You Should See Me in a Crown(24)
“Thanks, Melly, but you haven’t even tried it yet.” I shake my head.
“Notthecake!” She smiles and lowers her voice. Her light brown hair is shaved close to her scalp, and from up close it looks cute and fuzzy, like a tennis ball. “Yourunningforpromcourt. Peoplelikeusnevermakeitpastthefirstweek.”
People like us. And that feels sort of good in a way that surprises me. She’s right. High school is complicated, and the lines of demarcation that The Breakfast Club said divided us aren’t quite so clean-cut. The athletes are also the smart kids; the theater kids are also the presidents of the student council. But there’s still those outliers. The people who are everywhere but fit nowhere. People who are involved but not envied—present but imperfect—so the scrutiny pushes them out of the race. People like me, like G and Britt and Stone. And apparently people like Melly.
When lunch is almost over, I don’t even need the freshmen to count the money out for me as I look over at my classmates’ trays still covered in leftovers. I’m vibrating with an eagerness I haven’t felt in forever. There’s one clear winner, and for the first time in a long time, that winner is me.
You’d think that moving up five spots in the rankings would be cause for celebration, but we’re sitting in the Marinos’ basement and no one is celebrating. It would be kind of hard to, given Gabi’s relentless pacing and furious clicking through of her revised presentation.
“I was confident that you would move up more after the bake sale. I was absolutely sure of it,” she says, underlining her previous projection of making an eight-spot jump instead of just five with her trusty laser pointer. “This simply isn’t acceptable. I blame that absolute abomination of a poster hanging in the Commons.”
I tug at the collar of the off-white wrap shirt I’m wearing. It’s an upgrade from the cardigans, for sure, but I wish I were back in my favorite vintage Fleetwood Mac tour T-shirt instead. I don’t feel like myself right now, but I’m willing to make sacrifices for Pennington. If I’m serious about winning prom queen, I have to look the part. So I will, even if the part means I look more like a member of the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills than I do a normal, Midwestern seventeen-year-old girl.
“In all fairness, G, it only took her two-and-a-half seconds to come up with that slogan.” I shrug. “We should be grateful for the gift that is her sheer lack of creativity and complete inability to put a remarkable twist on the English language.”
Britt points the pen she’s been using to draw on her bare knee in my direction. “Ten points for Gryffindor!”
I laugh and lean forward on my elbows. “But seriously, Britt’s parents have the new posters finished, and we’ll put them up tomorrow. That should get us a little more traction.”
“We need more than just a little traction, my darling and dearest best friend. We need a massive jump, and we need it now.” She taps her chin and gets the look she always gets before a big exam. Like she knows the answer but is almost hesitant to write it down just in case she’s wrong. “We need to play Rachel’s game bigger and better than her. We need posters twice her size. Buttons circulating through the entire student body, including the PomBots and their male counterparts.
“We need a full overhaul of your public appearance, Lizzie.” She pauses for a second. “I’m talking full face of makeup before school, new hair—”
“Hear me out on this.” Britt throws her hands in the air. “Maybe, just maybe, Rachel’s posters and makeup aren’t the things that have her in the lead. Has anyone considered that? Maybe it’s something more insidious than that? Like the fact that this is a system designed to benefit people like Rachel Collins?”
Stone is at her acupuncturist, so it’s just the three of us tonight. I’m hoping that for once no one will need to defuse a fight between Britt and Gabi, but it seems unlikely based on the way Britt’s knee bounces up and down.
“Why won’t everyone just leave the strategy to me? There is no one who wants to see Liz get to Pennington more than I do, okay?” Gabi crosses her arms. “While we’re talking about strategy, I don’t like how chummy that Mack has been with you lately. It’s not good for your image.”
“What do you mean?” I sit up straighter. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Yeah, she seems cool,” Britt says, reaching for the Doritos and chomping down. “You remember Billie, that junior from JV? She’s in class with her, and apparently her dad does marketing for the company that makes our uniforms, or something? He’s scoring us some free merch.” She talks through the chip in her mouth. “So she’s good in my book.”
For whatever reason, I’m glad that Britt likes Mack too. Britt is usually a pretty good judge of character, and if she’s endorsing her, then maybe my gut has been correct.
Gabi pinches the bridge of her nose in frustration. I feel like that expression is her permanent condition these days—a cross between exasperation and constipation. Or both.
“But the rumors about her? Have you two not been reading my evening briefing emails?”
My smile fades immediately, and I feel like maybe I’ve been caught doing something I had no business doing, despite the fact that I haven’t actually done anything at all. I wouldn’t call us friends exactly, but every time I see Mack now there’s something familiar about it. Every time we so much as pass each other in the hallway, her smile is bright and open, like we really know each other. And part of me feels like I do.