––––––––
It was twelve fifteen on Wednesday afternoon when someone knocked on my door.
Odd. Daddy was at work, and I wasn’t expecting anyone.
I stood on shaky legs—how long does it take for muscles to atrophy?—and slowly pulled the door open.
Dana Rich looked at me in a weird mix of amusement and pity.
“You look awful,” she said, pushing past me and walking in to my apartment. “And this apartment smells like spaghetti sauce.”
Daddy had been making spaghetti with meatballs and garlic bread for three days straight, since he knew it was my favorite. With each tasty bite, I loved him a little more.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Watching you spiral into a pit of social oblivion,” she said, sliding an empty tub of ice cream out of her way with her toe.
“Get out, Dana.”
She stopped her march of disgust through my living room and turned to me.
“You have to come back to school,” she said.
I snorted and rolled my eyes. “Believe me, no one wants me back there.”
“Will you stop thinking about everyone else?!” she commanded, stomping one heeled foot. “You know, your little speech got it wrong. Being popular is not about creating some impossible standard of perfection for everyone else to live up to. Being popular is about not caring what everyone else thinks. That’s why you feel empty. That’s why you feel alone. Because you have been caring what everyone else thinks and not worrying about yourself.”
She turned away, looking out of the open window behind the television.
“I was the one that called Jake’s father.”
I gasped.
“What? Why?”
“Because Jake and Regina were destructive and had to be stopped. Did you know that Regina broke me and Jake up? She sent me fake screenshots and told me that Jake was cheating, and I believed her. Stupid. If Jake and me were still together, I could have stopped him. He would have listened to me. But, by the time I found out what she’d done, Jake had already moved on to you, and I was out of the circle.”
“So why call his father?”
“I had no choice. Stephanie was dead. Mel was in rehab. Somehow, you turned my boyfriend into a psychopathic rapist killer. I had to call him. No one else could stop Jake. And now, he’s gone. Stuck in Russia somewhere with his sister filling his head with stupid lies.” She sighed. “She finally got what she wanted. Her little brother, all to herself.”
She sniffled and wiped her nose. She tried to hide it, tried to look like she didn’t care, but I saw it. I saw the love she felt for Jake in her eyes. I saw the hurt she felt at not being with him. At what he had become.
I wondered if, by losing Dana, Jake lost a bit of his humanity, too. Maybe that was why he did what he did with me? Or maybe he was just a kid who’d never been told no. Who thought that, no matter how terrible he acted, he was untouchable. Either way, he got what he deserved.
“Anyway, that’s not why I’m here. Stephanie is gone, Ursula’s mom sent her to boarding school, everything is in shambles. The school needs a leader. We could be that leader.”
“We?”
“Yes. You and me can step in and fill the void. We can rule this school together. But you have to come back.”
I sighed. The old me would have jumped at the chance to be popular, and to have Dana as an ally, no less. But the old me was dead. This was the new me. The me that knew the dark side of popularity. I would never step over to the dark side again.
“Dana-”
“Is this about me punching you in the Stamford Club, because I was just doing it in solidarity with Stephanie?”
“No. It’s not about that. I don’t want to be popular. I’ll come back to school, but it won’t be to fill some void. It will be so that I can be me.”
“But you’ll be alone. No friends. No allies. You’ll be invisible again.”
I let out a breath.
“I’d rather be happy and invisible, then to be miserable and popular.”
“You’re joking? I’m offering you the tools you need to make your wildest dreams come true. You can’t just tell me no.”
I shook my head. “My dreams right now are to pass French and English, and to try and get my friends back. Being popular is not going to help with any of that.”
Dana squeezed her lips together and walked past me, putting her hand on the door. She snatched it open and walked back out.
I sighed, sat on the couch, and looked around at the mess that I’d been hiding in.
I bent down, and began to clean it up.