How to Be Popular (9 page)

“Popular?” Jason repeated, like it was French or something. “POPULAR?”

But before he had a chance to say anything else, Mrs. Lee came out of the guest room, looking pained.

“Stephanie,” she said. “Do you think you could come in here and convince your sister to take off her dress? She seems to want to keep it on until the wedding.”

“Sure,” I said. And I handed Jason his cummerbund. “Talk to you later, Jase.”

“Yeah,” he said, taking it from me. His expression, I saw, was a mixture of confusion and…well, there’s no other word for it: hurt. “Whatever.”

Except that what did
he
have to feel hurt about?
He
wasn’t the one Lauren Moffat and her heinous cronies hadn’t let pee for two days during Girl Scout camp.
He
wasn’t the one all the girls ganged up on at once during
dodgeball and pummeled with those stupid red balls. No one in our town ever said, “Don’t pull a Jason,” or, “You’re such a Jason.” Did they?

No. They did not. It was all well and good for Jason to say it like that—“POPULAR?”—but he didn’t know, did he? He didn’t know what it was like. He was a freak by CHOICE. He didn’t HAVE to be a freak, with that body and those parents and this house. He could have been as popular as Mark Finley, if he’d wanted to.

He just didn’t want to.

Something I would never, ever, in a million years, understand.

STILL D
-
DAY
MONDAY
,
AUGUST
28, 7
P
.
M
.

The talent auction was definitely on. And, so as to get the school year off to a financially advantageous start, it was on for Thursday night. I know because I got an e-mail from Mark Finley telling me so.

Yes. I, Stephanie Landry, got an e-mail from Mark Finley.

I have no idea how he got my e-mail address. But I guess if you’re Mark Finley, Bloomville High quarterback, senior class president, and paramour of Lauren Moffat, you can get anybody’s e-mail address you want.

I about died when I checked my e-mail account on the family computer, and there it was—Mark Finley’s name—in my inbox.

It wasn’t exactly a love letter, or anything. It was just a very factual, businesslike note to let me know he’d
reserved the gymnasium—which seats more people than the auditorium—for the purpose of holding the talent auction, at seven
P
.
M
. Thursday night.

But it was still an e-mail from Mark Finley. My first e-mail from a popular person. Ever.

But apparently not destined to be my last, either. Because Mark’s wasn’t the only e-mail I got. Quite a few people wanted to volunteer their services for the talent auction. I had offers as varied as baby-sitting services to stump removal to an accordion concert in your home.

I had no idea the students of Bloomville High were so talented.

Then I noticed some e-mails that looked…well, not quite right. That’s because their subject lines said Usuck and Ih8U. Plus, they all came from someone whose user-name was SteffMustDie.

Nice. They couldn’t even spell my name right.

I knew what these were. I even had a pretty good idea who they were from.

But that didn’t make it any easier. It didn’t make me feel any less sick when I clicked on them. Because I
had
to click on them, of course, even if just to delete them.

WHY DON
’
T YOU GIVE UP AND STICK TO YOUR LOZER FRIENDS
,
FREAK
, one not-so-friendly missive asked, not necessarily grammatically correctly.

STOP SUCKING UP
,
BROWN NOSE
, she advised me, in the next.

And, yeah, okay. It hurt. They made my chest feel tight, those e-mails. Like I couldn’t breathe. Who could
hate me that much to want to make me feel that bad? Especially when I hadn’t done anything to anybody—well, except spy on my next door neighbor and sprinkle sugar in Lauren Moffat’s hair.

But she didn’t know that was me. And she was the one who’d started it, with the Don’t Pull a Steph stuff.

I’ve seen movies where girls got sent mean e-mails from their peers. In the movies, the girls always freaked out and started crying and printed out the messages and ran to tell their mothers, who then complained to the principal of their school, who then made it his mission in life to find out who was behind those messages.

In the movies, the principal always finds out and suspends the perpetrators, who, by the movie’s end, apologize to the victim. And then they all become friends after they realize it was really just a big misunderstanding…usually after some pretty teacher the screenwriter based on herself intervenes and teaches them all to be More Empathetic.

Can I just say that in real life, this never happens? The people who send the mean e-mails always get away with it, and the victims just have to suck it up and go around wondering for the rest of their lives who could possibly hate them that much—always suspecting, but never knowing for sure. Always wondering if they had done or said something just a little differently, if the person would hate them less…but never knowing, since they have no idea what it was they did to make the person hate them in the first place.

Well, unless they’re me. Then they have a pretty good idea what they did.

They just don’t know why something that happened so long ago—and was a total accident, besides—has to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

I didn’t start crying. And I didn’t run for my mother, either. Instead, I just hit
DELETE
.

Because seriously. Who cares? I’ve had worse things said to my face. I wasn’t exactly going to freak out because someone who didn’t even have the guts to use her real screen name was upset with me.

Besides, The Book had fully warned that anytime you try to effect social change, there will be those who will feel threatened and/or insecure, and will attempt to stop you, either by intimidation or ostracism.

These people, The Book said, were to be ignored. There was simply no other way to deal with them, as their fear of change of the social order is completely irrational.

So what else could I do? Except delete. Delete. Delete.

Then I had an e-mail from Becca.

My mom refuses to let us set up Instant Messaging accounts, as she considers them cerebral black holes that
suck out your brain and leave you spending hours basically doing nothing (she feels the same way about MTV, which is why it’s password protected).

So I had to e-mail Becca back and just hope she was online and would write back soon.

She was online. A minute later, I got the following:

I stared at the screen. I had to read her message like ten times, but still, I didn’t understand it. Or, rather, I understood it…but I figured it couldn’t mean what I thought it meant.

While I waited for Becca to write back, I listened to Robbie argue with my dad, who was making lasagna for dinner. Robbie hates lasagna—and all red food, actually—on principle and wanted chicken instead.

A VIBE? What was she TALKING about? What kind of vibe could JASON have been giving off? Except his usual, I’m-starving-and-I’m-going-to-eat-everything-in-sight vibe. Unless it was a why-is-Becca-acting-so-weird vibe that she was misconstruing as a Becca-is-hot vibe.

In the kitchen, Robbie was losing the lasagna battle. He was going to have to fall back on his standard, “Fine, then I’ll just have peanut butter and jelly” argument.

Oh my God. What a mess.

Because of course there was NO WAY Jason LIKE liked Becca. Even if he hadn’t just come out and complained
about her to me barely two hours ago, there’s the fact that…well, the entire time I’d known Jason—even as far back as nursery school—he had never liked anyone he had an actual chance of attaining. It had always been Xena Warrior Princess, or Lara Croft, or Stuckey’s mom, or Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. He had never liked a girl in any of our classes…

…as I knew only too well, given our fight in the fifth grade.

No, Jason wasn’t likely to have fallen for Becca. But how to tell her that, without hurting her feelings?

I tried.

Becca wrote back almost right away.

The One?
Oh, God, this was worse than I’d thought.

But Becca had an answer for this one, too.

YES! I wanted to write. THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I THINK.

But that would have been too mean. Even though it was true.

Instead, I wrote:

I knew Becca would appreciate this analogy, having grown up on a farm and all.

Becca, though, totally missed the warning part of my e-mail and honed right in on the part where I said I’d ask Jason if he liked her.

I was guessing that no one was going to bid on Becca. Except maybe her mom. But I tried to be enthusiastic about it just the same, and thanked her.

It was as I was signing off that my mom came home from the store, aggravated, as usual, by how slow business had been.

“How much did we make on this day last year, Stephanie?” she asked me as she hung her purse and car
keys on the hooks just inside the driveway door.

“Oh, Mom,” I said with a groan, acting like I thought she was being a drag. But really, of course, I knew when I told her, she’d just get even more upset.

I was right. She made me look it up in my special Excel file for that purpose, and we were sixty dollars down from last year.

“But sixty dollars isn’t that much,” I tried to point out to her. “That might have nothing to do with Super Sav-Mart. It could just be, you know, we didn’t sell a doll today, or whatever.”

“God,” my mother said, ignoring me. “I need a drink.”

“Maybe you should think about installing that café like we talked about,” I hinted. “Now that the Hoosier Sweet Shoppe closed down—’’

“Closed down!” Mom interrupted, pulling down her not-so-secret stash of Tootsie Rolls from a top bookshelf (she doesn’t care if I know about them, since I’d never gorge myself on them, being too fearful of going up another size, unlike my brothers and sisters) and helping herself to a handful. “They were driven out of business by Super Sav-Mart!”

Um, not exactly. The Hoosier Sweet Shoppe shut down last year after an ancient water pipe burst in the ceiling, destroying all of their stock. But you don’t argue with a woman as hormonal as my mom.

“It wouldn’t be hard to break through the wall to the Hoosier Sweet Shoppe,” I said, “since it’s right next door—”

“And where am I supposed to get the money for that, Stephanie?” Mom wanted to know. Then, before I could say anything, she said, “And DO NOT say from Grandpa. I will not kowtow to that man, trying to get his money. Unlike the rest of the people in this town, I have some dignity.”

Talk about touchy.

I wanted to tell her not to worry—that everything was going to be fine. Because I had a plan that was going to bring tons of business to the store.

But I didn’t want to jinx it. So I kept my mouth shut and went over to make Robbie a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so he’d shut up already about not wanting to eat Dad’s lasagna.