It’s happening. I guess I always knew it might. They’re changing. We’re changing. It’s only the second day at Upper, and I already caught Kate staring at Bradley Farrow like he was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. And Maddie. God, this is so bitchy, but she’s so much like her mother. She’s always watching, assessing, searching for an angle to get in with the “right people.”
And where does that leave me? My parents don’t even know what a country club is, would lose it if they knew I snuck makeup or saw the way I hiked up my uniform skirt the second I walked into school. I’m lucky if they let me out of the house on the weekend instead of forcing me to practice piano until my fingers go numb.
I used to know who I was. I was the girl who wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone. It was always my idea to sneak out. My idea to hide behind the gravestones so we could watch the Obsideo ceremony. My idea to play the game where we see how many phone numbers we could collect during one night at a Pemberly Brown dance.
And so I won. Every time. Until last weekend. Kate ended up with more numbers. I caught her deleting some so I would think I’d won again. It should have made me feel good to see her clinging to the past like me, but then I saw her smile at Bradley and watched how he smiled back and I felt myself slipping.
Slipping and sliding and becoming less relevant in this new upper-school world where most kids don’t have curfews and the Sacramenta are no longer a dare, but a part of day-to-day life.
Kate and Maddie are growing apart from me. Everything is shifting. It’s small for now, tiny fissures beneath our feet. But the fault lines are there and the ground is rumbling. Change is coming and it’s going to shake up our world. I just hope they won’t let me slip between the cracks.