Populazzi (34 page)

"I don't do the shadows. No one would believe it if I tried. They also wouldn't believe
you
as me."

"That's not true. People can change their opinions of people pretty easily. I've seen it happen. If you and I both act like we've switched places, everyone else will follow."

Trista shook her head. "I can't
teach
you to be me."

"Really? You taught me to be me. You had all kinds of rules for how to be part of your group: what I could say, what I could do, what I could wear ... It makes me think you'd have a set of rules for yourself, too. Things you do that keep you in charge."

Trista fixed me with a flat-eyed glare, but I didn't care. I stared right back. I gave her nothing.

She sat on the couch and I knew I had her.

"So either I go with this ... or you tell everyone what you saw."

"Exactly."

She called Riley onto her lap and thought about it as she scratched his chest.

"Fine," she said. "It's a deal."

It's amazing how time flies when you turn off your heart. The whole month of March seemed to zip by in a blur.
Little Shop of Horrors
went up that first week, but I played sick when the rest of the Populazzi went to see it. It was bad enough that Archer and Sue kissed and held hands in the halls all the time; watching them fall in love onstage would have made me ill.

March brought spring weather, which was unusual. I still needed a jacket to be comfortable outside, and with every breeze came a whiff of arctic chill, but it was nice enough for the Populazzi hangout to shift from The Heap back outside to the Oak. The first time I climbed into its branches, I couldn't help but peek at the windows of the main building and remember my first day, when I could only stare out, awed and intimidated.

I thought about my time with Nate, too—how I could always see the Oak from his rock. I'd never figured out exactly why he'd gone so crazy after we broke up. The madness hadn't lasted after I'd gotten together with Eddie. For all of Nate's outsider mystique, I guess not even he messed with the Populazzi.

But I was curious, so one day when we were all at the Oak after lunch, I climbed to a high branch and looked down at the rock. I could see Nate there, sitting and playing guitar like always, but now some other girl was perched by his side. It took me a minute to recognize her as Dinah, one of the Theater Geeks. It wasn't the distance that made her so hard to pick out, it was her look. I couldn't believe it—she had dyed her dirty-blond hair bright red and wore buckets of eyeliner and an outfit she could easily have retrieved from Mom and Karl's haul to Goodwill.

I wondered if Archer had told her
she
was gross. I doubted it.

I shook out my head of finally-returned-to-normal curls and shrugged. If Nate and Dinah made each other happy, more power to them.

As for myself, I wasn't looking for happiness. I was looking for results. To the casual observer, nothing in my life had changed after the winter formal. I was still Eddie's girlfriend; I still spent all my time with the Populazzi; I still went to The Hang after school and on weekends; Saturday night was still club night. It all looked exactly the same.

Only now I was Trista's protégée. Whenever we could, usually late at night, we slipped away from the other girls and the guys and into the basement of the main house so she could feed me her pearls of Supreme Populazzi wisdom.

"Become Supreme Populazzi with help
from
the Supreme Populazzi," Claudia had marveled when I'd told her the whole story. "It's Machiavellian. It's brilliant."

I said I'd wait to accept that label until the technique had actually worked, but I did feel good about the plan.

"No secrets," Trista reminded me during one of our sessions. "I always say that, and it's the most important thing you need to know."

"But
you
have secrets."

"Because I'm at the top ... for now. If you want to be at the top, you'll keep your secrets to yourself but know everyone else's," she said. "Gemma, Ree-Ree, and Kristie wouldn't dream of going against me because I have too much dirt on them."

"And because they're your friends."

Trista looked at me blankly. "What do you mean?"

"They wouldn't do anything against you because they're your friends."

"Whatever. People are selfish. Give them the chance and they'll take what they can get. Look at you." Trista didn't say it accusingly, just as a fact of life that confirmed her philosophy. "Always assume you're on your own and everyone else wants to bring you down. It's the only way to stay the best."

Another night, Trista and I were playing Wii Fit while we talked. I was working on the tree pose, but I kept losing my balance. "Look away or something," I told her. "I can't do it when I know you're staring at me."

"That's a problem. If you want to be really popular, you have to assume you're being scrutinized every second, because you probably are. You have to
thrive
under that pressure."

She executed a perfect tree pose.

During another session, Trista made us ice cream sundaes in the basement kitchenette.

"You know one word that'll help you be like me?" she asked.

In my head I started running down the alphabet:
Artificial, Bogus, Conniving, Devious...

"No idea," I said. "What word?"

"Magnet." She dropped a cherry on each of our dishes, then set them on the counter so we could dig in. "Everything about me is a magnet. Like the way I look. I look good, right?"

"Well, yeah. You're really pretty."

"I'm
beautiful.
I work at it. Beauty is a magnet. Not just to get guys either. Women are more impressed by beautiful women. It's a fact. Know how my mom got my dad?"

"She was beautiful?"

"She was beautiful. And she's going to lose him unless she gets beautiful again. He warns her about it every day."

"He does?"

Trista nodded. "She gained weight. She was a size two when they met. Now she's a ten. Know what he gave her for her birthday?"

I had no idea.

"Box of sexy lingerie," she said. "All size twos."

"Subtle message." I wasn't sure what had the bigger yuck factor: the message or the fact that Trista knew all about it.

"I thought it was pretty straightforward," she said, completely missing my sarcasm. "He's not attracted to her at this weight. She has fewer friends, too. I've seen their high school yearbook—she was
it.
Now she has maybe two good friends, tops."

She took a big bite of the sundae, and a question started nagging at me. "Trista," I asked, "are you going to throw up when we're done?"

Trista thought about it. "Probably not," she said. "Real bu-limics are like that: they disappear after every meal and get rid of it. That's not me. I only do it once or twice a week. Three times at the most. And it's only after a
binge,
not just a meal or a dessert."

"What's the difference?"

"Are you kidding? Okay, once when I was really stressed out, I took the car and hit McDonald's for a Big Mac, large fries, and shake, DQ for a dipped cone, and Dunkin's for a half-dozen donuts. Downed the cone and the fries in the car, the rest back here."

Ew.

"Exactly. Who wants all that in their body? I had to get rid of it. That one sucked, though—too much doughy stuff—almost impossible to get up. I didn't think I'd be able to do it, which was a complete nightmare. Can you imagine?"

"No," I replied honestly.

"Now I'm smarter. I choose things that come up easier. Soft-serve ice cream, giant bowls of cereal with milk, that kind of thing. And lots of fluid."

It was weird. She was talking about the intricacies of her bulimia like it was a hobby, not a disease.

"But ... it's really bad for you, isn't it? I mean, does it hurt?"

"Sometimes, but if you do it enough, it's harder to trip your gag reflex, which comes in
very
handy, if you know what mean.

I did know what she meant, but somehow juxtaposing it with vomiting made the whole thing highly unappealing.

"Maybe you should talk about this with your parents or something," I said. "Maybe they could help."

"Oh, yeah, that'd be great. I went crying to Mom after my first time. It was, like, ninth grade and I'd eaten a whole box of Frosted Flakes—no milk, I didn't know—and scratched the hell out of my throat to get it up. I was totally freaked and I told Mom, but she didn't say a word, just kept filing her nails. I finally begged her to say something, and she goes, 'What am I supposed to say? What kind of mother do you think it makes me if my daughter's a bulimic!'"

"Wow," I said. "Okay, so maybe not her, but—"

"People don't want to see your weaknesses, Cara. And you can't let them. Not if you want to be a magnet."

She looked at me as if to make sure I'd gotten the message, then went back to her sundae. "I like talking to you about this stuff, though. It's nice."

It
was
nice ... which was weird. Trista and I had been having so many late-night conversations and she'd opened up so much to me, I felt closer to her than I ever had before. Claudia was my reality check. She reminded me that the only reason Trista was being so honest and genuine was that I had dirt on her. If she could have, she'd have thrown me to the wolves in a heartbeat.

 

The magnet thing became Trista's favorite metaphor for popularity. She brought it up again toward the end of March, right before spring break.

"So I've been thinking about our transition of power," Trista said, lining up a tricky shot on the bumper pool table.

"What about it?"

She sank the shot and lined up another. "It won't be easy for people to buy it. I'm
so
magnetic that, no matter how magnetic we make you and no matter how much I try to sell it for you, I'm not sure it'll work."

"Are you going back on our deal?"

"Will you forget what you saw?"

I just looked at her.

"Exactly," she said, sinking another shot. "So I can't. But I had an idea: a big public way we could officially set you up as the new me."

"What's that?"

"The spring party." Trista put down the pool cue and plopped onto the couch. "Every year I throw a party after spring break. Everyone knows about it, but the actual invitation list is very selective. Big but selective. The party is epically CHIW—the kind of thing people talk about for months. If you really want to be me, this year
you
throw that party. I'll help, but we'll make sure everyone knows it's
yours.
Your magnet-tude will skyrocket."

I liked the idea a lot. I'd been wondering how we'd get everyone to see me as the new Supreme Populazzi, and this seemed like the perfect plan.

But the strategy had come from Trista, so I was suspicious.

"You really want to do this for me?" I asked.

"Of course not. But you know my secrets, so I need to keep you happy."

She was right. "Okay," I said. "Let's do it."

"Great. Where? Not your house. I've been to your house."

"What's wrong with my house?"

"It's fine ... for a house. But not for an epic party. And even if it were, would your parents get out of the way?"

No. My parents would never get out of the way for a party. They would in fact very much want to be
in
the way and policing every moment. Plus Trista was right: the house was nowhere near epic. I needed a spot like Trista's. Or Nate's.

Or my dad's.

I smiled. "I just might know the perfect place."

My dad and I had an interesting relationship. I had last seen him a year ago, and I had made him cry. We'd met on neutral territory: a Wendy's. He'd asked me to meet him at his house, but ever since I'd turned thirteen and he boycotted my bat mitzvah because I wouldn't let the Bar Wench get called up for an Aliyah, I had refused to set foot on his property.

I didn't hug my dad when I saw him last. I didn't even smile, which in my pre-Nate-training days was an effort for me. I simply sat across from him, perfectly straight-faced, dipping my fries in my Frosty and regaling him with every story I remembered from my childhood in which he'd let me down. All those times when I was three, four, five years old, totally in love with my daddy and waiting for him to pick me up for a scheduled visit. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Until he'd finally cancel.

I reminded him of my school plays in fourth and fifth grade. He'd come—but he'd been on the phone the whole time, bouncing in and out of the theater.

I reminded him of the times he
had
picked me up for our father-daughter visits only to run up to his computer the minute we got to his house, leaving me with the Bar Wench, who expected me to help her take care of her whiny sons.

I showed absolutely no emotion as I dragged him through the muck of Memory Lane, and I made him cry. I loved that I made him cry. It made me feel accomplished, powerful, and strong. It made me feel
right.

Given that our last
two
annual visits had played out that way and given my vow never to set foot in his house, it was more than a touch hypocritical of me to try to have a party there. Then again, it fit perfectly with my new philosophy to keep my emotions at bay and do whatever was necessary to get what I wanted.

I described Dad's house to Trista. She thought it sounded perfect, but of course she knew I had to lay some groundwork before I asked to throw a party there. She suggested I use the two-week spring break to reconnect with him, then pop the party thing on him afterward. She also recommended I show her Dad's house so she could see if it was "magnetic" enough. I was pretty sure it was, but Trista's taste was dead-on, so I agreed. I called him at his office to make an appointment.

"Leonard Engineering," his secretary answered.

"Um, hi. Is Lenny there?" I asked.

Yes, my dad's name really is Leonard Leonard. I long suspected that this was the actual source of all his problems, and he might have been a far better husband, father, and person if his parents hadn't been so cruel.