Beauty (8 page)

Mr. Templeton blew out a breath, shaking his head slowly. But the corners of his mouth were turning up in what almost looked like a smile. “In the future, Miss Davis, would you please refrain from using my head for target practice?” I nodded. “Now,” he said, rubbing a little at the spot where the birdie had nailed him. “Thankfully, this class is almost over. Everyone go ahead and put your equipment away!”

“Thanks,” I said gratefully as Hudson and I returned our racquets to the equipment box.

“Oh no, thank
you
,” he replied. “I think that was the most entertaining thing I’ve ever seen in gym class.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“I mean, who knew,” he continued, “that our very own Molly Davis was some kind of racquet-wielding hit man.”

I smiled sheepishly at him. “Death by birdie does happen to be my specialty.”

Hudson laughed. “Remind me never to play darts with you.”

The bell rang for the end of class and we headed into the hallway. “So,” Hudson said, pausing outside the door. In the bright, florescent light of the hallway, I could see tiny specks of green in his brown eyes. “I guess I’ll see you later? Try not to assault any more teachers in the meantime,” he added with a smile.

I smiled back at him. “I’ll try,” I said. “But I can’t make any promises.”

Two periods later, I headed into the Cletus B. Morgan Student Cafeteria, otherwise known as “the Morgue.” According to Miracle High lore, the nickname went all the way back to the year the school first opened, in 1933, when a freshman supposedly choked on a piece of meat, dying right there in the cafeteria. I had no idea if the story was actually true, but like awful nicknames tended to, it had stuck.

Hayley and Kemper were already at our usual table, a plate full of raisins in front of Hayley, the fried meat of the day in front of Kemper. Back in the day, Hayley used to love the Morgue’s lunch meat. She was always claiming that the mystery of the meat made it taste even better. “Who knows?” she’d quip. “I could be eating filet mignon right now!” But this raisins-only Hayley wouldn’t come within five feet of anything with the word
fried
in it. Picking up a meat tray of my own from the hot line, I wove my way through the maze of tables to meet them.

We might as well have assigned seats in the Morgue; that’s how little people switched up their tables. The high-IQ clubs—AV, Latin, Rocket Scientists, Mathaholics—always sat in the tables right up front. They were the worst tables in the room: right by the hot food line, where at any second you were apt to get squirted with ketchup or sprayed with soda or sprinkled with meat grease. The cheerleaders and jocks got the best tables, of course, the ones in the back by the windows. The windows looked out over the teacher’s parking lot, so you got to catch teachers sneaking out to their cars for a smoke or a nap or, if you were lucky, a make-out session. Or so I’d heard. I wouldn’t know, since Kemper, Hayley, and I sat in what we liked to call the Middle Ground. Our table was smack in the middle of the Morgue, far from the hot food line, but also far from the windows. No-man’s-land.

Usually people passed right by the Middle Ground without a second look. But today, as I dropped down across from Hayley and Kemper, I felt almost every pair of eyes in the Morgue on me. And there were whispers too, my name wafting around the room like a breeze. “All right,” Hayley said, the second my butt hit my chair. “I know there’s something you’re not telling us, Molly.” She reached across the table and grabbed my arm, shaking it a little. I noticed she’d added several tiny braids to her hair, around her face. “So come on, spill already!”

“Leave her alone, Hayley,” Kemper said sharply. “If she doesn’t want to tell us, she doesn’t have to tell us.”

“I
am
telling you, Kemp.” Dharma’s face flashed through my mind, but I pushed the image away. I was pretty sure if I told them I was starting to think a strange hippie portrait artist might have magically altered my looks, I’d go very quickly from being newly beautiful to fully insane. And the idea
was
insane. Wasn’t it? “I have no idea what happened to me.”

Kemper ran a hand through her short blonde hair. “Okay,” she said. “If you say so.”

I glanced down at my tray. “I say so.”

Hayley waved a hand through the air. “All right, whatever,” she declared. “However it happened, I think it’s great, Mol. I mean you’re, like,
stunning
now. Just think what this is going to mean for our social lives!”

“Yeah,” Kemper grumbled. “Because it’s all about you, Hayl.”

“Oh, like nothing is about you, Kemper?” She gestured to the stack of flyers sitting next to Kemper’s tray. It was a typical Kemper flyer: WHEN IT COMES TO CHEMICAL PESTICIDES, SAY: KISS MY (GR)ASS! “You’re always pushing something or other about you!”

Kemper narrowed her eyes at Hayley. “Wanting pesticide-free grass for Miracle High is about
me
?”

“Hey guys,” I cut in quickly, before this could go from bickering to full-out fighting. I wracked my brain for a subject changer. “You won’t believe what happened in chem class today!” Before either of them could say anything else, I launched into the story of my chem class. “I made this stupid joke to my lab partner, calling myself ‘Molecular Molly,’ and everyone sitting around me started to laugh. And when Mr. Carson found out what we were laughing about, he made the whole class come up with their own science nicknames.” I shook my head, remembering how Blake Mills, Miracle High’s sophomore quarterback-in-training, had coined himself Beaker Blake. “Everyone got really into it. It was kind of crazy.”

“I love it.” Kemper pumped a fist into the air, her bickering with Hayley clearly forgotten. “Kinetic Kemper to the rescue!”

I laughed. Back in third grade, Mrs. Hayden had assigned Hayley, Kemper, and me to work on a science project together. We’d spent weeks making a board game called Science Superheroes. The players were Molecular Molly, Kinetic Kemper, and Half-Life Hayley. That game was how we became best friends, and for years after we’d call each other by our Science Superhero names, our own secret little joke.

“What do you think, Half-Life Hayley?” I joked.

Hayley ate a handful of raisins, chewing slowly. “Nicknames are so passé,” she said finally. I exchanged a look with Kemper. So passé? What was Hayley talking about? Lately it seemed like she wanted to pretend those early years had never happened. Like our whole past didn’t exist. But before Kemper or I could reply, I noticed a commotion in the front of the room.

A bunch of freshmen and sophomores were climbing out of the hot-food-line tables … and they were heading straight in our direction. “Uh, guys,” I said slowly. “Are they all coming to our table?” Usually, our table was pretty empty. Sometimes Missy Nguyen and Lucy Lincoln sat with us, but mostly they spent their lunch periods rehearsing in the band room.

“What’s going on?” Hayley hissed. “Don’t they know they’re supposed to sit up front? That’s, like, their
place
.”

“Oh, grow up, Hayl,” Kemper muttered.

“Hi, Molly.” Karen Baker, the president of the Mathaholics Club, stopped in front of me. The rest of the group stood huddled behind her, and every time she inched closer to me, they did too. Karen used to work on set design for the school play with me, until her mom convinced her that Mathaholics would look better on her college applications. We’d always had different groups of friends, but I liked her; she was one of those people who surprised you by how funny she could be.

“Hey, Karen.” I smiled as she pushed a strand of frizzy hair out of her eyes. Karen was the only person I knew whose hair was as bad as mine. Back when we worked on sets together, we used to spend hours trading frizz horror stories. My hand went automatically to my own hair, forgetting for a second that it was now smooth and frizz-free.

“Wow.” Karen stepped closer to the table, her eyes glued to me. “I heard people talking, but I had to see it for myself. You look … amazing, Molly. And your hair. It’s … it’s …” She shook her head, clearly at a loss for words.

“I know.” I pushed my hair behind my ears, feeling almost guilty all of a sudden. “It’s different.”

“You can say that again,” Karen said enviously. “Anyway, I—well, we really”—she gestured to the group huddled behind her—“were wondering if we could sit here today?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said. I glanced at the group with Karen. There were a lot of them, more people than usually fit at the narrow cafeteria tables, but it wasn’t like I could say yes to some and no to others. “Go ahead and squeeze,” I said, scooting over to make as much room as I could. I gestured for Hayley and Kemper to move down too.

“Seriously?” Hayley muttered under her breath. “Suddenly we’re dork central?” She stood up, clutching her huge bedazzled purse in her hands. “I have to do some reading,” she said abruptly. “See you guys later.” As she headed out of the Morgue, I saw her pull that same small book out of her purse.

We managed to squeeze fourteen people into the ten-person table, and soon everyone was talking and laughing as they ate. “I’ve got to stop eating these UFOs,” Karen said, dangling a piece of lunch meat between two fingers.

“UFOs?” her best friend, Theresa, asked.

“Unidentified Fried Objects,” Karen explained, making the whole table crack up.

“More like
Uneatable
Fried Objects,” Theresa said.

As we sat there, joking about the lunch meat and tossing hardened bits of UFOs at one another, I could feel people looking over at us. Subtly at first, and then more blatantly. And not just people from the other hot-food-line tables, either. But from the window tables too. Their glances felt hot and loaded, almost like they wished they were with us.

And it was the craziest thing. The more people looked over at us, the more I could feel Karen and her friends flourishing under the attention. Theresa sat up taller, straightening out her usually hunched-over back. Mark McCafferty’s chest puffed out a little as he told us about the family of squirrels that had taken residence in the tree outside his bedroom window. And Karen stopped pushing her hair back every five seconds.

I was listening to Ali Gifford attempt to explain a Latin joke that no one was getting, when I noticed a familiar head of blond hair across the room. Hudson was holding his tray in his hands and walking straight toward our table. But when he saw how crowded it was, he stopped short. He met my eyes, giving me a little smile, as if to say:
Oh well
. Then he made his way to his usual table instead.

My heart plummeted as I watched him squeeze in across from Ashley and a few others. Ashley leaned forward and said something that made him throw back his head and laugh, his dimple deepening. He looked so perfect sitting there, surrounded by his athletic, beautiful friends. Like some kind of ad for teen spirit. I felt a wave of jealousy wash over me. I wanted to know what it felt like to sit across from him at lunch. I wanted to know what it felt like to have him laugh between bites at something I said. I watched as Ashley took a delicate sip of her soda and Zach Martin tossed a grape at Blair. It was more than that too, I realized. I wanted to know what it felt like to be one of them. To have a place there. I pulled my eyes away, looking down at my tray of UFOs. At either end of my table, people were laughing and talking and having a good time. I tried to join in, tried to feel like I belonged
here
, but I couldn’t help wishing that just once, I could belong over there.

Who Cares about the Beast
When You’ve Got Beauty?

“GOOD THING I have an SUV,” Josh said, tossing our bikes into the back of his car as students streamed out of school around us, climbing into cars and boarding buses. “Because that is one big bike, Kemper.”

I waited for her to make some kind of smart Kemper-type remark (
Well, you know what big bikes mean …
), but she just blushed a little and made a noise that sounded dangerously close to a giggle. “It’s for off-roading,” she explained. “My family goes sometimes.”

“Well,” Josh said, nudging her with his elbow. “At least it’s safe from your herd of followers in here.” Walking around to the driver’s seat, he climbed in. I was about to ask Kemper if she wanted shotgun, but she was already halfway into the backseat.

Josh told us about his old school as we drove, about how they were huge into SAT prep and used to have SAT quizzes every week, on top of their regular homework. “I don’t miss
that
,” he said, making Kemper laugh loudly from the back seat. “Though I do miss the lunch food,” he went on. “Seriously, what
is
that meat they serve here?”

Kemper let out a groan from the back seat. “It’s Miracle High’s unsolved mystery.”

“The case of the mystery lunch meat?”

“I bet there are wanted signs in the Miracle Police Station,” Kemper replied.

Josh laughed. “Wanted: crime by meat.”

“I should probably make a shirt,” Kemper mused.

I watched Josh out of the corner of my eye as he and Kemper volleyed jokes back and forth. It wasn’t hard to see why Kemper would like him. He had easy good looks: closely cropped hair, a smattering of light freckles, big brown eyes. And he had this nice way of smiling right at you, like he really meant it. He was on the football team, but he was one of the few guys who didn’t seem to let it take over his life. Just last week, I’d seen him talking with Anthony Herman, a guy most football players wouldn’t be caught dead with.