Platinum
Authors: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Contents
To Laurie,
who taught me all
about survival
of the fittest
acknowledgments
Writing a sequel is definitely an interesting experience. For this one, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone who read
Golden
and wanted to read more—friends, family, and readers, thank you so much for asking that all-important question: “What’s next?” Special thanks go out to some of my earliest readers, Anne Marie and Maddy Pace.
I’m also especially grateful to the people I’ve been blessed to work with for the past two years. Many thanks go out to Trish Parcell Watts for designing all of my beautiful covers; Noreen Marchisi, publicist extraordinaire; Web designer Allie Costas; and Holly Fredericks and Dave Barbour, for being behind the project from the start.
Most of all, thank you to the three people who I just can’t seem to thank enough, no matter how many acknowledgments I write: my editor, Krista Marino, for loving
Golden
, asking for a sequel, and knowing exactly how to help me make it the best it could possibly be; my agent, Elizabeth Harding, for believing in
Golden
from day one and for being the best champion any of my novels could hope for; and my mother/first reader/biggest fan, Marsha Barnes—the Gilmore Girls don’t have a thing on the two of us.
1
Me
If you want to be popular,
it’s not nearly as important that you know who you are
as it is that everyone else does.
“Lilah Covington
Is the hottest chick alive
And she’s mine. Hell yeah.”
Mrs. Mason looked somewhat scandalized by Brock’s poem, but honestly, if you assign your junior/senior English class the task of writing haikus, knowing full well that half the class is so drenched in testosterone that they can’t see straight, you’re pretty much asking for trouble. Quite frankly, she was lucky Brock had kept it PG.
Mrs. Mason cleared her throat. “Thank you, Brock,” she said. “That was certainly interesting.”
Funny, I thought. I was the subject of the poem, and even though I’d rewarded Brock with a coy and promising smile for his efforts, I wouldn’t have called the result “interesting.” A poet my boyfriend was not.
“Would anyone else like to share their haiku?”
Three football players raised their hands, and Mrs. Mason’s eye started twitching. Unless she wanted a repeat of The Disturbingly Explicit Haiku Incident of 2005 (don’t ask), she’d need to avoid calling on them. Honestly, the entire English department really should have given up on the idea of an annual poetry unit. What was the point in having us write haikus four years in a row?
“Actually,” Mrs. Mason said, her eye still twitching as some of the boys started snickering at the genius of their haikus, “let’s try something a little bit different.”
She picked up a piece of chalk and scribbled two words on the chalkboard.
I AM…
“I want you all to take fifteen minutes and write as many sentences as you can that start with these two words,” she said. “These sentences will be the basis of your next poem.”
The assignment wasn’t exactly revolutionary, but at least she’d had the foresight to skip the annual assignment on limericks.
Following Mrs. M’s directions, I lazily scribbled the prompt on the top of my page.
I am…
Let’s see, I thought, tapping my pen on the edge of my lips, who am I?
A mishmash of answers flooded my brain.
I was Lilah Covington.
I was the most popular girl in the junior class.
I was craving milk and cookies.
I was a child born to an unwed teen mother.
I was the only thing standing between this school and Fuchsia Reynolds’s reign of terror.
I was secretly addicted to
Boy Meets World
reruns.
And, according to Brock’s haiku (which was either mildly endearing or borderline offensive, depending on how well you knew Brock and whether or not you had feminist leanings), I was the hottest chick alive.
Needless to say, I didn’t think any of those answers were what Mrs. Mason was looking for.
Without looking at the page, I started doodling as the list of things I had no intention of writing down grew in my mind.
I was a person who lived by my own rules, but never, ever broke them.
I was shorter than I wanted to be.
I was smarter than I let on.
I was in control.
And I was slowly but surely losing my mind.
The moment the thought occurred to me, I drifted into the exact kind of nonsensical daydream that currently had me questioning my own sanity.
Three girls holding hands. Fresh dirt on an open grave. Pink. Purple. Blue.
“All right, time’s up!” Mrs. Mason’s voice brought me back to the real world. “Let’s see what you all ended up with.”
I looked down at my page, expecting to see nothing except doodles, but a single sentence stared back at me.
I AM BRIANNA
.
“Weird.”
2
Secrets
If you tell more than one person, it’s not a secret.
If I guess it before you tell me, it’s not a secret.
If you lie to me about it, it’s not a secret.
If you tell me because you think it will make me
like you better, it’s definitely not a secret.
And if it’s not a secret,
you can’t possibly expect me to keep it.
“So if you had to choose between babysitting for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and babysitting for Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, what would you choose?”
Fuchsia and I considered the options Tracy had offered us with a great deal of solemnity.
“Brangelina,” Fuchsia said. “Brad is so much hotter than Tom. And way less weird.”
I was slightly more practical. “TomKat. They only have one child under the age of ten.”
Since the boys were in their weekly lunchtime football meeting, Tracy, Fuchsia, and I were left to entertain ourselves, and we’d fallen back on an old standard. The three of us held the record for the longest-standing game of “What Would You Choose?” We’d been playing since my initiation into the group, halfway through the sixth grade.
“I’ve got one,” I said. “If you had to choose between having one huge boob and one small one…” I grinned wickedly. “…or having three of relatively medium size, what would you choose?”
Tracy squealed in horror. Fuchsia looked down at her own chest, as if it might offer up some kind of guidance.
I was totally the queen of “What Would You Choose?”
Ultimately, Fuchsia, an expert at bra stuffing, opted for the two of mismatched size, and Tracy, ever the follower, agreed a split second later.
“Hi, Lilah!”
I turned toward that too-perky voice and immediately identified its owner as someone who unquestionably sat on the other side of the cafeteria.
“Hi,” I said. Nothing more, nothing less.
The girl, who was obviously nervous, spoke again, her voice even more cheerful this time. “I just heard about that poem that Brock wrote you today. It’s just like so…” She sighed. “Romantic.”
Romantic? Seriously? I tried to determine whether she was sucking up or serious, and couldn’t decide which one was worse.
Beside me, Fuchsia’s eyes narrowed into slits. The only thing she hated more than Nons daring to defile the Golden side of the cafeteria was being reminded that I had a boyfriend and she didn’t.
“So if you had to choose,” Fuchsia said, her voice light, playful, and completely soulless, “between being caught dead wearing those shoes”—she flicked her eyes toward the girl’s feet—“or being stuck with a nose as completely horrendous as that one for the rest of your life…” Fuchsia zeroed in on the girl’s face and smirked. “Which one would you choose?”
“Ewwwww!” Tracy shrieked, making the girl blush crimson. “Neither.”
“Tracy, you know the rules. You have to pick one or the other, no matter how disgusting the options.” Fuchsia smirked again, and the scene in front of me blurred, until I saw Fuchsia the way she’d looked in the first grade, when she’d informed me that I couldn’t sit at her table at the Father’s Day picnic because I didn’t have a daddy.
“I do so have a daddy. I just don’t know who he is.”
I don’t know how long I zoned out for, or how many times the words I’d once spoken played over and over again in my head, but the next thing I knew, Fuchsia was calling my name, and the girl she’d laid the verbal smack-down on was gone.
“Lilah?”
I blinked hard, pushing the words out of my mind and forcing myself to see Fuchsia as she was today, not the way she’d been when we were six and I was the town scandal.
“Yeah?” I said.
“You never answered.”
I had to choose one. Those were the rules. I was the one who’d made them up, back when I’d introduced the others to the game, and I never broke my own rules—not in life, and not in “What Would You Choose?”
“The shoes,” I said. I didn’t elaborate. We’d been having fun, and Fuchsia had ruined it. What else was new?
“Sooooooo,” Tracy said, drawing out the word. “Guess what I heard.”
Fuchsia arched her eyebrows and leaned back in her seat. “Do I care?” she asked. She couldn’t take her frustration out on me, so she turned it on Tracy, who winced visibly.
For someone who’d been friends with Fuchsia since before she could walk, Tracy was surprisingly bad at dealing with her, which, more often than not, left me doing damage control on her behalf.
“Fine, Fuchsia,” Tracy huffed. “If you don’t want to know, I won’t tell you.”
Fuchsia looked down at her nails. “Touchy, touchy,” she teased, a smile in her voice, as if she hadn’t just gone off on a girl for daring to remind her that she wasn’t
numero uno
and hadn’t been since freshman year.
I gave Fuchsia a look, but didn’t say anything on the off chance that Tracy might actually fight back, preferably by mentioning Fuchsia’s escapades at Parker’s party the weekend before. No such luck. Tracy couldn’t quite handle Fuchsia on a good day, and given the fact that she was still in mourning over her recent breakup, these weren’t exactly the best of Tracy times. As soon as it became apparent that she wasn’t going to stand up for herself, I resigned myself to doing it for her. After all, friends help friends survive other friends.