Backlash (15 page)

I’ve been chatting with Lara as this Christian DeWitt guy for a few weeks now, and it’s getting kind of weird because Lara is flirting with me. I mean
really
flirting. It’s a side of her I’ve never seen before. I’m like,
Who IS this person?
This isn’t the Lara I knew. This definitely isn’t the Lara you see in school.

Okay, so I’ll admit I started flirting with her first. I mean,
Christian
did.
I
would never flirt with another girl. It’s not like I’m gay or anything. I guess that’s why this all feels so weird.

But like I said, it’s not
me
who’s really flirting with her. It’s Christian, or, as Lara’s started calling him,
sweetie
(barf),
honey
(puke), and
babe
(awkward).

Sometimes it creeps me out so much to be flirting with her that I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing it. I wonder if I should shut down his profile and the Gmail account without saying good-bye. Just disappearing Christian DeWitt from the face of the Internet. A few clicks here, a few clicks there, and His Royal Hotness Mr. DeWitt is virtual toast.

But then Lara walks past me at school with Ashley Trapasso, the two of them in their little cheerleading outfits with matching purple-and-gold hair ribbons, and Lara ignores me like she’s better than me all of a sudden.

That’s when I realize I have to continue, and I laugh to myself as she passes, because I know that the guy she’s seriously started crushing on is just make-believe. That actually, that guy is
me
, her old BFF Breanna Connors. How do you like
that
, Lara, sweetie, honey,
babe
?

I think it was because I was getting bored of flirting with Lara that I decided to let Marci in on the secret. Until then, my alter ego as Christian DeWitt was a secret between Gmail, Facebook, and me. But Marci was over one night around the time Christian would normally be chatting with Lara, and I was getting tired of having to keep thinking of nice things to say to the girl. I decided that Marci might be a source of useful inspiration.

At first I was really nervous about how Marci would react. I was worried she would think I was some kind of freak for doing this to Lara. Turns out she thought it was hilarious.

“Wait — Christian DeWitt is
you
?” she said.

“Yeah. Well, actually, he’s this Abercrombie model,” I told her, bringing up the model’s website. “But the ‘guy’ Lara is crushing on? That’s me.”

Just then, I noticed that Lara had come online.

“Check it out. She’s online,” I said. “Want to flirt with her?”

Marci giggled. “Oooooh yeah! Flirting is my specialty!”

She was speaking the truth. It’s one of the reasons I hang out with her. I keep hoping her flirting skills will rub off, and I’ll be able to interact with guys without coming off as a total dork. I mean, I’m great at flirting from behind a computer screen when I’m pretending to be Christian, but put me in front of a real boy and I get tongue-tied.

I started off the conversation, asking Lara how her day went. She went on and on with all her boring cheerleading stuff: how she’d mastered some new tumble and she was going to be second from the top of the pyramid. Like some guy would actually care about any of that. If there were an Olympics for Boring, Lara would be the all-time gold medalist.

Marci was cracking up. “You’d think she’d never talked to a guy before,” she said. “Let me have a turn!”

Marci doesn’t know about Lara and me and how we used to be best friends, and about Lara’s problems in middle school. She doesn’t know what I know: that Christian probably
is
the first guy who has ever shown interest in Lara. And he’s not even real.

“Sure,” I said, letting her sit in the chair.

“I know!” Marci said. “Why don’t we pretend Christian’s got a big dance coming up at his school and have him hint that he’s going to invite Lara?”

“Why didn’t I think of that?!” I said. “I’ve been getting so bored of flirting with her. At least this will give us something else to talk about so I don’t have to keep lying and telling her she’s cute and pretty.”

“Lara’s kind of cute,” Marci said. “I mean, she’s not a total dog.”

For some reason this annoyed me. She didn’t know Lara when she was Lardo. I was the one who was friends with that girl. I was the one who had to listen to Lardosaurus cry and complain.

“Well, she’s not my type,” I said, trying to cover up my annoyance with a joke. “Anyway, let’s look on the East River High website and see if they have an actual dance coming up, just in case Lara thinks to check.”

We were in luck. The weekend before Thanksgiving there’s the East River High homecoming parade, football game, and dance. That gave us plenty of time to string Lara along with the hopes of a fake date.

So do you have any big plans the weekend before Thanksgiving? Marci (as Christian) asked Lara.

Not really. I think we march in the homecoming parade. The cheerleaders, I mean.

You don’t have a dance?

Well, there’s a dance, but I doubt I’ll go
.

Why not?

Oh, you know. Not my scene.

So … if we had a dance at East River, that wouldn’t be your scene?

Marci and I laughed as we watched the cursor blink, picturing Lara completely freaking in front of her computer as she tried to figure out how to respond. It took her long enough.

I guess that would depend … on who I was there with.

So, hypothetically, if you were there with someone like … me?

“I wish I could see her face right now,” I said. “I bet she’s peeing herself.”

“I know, right?” Marci said. “Come on, Lara, tell your boyfriend what he wants to hear!”

“I’m not her boyfriend
yet
,” I said. “Don’t rush things.”

“You’re not her
boy
friend at all!” Marci said.

She had a point. But
I’m
the real Christian. He’s
my
creation. I wanted to be the one in control, the one setting the pace.

If it were … hypothetically someone like you, then it would definitely be more of my scene. : )

“Look! She went smiley face on him!” Marci said.

“DON’T ASK HER YET!” I said frantically. “Tell her you’ve got to go.”

Marci looked at me like I’d flipped.

“Why? We were just starting to have fun.”

“It’s more fun to string her along,” I said. “That’s what Christian would do if he were a real guy, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Marci sighed as she typed, Talk soon, gotta go.

I could just imagine Lara’s disappointment as Christian logged off so abruptly after teasing her with the idea of the dance.

A few years ago, my phone would have been ringing right away, and we’d have dissected every sentence of the chat for meaning. But that’s the beauty of this whole thing. I know exactly how Lara thinks.

Two days later, I tell Marci she has to come with me to the media center during our open period because I’ve got something to show her.

“This better be worth it,” she says. “Because Taylor Goodhew is in the student center, and no offense, but he’s a lot cuter than you are.”

Marci’s one of my best friends, but when she’s pursuing a hot guy, she’ll dump Jenny and me in a heartbeat. That’s just the way she is. It’s annoying, but you learn to live with it because she’s fun to hang out with the rest of the time.

“You’ll have time to go to the student center afterward,” I tell her. “Trust me, you want to see this.”

I find a free computer that isn’t close to other students and go to Wanelo. I know Lara’s screen name from back when we were friends. And I show Marci the “Cute dresses for the Dance” list she’s set up.

“Oh. My. God,” Marci says so loudly I have to tell her to shush before the librarian does. She lowers her voice. “The girl is, like,
totally delusional
. She’s making lists of dresses to go to a dance with a guy that
doesn’t even exist
!”

“I know! Isn’t it hysterical?” I tell her. “And look at the dresses!”

“This one just screams loser,” Marci says.

“What about this one?” I say. “It’s like she wants to be Ariel from
The Little Mermaid
but
in tenth grade
.”

We go through the entire list, shredding all of Lara’s choices. Marci’s having so much fun dissing Lara, she spends the whole open period with me and doesn’t even care that she missed going to the student center to hang out with “way cuter” Taylor Goodhew.

N
OT A-FREAKING-GAIN.
I am
so sick
of this! Every time I need the computer to do homework, Lara’s on it. I thought since she made varsity cheerleading she’d be out of the house more and getting a life.

To be fair, she
is
out of the house more at practice and stuff, but the problem is when she comes home, she’s glued to the computer. And judging from how she’s all smiley and smug, I’m betting you anything she’s
not
doing homework all the time she’s on it, even though whenever I say I need to get on she swears she is.

Type, type, type.

Plink!

That’s Facebook chat. She
so
isn’t doing homework, the giggling, lying dork.

That’s it. It’s
my turn
.

“Lara, I need the computer
now
.
I’ve
got homework to do. You’re just messing around.”

“I’m
not
,” she says. “I’m chatting to someone
about
my homework.”

Seriously, I can’t understand why God doesn’t just strike her down with a lightning bolt. It’s
so obvious
she’s telling great big whopping lies.

“I’ll give you twenty minutes, and then I’m calling Mom,” I say, furious that, as usual, I’m the one who ends up giving in and letting Lara get her way.

Being the younger sister stinks. Especially when your older sister has “issues,” and everyone expects you to tiptoe around her in case she loses it again.

Especially when she’s completely fine now. But everyone got so used to her
not
being fine that my parents still treat her like a piece of fragile porcelain.

Me? I’m their beef jerky kid. As far as Mom and Dad are concerned, I’m a nonperishable item, tough as old boot leather.

I’m going to ask for my own laptop for my birthday. I don’t care what the stupid police chief says. And if my parents say no, I’m just going to save up the money my grandparents give me for birthdays and Christmas and whatever until I can afford to buy one for myself. Then I can do my homework whenever I want to, instead of having to work around my faking-it fragile sister.

I have to get away from Lara and her annoying giggling, but I don’t want to go all the way upstairs. I want her to know I’m hovering in wait. So I go out on the patio to text Cara and Maddie.

The sun is sinking behind the trees, and I see the silhouette of the old tree fort, the one my dad made with Mr. Connors, where Lara and Bree used to spend so much time together before they stopped hanging out.

I spot movement in the shadows beneath the tree, a faint rustle of the dried leaves piled around its base. And then I see a person climbing up the wooden rungs nailed to the trunk.
Liam.

These days we smile at each other on the bus and when we see each other in the halls, but since our families stopped hanging out, we don’t see each other as much as we used to. I suddenly find myself wondering why. It’s not like
we
ever had a problem with each other. I guess we were used to our friendship just happening. Or maybe he got embarrassed about hanging around with a girl because his friends were teasing him. I swear, the minute I started wearing a bra, some of the guys at school started acting all weird.

I glance inside. Lara’s still on the computer. She’s still got eighteen minutes, according to the time on my cell, so I figure, what the heck? I walk over to the bottom of the big old oak, hoping I don’t scare Liam with the sound of my feet crunching through the leaves.