Safely in her room after deflecting and half answering her parents’ questions about the school event, she patted the winged cardigan good night (was that getting strange?), got into bed, and did the gentle four-knock to Jess: Are you awake? No answer. Jess was ignoring her. No way was she was asleep at ten thirty—for sure she was awake and reading.
It felt so different having Billy as her private number one fantasy mew, never expecting it to cross over into real life, and having Billy actually like her. The whole aura around him liking her was so insulting. How many times could she stand to encounter the face of someone who couldn’t believe Billy liked Vân Ước? Tears burned in her eyes. How dare they be so surprised? She was as nice as anyone else. And smarter. But had she really let anyone see her? Was it partly her fault for preferring to slip through as unnoticed as possible? Maybe to his friends it was as though he was going out with the invisible woman.
But she knew it was more than that, worse than that. It was their rejection of Billy slumming it with someone so far removed from his born-to-rule class. There. She’d used the word. It was a class thing. Which also meant a money thing. And they were both related to the refugee thing. Their judging and ranking made her hackles rise. Part of her relished the idea of standing up in front of all the people she least liked at school, and shouting, He wanted me, but I rejected him. Because I’m not buying into that bullshit.
She rolled over, untwisting her nightie as she turned, flipping her pillow over to its cool side. She gave it a good punch and thought through it all again—it was running on a loop—the whole preposterous, fallacious, spurious basis on which Billy liked her. That was some bullshit she was readily buying into, she coolly observed of herself, from the disapproving outside.
Well, it’s not as though he’d like her in her own right, would he?/ Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Good one/Of course it’s the wish hoo-ha.
How could her pride allow that to stand? It couldn’t, clearly. Or not for long. But why shouldn’t she have a couple of weeks knowing what it felt like to go out with Billy? Was she even more superficial than that? Did she just want to go out with “a” Billy?
She buried her face in the pillow. She knew it was a cheat. No way would Jane approve.
It was like the day in primary school, year three, when her father, in an unprecedented move, had brought home a big bag of gummy bears and she’d been allowed to take them to school. She had instant sticky friends for playtime and lunchtime. She knew they loved her for her gummy bears, but she still enjoyed it while it lasted.