“It's not a rumor, it's true,” Dylan interrupted.
“It's a rumor until it's proven true,” Kristen insisted. “Alicia, have you ever
seen
it?”
“Opposite of yes.”
“Then it's a rumor.”
“It's true!” Massie tapped her freshly manicured nails on her keyboard. “I can feel it. Ehmagawd! We are so set for eighth grade.” She hit play.
“
What you are about to see is classified
,” Skye continued, her expression serious and grave. “
If you can't keep a secret, please eject this CD-ROM and destroy it. Failure to keep the following information confidential will result in the DSL Daters ejecting and destroying you.”
An offscreen chorus whisper-chanted,
“Eject…eject…eject…destroy…destroy…destroy,”
while Skye stared at Massie.
“This is freaking me out.” Alicia folded her arms across her chest.
“Same,” Dylan echoed.
“If this is still playing, you have agreed to carry the secret of the key for the rest of your life
—
the key that unlocks the door to paradise.”
All of a sudden, the chorus from Nelly's song “Paradise” blasted through Massie's speakers.
Paradise
That's what she said to me
Paradise
Glittery animated images of rainbows and suns and stars pulsed on to the screen to the soulful beat of the music. Then they stopped, and Skye returned.
“This five-year tradition began when a certain major loser of an eighth-grader found the key to an abandoned room on campus….
“
A picture of a tall, gawky LBR standing in front of her locker with a pink knockoff pashmina draped over a barf-yellow boiled wool turtleneck appeared on the screen. Her face was covered with a clip-art picture of a gold key to conceal her identity.
“She snuck in with her friends, turned it into a secret hang spot, and invited a few Briarwood boys over during lunch. Within a week, these girls were the new alphas. And the old alphas were done
—”
Massie hit pause.
Without saying a single word, she stared at Skye's frozen face on the screen and imagined what it must have been like to be the alpha who got usurped by a pack of knockoff-pashmina-wearing LBRs. The thought made her stomach churn and her scalp tighten. It was the closest thing to physical pain she had ever known.
“Um, hu-llo?” Alicia waved a hand in front of Massie's eyes.
“Sorry.” She fluffed her hair and pressed play.
“When she went to high school, she passed the key on to the coolest girl she knew, who happened to be a true alpha. So from that moment on, the key always went to the OCD elite. And now I'm doing the same.”
“Yes! She knows I'm the coolest.” Massie gripped the computer screen and kissed it, leaving a shiny Crème Brûlée–flavored Glossip Girl lip print in the center. “The Pretty Committee will finally have a private place to hold meetings! I am so hiring a decorator over the summer.”
“Let's load it with animal-print furniture from the Ralph Lauren Home collection.” Alicia beamed. “The new line is insane!”
“Done.” Massie cranked up the volume, not wanting to miss a single syllable.
“Take a look at some of the things we did.”
One by one, photographs of “the room”—which was half the size of a classroom, and windowless—faded onto the screen. There was a shot of three girls lying on pink beach towels surrounded by white sand and matching bikinis, their faces hidden by animated smiley emoticons. A giant sun-lamp beamed down on them.
“Is that sand
inside
the room?” Claire asked.” It looks like they're at the beach.”
“Shhhhhh,” the girls snapped.
The next shot showed them leaning against a juice bar made of palm fronds and leaves. It reminded Massie of the Sugar Shack, a poolside smoothie hut she'd frequented during her family's vacation in Tonga.
“Is that juice bar
inside
the room?”
“Shhhhh!”
The third shot showed four grinning emoticons with their eyes closed in cushy black recliners getting pedicures from four shirtless high school guys. Rose petals covered the floors, and
happy valentine's day
was spelled out on the wall behind them in red-foil-covered Hershey's Kisses.
“Ehmagawd.” Kristen rubbed her flat abs. “I'll have a place to hide the clothes my mom won't let me wear. I won't have to change in the Range Rover anymore!”
“Let's hire that goth barista to work in there.” Dylan beamed. “We'll buy a Starbucks machine, make her wear a green apron, and teach her how to make those enormous fat-free blueberry muffins. We'll text our orders and zip over between classes to pick them up.”
“Can we dig a tunnel that leads to Briarwood so the boys can sneak in?” Claire asked.
“Love it all!” Massie tapped all their suggestions into her PalmPilot. “Done, done, and done.”
The photos faded away, and candlelit Skye returned.
“And there's something else in the room that's way too incredible for your little seventh-grade eyes to see.”
Skye winked at the camera.
“But it will be yours…if you are the first one to find the key.”
Massie smacked pause.
“First one to find it? Who else will be looking for it?” She ran a shaky hand through her chestnut brown layers. “Don't I automatically get it?”
“Yeah,” huffed Alicia. “I thought it got handed down from one alpha to the next.”
“It's probably just a formality,” Kristen suggested. “Like how you have to say the name of your favorite radio station before you win the concert tickets.”
Massie took a deep breath to calm her quaking hands, then pressed play.
“Since it's the fifth anniversary of the room, I'm going to break tradition and do something different. Instead of automatically handing the key off to the seventh-grade alpha, I'm turning this into a contest and have sent out five CD-ROMs to a wide range of girls. This way, nonalphas have the chance to become alphas, just as our great founders did, five years ago. And I've hidden the key under the mattress of a highly respectable Westchester boy who understands that being an alpha is about more than having the right clothes—”
“Yes!” Kristen punched the air.
“It's about staying true to yourself, no matter what anyone else thinks.”
Dylan stuffed a piece of bubble gum in her mouth and slurped back the onslaught of watermelon-flavored spit.
“I hereby dedicate the key, and the following poem, to him.”
Skye's Tiffany box-colored eyes glistened with tears. Massie couldn't help wondering if the effect had been added in Photoshop.
Biting her lip, Skye closed her eyes and began. Her words floated across the screen in a pink glittery script that seemed too cute and playful for the low, raspy voice reciting them.
The boy who sleeps atop the key
Is into the exact same things as me.
He loves all creatures, big and small,
So his age doesn't matter, not at all.
I try not to think about his “glamour-don't” style
By focusing on his kick-butt smile.
Note to self: I've kissed this guy,
But I've kissed them all. How bad am I?
We already rode off into the sunset together,
But the next time we do, it will be forever.
Holla!
The pink glittery script faded away and Skye's lips returned.
“Talking about this to anyone, including me or the DSL Daters, is against the rules. Searching for the room before you are in possession of the key is against the rules. And asking any boy if I have been to his house is a waste of time. The answer will always be yes. If you find the key, wear the Coach key chain with the little handbags on it around your neck. Then wait. I will contact you. May the true alpha win.”
Skye blew out the Tocca votive candle. A swirling gray ribbon of smoke twisted in the darkness, eventually giving up and fading. The screen was black.
“May the best alpha win?” Massie whacked her computer. “How many alphas does she think there
are
in the seventh grade?”
The image of Carrie Randolph and her BFFs Alexandra Regan (metal mouth) and Livvy Collins (lip-gloss eater) ruling the room popped into her head. The make-out virgins would probably throw parent-supervised girls-only parties where they'd talk about the latest technology in braces and the best-tasting balms. All this while the Pretty Committee roamed the cold, bustling halls in last year's calf-high Kors boots, searching for a warm place to hang.
“What if someone else wins?” Dylan anxiously tore a subscription card out of Alicia's
Teen Vogue
, then folded it around her chewed gum.
“Im-possible.” Alicia batted the air. “This is our destiny.”
“It better be,” Massie brooded, a massive to-do list forming in her head.
“Shhhh.” Kristen lifted a finger to her lips. “We're not allowed to talk about this with anyone.”
“Point.”
“That can't possibly apply to
us
,” Massie whispered, just in case.
“Point.”
Massie turned her back on the naked mannequin and snapped into drill-sergeant mode. “Kristen, put a file together of Skye's hobbies. Alicia, I need names of the boys she's kissed. Dylan, find out who else got this CD-ROM. And Claire, ask Todd what she said to him. We'll go over everything tomorrow during lunch.”
“What's
your
job?” Claire asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“My job?” Massie faced her army and lifted her chin. “My job is to win.”
O
CTAVIAN
C
OUNTRY
D
AY
S
CHOOL
T
HE
H
ALLS
Monday, April 5th
8:12
A.M.
Claire gazed at the Hogwarts-esque stone building, with its elegant turrets and landscaped grounds, then zipped her powder blue down jacket all the way to the very top. As she often had before, she found herself wondering how the rest of the Pretty Committee could manage to go jacketless on such a gray, blustery day. Granted, they were about to make their grand reentrance to OCD and didn't want their well-crafted outfits marred by coats and scarves and gloves. But didn't they feel the angry wind winding its way through the spaces between their bones? Or the finger-numbing chill of winter? Did they not feel
cold
?
It was the first time Isaac, the Blocks' driver, had dropped them off in the rear parking lot, and the first time Claire had seen her school from that angle. The back was as majestic as the front, yet something about the view made her feel lonely.
“Ew.” Alicia winced, scanning the rows of fuel-efficient Fords and Toyotas. “These cars are so Toys ‘R’ Us. Why are we
here
? Can't we go around front where the normal people park?”
“No,” Massie huffed, in an I'm-only-going-to-explain-this-one-last-time sort of way. “We need a private place for final
Outfit inspections. Besides, you may want to spend a minute or two on your hair. The wind has not been kind.”
“Why? What's wrong with it?” Alicia scurried to the side mirror of a white Volkswagen Jetta and finger-combed her highly envied black shoulder-length waves.
“Kuh-laire, doesn't Judi have one of
those
?” Dylan pointed to the bronze-colored Taurus sandwiched between a blue Corolla and a yellow Camry.
Claire's stomach lurched. “It's just a
rental,”
she snapped, instantly hating herself for feeling embarrassed by her mother's affordable car. But the last thing she wanted on her first day back was to be any more self-conscious than she already was.
Usually, this anxious niggling struck Claire the night before she entered a new grade. Or after a long Christmas break away from her friends. But never in April. And
never
this hard. It was a frustrating blend of excitement and fear, the kind that made her want to run and freeze at the same time.
Claire flipped the red cap on the bottle of Evian she'd taken from the mini-fridge in the Blocks' Range Rover and chugged, hoping to drown what felt like thousands of fuzzy caterpillars squirming behind her belly button.
On one hand, she couldn't wait to get back to the warm familiarity of old classrooms and classmates. But on the other, she was afraid. No, she was terrified. Terrified that starring in
Dial L for Loser
would make her stand out, when all she'd ever wanted was to fit in.
“Is anyone else kind of freaked right now?” An air cloud puffed from Kristen's heart-shaped mouth. “You know, like nervous?”
Claire nodded in her mind.
“Nervous?”
Alicia asked Massie, like she was checking to see if that emotion had been approved. But Massie was far too busy dabbing her wrists with Chanel No. 5 to tell anyone how to feel. That, or she was battling first-day jitters of her own.
“Yeah, you know, cuz we've been gone for so long and everything.” Kristen pinched her cheeks pink. “What if we can't catch up on our homework?”
“
That's
what you're worried about?” Dylan spit a wad of green gum onto the cold pavement.
“Homework?”
“Yeah.” Kristen blushed. “Why? What are
you
worried about?”
Massie rolled her eyes and then, without warning, began making her way across the parking lot.
Everyone followed.
“Nothing,” Dylan whisper-snapped defensively. “But if I
was
, I'd be worried everyone forgot about us and that they won't notice we're back.” She swung her striped denim Fendi Spy bag back and forth. “Not that I
am
worried about that. Because I'm
nawt.”
“Ehmagawd, do you think anyone's been sitting at table eighteen for lunch?” Alicia asked as she tiptoed across the freshly mowed lawn, probably to keep the dew off her brown suede boots. “What if they don't give it back?”
Massie choke-coughed twice, and then sped up. She didn't utter a single word until they crossed the field and reached the deserted side door entrance. Silently, she directed them to line up against the uneven stone building.
“Wardrobe check!” She beamed, the fun finally returning to her amber eyes.
Everyone rolled their shoulders and puffed out their chests, except Claire. Instead, she buried her chin in the puffy collar of her coat and prayed for invisibility.