Beauty (29 page)

“Molly!” I heard someone jogging to catch up with me. “I just wanted to say congratulations,” Judith gushed. “I’m so excited for you.” She had a huge smile on her face, but as her eyes traveled from my cardigan to the shirt I was wearing underneath—a black racerback tank top from Haute—it faltered. “Oh, um, nice shirt,” she stammered.

“Thanks,” I said coolly, tossing my hair over my shoulder. It wasn’t all that different from the one she’d made me, really—silk, racer-back, laced with sequins. But of course this one wasn’t homemade. “I’d planned on wearing yours,” I lied, “but then this morning I just, um … couldn’t find it.” I gave her an exaggerated shrug. “Next time, right?”

“Right,” Judith said dully. She looked away quickly, but not before I caught a glimmer of tears in her eyes. Was she really crying over what
shirt
I was wearing? Freshman could be so pathetic. “Well, c-congratulations again,” she eked out. Then she turned and jogged down the hall.

I reached Hudson’s classroom just before he got there. “Molly.” He sounded surprised to see me.

“Hey, king.” I stepped closer to him, putting my hand on his arm. “I haven’t seen you all day.”

“Yeah. I know.” Hudson sounded uncomfortable as he took a step back, shaking off my hand. “I really have to go, though, so—”

“Wait!” I looked up at him pleadingly. “Is everything okay? I mean … are we okay?”

Hudson shook his head. “I don’t think we should do this right now, Molly.”

“Do what right now?” I could feel panic building inside me, making me feel flushed and dizzy. Several people pushed by us to get into class, but I barely even noticed. “Please, Hudson! Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“Fine, you really want to do this now? Then we’ll do this now!” Someone else pushed by us, and he pulled me down the hall a little, away from the doorway. “I liked you, Molly. I really did.” His eyes were sad as they met mine. “But that girl—that funny, clumsy, sweet girl—she’s gone. And I don’t really like the one that’s here in her place. It’s over, Molly.” He shook his head, backing away from me. “I’m sorry.”

I stood there dumbly as he disappeared into his classroom. The bell rang and the door slammed shut and the hallway emptied out, but I just kept standing there, unmoving. It was like if I stayed still, then maybe time would too, and I wouldn’t have to move forward, to this new place where I wasn’t with Hudson and Hudson wasn’t with me.
He didn’t mean it
, I thought desperately. He couldn’t have meant it. Right?

I thought of his eyes, and how serious they’d looked when he’d said those words.
It’s over.
He’d meant it.
So, who cares?
I told myself.
I’m queen!
But those words that had seemed so heavy earlier, like they could outweigh anything else, suddenly seemed light as a feather. So light, the slightest of breezes could lift them. So light, they could float away and never come back. So light, it was like they barely mattered at all.

Under the Knife? Over My Dead Body.

IT WAS ONLY five o’clock, but music was already pounding from Brandon’s house by the time Ashley, Blair, Brittany, Sarah, and I walked up the driveway. Ashley had spent all afternoon assuring me that no boy, not even Hudson Taylor, was worth missing a party for. “He’s just a boy,” she kept saying. The problem was, he wasn’t. He was Hudson Taylor, the boy I’d liked forever, and every time I thought about how he’d looked at me at school that day, I felt something start to rise in my stomach.

When I’d told Ashley that, she’d laughed. “You’ve been dating for what, two weeks, Mol?” She’d waved it off like it was nothing, like those two weeks had meant squat. And maybe to her they had. Maybe they were just another drop in the Ashley Coolidge bucket of popularity. But those two weeks had changed everything for me, and the thought of erasing them, just striking them out with a single swipe, made me wonder where exactly that would leave me. “Just have fun tonight and forget him, okay?”

And I was trying to, I really was. As we made our way up the long driveway toward Brandon’s house, I was doing my best not to wonder if Hudson was inside, and what he was wearing, and if he’d smile when he saw me or just look away. “Hold it,” Ashley said before we’d made it even halfway up the driveway. Beckoning for us to follow her, she led us to the side yard, behind a cluster of bushes. “Before we go in, I brought a little something for us.” Grinning wickedly, she whipped a plastic water bottle out of her purse and held it triumphantly in the air. “The Coolidge vodka special!”

Blair laughed. “Meaning whatever you could scrounge up in your house?”

“Exactly.” Ashley unscrewed the top of the bottle and made a toasting gesture. “To a great party,” she said, taking a swig.

She swallowed loudly, making a face, then passed the bottle to Blair, who did the same.

“Yum yum,” Blair said, smacking her lips. Brittany grabbed the bottle from her, taking a sip of her own.

“Molly?” Blair held the bottle out, letting it dangle between her fingertips. “Want? A little liquid courage for seeing Hudson?”

She and Ashley giggled, and Ashley mumbled something under her breath that sounded a lot like, “She needs it.” I looked over at her in surprise, but she just smiled at me and motioned toward the bottle. “All yours, Mol,” she said.

I took the bottle gingerly. I’d never had vodka before, and from the smell wafting up from the bottle, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to. But they were all sitting there expectantly, waiting for me, so I held my breath and, lifting the bottle to my lips, forced down a gulp. It burned its way through my throat, like I was swallowing flames. I looked down, my eyes tearing.

“Wow, Molly,” Brittany said admiringly. Someone took the bottle out of my hands. “That was quite a sip.”

I was trying too hard not to gag to respond.

They passed the bottle around several more times, but I waved off another turn. I could already feel the gulp I’d taken swimming its way through me, giving me that airy feeling again, like if I wasn’t careful, I might float away at any second.

“
Now
it’s time to party,” Ashley said once the bottle was empty. “Believe me,” she added, giving me a knowing smile. “You don’t show up to one of Brandon Miles’s parties sober.” She stood up, linking her arm through mine. “Ready?”

An image of Hudson flashed through my mind, making several nerves tingle in my stomach. I quickly shoved them away, scrambling a little unevenly to my feet. Ashley was right. I didn’t need Hudson—or any other boy for that matter. I was Molly Davis, prom queen. It was his loss. “Ready,” I declared.

Brandon’s house was already packed by the time we entered. I recognized people from every grade. There were cheerleaders, basketball players, football players, and every member of the prom court. Apparently, if you were anyone at all in Miracle, you were at Brandon Miles’s party.

“Molly Davis!” Brandon gave me a sloppy hug hello, slurring my name a little. He’d clearly dipped into a water bottle of his own. “This is for you.” He placed a Burger King paper crown crookedly on my head. “Everyone in the court gets one. Right, Ash?” He gave Ashley a slightly too hard nudge in the ribs, and she grimaced a little. “She had one last year,” he explained to me. “But I guess her reign as queen is over… .” He laughed loudly at his own joke.

“Sorry,” I muttered under my breath to Ashley.

“He’s just wasted.” She shrugged. Dropping my arm, she leaned in to whisper something to Blair.

“By the way, Molly,” Brandon said, tossing an arm around my shoulder. “Can you tell your boy to get his ass here already?”

“He’s not here yet?” I asked, too surprised to remember to correct Brandon that he officially wasn’t
my boy
anymore. But Brandon didn’t answer. He was already walking away, waving a paper crown at Becca Ford.

“He’s a mess.” Ashley rolled her eyes. “And paper crowns? Really? I can’t believe he’s still doing that. It’s like we’re in elementary school.”

“Seriously,” Blair, Brittany, and Sarah all agreed. I quickly pulled off my crown, tossing it onto the floor.

“Much better,” Ashley approved, reaching over to smooth down my hair. “So what do you say, girls? Hammock?”

“Duh,” Sarah said

“Where else?” Blair agreed.

I smiled as if I had any idea what they were talking about. My head was starting to feel a little fuzzy, like someone had stuffed a whole wad of cotton in there.

Ashley led the way as we wove through the throngs of people toward the backyard. “Remember the party where Hudson puked all over the swing set in front of everyone?”

“Ugh, it’s ingrained in my memory forever,” Brittany groaned. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget that smell.”

I kept my eyes down as we stepped outside. Why was Ashley bringing up Hudson? Wasn’t she the one who’d told me to forget about him? I kept quiet as we all piled onto the oversized hammock in the middle of the yard. I couldn’t help but take a quick glance around, searching for Hudson. But Brandon was right. I didn’t see him anywhere.

“Hey, look who it is,” Blair said snidely. “Miracle’s very own Little Miss Piggy!”

I followed her glance toward the back door. Hayley was standing there in yet another pink outfit, scanning the backyard. Someone was standing next to her, her back toward the yard as she talked with someone inside. Kemper. I sat up a little, surprised to see them. A second later, Kemper turned back around, whispering something in Hayley’s ear. Her dyed strand of hair was now sunflower yellow, a pretty, cheerful color, and I had a sudden urge to tell her it was my favorite color yet. But I quickly quelled it. Kemper’s hair wasn’t mine to comment on anymore.

Hayley nodded at whatever Kemper was saying, and then Kemper slipped into the house, disappearing behind the door. Squaring her shoulders, Hayley started across the lawn. I shifted uneasily in my spot. The fuzzy feeling in my head was slowly turning into a gentle pounding, and I blinked a few times to make sure what I was seeing was right. But it was. Hayley was walking directly toward the hammock—and me.

“Hey guys,” she said brightly, as if we were all the best of friends. Next to me, Ashley made an oinking noise under her breath. “I have something I think you guys will want to see,” Hayley continued, ignoring her. “In fact.” She let her voice rise, so it wafted through the backyard. “I think a lot of you are going to want to see this.” Her smile widening, she rooted through her purse. I caught a glimpse of that book she always seemed to have with her lately, as she pulled out a stack of papers that looked a lot like flyers. “It’s the dirty truth about your queen,” she went on, her eyes meeting mine for a split second before she began passing out the flyers.

The dirty truth? What was she talking about? I reached for one of the flyers.
From Not to Hot
, it said across the top.
Miracle Plastic Surgeons can make YOU look like this too!
Underneath the heading were two photos of me. The first was a “before” shot. I recognized it right away. Hayley had taken it last summer, when she, Kemper, and I had ridden a bus for nearly two hours to get to her aunt’s pool. There had been no AC on the bus, and by the time we reached her aunt’s house, my hair had grown to the size of a tree. To top it off, my face was red and sweaty, my eyes were squinting in the sun, and there was a gigantic pimple on the tip of my nose. The “after” picture was the one Ashley had taken of me and Hudson at lunch the other day. My hair was shiny, my skin was flawless, and my eyes were sparkling. They looked like two different people.

On the after picture, Hayley had drawn arrows pointing to each area of my face that had changed: my cheekbones, the space between my eyes, the width of my lips. “That’s right,” Hayley said. “Your precious queen had surgery.”

“Oh my God,” I heard someone say, as eyes started turning toward me. “I can’t believe she had surgery!”

“And then kept it secret,” someone else joined in. “Did she really think no one would find out?

More and more eyes landed on me. I’d gotten used to stares these last two weeks, but this was a new kind. It was like people were measuring me up, trying to peel back my layers to find out what was hidden underneath. “It’s not true,” I protested. “I didn’t have any surgery!” But the whispers were already starting to build, one stacking on top of another, heavy as bricks. Hayley smiled smugly at me. She knew exactly what I knew: It didn’t matter if it was true. It didn’t even matter if everyone believed her. What mattered was that the seed had been planted. The damage had been done.

“Of course it was surgery,” I heard someone say.

“How did I not see it before?” someone else chimed in.

“I can’t believe she’s
still
lying about it,” a third person added.

I looked wildly around. Every single person was gaping at me now, like I was some kind of science experiment, like I was one of the beakers we studied in science class.

I turned to Ashley and Blair. “You guys know it’s a lie, right?”

Ashley pulled herself into a sitting position. She touched a finger to my cheekbone, then pulled it away. “It makes so much more sense now,” she breathed. “It explains everything.”