New Girl - By Paige Harbison Page 0,45
made the mistake of liking Max—something that was starting to feel embarrassing and blasphemous—and now I’d shown up at the only school-wide occasion so far and worn Becca’s dress. I wanted to undo it. But I couldn’t.
In…one, two, three.
Out…one, two, three.
In…
“Get out of my dress.”
I blinked. I looked around the room, and saw her. Becca Normandy, smoking a cigarette and looking as cool as we’ve always been told cigarettes don’t make you, and leaning on her crossed legs.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t talk. She was…she was here. She was…here. My throat was tight from the shock. That feeling of chills running down my back wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t ask what she was doing here—all I could do was see her. Her blond hair, so much lighter and softer than mine, had light reflecting off it that made her look practically ethereal. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible in this musty room.
She was staring at me, and I felt like she could see everything about me. Everything I’d ever been or thought.
I opened my mouth, and she rolled her eyes.
“I don’t even want to hear it. You’re a cheap imitation of me. You’re dirty blonde. You’re muscle-skinny, not a waif. You own moccasins.” She stood, and stamped out her cigarette. “That dress looks terrible on you. You know that, right?”
She looked at me amusedly through narrowed eyes, and turned her head. I still couldn’t speak.
“That is why everyone was asking what you were wearing. It’s not that they didn’t know you were supposed to be Marilyn Monroe, or even that they were so shocked that you would try to copy me. It’s because you were filling it out so badly you made it look like a sleeveless muumuu.” She exhaled noisily. “I have only one question for you.”
Becca crouched at the side of the couch. She was painfully beautiful, the ideal kind of pretty that doesn’t fear a magnified mirror. She didn’t seem to have any flaws at all. Not an eyelash was out of place. Her teeth were toothpaste-ad white. Under her eyes there were no circles. She wafted the scent of alcohol and menthol cigarettes in my direction, but it mingled with her perfume and made her whole image tie together in some kind of strange, unusual beauty. It was like she waited for me to notice these things before moving on.
“I want to ask you…what made you think you could have him?” She smiled a little, and briefly allowed a line to come between her eyebrows. “Haven’t you heard everyone? Max is in love with me. He’s in love with me. I’m that one he’ll never forget. I’m the one he let get away. I am the girl that boys never, ever get over. If I don’t come back or want him back and he marries someone else, even, his future wife will have to come to terms with the fact that he’s never going to get over me. Sure he might continue living, but I—” she bit her lip “—I am what made him live. I am his light. I am his excitement. I was the bells, the light, the darkness and the melody in his life. You? You could only ever hope to be—” her nose wrinkled as she tried to think of what I could hope to be “—a butter knife. You might be practical and useful, but you’re just a blank, dull, staring thing that’s there to serve a purpose. And any reflection of me that might be in you is distorted and ugly. You are nothing more.”
My heart pounded, and my face was hot. My body trembled. I could hear the ocean. When I noticed it, she did, too, and held up a finger.
“You hear that? The water? No one knows if it ate me alive or not.” She said it with a singsong voice like she was keeping a secret from a child, saying the last few words with a seductive, dripping relish. It was like the whole thing was a game to her. “Doesn’t that already make me more interesting than you? If or when I come back…can you imagine it?” She rocked backward onto her heels, a smile stretching across her face. “I could walk up there right now, take back Max, and have a world of people who know me and love me thrilled to see my pretty face again.”
I was colder than ever, and her words were making my head spin. I felt like I was