Project Paper Doll Read online

I ignored the shouting behind me; it couldn’t be for me. The only person who might shout for me was Jenna, and this was a guy’s voice.

  “Ariane!”

  I froze, then looked over my shoulder to see Zane Bradshaw barreling toward me, everyone scattering out of his way, frightened villagers running from a fairy-tale giant.

  I turned away quickly, my face burning. Having one of the most popular guys in school shouting your name in a crowded hallway was only slightly less noticeable than, say, taking out a billboard next to the interstate with your picture on it. And the words “LOOK AT ME.”

  God, I hoped Jenna hadn’t heard him. I winced at the thought. What did Zane Bradshaw want with me anyway? It couldn’t be anything good.

  I resisted the urge to squeeze myself into an open locker and, instead, resumed walking, moving as quickly as I could without encouraging more stares. Maybe if I got far enough away he’d give up and forget about me. Today was not the day for this. In fact, never would be the day for this, as far as I was concerned.

  But oh no, I couldn’t get that lucky.

  Within a few seconds he’d caught up with me, looming over me like a tall annoying tree. His legs were so much longer than mine, he’d covered the same distance in half the time.

  Stupid tree legs.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said, breathless at my side, as if he’d run up the stairs and down the hall to find me. His handsome face was flushed, he hadn’t shaved, and there were big dark circles under his eyes. I could smell soap on him, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower, and his dark hair was damp.

  Something was definitely up. He was almost vibrating with a sense of urgency, and I got the feeling of impending doom hanging in the air. Then again, generally speaking, I wouldn’t ever have a good feeling about Zane Bradshaw tracking me down to “talk.” That was so far from the norm, the world might as well have turned upside down.

  “What do you want?” I asked, my voice tight, barely above a whisper. I could feel people watching him, and therefore me.

  He held his hands up as if declaring he was weapon-free. “Just to talk, that’s all,” he said in what felt like an excruciatingly loud voice. Then he seemed to realize how many people were watching. “In private,” he added.

  I stared at him. What he could possibly want to talk about? We had no classes together this year, and obviously we didn’t run in the same social circles. Because I was allergic to bitch. Not that Rachel Jacobs would have had me as a friend even if I’d wanted her to, but I liked to remember that it was my choice, too.

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught more people turning in our direction, curious about who Zane Bradshaw wanted to talk (loudly) to.

  Great. So much for staying invisible. Still, there was a simple solution.

  “No,” I said flatly, and turned away.

  My father always said never offer a choice if there’s only one right answer.

  I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYONE so resistant to the idea of a simple conversation. The girl who had gone toe-to-toe with Rachel looked as if she’d rather crawl across a bed of nails than talk to me. And that was before she darted away down a side hall.

  Damn it.

  I took off after her. “Ariane…wait.”

  She didn’t slow or stop, just kept moving at a pace that I could barely keep up with, which was saying something, considering how short she is. This close to her, I realized the top of her head—with all her strange hair pulled up and sort of contained—wouldn’t even reach my shoulder.

  Jesus. She was miniature. Okay, probably not, but it seemed like it when there was almost a foot-and-a-half difference in our heights.

  The realization sparked a surprising wave of disgust for whoever had caused all her broken fingers last year. I didn’t believe anyone was that clumsy naturally.

  It occurred to me, belatedly, that she might be afraid of me. After all, she didn’t really know me. Not any more than I knew her. And I was big and she was small—I knew how that dynamic could work.

  I slowed a step, giving her room to breathe. “Hey, I just need a minute,” I called to her.

  “Go away. Please,” she said, so quietly I barely heard her over the chaos of last-minute phone calls, lockers slamming, and some announcement over the loudspeaker that no one was paying any attention to. The warning bell was going to ring soon, and we were running out of hallway. If she was planning on taking the back stairs to make a getaway, I was out of luck. I wouldn’t have time to chase her down, explain what was going on, and get upstairs again in time for class.

  I swallowed a surge of frustration. I hadn’t had to work this hard to get a girl to talk to me since eighth grade, when I was still just “Quinn Bradshaw’s little brother.” “Look,” I said, “if you’ll hear me out, I think—”

  Ariane spun around to face me, and her heavy backpack, loose on one shoulder, swung with the motion. I was surprised the weight of it didn’t pull her over backward. “I realize someone saying no to you is probably a new experience,” she said, her voice quiet but sharp, “so let me help you with it. It’s the opposite of yes. It means I don’t want to talk to you for a minute, thirty seconds, or any other standard or nonstandard measure of time. Got it?”

  I gaped at her. She wasn’t afraid; she was angry. At me. And the injustice of that stung deeply, especially after the morning I’d had. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know what my life was like. “What is your problem?” I demanded. “I haven’t done anything to—”

  “No, you’re right.” She smiled without humor. “You didn’t do anything.”

  Her tone and the accusation in her gaze made it clear she was referring to the incident with Jenna.

  I sighed. “That was…not my idea. And it’s complicated.”

  “I’m sure it is, Zane,” she said blandly, leaving no doubt that she believed it was anything but. “Good luck with that.” She walked away.

  “It’s about yesterday,” I called after her, a last-ditch attempt. She had to know that Rachel wasn’t going to let that go, right? She had to be expecting some kind of retribution.

  She went perfectly still, and a freshman with his nose buried in an unreasonably thick binder nearly knocked into her.

  “What about yesterday?” she asked warily.

  I caught up to her in a couple of steps. “Come on.” I tipped my head toward a closed classroom door. It obviously wasn’t in use this hour; otherwise it would have been open. That meant it was probably locked as well. But standing in front of it would get us out of the flow of traffic.

  “Don’t.” Ariane preemptively shifted away from me as if I was going to try to drag her.

  Holy shit. Someone had done a number on her.

  I held my hands up. “Wasn’t going to.”

  “Sorry.” She looked around, weighing her options, and then followed me over to the door, moving as if every step cost her. “I can’t be late to class. What do you want?”

  “I need your help.”

  She looked up at me, surprised, and met my gaze directly for the first time. “What?”

  Contact lenses, I realized. She was wearing contacts. I could see the edges of them around the unnaturally dark blue of her irises. Which probably meant that her eyes weren’t blue at all, but some darker color, altered by the tinted lenses.

  Weird. I frowned.

  The vanity of colored contacts did not jibe with what I knew of her. She didn’t seem like Rachel or the twins, obsessed with clothes and expensive haircuts and makeup. She wore jeans and T-shirts mostly, and her hair was always in that half-controlled messy ponytail/bun thing. Once again, she seemed less a whole person and more a conglomeration of parts that didn’t make sense.

  Ariane glanced away abruptly, pink rising in her pale cheeks.

  I’d been staring. And now it was my turn to apologize. “Sorry.” I hesitated, not sure how to approach all of this. “It’s Rachel.”

  She stiffened.

  I hurried to explain. “What you did yesterd
ay, Rachel’s got it into her head that you were deliberately trying to humiliate her and—”

  “It’s your job as a henchman to warn me off, maybe scare me or manipulate me into doing something she wants,” she said flatly.

  “No. God. No,” I said, shocked. We weren’t the freaking Mafia. Though it occurred to me that Ariane wasn’t far from the truth. Rachel was never that direct about it, but her “pranks” had the same effect as a threat: Do what I want, be who I say you should be…or else. And I’d taken part in how many of those over the years? I felt sick.

  Ariane raised her pale eyebrows in question.

  “Okay, yes, sort of,” I admitted with a grimace. “But it’s not what you think…not really. I’m not going to go through with it or anything.…” I fumbled for the words, trying to find a way to explain this that didn’t make me sound like the world’s biggest asshole. I didn’t have Quinn’s gift for spinning awkward truths into silky smooth half-lies everyone was happy to swallow. He was a born politician, but normally I wasn’t this bad. Something about the way Ariane stood there, cool and distant, impassively watching me bumble along…it made me feel exposed, a lower life-form trapped under her microscope.

  “Rachel wants me to ask you to Bonfire Week.” The words came out in a rush. There.

  Looking more tired than surprised, she closed her eyes for a long second—her eyelashes were so pale, they appeared almost white against her skin. “And then?” she asked, opening her eyes.

  “And then, I don’t know.” I raked my hands through my hair. “Dump you in some kind of loud, public, and humiliating way at her party on Friday.” It sounded so dumb now in the face of her calmness. Like, short of suffering some kind of temporary brain damage, there was any chance she would have ever fallen for it.

  “Assuming I would find you irresistible enough to accept you in the first place,” she said dryly.

  Heat rose in my face. “Assuming, yeah.” Hey, it wasn’t that big of a leap. I may not have had a girlfriend, but I’d never had trouble finding dates or, for that matter, hookups. Being Quinn Bradshaw’s little brother had proven beneficial in that one regard, once Quinn himself was out of town and no longer an option.

  “Okay, warning duly noted.” She hefted her bag higher on her shoulder with a sigh. “Thanks for the heads-up.” She started to turn away.

  “Actually…” I began.

  Ariane paused and gave me an amused look. “You do realize it’s kind of pointless to ask me now, right? You just told me the whole thing is a revenge scam.” She glanced out into the hallway, probably checking the time on the wall clock. It was getting close to the bell. There were fewer people passing by, not as many lockers slamming shut.

  “I think we should go through with it,” I said. “Not all of it, obviously. Not the end. But the rest of it.”

  She stared up at me for a long moment, her evaluating gaze so intense it felt like she was looking through rather than at me. “You’re serious,” she said finally, with the air of someone solving an equation and being faintly surprised by the results.

  “Yeah.” Did she think I was going to all this trouble for fun?

  She shook her head in disbelief. “Why?”

  My mouth tightened. Because Rachel had crossed the line. She’d used my real life as part of one her stupid ploys. But I wasn’t going to get into all of that with Ariane Tucker. “It’s a long story. But the short version is, I think she needs to see she can’t mess with people like that.”

  “Uh-huh.” Ariane sounded skeptical, but she wasn’t walking away. Maybe this would work after all. “What are you proposing?” she asked cautiously.

  Yes. Now I had her.

  I shrugged, forcing myself not to look too eager. I didn’t want to scare her off. “Easy. We take the drama out of it. We play along until the end. Then when she wants a big show, some loud, humiliating scene, we just shake hands and walk away.” Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the most exciting plan ever, but it was pretty good considering I’d only come up with it ten minutes ago in the parking lot. And besides, it would drive Rachel crazy. Especially when, if I knew her, she’d be spreading the word for everyone to watch for a big blowup at her “social event of the year” Bonfire party. If it fizzled like a wet sparkler, she’d be completely humiliated. And it would serve her right.

  Ariane frowned. “Why don’t you just tell her no? Why go to all this trouble?”

  Oh. I hadn’t been expecting that question. I’d kind of been betting on her hatred of Rachel to make this a quick sell. And the answer…I wasn’t sure if I had an answer other than I didn’t want Jonas to do it. But I couldn’t say that; it would only bring up more questions. Among them, why did I care what Jonas did with Ariane? And answering that would mean sharing more about my life—my dad, Rachel, all of it—than I was comfortable with at this particular moment.

  I hesitated. “It’s complicated,” I said for the second time in one conversation.

  Ariane eyed me with more than a hint of disdain. “Sounds like a cop-out to me.”

  “Whatever.” I wasn’t doing this for a life lesson from Ariane Tucker. “Are you in or not?”

  She was quiet for a long second. “No,” she said.

  My heart sank.

  “This could all be part of the game,” she pointed out. “You let me in on it only to gain my trust and then pull the carpet out from under me at the last second.”

  That would be completely twisted…and probably not outside the realm of possibility, under other circumstances. But not today. “It’s rug,” I said automatically, my mind spinning, trying to figure out what to say to convince her.

  She frowned. “What?”

  “It’s rug. Pull the rug out.”

  She made a face, and the pink in her cheeks returned.

  “And I’m not going to do that,” I said, trying to sound as convincing as possible without pleading. “You have to trust me.”

  “I don’t.” Then she turned on her heel and joined the much-diminished traffic.

  Crap. I stepped out after her. “If you don’t do this, she’ll come after you another way,” I called. “Rachel won’t give up. She’ll find your weak spot and make sure it hurts.” She excelled at that.

  Ariane paused and looked back at me, a bitter weariness in her expression. “Believe me, I know.” Then she disappeared around the corner as the tardy bell rang.

  PULL THE RUG OUT, NOT THE CARPET. You know better. I kicked myself mentally for that one all the way down the stairs to French III.

  It was a dumb mistake, one that came from learning outside of standard context, and a dead giveaway that I was different. The rug/carpet mix-up dated back to before my early days of trying to grasp the nuances of spoken language. I thought I’d trained myself out of it years ago. That only went to show how much he’d taken me by surprise. Zane Bradshaw, of all people, had rattled me.

  He’d meant it, what he’d said about getting back at Rachel.

  Most of the time, reading thoughts is a crapshoot. The human mind is a roiling mass of half-finished observations, fleeting sensations and emotions, and imagined scenarios playing out on an invisible screen. That was one of the reasons my father had warned me away from using it as a sole basis for making a decision.

  When someone is agitated, it’s even more difficult to track a specific thought. Emotions rise up and block almost everything else out. But those emotions, while lacking the detail and the shades of gray found in conscious thought, can give you a baseline on a person’s state of mind, albeit more as an internal scream of rage than, say, someone articulating, “Gee, I am angry.”

  Zane’s mind was as messy and chaotic as everyone else’s; no surprise there. But one thing had popped, loud and clear: he was angry with Rachel.

  I wasn’t sure what she’d done or why today was different, but he’d had enough. I understood that feeling, certainly, though it was a surprise to find it within Zane.

  But what had me shaking was how close I’d come to agre
eing. To see Rachel caught in the wheels of her own machinations…I wanted it so bad, I could taste blood. Or maybe that was just where I’d bitten the inside of my cheek to keep from saying yes.

  “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Tucker. Good of you to join us,” Miss Lenosi said as I crossed the threshold a full minute after the bell.

  A wave of whispers and giggles swept the room, and my face burned. So much for keeping an even-lower-thannormal profile today.

  Thanks a lot, Zane.

  I took my seat at the back of the room and shifted my pack to the floor. I reached down to pull a notebook and pen from my bag, and noticed my hands were trembling.

  Which was ridiculous. The worst was over. Zane wouldn’t approach me again on the Rachel matter, or any other.

  Except I wanted him to. One more push and I might have given in, against all my better judgment. My human side was rattling its cage, screaming to be set loose.

  No. I couldn’t allow that to happen.

  I forced myself to pay attention to Miss Lenosi’s lecture, scrawling her words across my notebook page and correcting mentally for her atrocious accent. Je vais came out as Juh vaze.

  But the idea of beating Rachel, scheming against her, with someone who was her friend…it made me want to laugh. It was dizzying and vengeful and everything Rachel deserved. I couldn’t reach her grandfather—that would be far too dangerous—but in this small way I could turn the tables on both of them.

  It was impossible, though. Against far too many of the Rules. And I didn’t know Zane, didn’t trust him. Even though I was pretty sure he wasn’t planning to double-cross on his plan to double-cross, I couldn’t be absolutely certain. It was an unnecessary risk.

  I gritted my teeth. This was the balancing act I struggled with daily, sometimes hourly. I felt like I was nothing but a bunch of extremes all bound up together. The logical voice in my head pointing out facts and likely scenarios, and the roar of emotions, the rush of want and need, that would drown everything out if I let it.

  Other than the sketchy info I’d found from years of careful Internet searches, I didn’t know much of anything about the other part of my heritage, the ones who’d come from so far away. But logic—and various conspiracy Web sites—suggested that the Roswell aliens came from an advanced society. Creating technology that would allow them to break through impossible barriers—like traveling faster than the speed of light—could only come from intellectual superiority, a focus on science, logic, and strategy. They’d harnessed their potential instead of squandering it by focusing on petty divisions between race, religion, economic status, gills versus lungs, and whatever.