NOW
Daisy was seated cross-legged in the school hallway eating her lunch (a bag of Doritos) with Mia Wilson and Emma Menendez. Mia and Emma were the kind of girls who attached themselves to prettier, cooler girls in the hopes that some pretty and cool might rub off on them. In actual fact, hanging around with someone like Daisy made them look less pretty and cool by comparison. Lucky for Daisy, they hadn’t thought of it that way.
“What did you do this weekend?” Mia asked, offering Daisy her Ziploc bag of carrot sticks. Mia, a vegan, ate raw vegetables all day and little else. She was very thin and her skin was pale, almost translucent, under its coating of foundation. Daisy wondered if peer-pressuring Mia into eating a cheeseburger would improve her pallor.
Daisy grabbed a wet carrot stick from the bag and took a bite. “I had to babysit my gross brother.”
“That sucks,” Emma said. In contrast to Mia’s cruelty-free sustenance, Emma was eating a ciabatta bun full of some nitrate-laden sausage that had ended the life of at least one pig and possibly a cow. Emma was cute and curvy and rosy-cheeked. “Was it so boring?”
Daisy’s mind drifted back to her make-out session with Liam, how high they’d been, how sure she had been that they were going to explore each other intimately. Then she thought about that big, muscular car purring in front of her, about the large hands gripping the steering wheel, the eyes, obscured by the darkness, watching her. Goose bumps pimpled her arms.
“Totally boring.” She snapped off a piece of carrot in her teeth. “What did you guys do?”
“I binge-watched Gilmore Girls on Netflix. Again!” It was ghostly Mia, who had moved on to cucumber slices.
“Oh my god,” Emma gushed. “I love that show. I want to erase my brain so I can rewatch it.”
“It’s actually better the second time.”
“This would be the fourth time for me.” Emma turned to Daisy. “Have you watched it?”
Daisy didn’t watch much TV, and if she did, it certainly wouldn’t be a trite dramedy about a mother-daughter relationship. “I haven’t,” she said, “but I hear it’s good.”
“So good,” Mia said.
“You have to watch it,” Emma echoed.
Daisy was about to change the subject by asking Emma what brainless TV show had taken up her entire weekend, when Tori Marra joined them.
“Hey guys,” she said, crossing her feet and lowering her tiny body to the floor next to Emma. Tori was petite, a dancer, with a shock of short, platinum hair that contrasted with her Mediterranean coloring. She was the alpha female of their social set: loud, mean, in charge. Daisy was cool with that. She’d never considered herself a leader, despite the omnipresence of a sycophantic group of wannabes at every school she attended. Daisy couldn’t help but enjoy the admiration, but she preferred to do so quietly, passively.
“How was everyone’s weekend?” Tori asked, and the girls responded with various iterations of tedium.
“Really?” Tori said, cocking an eyebrow at Daisy. “You had a boring weekend?”
“Yeah.”
“Even Friday night?”
“Uh . . . yes.”
“That’s not what Liam Kenneway said.”
Emma and Mia gasped, scandalized, but Daisy maintained her composure. “Really? What did Liam say?”
“I don’t know if I should repeat it here. It’s kinda . . . personal.”
Daisy caught Emma and Mia exchanging a panicked glance. They couldn’t be dismissed for this! Daisy also clocked the smug, almost triumphant glint in Tori’s dark eyes. A hint of jealousy had always emanated off the compact girl, a subtle resentment toward Daisy’s effortless popularity. Her glee in this moment confirmed it.
“Go ahead,” Daisy said coolly. “We’re all friends here.”
“Liam said you guys . . . did it.”
Emma and Mia gasped again, but Daisy remained nonchalant. “Did he?”
“Yep,” Tori said, with a cruel smirk. “And that’s not all he said.”
Daisy’s heart was thudding in her chest—anger, betrayal, fear—but she would not give this little blond bird the satisfaction. “Tell me.”
“He said you did some weird stuff to him.”
“Weird stuff?”
“Kinky stuff. Porny stuff.” An ominous smile. “Butt stuff.”
“Oh my god,” Mia muttered over Emma’s simultaneous “Ewww!”
“He said,” Tori continued, clearly delighting in her narrative role, “that you . . . licked his butt.”
“Gross!” Emma shrieked, and Mia visibly cringed.
Blood was rushing to Daisy’s cheeks, betraying her blasé affect. Liam was trying to destroy her socially. But why? Had her laughter damaged his ego so badly that he felt he had to disparage her? To hurt and humiliate her? It was the only possibility.
“He said you seemed really experienced,” Tori said, biting her lip to hold back a blatant smile. “Like you must have done a ton of guys at your last school.”
“That’s not true!” Emma said, with unearned confidence. Her voice was less assured when she added, “Is it, Daisy?”
It wasn’t. Of course, it wasn’t. But Daisy didn’t respond. She rose to her full height, looming over the girls on the floor. “Where’s Liam?”
The tiny diamond stud in Tori’s nose caught the fluorescent light and sparkled, rivaling the cruel twinkle in her eyes. “He’s by the vending machines with his friends. But I’m not sure you want to go over there.” She feigned sympathy. “It was getting pretty graphic when I left.”
Daisy turned on her heel and walked away. “Should we come with?” Mia called after her, halfheartedly, but Daisy didn’t respond.
As promised, Liam was ensconced in a group of his peers, regaling them with tales of Daisy’s sexual expertise.
“She’s a total freak,” he was saying. “I would never have guessed it.”
“Maybe she’s a nymphomaniac,” Dylan Larabee suggested.
“Probably. She couldn’t get enough!”
“Hi, Liam.”
All eyes turned toward her: the freak, the nympho, had been conjured by their words. Liam paled and she saw the terror in his eyes. He had been caught in the act: lying about her, vilifying her, slut-shaming her. Daisy could destroy this little twerp and he knew it. She could tell his posse that he couldn’t get it up, that he had a tiny penis, that he had prematurely ejaculated. Or she could just tell them the truth: that he had run away from her because he was too scared, too childish, not ready.
She opened her lips, prepared to ruin him, but then she looked at his face. It was white, trembling, almost tearful. Liam was a soft little boy—a child—trying, desperately, to maintain his rank in the social order of Centennial High School. Daisy wasn’t like him. She was strong and resilient. She would recover from his slander, and if she didn’t, so what? Her family would move again, she’d go to a new school, and make new friends. If she took Liam down now, he might never recover.
She pasted on a smile. “I had so much fun on Friday night.”
“Umm, okay . . .”
“Thank you for that.”
“N-no problem.”
“And, I just wanted to say . . . ,” she leaned in, and lowered her voice a tad, “. . . your butt tastes great.”
She sauntered away, savoring the stunned silence she left in her wake. The character assassination would resume when the boys recovered from their shock, she knew that, but for a moment, she felt satisfied. She was stronger, braver, tougher than these kids.
She was invincible.