#famous(13)

If there had been a legitimate problem, like the time Sophie Laurentis’s brother had called in a bomb threat to get out of the PSAT, kids would have been flooding out of the parking lots like some retreating human tide before the teachers had gotten organized enough to stop them.

It had to be about football. We always played homecoming against Sunny Valley, and both towns acted like it really mattered which group of high schoolers had the longest streak of beating other high schoolers at a head-injury buffet.

Still, I couldn’t get too near. With my luck, they’d want to interview me about the team—which I had only seen play from under a marching band hat—and the internet would have one more thing to make fun of.

I’d have to go through the middle school.

Unlike East Apple Prairie, West Apple Prairie Middle School wasn’t freestanding; it huddled up along the short wall of the high school. One narrow hallway connected the two schools, lined with lockers that always got assigned to freshmen. Chances were good it would be less of a crapstravaganza than the main entrance.

I breathed in and out a few times, closing my eyes and trying to focus on something calming, like a smooth lake. That was supposed to help, right?

Probably someone on the internet was telling me to drown in one just like it.

Smiling bitterly, I got out of the car and headed for the door.

I slid inside and turned left down the mostly empty hallway, walking as quickly as I could without drawing attention, head down. The tube lights overhead buzzed; it sounded like I was being watched by a million insects.

“You’re her, aren’t you?” I heard from my right.

I stopped midstride, without really meaning to.

“Oh my god, you totally are. You’re Attack of the Rach Face.” Her voice was getting higher and faster, like someone had pressed fast-forward on her. “You must be mortified.”

I glanced at the girl, standing at one of the lockers that lined the hallway.

She was a couple of inches taller than me and weed-thin, with long, dark-brown hair with just a hint of waviness. She had to be a freshman, and she was arrestingly pretty. “Date seniors already” pretty. She had a hand over her mouth like she’d said too much, but her eyes were smiling wickedly.

I started walking again.

“Weren’t you worried people would think he was too hot for you?” she called after me, banging her locker closed. She sounded interested, but I’d seen the mean-girl trick in action before: sweet voice, eviscerating statement.

I sped up.

“If it makes you feel better, you’re a lot less fat than I expected.”

I tried to ignore her quiet laughter and the thickening in my throat. I didn’t care about baby mean girls, right? But no, apparently I did. The thought made me clench my fists in frustration.

I didn’t look up again until I made it to my locker.

Stuck on the front were dozens of copies of the picture, the largest cut into a heart and smacked dead center. Around the edge pictures of middle school me formed a border of ugly. Some were from sleepovers with Jessie, pictures no one would have but her. It was like joining the popular crowd made her want to out-mean them all. Across the whole array, scrawled in red Sharpie, someone had written “#loser.” Then other people—the handwriting was different—had added on. Smaller scribbles proclaimed “#notgonnahappen,” “#lose-someweight,” “#freak,” “#pathetic,” and a bunch more things.

I couldn’t read the others because I was tearing the pictures off one by one, slowly, so the people watching—cell phones out to capture the moment—wouldn’t think I was losing it, eyes squeezed extra tight to try to keep from crying.





chapter six


KYLE

WEDNESDAY, 7:54 A.M.

I was gonna be late for first-period Physics. And if you handed in homework more than five minutes after the bell, Ms. Casey docked you an entire letter grade.

I whipped into the first parking space I could find, grabbed my backpack off the front seat, pulled my phone out of my pocket, and typed out a quick flit.

Feels weird to be going back to school after everything that happened yesterday. Wish me luck!

It was kinda dumb, but apparently that didn’t matter. Last night, after spending maybe an hour in my room debating what to say, I’d finally just flitted:

Wow. Um, hi everybody (?)

It got 3,297 reflits in the first five minutes. Seriously. Already I could feel my phone rattling against my hip bone. I grinned. It was hard to wrap my head around the idea that people cared what I had to say. Maybe I was more interesting than I thought.

It was only when I was closing in on the main entrance that I registered the cars taking up all the visitor spaces. They were all news vans.

It was probably about homecoming. Local news ran that story every year. I could see the principal, Dr. Rheim (we just called her Ream), standing near the doors. She was craning her long, narrow neck back and forth like she was taking a head count. Maybe waiting for someone to throw on the mascot costume?

I walked up the lawn so I wouldn’t have to weave through the cameramen bunched on the sidewalk. There were at least two, plus a couple other people hovering around whose jobs I couldn’t figure out.

Ream sprang into action first.

“Kyle, come here, please.” She gestured me over with one of her claw hands. Her back was even stiffer than usual. Was I blocking her shot or something? I started toward her, but it was already too late.