With the stress of my chemistry test behind me, I took out my Kate Spade planner to pencil in a shopping trip for Alex’s gift 2.0 after school. But first, I had a meeting for the Valentine’s Day Dance committee. It was ironic to be planning an event that I might not even get to go to, but it was also the perfect way to make up for my dismissive behavior to SBB at lunch. She didn’t know it yet, but being dragged to an extracurricular meeting was exactly the kind of drama that would bolster her understanding of the life of a high school girl.
Just before last period, taking a cue from the note-droppers in my life, I raised—or dropped—a white flag into SBB’s locker.
When I found her after school, she was tapping on the padlock, murmuring what sounded like some kind of chant into the slats of her locker.
“What are you,” I said, coming up behind her, “the locker whisperer?”
“What are you?” she replied. “The friend abandoner? How the heck do people open these things?”
“What’s your combination?” I asked.
SBB looked confused; then a flash of recognition came across her face. “Oh, that’s what those numbers are for?” She rummaged through her massive yellow JanSport backpack, and when she caught me giggling, she dropped the bag with a thud and said defensively, “What? The guidance counselor told me this backpack is really good for the spine. It distributes the weight evenly across your shoulders. I’m carrying a lot of heavy books here, Flan; it’s not like I can be fashion-forward every second of my life—”
“Calm, calm.” I coached, putting my hand on her shoulder. “Which is why I’m going to show you how to use your locker. You can keep some of your books in there.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just stressed.” She turned and pointed a finger at me. “And you didn’t make it any better. I’ve never been dissed in the hallway before! And even though, from an acting perspective, it was kind of good for me, from a friend perspective, I did not like it.”
“I know.” I nodded. By then, I had opened up her locker. It was dusty and empty, save for my little white envelope. “Which is why I’m going to make it up to you now.”
“What’s this?” SBB reached for the envelope. “My first note! I wonder who it’s from!”
As she tore into the envelope, I had to wonder whether she’d be disappointed when she found out that it was only from me, but when she read my message, her face lit up. “You want me to join you at a dance committee meeting? I’m so excited—see, this is the kind of thing I had in mind when I signed up for this torture. Okay, you’re forgiven!”
As I pulled a happily chattering SBB down the hall to the student activities lounge, I wondered whether I should warn her about how to act in front of everyone on the planning committee. I was about to open my mouth to put out a few suggestions, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“What’s all this?” Kennedy asked, waving her hand dismissively at SBB. “The dance committee is an elected position, Flan, and what goes on there is top secret. You can’t just bring anyone you want to sit in.”
Leave it to Kennedy to be a stickler for the rules as long as they worked against me.
“This is a new student, uh, Simone,” I stammered. “She just moved here from—”
“Chicago,” SBB responded, working the Midwestern accent. “The headmistress matched me up with Flan, since she was a former new student who adjusted really quickly—”
“That’s debatable,” Kennedy said, rolling her eyes.
“You debate with your headmistress?” SBB asked innocently. “Anyway, the headmistress told me explicitly that the best thing I could do for myself would be to follow in the footsteps of a model student like Flan.”
Oh boy, SBB was taking this a little far. Now Willa had joined the conversation, and she was definitely going to remember SBB’s French persona in the cafeteria. I decided to do some damage control.
“I’m sure if you have a problem with Simone sitting in on the committee,” I told Kennedy, “you can take it up with the headmistress.”
That might be enough to shut them both up. Ever since Willa had been implicated in a treasury scandal last month, both she and Kennedy were on academic probation. There was no one who made them more nervous than the headmistress.
“Whatever,” Kennedy said, unlocking the student lounge and taking a seat at the head of the table. She gestured toward the back of the room, where a lone desk was set off from the conference table. “She can sit in the back if she signs a confidentiality agreement.”
“Yay! I’ll have my agent fax a standard nondisclosure—I mean, I used to plan dances all the time at my old school in Chicago, but—” SBB squealed until I nudged her to shut up.
Willa took a seat next to Kennedy and narrowed her eyes at SBB. “Weren’t you the girl behind the vending machine at lunch? Weren’t you French?”
Whoops.
“I just act French for an hour before and after every French class, to immerse myself.” SBB tilted her head seriously. I wished she would just stop talking so she wouldn’t dig herself in any deeper, but I was too far away to nudge her again.
“So the Valentine’s Dance,” I said, changing the subject. A few other girls from our class had filed into the meeting, and I didn’t think everyone needed to be privy to SBB’s methodology. “It’s one week from tomorrow, and we still don’t have a theme, right?”
“What about Romeo and Juliet?” my friend Dara asked, brushing her long black hair behind her ears. She was the secretary on the student council, so she referenced her notes from our last meeting.
“Lame,” Kennedy dismissed her. “Shakespeare’s not sexy.”
I glanced at SBB, whose face had that “ooh, I know about Shakespeare from a movie I once made” look on it. Before I could stop her, she’d climbed on top of her chair.
“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo,” She spouted off the lines so theatrically that her beret fell down over her eyes. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet—”
“What are you doing?” Willa asked. She and Kennedy were the only ones in the room nasty enough to ask, but I could tell from the other girls’ faces that they were all thinking the same thing.
“We learned Shakespeare,” SBB said, “at my old school … in Chicago. Yeah, I took a test over it and everything.”
I covered my face with my hands. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.
“What’s your point?” Kennedy said, then turned to glare at me. “Flan, your shadow is being disruptive.”
“Uh,” I stalled, “I think her point is that Shakespeare is romantic, right, Simone?” I raised my eyebrows at SBB to try to get her to sit down and just observe.
“No,” Willa said flatly. “I’m class president and I veto that idea. Dara, what else do we have?”
As Dara flipped through her notes, SBB got back up on the chair. “That’s dictatorial!” she said, throwing out a word she’d loved since playing Napoleon’s mistress in a smutty period piece. “At my old school, in Chicago, we always voted to democratically settle such important matters.”
“This isn’t your old school, in Chicago,” Kennedy hissed. “At this school, in New York City, we socially annihilate people who annoy us.”
I had to stop SBB before she made any more of a spectacle of herself. I knew from experience that SBB had to feel needed in order to stay out of trouble. I racked my brain for a task to keep her occupied.
All I had in my not-so-good-for-the-spine Muxo schoolbag was the portfolio of prints from my photography class. Without much of a plan, I pulled them out and slid them across the table to SBB.
“Uh, Simone,” I said quietly, “I was wondering if you could help me figure out which one of these to blow up and turn in for my final project.”
SBB/Simone looked flattered and immediately set to work. For three blissful minutes, she was focused on flipping through my prints, and the conversation about the Valentine’s Dance got shakily back on track.
“Kisses on My Pillow, Love Me Do, Red Hot Valentine …” Dara listed off the uninspiring ideas for themes.
“Who came up with these?” Kennedy demanded. “They’re all completely forgettable.”
I glanced at Dara’s notes. Kennedy’s name was listed next to each of the bad ideas we’d come up with at the last meeting, but I could tell Dara would rather take credit for them herself than point this out to Kennedy.
“The ideas themselves aren’t terrible,” I chimed in. “It’s just they’re sort of vague. We need something concrete. We need a concept. After that, coming up with the ideas for decorations, music, and activities should be easy.”
“What about …” SBB/Simone said. The room waited impatiently for her to articulate. I just hoped she wasn’t going to get back up on the chair.
“What about this one?” she finally said, laying one of my photographs on the table. Of all my prints, this one was particularly well shot and well developed. It was an image of the perfect Balthazar linzertorte.
“You’re right.” I smiled at SBB. “This is exactly the print I should use for my class.”
“Not only that,” SBB/Simone said, laying on the hard a in that like a true Midwesterner, “it’s also the perfect theme for the dance: Picture Yourself in Love.” She turned to the other girls on the committee, but stayed—mercifully—in her seat. “What do you guys think? We could blow up giant classy prints of romantic city shots and hang them on all the walls for decoration. We could have one of those photo button-making machines and give the buttons out for favors.”
As I looked around the table, everyone seemed pretty intrigued by the idea. Even Willa and Kennedy hadn’t thought of anything nasty to say—and that was huge.
“Ooh.” SBB grinned. “And you know that song they keep playing on the radio, ‘Picture You with Me’? Who’s that by again—that really hot guy?”
“Jake Riverdale!” Dara chimed in. “Love him.”
“Me too.” SBB/Simone grinned. “That could be the theme song!”
I held back a laugh. The undercover pimping of her boyfriend’s new hit single was definitely SBB’s best acting of the day.
The whole table spoke up so enthusiastically that it was clear everyone was on board. I couldn’t believe that by the time the meeting adjourned, the details for the Valentine’s Dance had totally come together.
“Okay,” Kennedy huffed, clearly pissed that allowing SBB/Simone into the meeting hadn’t been a mistake. “We’ll meet again on Wednesday to finalize the details. Everyone better be here.”
As SBB/Simone and I walked out of the conference room arm in arm, I leaned in to whisper, “That was amazing. Are you sure you didn’t go to high school?”
“Didn’t you figure me out?” SBB asked. “I was just channeling you, Flannie. You’re my high school role model. You know the way you get when you’re planning something and your nose gets all scrunched up and serious.” She laughed. “Do you think they bought it?”
Looking back at Kennedy and Willa huddled in the doorway, I was sure that they must have. SBB/Simone had been so convincing—even though it was a little embarrassing to learn that I did that scrunching thing with my nose.
But just before we turned the corner, I overheard Willa’s voice and froze.
“I’ve got cousins all over Illinois,” she hissed to Kennedy. “I’m going to put out some feelers about this Simone from Chicago.”
I realized I’d better warn Simone that it might be time for a costume change.