The Secret Identity of Devon Delaney (2 page)

Yeah. Really fab.

“Mmm,” I say, still trying to pretend like I don’t know her. I figure that eventually, if I keep this up, she’ll just be like, “What’s wrong? Aren’t you Devon?” And I’ll be like, “Yes, I’m Devon, but I’ve never seen you before.” And she’ll be like, “Oh, okay, sorry, wrong Devon.” And that will be that. Although Lexi does know my last name. But I could try to keep that secret for a while. Maybe.

“Devi, I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, grabbing my arm. “I’ve had the most horrible morning. I don’t know anyone, and I was totally afraid I’d have to sit alone at lunch. I’ve been looking for you all over, but every time I asked someone about you, they acted like they had no idea who you were.”

“Mmm,” I say again.

“Devi, what’s wrong with you?” she says, looking at
me with wide eyes. “Are you sick or something? You’re being weird.” She takes in the jeans and pink UConn hoodie I’m wearing. When Lexi and I spent the summer together, I never wore jeans. I wore lots of skirts, lots of cute shorts, and lots of tank tops. I always had my hair perfectly straightened, and I wore tons of lip gloss. “Seriously, are you okay?” Lexi asks again, frowning. “Oh my God!” she says, her eyes brightening. “You’re wearing the bracelet!” She looks down at my wrist, and there’s the purple and gold beaded bracelet we made before I left. We went to the store together to pick out the beads and spent a whole afternoon working out the perfect color combinations before stringing them together. Lexi holds up her wrist and shows me the matching bracelet.

So much for pretending to be someone else.

“Yeah,” I say, “I’m wearing it.” I look ahead, hoping she gets the message. The message being, you know, to be quiet.

“Oh, Devi, this is going to be such a good year!” she says. “I’m so glad I know you, I mean, how lucky am I? Knowing one of the most popular girls at my new school before I even start?” She squeals. Mr. Pritchard ignores her. What is the deal with him, anyway? Why is it teachers are always enforcing the rules when you
don’t want them to? And now, when a girl who has the ability to ruin your life shows up prattling away about nonsense, they don’t? They just keep going on and on, about the value of pi.

“So we’ll sit together at lunch, right? Thank God!” She smiles, revealing a mouthful of braces. “And I can’t wait to meet Jared!”

Mr. Pritchard picks that moment to tell us to quiet down, and Lexi smiles and rolls her eyes at me. “Meet me outside the cafeteria before lunch,” she says, then turns and faces the front of the classroom.

I try not to throw up. Because Lexi Cortland thinks I’m dating Jared Bentley. Jared Bentley, who is the hottest guy I’ve ever seen. Jared Bentley, who plays soccer but is also on the seventh-grade student council, which is totally contradictory. Jared Bentley, who doesn’t even know I’m alive.

This whole thing is my parents’ fault. If they hadn’t gone uber-psycho and decided they needed time to work out their problems (or as my mom likes to call them, “marital challenges and roadblocks”), I never would have been sent to live with my grandmother for the summer. And I never would have met Lexi Cortland. Which means I never would have lied about
Jared Bentley being my boyfriend, or that I was one of the most popular girls in my school.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad my parents stayed together. Although it
is
kind of annoying to see them kissing each other when I walk into the family room, or whenever they think my little sister, Katie, and I aren’t looking. But why couldn’t they have stayed together with us around? Why did they have to ship us ninety miles away for the summer?

I spend all of my fourth-period earth science class silently cursing my parents, and when the bell rings signaling the beginning of lunch, I consider just skipping it and hanging out in the library. I could get my best friend, Melissa, to come with me. And then I can just avoid this whole thing. Until I come up with some sort of brilliant plan that will allow me to save myself, before everyone finds out I lied about Jared Bentley being my boyfriend and I get completely humiliated and become the outcast of Robert Hawk Junior High.

I rush to the caf, hoping Melissa hasn’t bought her hot lunch yet so I can whisk her off to the library for a quick, secret conference. But as soon as I get there, Lexi Cortland screams my name from the popular kids’ table in the corner. “DEVI!” she yells, standing up and waving. “Come on! I saved you a seat!”

Crap. Now what am I supposed to do? I can’t very well go sit at Jared Bentley’s table. That would be disastrous. I mean, Lexi thinks he’s my boyfriend, and how can I explain that one? Why and how is Lexi sitting at the popular kids’ table, anyway? It’s her first day of school! The A-list is so not that easy to penetrate.

I ignore Lexi and walk toward the corner where Melissa is sitting.

“Hey, Mel,” I say, grabbing her and lifting her out of her chair. Seriously, I did. Lift her, I mean. Melissa is the smallest girl in our class. Which causes certain problems because she still has to buy clothes in the kids department, and also because at the beginning of the past two school years, her teachers have expressed concern over her size and have sent her to the guidance counselor, who then calls her parents in. And Mel’s parents have to explain to them that, no, Melissa doesn’t have an eating disorder, she eats tons (she does too—one time she ate a whole Domino’s Pizza at a sleepover and was still hungry), and thank you for your concern, but no, they are not in denial, and please don’t call them down to the school anymore for this, because they have jobs and it interrupts their workday and also upsets Mel.

“What are you doing?” Mel asks.

“I’ll explain in a second,” I hiss, hoarding her toward the door.

“I’m eating lunch!” she protests, her blue eyes crinkling as she frowns at me. She glances back at her lunch tray.

“You can have mine,” I say, thrusting my brownbag lunch at her.

“But I don’t want yours,” she protests. “I want the pizza that’s on my tray. What are you—”

“No time to explain!” I say, moving faster. I step on Gregory Weston’s foot as I try to make my way through the throng of kids in the cafeteria.

“Watch it!” he says.

“Sorry,” I yell over my shoulder. I’m four feet from the door when suddenly, the jig is up.

“Devi!” Lexi screams, grabbing my shoulder. Her perfectly manicured nails exert slight pressure into my skin. “I was looking for you! I’m sitting at your table, can you believe it? Come on, I saved you a seat.”

“Oh, I can’t,” I say, brushing my hair away from my face and trying to shield Mel from Lexi, all the while moving us toward the door. “Mel and I are going to the library and—”

“Oh, is this Melissa?” Lexi squeals. She jumps up and down, her wristful of bracelets jangling as she
does so. “I’ve heard so much about you!”

Melissa frowns at Lexi. “Who are you?” she asks, looking between me and Lexi, confused. The thing is, I never mentioned Lexi or the other girls I hung out with this summer to Mel. I know it sounds horrible, but I told Mel my summer consisted of Sitting around at Gram’s with my little sister, watching lots of reality TV (
Dancing with the Stars
was my favorite), and reading lots of books. It worked until Mel asked which books I had read, and in reality, I’d only read two books while at Gram’s, one of them a Harlequin romance I’d found behind the bed in the guest room, and which, surprisingly, made me want to read others. (Even though I had to hide the cover from my sister, Katie, by reading it under the blankets with a flashlight after she’d fallen asleep. I really didn’t think Katie should be exposed to such, um, rippling muscles. Although at one point, I was very tempted to show her, because I really couldn’t figure out if the muscles on the cover model were real or added with Photoshop. But I controlled myself.) Anyway, I couldn’t really tell Mel I had read a Harlequin, so I started making up books, and then she asked me what I’d thought about some of them because, unlike me, apparently Mel really
had
spent her summer reading. It was almost a problem, but I changed the subject
by bringing up the fact that I’d heard Brent Madison (her crush) was going to be in advanced math this year, which was the same class Mel was in. I had to sit through half an hour of her wondering what she should do about this problem (i.e, find a seat next to him or not, because if she sat next to him, it would help her get to know him, but if she didn’t sit next to him, her grade would probably be better, and how could she risk her math grade for some guy?), but it was worth it.

“I’m Lexi!” Lexi says now. She grabs Mel in a hug. I look around, wondering if I’m perhaps on one of those hidden-camera shows. Like
Punk’d,
only for noncelebrities.

“Oh,” Mel says, hugging Lexi back hesitantly She gives her a few pats on the shoulder.

“Come sit!” Lexi says.

“Oh, no, we can’t,” I say, looking around nervously. “We’re on our way to the library.”

“The library!” Lexi says, throwing her head back and laughing. The lights of the cafeteria bounce off her braces. “Don’t be silly, Devi.” Mel’s eyebrows shoot up at the use of the word “Devi.” “Come sit with me! I’m at Jared’s table.” Mel’s eyebrows shoot up even more.

“But how did—” I start.

“I couldn’t find you,” Lexi says, tossing her long blond hair over her shoulder. “So when I got to the cafeteria, I asked a girl where Jared Bentley was sitting, because I figured that’s where you’d be. I thought you said in math you were going to meet me outside the cafeteria at the beginning of lunch.”

“I, uh, forgot,” I say lamely Mel’s eyes are now practically bugging out of her head, and I send her a silent message not to say anything that could potentially ruin my life.

“Come on,” Lexi says. “We’re missing lunch. And that guy is totally staring at me.” She looks in distaste at the table next to us, where Mark Gibson’s eyes are almost as big as Mel’s. You can’t blame him. Lexi is wearing a very short skirt.

“Lexi,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I really can’t.”

“Why not?” Lexi says, her eyes narrowing. She looks at me suspiciously. “What’s the problem?” This is the moment of truth. This is the time where I should come clean, I should tell Lexi that everything I told her this summer was completely made up, that Jared Bentley and I are not dating, that no one calls me “Devi,” and that I don’t usually look the way I did this summer.

“Lexi, I—”

“Alexis Cortland!” a voice booms suddenly. I turn
around to see one of the guidance counselors, Mr. Boone, standing behind us. Mr. Boone is really cool. He totally saved the seventh grade a couple of weeks ago when the eighth graders tried to fix the Robert Hawk Junior High penny contest for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

“Mr. Boone,” Lexi says sweetly. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m looking for
you,”
Mr. Boone says. He adjusts his navy blue striped tie. Mr. Boone is always adjusting his tie. I don’t know why. Other than the fact that maybe his tie is always loose? Or maybe he feels uncomfortable all dressed up, like the hero in one of the romance novels I read this summer. He was a carpenter (the guy in the book, not Mr. Boone) and he fell in love with this woman who had a lot of money. She was an heiress or something, and he was doing work on her house. Anyway, she took him to this huge event, kind of like a ball, and he had to wear a tuxedo, and he was very uncomfortable. Because he was used to going around shirtless all the time (to show off his rippling muscles, I think, which is why the heiress got interested in him in the first place). I imagine Mr. Boone walking around with no shirt on, and I blush.

“Why were you looking for me?” Lexi asks.

“Because you were supposed to spend your lunch period in my office, going over your schedule for this year,” Mr. Boone says. He adjusts his tie again.

“I totally forgot,” Lexi says in a tone that makes me think she totally did not. “Let me just get my stuff and I’ll meet you in guidance.” She turns to me. “I’ll IM you later, okay, Devi?” She blows me a kiss and turns on her heel to grab her stuff. Mr. Boone follows her, presumably so she doesn’t “forget” again.

Suddenly, my head is spinning and I collapse into the nearest chair.

Mel’s eyes are still the size of saucers. “Um, you want to tell me what’s going on?” she asks, plopping down in the chair next to me. “Devi?”

I spend the next half hour in the library
with Mel, filling her in on the Lexi debacle. We then make the following list:

Lies, Realities, and Possible Solutions

Lie Number One:
I am popular.

Reality:
I am not.

Possible Solution:
Somehow become popular? (At this point, Mel points out that if I knew how to do this, I would already have done it.)

Why This Solution Won’t Work:
See above comment by Mel.

Lie Number Two:
I am dating Jared Bentley.

Reality:
Jared Bentley doesn’t know my name. I don’t think. One time earlier this year, he asked me if he could borrow a writing utensil in English. And all I had was this pen my grandmother had given me over the summer that was purple and said DEVON in huge yellow letters. Maybe he remembers this?