28
The first thing I became aware of was a sharp pain in my forehead. For a second, I wondered if my run-in with Sara and her baseball bat had been real. I peeled my face from the sticky surface it had congealed to and rubbed the stinging spot on my head. A tiny blue crystal came off on my fingertip.
I’d fallen asleep at my craft table. Not just fallen asleep—face-planted into a crystal and passed out cold.
I groaned as I massaged the dented spot on my head and the night before came rushing back. Before I could grab for my phone to see if anyone had acknowledged me, my bedroom door opened slightly. Nick’s eye appeared in the crack.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
“Well, in one night, I became the laughingstock of Monroe County, made more enemies than I have in my entire life, and almost gave myself a lobotomy with a bead. So yeah, I’m stellar.”
Nick leaned against the door frame with his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. “Charlie says she’s making you cookies today.”
“Aw, she’s the best.”
His face instantly went all moony. “Yeah, she is.” He caught himself and stood up straighter. “She knows what you’re going through.”
I rubbed my eyes, finally starting to wake up a little. “I guess at this point it can’t get much worse, right?” I reached for where I’d left my phone the night before, but my hand came in contact with an empty table. I leaned down to see if it had fallen on the floor. Not there either.
“Where’s my phone?” I stood up to look around and noticed an empty space where my computer had been too. “What happened to my—” I whipped around to face my brother. “What’s going on?”
Nick ducked out of my room, trying and failing to shut the door before I started chasing him. I threw it open and reached his door right before he could close it, hurling all my weight against it and yelling that I’d shave off his eyebrows in his sleep if he didn’t give my stuff back. The door gave way and Nick leaped over his bed, half laughing and half hovering behind it like it wasn’t the least effective barricade on the planet. “Trust me,” he said, “you don’t want to look at the internet right now. I’m doing you a favor.”
I charged at him. He tried to roll over his bed, but I dove on top of him and shoved his face into the comforter so that only one eye stared up at me. “Tell me what’s going on right now or I send Charlie my video of you cleaning our bathroom in your underwear and singing with your headphones on.”
“No!” He stuck his tongue out and tried to lick my hand. I relocated my grip to his forehead and pushed harder.
“Dream on,” I sang in my best screechy falsetto, imitating Nick in the video I’d shot on the sly a couple months ago. He’d threatened my life if I ever posted it anywhere, but at this point, nothing he did could be much worse than what had already happened to me. “Dream on, aaaahhhahaha!”
“Okay!” He pushed himself up like Gulliver breaking away from Lilliputian restraints, and I rolled backward off the bed and onto the floor. When I looked up, Nick was peering over the edge and holding out his hand to help me up. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He rubbed the side of his face as he headed to his closet. “Shit, I think some of Kendall’s spaz rubbed off on you. You are freakishly strong.” He pulled my laptop from beneath a pile of crap on his closet floor and opened it. When he turned it toward me, the Busted-turned-Bitch website lit up the screen.
I didn’t reach for it. “Oh God. What now?”
Nick proffered the computer. “Do you want to know or not?”
I took it from him, and the way my stomach lurched made me grateful I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet.
At first glance, nothing seemed different. The bitch headline still came screaming out of the old Busted one, and the video of the promposal still showcased the same god-awful thumbnail.
And then I scrolled a little further.
The blood drained from my face. A photo from last year’s bonfire stared back at me. The picture had been taken from Kevin’s deck, looking down into the backyard. Kevin and two of his friends stood in front of the fire with their arms around each other’s shoulders, beers held high in their free hands. But off to the side sat two people unaware that their picture was being taken. Jordan had his arm wrapped around my shoulder and my hand rested on his knee. We were looking at each other, lost in our own little world. The caption below read Marisa gets cozy with the boyfriend of another client.
“What? This picture is old! Where did she even get it?”
My mind raced. Could Jordan have done this? Was this the reason he’d gone to Kendall’s house? It didn’t make any sense. Why would he implicate himself as part of Kendall’s disgusting need for revenge?
I scrolled down again to read the testimonial that went along with the picture.
I wanted to make sure my boyfriend was only into me, so I asked Marisa for help. All she needed to do was catch him with another girl, and instead she was the one in his face all the time. She may have proved my boyfriend doesn’t deserve me, but she did it by being as big a slut as he is.
My throat constricted. In his face all the time were the exact words Sara had used in her original email to me. Kendall might’ve seen it before I changed the password, but how could she possibly have known who’d written it? Not only that, if Kendall and Jordan were friends—or friends with benefits—why would she let Sara call him out this way?
The misery didn’t stop there. Beneath Sara’s lovely little blurb, Kendall had added another photo. Jordan and me at our lockers, talking. My back faced the camera and Jordan’s eyes were trained on my face. My green shirt, black flats, and TJ’s black belt around my waist told me it was the day Jordan had asked me to the bonfire.
Apparently, Sara Cat had done a little spy work of her own.
I looked at Nick. “I don’t even know what to say anymore.”
“Say the word and I’ll make Pace a eunuch.”
“He didn’t get me into this mess. I did. I did this all by my own stupid self.” I stared at the screen again, watching the word Bitch blare into view over and over.
I’d made some seriously dumb decisions in my life, but the dumbest was letting Kendall Keene back into it.