Project Paper Doll Read online

Jenna nodded, her head moving a fraction of an inch, but I could hear her breathing getting choked, the way it did every time she called me after watching The Notebook.

  “If you cry in front of everyone, they win. Get it?”

  “But why do they want to—” Her breath caught on a barely repressed sob.

  “Doesn’t matter. Let’s just go.” An unfamiliar pressure was building inside me. I was not going to let Rachel win this one.

  With my hand on her arm, I pulled Jenna toward the bathroom, and thankfully, people moved out of our way.

  “Oh my God, Jenna what happened to your locker?” Rachel asked as we passed by.

  Jenna stiffened.

  “Ignore her,” I whispered.

  Rachel sighed loudly.

  A glance over my shoulder showed Rachel starting to follow us with an annoyed look. Yeah, being forced to walk somewhere to torture someone is such a hassle.

  Before I could think it through, I shoved Jenna ahead of me toward the bathroom and moved to block Rachel’s path.

  My heart was pounding so hard it made my whole body shake. “You are going to go away now,” I said quietly; but in the sudden silence surrounding us, I suspected that almost everyone heard me, even Zane in the distance. Evidently, he’d decided it would be worth it to watch the show.

  Rachel laughed. “Excuse me, who are you again?”

  I ignored her. “All of you,” I said, directing my gaze toward Rachel’s crowd—the twins and a bunch of Zane’s buddies—a few feet behind her.

  She faced off with me, the pointed tips of her stilettos (who wears shoes like that on the first day of school but Rachel Jacobs) almost touching my battered imitation Chucks.

  “I think you need to mind your own business,” she said.

  Rachel was pretty. She was taller than me with long black shiny hair that looked expensive and high maintenance. She didn’t resemble her grandfather at all except in the expression on her face. Hard eyes, mouth smiling but not really. It screamed, You are nothing, and I can do whatever I want.

  Suddenly I was little and stuck in that lab again with no way out, and Dr. Jacobs was telling me that it was fine if I didn’t want to cooperate. As long as I didn’t mind being alone in the dark for a few days. After all, he couldn’t pay his team to be here if I was going to waste their time.

  Overhead, the lights flickered, and I couldn’t stop it. Worse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Echoing pops sounded as the lightbulbs exploded, and glass rained down.

  People started screaming and running, Jenna’s misery forgotten in their desire to protect themselves. One of Rachel’s devotees, Trey, I think his name was, rushed up to pull Rachel under his arm and hustle her away.

  Ah yes, I was striking terror in the hearts of humans everywhere. My planet-invading parents would have been so proud.

  My Earth-based father? Way, way less so.

  “I MEAN, WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?” Rachel said with a loud huff.

  Twelve hours later and she was still bitching about the thing with Ariane Tucker and Jenna Mayborne this morning.

  I shook my head. As usual, when Rachel didn’t get what she wanted, she had to make life miserable for everyone.

  I was stretched out on two wooden benches on Rachel’s enormous back deck, my eyes closed and my feet hanging off the end—one of the many disadvantages of life at six foot four. But it wasn’t uncomfortable enough for me to move yet. I held a cold beer, my third, on my stomach. Condensation rolled down the bottle past my fingers to create a damp and chilly place on my shirt.

  A few feet away, Rachel and the twins, her nearest and dearest cronies, moaned about Ariane over the slosh and splash of the hot tub.

  “Rachel, she’s only been in our class for forever.” Cami Andrews punctuated her disbelief with a slap of water. “She moved here from, like, Ohio. Her mom died and she came to live with her dad.” She paused. “And she was really sick a long time ago or something, but she got better.” I could hear the frown in her voice as she tried to remember the details.

  Cassi seemed to be humming “The Star-Spangled Banner” under her breath, for no apparent reason.

  “I know who she is,” Rachel said, sounding further irritated. “I’ve heard her name before. It’s just like, suddenly she comes out of nowhere and she’s, what, Miss Morally Righteous, Defender of the Annoying? What business is it of hers, anyway?”

  In theory, it had been none of Ariane’s business at all, which made it all the more awesome. Not that I could say that aloud.

  But the truth was, most people wouldn’t stand up against Rachel even if she was torturing them directly. And quiet, sit-in-the-back-of-class Ariane had come to Jenna’s defense, shocking the hell out of me and everyone else. The good timing of the unexpected special effects—apparently a transformer had blown a couple blocks away, which made the lights pop—hadn’t hurt either, adding a whole Carrie-esque feel to the moment.

  Ariane hadn’t flinched, even with Rachel in full-confrontation mode and breathing fire. I never knew she had it in her—an unhesitating lack of fear. I admired the hell out of that.

  “She’s in my gym class,” Cassi offered in her breathy voice. She and Cami had seemingly formed a pact early in life that Cami would be the smart one, relatively speaking, and Cassi would be the pretty one. This despite the fact that they were identical twins. Regardless, they each played their role to the hilt. “But she never participates,” she added, sounding confused. “She sits on the bleachers. Or on the grass. But only when we’re, you know, outside.”

  See what I mean?

  “She was in my Advanced Comp class. I think,” Cami said.

  “What are we talking about?” Trey had evidently abandoned Matty and Jonas in the pool. His feet made splatting sounds on the deck as he approached.

  “That girl,” Rachel said, with a pout in her voice.

  Oh God, not this again. I could predict how this was going to go. Rachel would be all needy and “love me, love me,” Trey would swoop in and try to save the day, and then Rachel would find some way to bitch-slap him back to the last century. That’s the trouble with having the same friends your whole life—you know what they’re going to do before they do it. Various people on the fringes of our circle flowed in and out, depending on Rachel’s mood, but at the core, it was always Trey and me and Rachel and the twins. Since that first day of kindergarten, when Rachel had picked our table to sit at and scored us all an extra cookie at snack time by telling us to hide the first ones we’d gotten.

  “Babe, you’re not still upset about her, are you?” A louder splash and a shriek from either Cami or Cassi meant Trey had joined them in the tub.

  And here we go…

  I opened my eyes and squinted in their direction long enough to see Trey slipping his arm over Rachel’s shoulders. I’d give that about three minutes.

  “I’ve never even seen that girl before,” he said, baffled. “She must be new, right?”

  Dude. Trey. I sighed. He never saw anyone but Rachel. Especially not someone like Ariane Tucker, who looked as if she practiced being invisible. To be fair, I’d never paid much attention to her either, until last year when I sat behind her in Algebra II. Then, I don’t know…no matter what my old man says, his eye for detail must have rubbed off on me. Something about Ariane was off in some vague, indefinable way. No one would probably describe her as pretty, but there was something about her that drew me in. Maybe attractive was a better word, in that I couldn’t define what caught my eye, but it was impossible to look away once I noticed her. Most people didn’t seem to notice her at all, which seemed more than fine with her. Another oddity.

  I’d gathered pieces of the puzzle that was Ariane Tucker here and there—like how she always did her homework in ink. INK. Who does their math with a pen?—but never enough for them to add up to anything.

  Today’s events only gave me more mismatched details to work with, building my interest.

  “Something you want to add, Zane?” Rach
el’s voice cut through the too-hot August air, bringing a chill with it.

  “She always missed two questions.” I wasn’t sure why I spoke up. I knew better than to engage in Rachel’s games. Blame it on the beer buzz or exhaustion from surviving the summer with my dad constantly on my case. I’d thought life would be better with Quinn—my perfect older brother—staying at college this summer to work. Less opportunity for direct comparison, and therefore less falling short on my part. But if anything, my dad was worse than ever.

  I’d been living for the start of school until Rachel had to go and make things complicated this morning with her “joke.” I was so tired of all this “we’re better than everyone else” bullshit. I couldn’t believe I’d once found it funny.

  “What did you say?” Rachel demanded.

  I stared up at the designer Japanese lanterns hanging above my head. “I sat behind Ariane in math last year. She always used pen, and she missed two questions on every test, quiz, assignment, everything.” She was so much shorter than me, it had been easy to see over her shoulder when Mr. Scaliari handed back our stuff. I’d started paying attention when I noticed the ink thing.

  “The same two questions?” Cami asked, frowning.

  “No, different ones every time, but always two,” I said. Which meant sometimes she got a 98 out of 100 and other times, when it was a three-question quiz, she completely failed.

  Also, she smelled like lemons, but the real kind, not the fake dishwashing-soap stuff. I was pretty sure her hair was lighter than she wanted people to think—the dark streaks were dyed. It was possible there was trouble at home—she’d had splinted fingers four times last year. And I thought she might have a tattoo. The collar of her shirt had slipped back one day on her thin shoulders, and I’d seen the edge of one of those big square bandages. The kind my mom had used on my knees for those massive skateboarding wipeouts in my earlier days. Then, once I’d noticed that and knew to look for it, I saw the faint outline of a rectangle underneath her shirt in the same place every day. It couldn’t have been an injury, not for that long. My next best guess was a tattoo, one she was ashamed of. It happened—an exercise in poor drunken judgment, usually on spring break. Marcos Pyter, one of the middies on our lacrosse team, put his exgirlfriend’s name on his arm after she was already his ex.

  But quiet, obedient, possibly abused Ariane Tucker with an embarrassing tat? I couldn’t make that fit. Then again, I couldn’t make today’s events square with what I knew of her either. And unlike Rachel, I was kind of fascinated.

  “Whatever,” Rachel said impatiently. “So she deliberately misses questions because she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s a brain or something. Who cares?”

  A girl who took on Rachel Jacobs in front of a crowd didn’t strike me as the type to worry about people thinking she was too smart.

  “The point is, she shouldn’t have gotten involved,” Rachel continued. “It had nothing to do with her.”

  Trey rubbed her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, babe, does it? It’s over. Mayborne got the message.”

  I groaned and shut my eyes, bored already with the inevitable fallout. Trey was a good guy, but he seemed doomed to repeat the same Rachel-related lessons over and over again.

  “Trey! No!” she said. “She humiliated me in front of everyone. I can’t let that go.”

  I could have pointed out that Ariane had been far from humiliating anyone. She’d just stood up for Jenna and refused to knuckle under—which, in Rachel’s mind, was probably the equivalent of forcing her to lick someone’s shoes.

  Rachel didn’t handle disappointment well. She hadn’t had a lot of experience with it. Her parents were always gone, leaving extra money in her account and Rachel to her own devices most of the time. Her father traveled for GTX, and her mother was either with him or at a “spa” somewhere. Her grandfather, Dr. Jacobs, adored her. He showered her with expensive gifts—clothes, a car, vacations to any sunny island she wanted. (I’d once seen Rachel end one of these poolside kickbacks to take his call. He was always caught up at work, and I suspected she valued the rare moments of his attention more than anything he ever sent to the house in a big red bow; not that she’d admit it.)

  Despite (or maybe because of ) all of this, Rachel was extremely generous with those she deemed worthy. Trey, Cami, Cassi, and I had an open invitation to her house and everything that she owned, which was saying quite a bit. She treated us like family in place of her blood relatives.

  But she expected blood loyalty in return.

  The water sloshed loudly. “Jonas!” Rachel called in the direction of the pool. “Come here, I need you.”

  “Babe,” Trey protested. “I’m right here—”

  “Shut up. It’s not about that.” Rachel’s voice had taken on a greedy intensity that I knew all too well.

  I didn’t like where this was going. Jonas tended to act first and think later, if at all. In Cub Scouts, on an overnight camping trip in fourth grade, he’d been showing off his supposed knowledge of karate inside the tent and snapped the main plastic support pole, collapsing the tent around us. In the rain.

  I opened my eyes again.

  Jonas jogged over from the pool. “What’s up?” He raked a hand through his hair and flicked the water on Cassi to make her shriek.

  Rachel rested her chin on her folded arms at the edge of the hot tub. “I want you to ask that Ariane girl to Bonfire Week.”

  Oh, not good. Rachel was scheming, and that never ended well for anyone but her.

  Jonas’s face fell comically. “Are you kidding?”

  Rachel raised her eyebrows in response.

  Jonas stepped back, shaking his head. “Oh, come on, Rachel,” he pleaded. “I’m this close to sealing the deal with Lainey Pryce.”

  “Lainey Pryce will sleep with anyone,” Cami said with distaste.

  “Not since she went to church camp in June and became a born-again virgin.” Jonas grinned. “Challenge accepted.”

  Yeah, these were my friends.

  “So sleep with this one instead.” Rachel waved a hand dismissively. “You want a challenge, she barely talks to anyone.”

  “Because she’s a freak. I have a reputation, you know.” But I could hear him wavering, tempted by the idea of trying his superpowers of seduction against Ariane. Jonas was all about the challenge and not so much dealing with the aftermath.

  I sat up. “I’ll do it.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. What the hell was I saying? I didn’t need this kind of trouble. I had more than enough already.

  “What?”

  I wasn’t even sure who’d asked the question: Rachel, Trey, Cami, Cassi, and Jonas were all staring at me.

  I shrugged. “I said I’ll do it. I’ll ask her to Bonfire Week.”

  Jonas exhaled loudly in relief. “Thanks, dude. You saved my life.” He turned and headed back to the pool, shouting at Matty about a cannonball contest.

  “You hate Bonfire Week,” Trey said.

  “I doubt Ariane’s much of a fan either.” I had trouble picturing her face painted in the school colors. “So we’ll have that in common.”

  Rachel narrowed her eyes at me. “Why?”

  “Why, what?” I stalled for time, knowing what was coming.

  “Why are you suddenly Mr. Social when it comes to Ariane Tucker?”

  “Rachel,” Trey muttered in careful warning.

  “No, for the last year he’s been basically ignoring us. I think we have a right to know what has triggered his sudden return.”

  And there it was…

  Rachel would bring that up. I already lived with the pitying looks and the whispers, though they’d faded somewhat over the last few months finally. Was it necessary to keep reminding everyone what had happened?

  “You want someone to ask her out,” I said. “And I’ve spoken to her a few times.” A slight exaggeration. Unless you count learning that 2.333333 was not the answer to number 10 in the homework. And she’d ba
rely glanced in my direction during that exchange. Still, I couldn’t stand the thought of Rachel siccing someone else on her. What Ariane had done today took a lot of guts. She didn’t deserve to be demolished by whatever Rachel had planned, and Jonas wouldn’t give a damn. But I could try to stop it from getting out of hand.

  I was tired of these games Rachel played, but it was too late to strike out on my own. I only had two years left here. It wasn’t worth the effort. Not to mention, being friends with a member of the illustrious Jacobs family was pretty much the only thing I’d managed not to screw up, in my father’s opinion.

  Rachel cocked her head to one side, giving me a considering look. Then she stood up in the hot tub and stepped out. The ends of her dark hair were wet, and goose bumps covered the skin that was not covered by her red bikini.

  I braced myself, expecting her to begin firing off questions, her suspicions aroused.

  But instead she leaned down, smelling of chlorine and that heavy musky perfume she favored, and said, “Welcome back, Zaney.” Then she brushed her mouth over mine, which shocked the hell out of me.

  She strolled off toward the house, leaving me to deal with Trey, who was glaring at me like he wanted to set me on fire.

  Great.

  That was Rachel for you—always looking for the two-for-one when it came to causing chaos.

  MY FATHER WAITED until my second bite of breakfast on Wednesday (four scrambled eggs for my higher protein needs) for the ambush.

  He slid a newspaper across the table. “Were you planning on telling me about this?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.

  The edge in his voice took me aback, as did the faint smell of alcohol on his breath. It wasn’t really morning for him, as he’d yet to go to bed, but still. I hadn’t seen him drink—at all—since the first few months of my life Outside, when he was mourning the loss of his daughter. I’d only been living with him for a couple weeks when he received word that she’d died. Back then, I would slip out of my room—which I wasn’t supposed to do—and find him in the living room drinking scotch and staring at photos of his Ariane, which he normally kept hidden in the basement. He had not expected her to recover; I’d known that much when he’d given me her name. But that knowledge had not helped him in any way. If anything, it had only made his grief worse. He’d gone through a period where he always had a bottle in hand. But that was a long time ago.