The Cinderella Society (4 page)

The cool relief felt like heaven on my scorched skin. Sarah Jane and I stood there for several minutes, resoaking the paper towels in cold water when they got warm, as an awkward silence engulfed us.

In all my years of wishing for backup, I’d never let myself imagine it could come in the form of someone like Sarah Jane Peterson. I beat back the needy hopes that I might be teetering on the brink of cheer acceptance.

After many rounds of cold paper towels, I pulled the neck of my T-shirt open and peered down. My bra was a total loss, and my chest was beet red, but no blisters.

Kyra poked her head in the doorway. “Everything okay in here?”

“It’s just us.” Sarah Jane motioned her inside. “She’s got it on.”

“Thank God. What was Lexy trying to prove?” Kyra turned to me. “Did she see the pin?”

“What?”

Sarah Jane flicked the hem of my shirt. “Did Lexy see this?”

“No clue. Does it matter?”

“Yes,” they said in unison.

I tossed the paper towels in the trash as Kyra turned to Sarah Jane with wide eyes and dire news I didn’t understand. “They left in
three
SUVs.”

“What do they need with three? And what were they doing here, anyway? This isn’t part of their tradition.” Sarah Jane shook her head. “We need to get out of here.”

“Already in progress.” Kyra looked back at me. “Are you ready?”

For what?
So far my little escapade was a mystery wrapped in disaster paper. With a skin-on-fire bow. I had no desire to play Nancy Drew.

“I think I’ll head home,” I said, easing toward the door. “Thanks for the towels, Sarah Jane.”

“Not so fast,
chica.”
Kyra wedged herself between me and the door. “Don’t you want to know what that was all about?”

“It was about me ‘stealing’ her spot.” I resisted the urge to make air quotes. For all I knew, Sarah Jane and Kyra agreed with her.

Or not. They looked surprised by that revelation, so I clarified. “I made the team—she’s an alternate.” Was any of this ringing a bell?

“That’s just a cover, Jess.” Sarah Jane dried her hands. “We’ll explain it at Overnight.”

“Overnight where?” All I wanted to do was crawl into my own bed and pull the covers over my head until I was twenty-five. “I’ve got plans tonight,” I lied.

“I know you do,” Sarah Jane said with a smile. “With us.”

*   *   *

They tucked me into the backseat of Sarah Jane’s red convertible. On the way to my house, Kyra filled me in on
the Overnight hostess, a former MSH cheerleader named Cassandra who’d just finished her freshman year cheering for Georgia. I acted like I was totally cool with being whisked away to sleepover heaven, but inside?

I was freaking.

A life spent being new on the block meant that by the time I got to be good enough friends with people to do group overnights, moving day was bound to be in the works. At sixteen, I was embarrassingly naïve about the whole deal.

What did you pack? What did you wear to sleep in? My comfort choice of cutoff sweats and ratty tees was so not making the trip. Did you bring munchies?

And then it hit me. These were not my biggest concerns. This wasn’t Kyra and Sarah Jane’s party—it was Cassandra’s. Which meant—hello?—
Cassandra
should be issuing the invite to an outsider.

Would they turn me away if Sarah Jane and Kyra were vouching for me? How much of their social status would be ever-so-briefly extended to me? I’d never been this close to a party of their caliber to know for sure, but given the day’s events so far, this was not the time to take another risk.

Not eager to add Sleepover Crasher to my long list of vile, Lexy-inspired nicknames, I tried to head off another fiasco. “So, will everyone be there?” I asked when the conversation up front hit a lull. Maybe I’d blend in okay if it was a cheer-team thing.

I thought of the rumor.
Or maybe not
.

Kyra turned down the music. “Everyone who?”

“The whole team?”

“The cheer team? A few people. Not everyone.”

I took a deep breath. Better to get my concerns out in the open than descend on a surprised and potentially unthrilled
Cassandra. “Shouldn’t I really be invited by Cassandra?”

Sarah Jane glanced up at me in the rearview mirror. “Have you met Cass?”

“No.”

“Then how would she know to invite you?”

How could my distress be completely lost on both of them? “I don’t want to crash the plans,” I said, hoping for casual but delivering more on the side of lame and self-conscious.

“It’s no big, Jess,” Kyra said. “It’s kind of a tradition, not a formal party or anything.”

“More like a standing invitation,” Sarah Jane added. “I’m not even sure who-all’s gonna be there. We never know until we get there.”

That’s how it is with the in crowd. If they hear about a party, they just assume they can hang. Not so for the rest of the world. Most of us have to be outright invited or we run the risk of ridicule and banishment.

When Sarah Jane turned off the engine in front of my house and they started unbuckling their seat belts, I panicked.

“Be right back,” I said, bolting out of the car. I didn’t have a packing plan yet, didn’t want them to see my room in hurricane mode, and definitely didn’t want them to meet Mom in her current hormonal state. My life was ridiculous enough all on its own.

I nearly ran over Mom when I blew through the door. “Got invited to a sleepover,” I called, taking the stairs two at a time. “I’m just grabbing my stuff.”

I yanked my cheer duffel off the back of my closet door, tossed my ruined tee and bra in the trash, then remembered the pin and snagged it. I threw on my pink
CHEER CHICK
tank and surveyed the heap of clothing on my bed. In the time it took Mom to waddle up the stairs to grill me, I’d already
thrown in shorts, yoga pants, and a couple of tees, and was pulling out whatever I had clean in my underwear drawer.

“Were you planning to ask?” Mom eased herself down onto my bed, huffing after hauling forty extra pounds of baby stomach up the stairs. “Whose house are you going to?” she asked between gasps for air. “Will her parents be home?”

“Sorry. Can I go? It’s one of the girls who used to cheer here,” I said, not liking the direction this was going. “Two of the other cheerleaders invited me to a sleepover they always have at her house.”

I ran across the hall and stuffed my skin-care and makeup bin—what Dad calls my tackle box—into the bag and hoped I could make her see reason. For a woman who’d pretty much let me fend for myself since I was twelve, she’d turned into Super Mom of the Billion Questions since we’d moved to Georgia. Quitting her job as a big-shot auditor to stay home with the twins once they were born left her with a void she filled by grilling people for a living. Lucky me.

Mom sat perched on the edge of my bed, breathing hard and contemplating my story. Finally, she came to her senses. “It’s a cheerleading sleepover?”

“I’m not sure who-all will be there, but Sarah Jane said some of them will. She’s our cocaptain,” I added for good measure. Captains were responsible, right? That had to help my case.

Mom nodded, somehow comforted by the idea of me spending the night with complete strangers whose parents may or may not be home as long as it was sports-related. Whatever.

“We need to get started on the nursery mural,” she reminded me. “You’ll be home in time to help in the morning?”

I stiffened a little. She’d never considered quitting her job
for me, but for the twins? It was a whole new ball game. If the Parker household was the solar system, the twins were about to become our sun.

“Promise,” I said. “I’ll have my cell if you need me.” I gave her a quick hug—extra gentle around the middle—and darted for the stairs before she could change her mind.

*   *   *

Until a few years ago, Mt. Sterling was your average small town, tucked away between Atlanta’s outer suburbs and the North Georgia Mountains. A quiet, friendly place filled with nice people like my grandma (that’s Nan) and stores like her funky New Age gift shop. Then some fancy companies moved their big-kahuna offices to town, and it totally went upscale.

Cassandra’s subdivision? Definitely Big Kahunaville.

I trailed Sarah Jane and Kyra up the front walk of Cassandra’s McMansion and waited quietly, trying to look unobtrusive. Kyra pressed the doorbell, chattering comfortably the whole time. When the door opened and squeals of delight were exchanged, I changed my strategy from unobtrusive to blend-in-with-the-brickwork. But Sarah Jane was having none of that. She pulled me inside the gorgeous marble foyer and made formal intros.

“Cass, this is Jess Parker. She’s new on the team this year. Her team in Seattle was top ten at nationals.”

“The one who put Lexy out on her butt,” Cassandra said, raising her eyebrows. “Your reputation precedes you.”

After having spent time with Kyra and Sarah Jane, you’d think I’d have been used to being around beautiful people. But Cassandra made them look almost average. Thick, glossy hair the color of milk chocolate and a megawatt smile made her look like a walking advertisement for, well, anything you’d want to sell. Especially to the male population.

“I guess that’s me,” I said, unable to think of a snappy comeback to lighten the mood. “Sorry for crashing your party.”

“Don’t sweat it. SJ told me you were coming.” Cassandra smiled. “And I think someone putting Lexy in her place is long overdue. Everyone needs a knock off their pedestal to keep them humble.”

I was so relieved she wasn’t mad about the Lexy thing—or the crashing thing—that I almost didn’t register the voice behind me.

“Don’t get your panties in a wad, Cass,” said the hunky voice of my dreams. “I just forgot my iPod.”

“Off-limits, Ry! You know the score. You forget something after seven, you go without until tomorrow,” Cassandra yelled as Ryan jogged past us and up the curving staircase. Cassandra turned back to us, shaking her head. “Guys. They think rules only apply when it’s convenient.”

Three things went through my mind in rapid succession. One, Ryan Steele was here in this house, which meant … two, Cassandra was his sister, which also meant (please,
no)
 … three, Cassandra was Lexy’s sister too. If I’d been wondering about ulterior motives, a public face-off between Lexy and me on Lexy’s home turf was about as juicy as any gossip I could think of. Apparently, I wasn’t crashing the party after all.

I was the entertainment.

The doorbell rang again, and I stepped aside to witness another squeal-fest while my mind drummed up ways to make a quick escape without letting on that I’d figured out the game. Mental wheels spinning at hyper speed, I turned to pick up my bag, and rammed right into a now-familiar chest.

I rubbed my nose and snuck a glance at Ryan’s face.
Just in time to see the corner of his mouth tugging up in a half grin.

“Is this going to be our thing?” He lost the battle to keep from smiling. “Running into each other everywhere?”

God, I hoped so. “I didn’t hear you come back down the stairs.”

“Not hard to believe with all the screaming.”

He gave me a wink and moved toward the door before turning back. “Don’t let Cass make you do anything you don’t want to do. She’s a devil underneath that squeaky-clean exterior.”

“Ryan! Don’t scare the guests.” Cassandra swatted him out the door. “You’re gonna make her run before we even get to check her out.”

“Check me out?”

“Get to know you,” Cassandra said smoothly, steering me away from the front door-slash-escape route. “Come on in, Jess. I promise we’re harmless.”

I must have hesitated a second too long, because Cassandra draped an arm around me. “Lexy’s not here,” she said in a low voice, while Kyra and Sarah Jane greeted two other girls I recognized from school. “She has her own plans, so it’s just us tonight.”

I wasn’t buying it. Since when had I ever been an
us?

“Look, I don’t blame you for being suspicious,” she said. “You’re here for a reason, but I guarantee you it’s not what you think. Do you have your pin?”

I patted my shorts pocket.

“That’s your ticket for the evening, and Lexy definitely doesn’t have one. Trust me, okay?”

I looked up at her in her all-American glory, and for some inexplicable reason, I trusted her. That had to mean
something. The pin felt warm in my pocket, like it was trying to send me a message.
Believe
, it seemed to say.

To which I responded:
I am the person here; you are a piece of metal. Hush it
.

But I couldn’t shake Cass’s soothing mojo. She was drawing me in. Despite Ryan’s warning and my suspicion that I might still be the evening’s entertainment, I swallowed hard and let optimism reign supreme.

“Onward,” I said. The time had come to meet my fate.

Chapter 3

CASSANDRA LED ME BACK
into the open, airy kitchen—a modern wonder roughly the size of my whole house—where girls were sipping delicious-looking shakes. That sounded awesome, since I’d been too nervous to eat before I went to The Grind. Except now I was a bundle of new nerves, and harfing up a smoothie in front of the hostess was probably frowned upon.

As we walked around the large island with its gleaming countertop, I noticed the two girls on blender duty adding dashes from all kinds of pretty bottles. I couldn’t see the labels, but hard liquor was an easy bet. Which stunk, since I wasn’t a big drinker. Or any kind of drinker, for that matter. Yet here I was, finally on the fringe of social acceptance, and
whammo
. The liquor dilemma.

I didn’t get a chance to think of a graceful way to decline, because Sarah Jane, Kyra, and a girl named Paige immediately joined us with frosty glasses that smelled like a divine mix of bananas and chocolate.

Cassandra lifted her glass in a toast to the four of us. “To a successful summer.”

“To a successful summer,” we repeated, clinking glasses.

Everyone else took a long drink of the frozen wonder.

I hesitated.

Cassandra watched me over her glass. “You don’t want it?”