her morning-fog face, her bloodshot eyes, her endless coffee and the disgusting mess that is her personal universe. It’s not even so disgusting any more. I grab a handful of napkins and bravely peel the doughnut off the dashboard and dump it in the ashtray, which is filled with butts from Ash’s on-again, off-again smoking habit.

I don’t say anything for a few minutes, waiting until Ash has more caffeine in her system. After a while, she grumbles, “What are you so happy about?” She pumps the gas pedal of her old Dodge to keep it from dying out at the stoplight.

“Who says I’m happy?” I ask her.

“Because you’re not complaining about the dumb party or the itchy costume or how long it took you to get the make-up off or the fourteen thousand college essays you had to write yesterday,” she says. “That means you’re happy about something.”

Ash is not happy. Fish Tank, she’d told me on the way home from the party, had some girlfriend who went to the Catholic high school, so didn’t want to hook up with Ash or anyone else. I didn’t tell her about ending it with Luke. For some reason, it had felt like a secret, something that was more special because I was the only one in the world who knew it, or at least the only one in the world who knew I was serious about it. Sunday morning, I sat in church while the pastor—the really boring one—babbled on about some dumb movie he saw and what Jesus might think of it, going on so much and so long that he seemed to be putting himself and the rest of us to sleep. So instead of listening to Pastor Narcolepsy, I told God what happened (yeah, yeah, as if she didn’t know already). Anyway, I said that it was over and that I was OK. I said I felt strong, like I’d broken a spell. I swore that I would concentrate on my work again, that I would be back to myself. I would no longer be operating in a Luke-induced lust haze. I would be myself again.

But with the harsh Monday-morning light piercing my eyes, with Ash mumbling like an old drunk into her coffee, I decide to go public.

“I’m not exactly happy,” I say. “But I feel really good. I broke up with Luke on Saturday night.”

“You did what?”

“I broke up with Luke.”

Her mouth hangs open. Then she says, “How can you break up with a guy if you’re not even going out with him?”

This annoys me. “We’ve been hooking up for the last two and a half months, Ash. We were doing something. And now we’re not.”

“Right,” says Ash. She jams her coffee cup into the cup holder. “Ten bucks says you’ll change your mind.”

“I’m not going to change my mind.” I check myself as I say this, wondering if I’m telling the truth. But I am. I feel it. At the party, as Luke was buttoning up his shirt over that body, a body so perfect that it was like a punch to the throat, I’d said, “Well, it’s been fun. ‘Bye. Have a nice life,” and walked out of the bedroom without looking back. “I just don’t want it any more, that’s all,” I say.

“Can you hear yourself?” she says. “You don’t want Luke DeSalvio. Everybody wants Luke DeSalvio. Hell, if you guys kept hooking up, maybe he’d ask you to the prom.”

“I’m not going to keep hooking up with some random guy in case the cheerleading squad isn’t available to escort him to the prom.”

“Bite my head off, why don’t you?” She drums her fingers on the steering wheel. “He’s not exactly random. I thought you liked him. I thought you more than liked him.”

I sigh. “I do. I did. I can’t figure out if I wanted him or I just wanted, well…”

“You dog!”

“That’s the point. I’m not. I’d like to be able to talk to the person I’m hooking up with.”

“Talk? To a guy? What for?” She sees my face and laughs. “Kidding, kidding.” She digs around underneath the doughnut for a still-smokable butt, giving up when she doesn’t find one. “I guess I’m just surprised. I mean, I think it’s totally the right decision. It’s great. It does say something that he went for you, though, as much as I hate to say it.”

“Thanks a lot,” I say.

“You know what I mean,” she says. “You, Miss Skip-a-Grade, 9.45 GPA, off-to-the-Ivy-League prodigy—”

“I wish you would stop saying that.”

“And him with the bazillion varsity letters, the golden tan, and the…”

“Amazing ass?”

Ash pulls an I’m-so-shocked face and adopts her British accent. “Such a cheeky girl!”

“Such a dorky girl,” I say. “Who knows why he was hanging out with me. Maybe I was next on the list.” I reach back and rebundle the hair at the back of my head, thankfully blonde again. “I tried the casual hookup thing. It’s not for me. It’s like I was trying to be someone else. Trying to be him.”

Ash considers this. “I’m not sure that’s such a bad idea. To try to be like guys. Look at them. They just do whatever they want and nobody cares. Why shouldn’t we be like them?”

I sigh. This is not the Ash I’ve known for ever. The Ash I knew used to be totally and completely in love with Jimmy—poet, guitar guy, future rock star. They went out for a year and a half, until he had some sort of schizoid butthead attack and cheated on her with a freshman girl with shiny Barbie hair and enormous Barbie breasts. Since then, it’s all she thinks about. How free guys are. How they go after what they want, how they get it, how happy they are doing it. How hooking up is so much better than having a boyfriend, how it can keep you from getting hurt.

But I know that’s not true, and I know better than to bring up Jimmy. After Jimmy, Ashley became Ash and Jimmy became a ghost. He might as well be dead, even though his locker is right down the hall from ours. “This particular prodigy doesn’t have time for Luke DeSalvio or any other guy,” I say. “This prodigy has to keep her grades up so that the colleges come knocking with the big bucks.”

Ash smiles. “My list is up to six now. I’ve got Rutgers, Oberlin, NYU, SUNY, Sarah Lawrence. I’m hoping that they’ll ignore my math grades. And my chemistry grades. And that D I got in cooking freshman year.”

“I still don’t know how you managed a D in cooking.”

“Mrs Hooper had us make mayonnaise. How is that cooking?”

“You said six colleges.”

“I’m also applying to Cornell.” She gives me a knowing look. “Bet that’s your safe school.”

I pull Ash’s cup out of the holder and take a swig of cold, gritty coffee. “Nothing’s safe.”

First-period study, and Chilly’s on an Audrey hunt. He lopes into the library and gives me a wicked grin. He sits in the seat across from me, his brows waggling, suggestive of God knows what. I ignore him, grab one of my books and flip it open without really seeing it. Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing. Blah blah blah, says Beatrice. Blah blah blah, says Benedick. Your lips are like worms.

“Nice party?” Chilly says.

“Fine.” I try to make my voice flatter than a robot’s in the hope that he’ll leave me alone. No such luck.

“Did you hook up?”

“You have sex on the brain,” I say.

“I have sex other places, too.”

“I don’t think you have sex anywhere, and that’s why you have to live vicariously through the rest of us,” I say.

“Vicariously,” he says. “V-I-C-A-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y. Is that one of the words in your SAT practice book? I bet you use flash cards.”

“Is there a reason you always have to sit near me? Isn’t there anyone else you can irritate around here?”

“You’re my favourite.”

He props his chin in his hands and bats his nuclear-accident eyes. Chilly would probably be nice to look at if he wasn’t such a jerk, but the jerkiness overwhelms every other thing, the jerkiness is like a great cloud of nerve gas that causes the eyes to roll and the knees to buckle and disgust to claw at the back of the throat. When he first came to our school from Los Angeles in the middle of sophomore year, the girls took notice. Tall, lanky, skin like coffee ice-cream, those freaky blue-green eyes, a movie-star strut—what’s not to like? I liked it, I’m embarrassed to admit. Oh, he started out great. Notes and gifts and all this attention that I’d never had from anyone. My mom called him “charming”. But then Chilly started feeling more comfortable. He started opening his big stupid mouth. He took all the same honours classes that I did, but while I did hours of homework and studied every night, he seemed content to do the least amount possible. He almost never had a book with him. At least not one that he was supposed to. He made fun of me for my study habits, my friends and my work on the sets of the school plays. He said that the only thing worth my time was him. I finally told him that if he wanted a pet, he should go out and get a poodle.

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.

Ash pulls the car over to the side of the road and slams on the brakes. She grabs the phone. “Oh, God,” she says. “Who took this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where were you?”

“Upstairs in one of the bedrooms.”

“Audrey, why didn’t you close the freaking door?”

“We did!” I say. “Someone must have seen us go in. Someone must have opened it.”

“You didn’t hear anyone? You didn’t see anything?”

I try to think. The music was so loud—you could hear it coming through the open windows—and then there was the noise that Luke was making. “No,” I say. “I didn’t hear anything. And I had my eyes closed. I guess Luke did, too.”

“Schweinhund,” she says. “Do you think he planned this?”

“Who?”

“Luke!”

“What? No, I…” My head is shaking no no no, but I’m not controlling my own muscles.

And then it hits me all at once. Cindy Terlizzi’s slow smile in study. The pointing in the hallways. Pete and the rockheads. Jeremy Braverman, braver than he’d ever been before. “Ash, it’s the picture.” My stomach does liquid flips and I thrust the fries from my lap. “Someone’s been sending around this picture.”

The Gauntlet

The parking lot of the school. I don’t want to get out of the car.

“Look,” says Ash, “let’s skip the rest of the day. I don’t care if we get in trouble. We can hit the movies or something.”

Movies? I can’t think, I can’t concentrate. I can’t understand this. Who took this picture? Who sent it? The return-mail address on the message meant nothing to me. Ash says we can trace it, but I say, “Who are we? The freaking FBI?”

The phone is still open on my lap. Everyone who gets this picture will know it’s me. No one else has hair like this. I wish I’d hacked it off long ago, but I didn’t because it was the only thing that made me special. Real special, now. My stomach is locked down so tight that I can’t even throw up.

“Say something,” Ash says.

This is my private thing, and now it’s porn. I feel like someone stole my diary and read it out loud over the speakers. Except that I don’t keep diaries. I don’t even have a blog. “What am I going to do?”

She doesn’t answer, just takes my hand and squeezes it. I would cry if I had any moisture in my body. My throat is dry and scratchy, my tongue a dustrag.

“So do you want to cut for the rest of the day?” Ash asks me.

I want to cut for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the year. I want to cut till I go to college. But I have a history test in the afternoon, and if I cut, I’ll miss it. The history test was important before, but now it seems like the most important thing in the world. I have to take that test. I have to ace that test. It’s the only thing I can do.

“No,” I say. “I’ve got a test.”

“Audrey, come on—”

“No,” I say again. “If I cut today, it will be worse tomorrow.”

“OK,” she says. “I’ll walk you to your locker.”

We get out of the car and walk to the back doors, the doors to the senior wing. The sun has stopped shining, but the air still feels oddly warm and heavy and damp. I’m slogging through molasses, or through dense foliage in some hot, stinking jungle. We push open the doors and immediately the eyes are on me again, the hands hiding wide, smirky grins. It must be all over the school, the bits and codes and ones and zeros flying from one phone to the next, assembling themselves into skin and hair, hands and knees. A hundred blondes between two hundred legs. Me. And me and me, and on and on.

The people part before us and line up on either side of the hallways to watch us go. I hear someone murmur something and Ash’s head whips around. “Shut up, Arschloch,” she hisses.

We get to my locker and I go through the motions of getting my books. Calc, English, history. We are doing the Constitution in history class and I run through the amendments in my head. First, free speech and freedom of the press; second, the right to bear arms; third, the right of a property owner to keep soldiers out of his home; fourth, the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. Unreasonable seizures. Is this a seizure? It feels like one. Someone has ripped my skin off and all my arteries are hanging out. I can only imagine what they’re thinking, what they’re saying. Her? Man, who knew the honours chicks were so easy?

There’s a collective hiss from the crowd in the hall. I hear “Luke! You didn’t answer your phone, dude. You have to check this out.”

I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop myself. I turn and see Luke surrounded by a clot of guys, one of them brandishing a phone.

“What is it?” Luke says. He takes a long, lazy pull on the milkshake he must have bought at lunch.

“Just look at it!”

Luke shrugs and takes the phone. One of the rockheads points at the picture helpfully. “This has got to be Audrey Porter,” the rockhead says. He says it loudly and clearly. He doesn’t care if I’m only metres away. He doesn’t care if I hear.

Luke suddenly stops walking and the rockhead rams into him. Luke blinks at the picture, his brows beetling as if he’s annoyed. Then he thrusts the phone back at the rockhead. “You don’t know who that is.”

“Come on! That’s Porter. Gotta be. Is that you with her?”

Luke walks quickly down the hall towards me. He’s not looking at me and Ash at all. His eyes are trained straight ahead at the doors at the end of the hallway. “You can’t see their faces,” he says. “That could be anyone.”

“No way,” says the rockhead. As the group passes by, he jerks his head towards me. “Look at the hair.”

“Whatever,” Luke says. He doesn’t turn my way, just keeps walking. He flicks a hand at the phone. “You guys can find way better stuff on the Internet, if that’s what you need.” The group floats down the hallway, around the corner and out of sight. I can still hear the gurgling sound of Luke’s straw as he polishes off his milkshake.

Pam Markovitz saunters over, with Cindy Terlizzi bringing up the rear like an overeager Maltese. Ash tenses up, waiting for one of them to say something, anything, so that she has an excuse to cut them down. But Pam tips her head, sucks on one of her incisors, and smiles with her kitty-cat teeth. “That was cold. Kind of makes you wish you were a lesbian, doesn’t it?”

Oh, yeah, I wish I were a lesbian. An away-in-the-closet, never-had-sex, never-admit-it-to-myself lesbian. Instead, I’m me in calculus, where we are doing limits and continuity. One must be able to calculate limits for the integers x and y. Ms Iacuzzo’s drone could put a coke fiend to sleep, but our calc book is enthusiastic. It has exclamation points. Pick values for x and y! Guess what you think the limits might be! Test your conjecture by changing the values! The book says calculus is fun! And! Useful! It is useful today, to the uncloseted unlesbian. I’m so busy picking values and testing my conjectures that I can’t think about who took a picture of me going down on Luke at Joelle’s party; I can’t think about Luke himself, his lips so warm when he kissed me and his face flat and frozen when he passed me in the hallway. x is 2 and y is 3. x is 19 and y is 40. x is -435 and y is zero.

In English, Mr Lambright hands back the first drafts of our Much Ado About Nothing papers and there is much ado when the people see all the red marks tattooed on them. No fair! I can’t even read your handwriting! I worked for two weeks on this draft! Ron Moran, our probable valedictorian, sits smugly at his desk, looking out of the window, his paper branded with the customary “EXCELLENT!” Mr Lambright likes my ideas but thinks I need to work on smoother transitions; I need to link this thought to that thought, one foot in front of the other, like when I walk down the hallway from English to history and I see the faces staring and the mouths snickering and Pete Flanagan shaking his hips and sloooooowly unzipping his fly.

History class. I sit in the back of the room, but I’ve forgotten about Chilly sitting right next to me. See Chilly snicker. See Chilly stare. See Chilly clap his hands to his cheeks in pretend shock. Hear Chilly say, “Who knew you were such a ho?”

I know what I should say: With anyone but you. But I can’t bring myself to do it, my mouth is too dry. I don’t look at him or look at anyone else; I focus on the amendments, one, two, three, four, five. I sing the Preamble in my head, the way it was sung on the old Schoolhouse Rock CDs my parents bought me when I was a kid. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility-e-e-e.” After the bell rings and Mr Gulliver passes out the tests, I start scribbling. The answers come hot and fast, filling my head. I write until my hand cramps, till the bell rings.

Chilly says, “Ho, ho, ho!”

Chilly says, “Saved by the bell.”

Chilly says, “Girls gone wild!”

Chilly says, “Oh my goodness! What will your parents do when they find out?”

I fling my test on Mr Gulliver’s desk and run.

I don’t wait for Ash. This little piggy runs all the way home, the whole mile, pack banging into my back with every step. I know what I’ll find when I open the door: my mom, sitting at the kitchen table, laptop in front of her, staring off into space or staring into the screen.

But this is not what I find. I open the door and my mom is standing by the kitchen sink, frowning into it.

I should say something. I say, “Hey.”

“Look at this,” she says, pointing down. “Is that a cricket? Or a grasshopper?”

I look down. Brown bug, big eyes, long legs made for jumping. “Why doesn’t it jump out of the sink? Why is it just sitting there?”

“I don’t know,” my mom says. “It’s dumb?”

“Maybe it’s dead.”

“Poor bug. We’ll leave it in peace for a while. A little monument to nature.” She pats me on the head—I’m taller, but she still pats—and opens the fridge. She pulls out a Fresca. She lives on Fresca. Grapefruit soda with no calories. I tell her about the carbonation causing bone loss in menopausal women (hey, I watch Dateline NBC), but she says that since she can’t smoke or drink caffeine, what’s a little osteoporosis? She tries not to take me too seriously. She tries not to take anything too seriously. She says we have one life and we need to celebrate every day. Her new book, called Do You Know the Muffin Man?, is about a cheerful but murderous baker. She’s been researching all sorts of muffin recipes and tries them out on us.

She holds out a plate. “Cranberry-orange-oatmeal,” she says. “A little gritty, but good.”

“No, thanks,” I say.

She breaks off a bit of muffin and pops it into her mouth before setting the plate back on the counter. “Are you OK? You look a little peaked.”

“I’m fine.”

Mom raises her brows but says nothing. She’ll wait me out. That’s what she does best. Waits. It took her ten years to get a book published, but she never seemed to mind. I like them, she’d say. Maybe someday someone else will like them. And then someone did. Small publisher, but good enough. Patience is a virtue, she says, but I’m not like her. I can’t wait for anything. I’m sixteen, but I’d rather be twenty-six or even thirty-six, free and out in the world, a place where you could sue people for taking pictures of you, a place where people pay for what they do. But then, maybe I am already.

She takes her Fresca back to the kitchen table, which is strewn with papers and books and Cat Stevens. “Anything happen at school today?”

I think about my mom’s books. No one has ever done more than kiss in any of them, and that was only once. “Not much,” I tell her. “I had a test in history. The Constitution, amendments, blah blah blah. I did fine. And I got my draft back from Mr Lambright.”

“Transitions again?” my mom asks.

“What do you think?”

“You never liked transitions, even as a baby. You went from crawling right to running.”

“Walking was too slow,” I say. “I had places to be.” It’s an old joke, but this is what we do, so I do it. Her laptop is set to purr every time she gets an e-mail, and it’s purring now. She has her own website, Elainepenceporter.com, and her e-mail address is right there for anyone to find. Anyone can write to her. Anyone can send her anything. And I know they will. Why wouldn’t they?

I sit down at the table. Cat Stevens gently gnaws on my fingers; he loves fingers. I’m not sure if he thinks they’re food or what. My mom taps a few keys, scrolls down, taps another key or two.

I wait for the other shoe to drop. Or is it the axe? The knitting needles? The muffins? “Anything interesting?”

“Nah,” she says. “Not unless we need a new mortgage or some Viagra.”

I try to laugh and instead make a sort of strangled sound. “Is Dad still at the store?” My dad owns a formal-wear shop—wedding gowns, party dresses, that sort of thing.

“When isn’t he at the store?” my mom says. “He should be home about seven or seven thirty.” Angel is also her store—they opened it together fifteen years ago. She still works there on weekends, and so do I when I don’t have too much studying. Dad never leaves. And even when he’s not working, he’s working.

Her computer purrs again. More mail. Click, click, click. Frown. “What?” she says, more to herself than to me. But of course I know what.

“It’s a picture, right?”

She glances up from the computer and considers me in her careful way. She tips the screen so that I can see what’s on it. Two striped kittens, with the message “My new babies, Bastet and Vladimir!”

“Oh,” I say. “Cute.”

“You were expecting something else?”

I should tell her. I want to tell her. I don’t know how. What are the words? Mouth? Head? Me? I say, “No.”

“No?”

I shrug like I don’t know what she’s talking about. Silly Mom!

“Uh-huh. Well. I’m assuming you have a mountain of homework to do, yes?”

“Yeah. I’ve got to work on those transitions for Mr Lambright. Otherwise I won’t get an A.”

“Oh, my!” she says, with mock horror. I sigh, and her expression softens. “It’s your senior year. I think you can relax just a little.”

“Like you?” I say, pointing at her computer.

“Don’t you worry about me, I relax plenty,” she says. “It’s you I’m concerned about.”

“You should worry about Dad,” I say. “He’s the one with the high blood pressure.”

“Which you’ll have before you’re eighteen. You’re just like him.” She smiles at me. “Audrey, I think you can start having a little bit of fun. So you don’t get an A this once. So you get an A minus. Is that really the worst that could happen to you?”

I can’t look at her when I answer. “No. I guess not.”

I go up to my room and throw my knapsack on my bed. I feel sort of itchy all over, and I’m not sure what to do with myself. First I go over to the toothpick village. It is what it sounds like it is, a village built out of toothpicks and Popsicle sticks. I’ve got houses, a couple of churches, stores, roads, a windmill, whatever—all painted and mounted on a slab of wood. I started building it when I was nine, right around the time I got sick of Barbies. Every once in a while, I work on something new. It’s a totally twisted, pathetic hobby, I know, but I’ve always loved building things. It’s sort of like meditation, except for, you know, the toothpicks.

But today, the toothpick village isn’t cutting it—I can’t think of a single thing that I’d want to add, and it seems like nothing more than a kindergartner’s art project or a load of firewood. So I sit at my desk. I flick on the computer and the machine hums to life and starts pinging, meaning I’ve got about four thousand instant messages. I don’t even want to read them. I start deleting them, but I can’t help but see a few, mostly from IM names I don’t recognize:

Instant Message with “sweetyPI567” Last message received at: 3:42:10 PM sweetyPI567: U R such a ho! your dad should call his store Sluts R Us!

Instant Message with “69luvvver” Last message received at: 4:19:36 PM 69luvvver: will u marry me? will u at least suck me off????

Instant Message with “ritechuschik2424” Last message received at: 6:10:22 PM ritechuschik2424: u do what u want to do and don’t let any one stop u. its ur life. U R not a slut ur just trying to have fun. LDS is HOT!

I’ve got e-mail, too. A few people helpfully sent me a copy of the picture, just in case I haven’t been humiliated enough. Joelle sends a few ALL-CAPS messages telling me that Ash told her what happened and claiming that she will personally eviscerate Luke DeSalvio (unless, of course, I still like him). Then she says that what I need to do is deny absolutely everything and that she’ll tell everyone she saw Pam Markovitz or Cindy Terlizzi running around in a blonde wig. I erase all the messages, even the ones from Jo. I keep pressing the button till there are no more messages in my in-box, and then I press it a few more times, just to make sure.

My phone rings inside my backpack and I sit there, listening to it buzz. Later, as I’m reworking my paper for Mr Lambright, it buzzes again. And when I’m doing my calc homework. And again when I’m studying bio. Buzz, buzz, like wasps hitting a window. If they buzz long enough, if they hit hard enough, maybe they’ll all die.

“Audrey?” My mother’s voice warbles up the stairs. It must be time for dinner—not that I want to eat anything, now or ever. My stomach has shut down, packed up, and left for a vacation. Bye-bye, stomach. It occurs to me that I could actually lose a few kilos by the time I’m ready to eat again, and then I can’t believe I’m thinking what I’m thinking. I must be sick. There’s plenty of evidence. Once, when I was about eleven, my mom was asking me what kinds of words kids use in place of swearwords when teachers are around, because she had a kid in one of her books and wanted to have him swear without actually swearing. I told her we called people jerks, losers and dorks. And I told her that sometimes we went all British, calling people prats and gits and saying “bloody hell” with accents that made it sound like “bluddy hill”. And then I told her about our very favourite non-swear swearword, one that we recently discovered and said all the time. “What is it?” she said.

“Cocksucker,” I told her.

Her jaw dropped open almost to the table, and her eyes popped wide. “Audrey,” she said. “That is most definitely a swearword.”

“It is?”

“Absolutely, definitely a swearword. You guys have to try and stop saying it, OK?”

By then I was blushing so hard that my cheeks sizzled. How could I have been so dumb not to know a swearword when I heard one?

“Do you know what it means?”

And I’d told her I did—and I did sort of—but I thought it was more like a kiss, and how bad could a kiss be?

I go downstairs, where things are more than bad. They are worse. My mom is sitting at the table, which hasn’t been set for dinner. There’s no food on the cooker, no pizza box by the sink and nothing roasting in the oven. My dad stands at the kitchen counter, his jacket still on, as if he can’t decide if he’s coming or going. He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and smooths it out on the counter. I don’t need to see it, but I can’t help but see. The picture, again. This time with a message: “Look at Your Little Angel Now.”

A Beautiful Thing

Dad does not know what to do with himself. He takes off his jacket and holds it over one arm. Then he switches it to the other arm. Then he throws it on the counter. He pulls it from the counter and hangs it over the back of a chair. As if there were a person inside, he pats the shoulders of the jacket. He doesn’t look at me.

I am sitting at the kitchen table with my mom, counting the scratches in the wood. There are a lot of scratches. Most of the stuff we have is old or cheap or both. My parents love flea markets and antique stores. Not too long ago, my mom thought about opening her own vintage clothing boutique, until my dad reminded her how much she hated the business end of business.

“Where did this come from?” my mom asks. Not me, my dad.

“Someone sent it to the store e-mail address,” he says.

My mom turns to me. “Is this why you seemed so depressed before?”

I nod.

“What happened? Is someone playing a joke on you? Did someone dress up like you?”

For a minute I think about saying, Yes! A joke! It’s just a big joke! But I shake my head no.

My mom’s fingers brush the edge of the paper on the table. “So this is you?”

My eyes on the floor, I nod yes.

“From Saturday night?”

More mute nodding.

My dad’s hands tighten around the shoulder of the jacket. “Did someone force you to—”

“No, Dad,” I say. “Nobody forced me.”

“I don’t understand,” he says. “How could someone take a picture? Did you let them?”

“No!” I say.

But my dad doesn’t stop. “Is that what’s going on at parties now?”

“John…” my mom says. “Let her talk.”

My dad snatches up the picture. “Who is this?” he says, jabbing a finger at the naked chest floating above my hair.

“Nobody you know,” I say.

My dad’s jaw quivers like I just smacked him. “Nobody?” he says.

I’m not crying. It’s impossible that I’m not, but I’m not. I feel cold and hard, like marble. An Audrey-shaped statue sitting at the kitchen table. Stevie the marmalade catdog jumps in my statue lap and licks my statue fingers. I barely feel his teeth as he nibbles.

My mom’s lips are moving, forming words and then biting them back. Finally she says, “Is this your boyfriend?”

I almost laugh, but my marble mouth just isn’t that mobile. “Sort of,” I say. “Not any more. I broke up with him.”

“Christ!” my dad says. He stares at me. “Tell me that you at least used protection.”

“We didn’t need protection,” I said. “I mean, not for that. I don’t think.” I can’t believe I’m saying it as I’m saying it. This is not embarrassment. It’s not humiliation. It’s something deeper and darker and more awful, like a giant black hole of spinning saw blades.

He looks like he has a bee caught in his throat. “You don’t need…”

My mom gives him a warning look and he clamps his mouth shut. She says, “So you were…with your boyfriend, and someone took the picture. Do you know who did it?”

“No,” I say. “I have no idea. Somebody must have snuck up on us.”

My mom nods again as if she understands, but I can tell that she doesn’t, that she’s completely out of her element, that she’s gearing up to call in the professionals. They didn’t do this in her day, maybe, or they didn’t have the physical evidence. No digital cameras or picture phones. No e-mail or blogs or instant messages. No photographs to send to other people’s dads. “Who else has seen this?”

“Everyone.”

She winces. “Oh, honey.”

My dad says, “What do you mean, everyone?” He’s frowning so hard and so deeply that his dark eyebrows bunch up in folds over his nose.

“They’ve been sending it from phone to phone at school. All day today.”

There’s silence. I don’t know how long. We can hear the clock tick. We can hear Stevie’s tongue as he patiently sands away my fingerprints.

Then my dad says, “I’ll call the phone company.”

“Why?”

“To find out who was sending the picture around.”

“Can you do that?”

“I can try,” he said. His mouth was a thin, tight seam. “I’m sure it’s the boy.”

“Who?” I said.

He points at the photo. “This one. He probably had some friend take the picture.”

I sigh. “I don’t think so. He couldn’t have known.”

“Known what?”

That I would unbutton his shirt and spread it like a curtain. That I would slide his belt from his belt loops and fling it behind me.

But then, maybe he did know. Maybe he and everyone else could guess where it was all going and I was the only one who couldn’t.

“Known what?” my dad says again. “He couldn’t have known what?”

We used to play a lot of catch when I was little. I can still throw a baseball like a guy and my football pass has a decent, if wobbly, spiral. Good arm, good arm, my dad would tell me, grinning. Now my father is staring at me as if he has no idea who I am or where I came from.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Never mind.” My dad whips his jacket from the back of the chair and stalks out of the room.

“Audrey,” my mom says. “He’s just upset right now. He’ll get over it.”

“Sure,” I say. “Right.”

It’s clear my dad is not going to get over anything until he finds someone to sue. Or shoot. We spend Monday night in virtual silence while my dad does endless Google searches on laws regarding the transmission of photos over cell phones. My mom brings me tea and more tea and spends a lot of time trying to figure out what, exactly, she should say to me. We try to watch a new cop show—my mom loves cop shows and she got me hooked but the episode is about these boys who date-rape a girl at some exclusive Manhattan high school. Neither me or my mom can take it. We turn it off and go to bed early. I don’t sleep.

Tuesday morning and still we’re not over it, won’t be over it for a long long time. My dad leaves before me so that he doesn’t have to look at me. My mom, wearing her usual uniform of sweatpants and a sweatshirt, sits at the kitchen table staring off into space, a cup of coffee cooling in front of her. She looks like I feel. Dark circles, hair puffy and matted. The sun filtering through the cracks in the curtains highlights a web of wrinkles around her eyes.

“Did you sleep?” she asks me.

“Not really,” I say.

“Me neither.”

She stands, walks to the coffeepot, and pours another cup of coffee. She adds milk and lots of sugar, and hands it to me. I only drink coffee once in a while, but she knows I need it. I grab a yoghurt, a napkin and a spoon and we sit at the kitchen table. We’ve got two minutes before Ash comes to pick me up.

“I’m so sorry about what happened,” she says.

“Me, too.”

“I don’t understand how someone could have been so cruel. To take that picture of you and send it around. I can’t stand it. Who could be that mad at you?”

“It could be someone who doesn’t even know me, Mom.” I open the lid on the yoghurt and take a spoonful. It tastes like glue. “It could be a random person who just thinks it’s funny.”

“Funny?” my mom says. She turns her mug around and around in her hands. “I want to kill whoever did this.”

“You mean you want to kill me.”

Her head snaps up. “Of course not!”

“Dad does.”

“Stop that,” she says. “Your dad loves you.”

“He still wants to kill me.”

“This is hard for him. For any dad. He doesn’t want anyone to take advantage of you.” She takes a deep breath. “Sex is a beautiful thing. If it’s with the right person. Was this…have there…been others?”

I don’t say anything. I get up, take the container of yo-glue and go to toss it in the trash. I see that the picture my dad printed at the store has been torn into little pieces and thrown inside, right on top of the cranberry-orange-oatmeal muffins.

“Audrey, I just want you to be careful,” my mom says.

I don’t say, Like you were? There’s a honk from outside. “That’s Ash,” I say. “I have to go.”

At school, anyone who hadn’t seen the picture has now seen it over and over again. I find a copy of it pasted on my locker. I grab it, crumple it to a ball, and throw it on the floor. I haven’t said a word to Ash all the way to school, and she hasn’t asked me to, but now I tell her about my parents.

She sucks her breath through her teeth so quickly that she whistles. “Scheisse,” she says. “How did they find out?”

“Someone sent the picture to the store. My dad brought a copy home. They thought that it was someone playing a prank.”

“How did they take it?”

“My dad’s mad. At first he thought someone, um…” I lower my voice. “Someone, you know, forced me or whatever, but I told them that no one forced me to do anything.”

“You should have said someone forced you.”

“Yeah, right. And have them call the police? I don’t think so.” I stuff my jacket into my locker. “My dad can’t even look at me.”

“What about your mom?”

“She’s trying, but she doesn’t know what to say. It took her till this morning just to say the word ‘sex’.”

“Jeez,” says Ash.

Cindy Terlizzi and Pam Markovitz walk by. Pam grins at me and gives me the thumbs-up sign.

Ash scowls, then sighs. “It’s bad now, I know. Really bad. But people will forget.”

“Yeah?” I say. “When?”

“Soon. They always do.”

I know they will, someday, but that doesn’t help the frozen spot where my guts should be. That doesn’t stop the stares and snickers and giggles in the hallway. That doesn’t stop Chilly from whispering poison in my ear. That doesn’t keep the more girl-impaired of the male honour students from eyeing me with this strange curiosity, like they want to pin me down to a dissecting tray and prod me with sharp instruments. Even Ron “Valedictorian” Moran, who’s had a girlfriend for the last year, stares. I stare right back. What was Ron doing with his girlfriend when they thought no one was paying attention, when they thought their parents were out for the afternoon? Ron looks away.

All day, I bury myself in work, in words. I sink into them like a bath. My friends give me my space, but the teachers yammer all around me. Limits, amendments, oxygen cycles, Shakespeare. This is important and that is important and all of it will be on the test. I write, underline, highlight, repeat. I get text messages and delete them. A few people pass me stupid notes that I know say horrible things, and I shove them into my books or backpack without looking at them. At lunch I will go outside and set them all on fire. Ash will throw the ashes out of her car window.

“What I really want to know is, who took that picture?” Ash says. She’s taken me to the diner to eat. “Do you really think that Luke had nothing to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Ash scoops up a spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy, what she orders every time we come to the diner, day or night. Her eyes narrow. “What about Chilly? He’s still dogging you like he owns you.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Ash puts down her spoon. “Don’t you want to know who did this? Doesn’t this make you mad?”

“Well, yeah,” I tell her.

“Well, yeah?” she says. “I’d be furious! I’d want to kill someone! You got more upset that time Madame Kellogg gave you a B plus on your French report.”

“I just wish it never happened,” I say. “I wish I’d never done it.”

She tucks a stray curl behind her ear and sighs. “You love him, right?”

That seems funny to me. I love my parents. I love Ash and Joelle. I love my cat. Luke is—was—a different story. Luke is like a creature from another planet. Can you ever really love a creature from another planet? Someone who could jump on his spaceship and rocket off to Pluto at any minute? “I don’t know.”

Ash is getting annoyed with all that I don’t know. “Yes, you did. Isn’t that why you were all weirded out with the friends-with-benefits thing? Weren’t you jealous of all those other girls? Didn’t you want to go out with him?” She eats another spoonful of mashed potatoes.

I want to tell her the whole story. I should tell her. She’s my best friend and I need her to understand. But I’m not sure if she will. After Jimmy, I’m not sure if she can. So I agree with her. Yes, I was weirded out. Yes, I was jealous. I don’t know what else I was—insane? obsessed?—but I think if I say “I don’t know” one more time, she’ll kill me.

Luckily, or unluckily, she decides to let me live. Sixth period, and I’ve gotten through most of my classes and even managed to eat two bites of Ash’s potatoes at lunch. Even though I’ve got my eyes pinned to the floor, I see Luke walking down the hallway as I’m trying to get to history. It’s not the blond hair that catches me, it’s the movement—the rolling, easy walk, the walk that says he could run very very fast if there were ever any need to. He’s alone this time, no gaggle of rockheads shoving phones at him. Then he sees me. He never said much more than “hey” to me in public before, but this is a new low. His face stiffens and his eyes narrow, and his lip curls up as if he’s disgusted, as if he can’t even bear to look. He speeds up, passes me and keeps on rolling, like a wave that jumps the beach and takes you out at the knees.

Once More, with Feeling

The first time was Ash’s party, a back-to-school barbecue without any of the actual barbecuing. There must have been a shortage of parties that weekend, because the entire senior class showed up to mourn the end of the summer. Ash’s parents had taken her little brother out of town, stupidly trusting Ash not to do anything stupid (like, say, throw a party for the entire senior class). But there we were, in Ash’s house, with everyone packed inside and spilling outside, a blur of shorts and halter tops and precancerous brown skin, all of us hugging our friends and hugging total strangers and loving the world. Even Chilly seemed less Chilly somehow—less obnoxious, less angry—maybe because there were chicks there who’d never met him before and were willing to give him a shot. I remember looking out the open window to the back yard and seeing a girl run by wearing only her underwear, but moving too fast for me to see her face. I could hear her, though. She was giggling like a maniac.

Once in a while, Ash would announce that the drunk and otherwise hammered would have their keys and maybe even their cars confiscated to guard against possible injuries and subsequent lawsuits (her dad is a lawyer), but as these things go, the party was tame. Something was in the air, some late-August-evening magic-fairy nice dust that made us all mostly friendly and sort of giddy and not too destructive. It seemed that we all understood that this was our last summer together, that next year at this time most of us would already be gone—off to start the rest of our lives.

Even I wasn’t exactly me. School hadn’t started yet and I had nothing in particular to hyperventilate over. I’d already taken all my entrance exams, and my college applications weren’t due for months. I felt so strange—untethered from myself, like I was watching myself from a distance. Like I was my own shadow.

It felt kind of good. A relief.

Being me is tiring.

The only problem was the late arrival of Jimmy and his ho girlfriend. I guess he figured that since he and Ash had broken up six months before and there wasn’t another party in the whole town, he could show up and blend in without getting Ash too crazy. Right. Like Jimmy could blend in anywhere with a chick named Cherry, the very same chick that he dumped Ash for. Since they’d broken up, Ash had serious radar for Jimmy. I think she could spot him a mile away. She could sense him. She could smell