Archer in English, I figured they'd pretty much be a wash.
I was wrong.
As I walked out of precalculus, Trista Camello fell into step next to me.
Just like that.
"So I'm taking a poll," she said. "Is it ruder to tell Mr. Scheller we know he wears a bad toupee or to let him go on wearing it when we're all secretly laughing about it?"
"Mr. Scheller wears a toupee?"
"You haven't noticed? The top and front of his hair are jet black. The sides are completely gray."
I'd never really paid attention to our precalc teacher's hair before, but now that she mentioned it...
I laughed.
"You're totally right—he does wear a toupee!"
"Yes! A bad one! So what do you think: ruder to tell or not to tell?"
"It has to be ruder to tell, right?"
"I don't think so," Trista said. "It's like when someone has lipstick on her teeth. Wouldn't you want to know if you had lipstick on your teeth?"
I suddenly wondered if I did have lipstick on my teeth. I stopped smiling, just in case.
That reminded me that I'd been smiling. And laughing. All of which had been very un-DangerZone of me. I made a conscious effort to be more disaffected, but it was hard around Trista. Her energy was irresistible.
She bent her head closer to mine and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. "So ... you and Nate Wetherill."
She let the statement hang between us.
"Yeah?" I asked.
"Are you together?"
Trista Camello, Supreme Populazzi, had just asked me the very same question I'd been struggling with all weekend.
It struck me that Trista would know better than I would if Nate and I were together. She'd probably been in and out of relationships since prepubescence. She was being so friendly, maybe I could just spill everything and get her expert take.
I wanted to do it, but if she decided Nate and I weren't really together, I was sure her interest in me would end. Plus spilling would be way too non-DangerZone.
"Whatever," I said.
I channeled Nate's way of walking and kept my eyes straight ahead and my expression blank. I could tell Trista was still looking at me, seeking more.
Then she gave up. "Got it. See you."
She quickened her pace until she could link arms and fall into step with a Senior Penultimate down the hall.
So I was on the Populazzi's radar. Very, very cool. Claudia would love this. I called her at the start of lunch, once I'd settled into my car, turned it on, cranked the heat, and busted into my daily Zone bar and Diet Coke. That was one of the many beauties of the new me: I no longer needed to eat in my cement-stairs bunker. I wasn't hiding anymore. I was a DangerZone now, and DangerZones were entitled to weird behavior like hunkering down in an idling car to scarf a meal. Besides, it had gotten way too cold to sit outside and eat.
"Work the Ladder and the Ladder works!" Claudia crowed after I'd told her about my Trista conversation. "How's the new coat?"
"You cannot seriously be connecting the word 'new' to this coat."
The coat was a purchase Claudia forced me into over the weekend, after I asked if it was possible to get frostbite on one's rear end. After a week of sitting on Nate's increasingly frozen rock wrapped in nothing warmer than jeans and a hoodie, it seemed as if the answer was yes. Not that I was against it—if I did get frostbite of the buttocks, I imagined the doctors would have to shave off the frozen portion and reshape the rest, perhaps leaving my tush smaller and sleeker—a cheerier posterior.
Claudia, however, didn't see this as the same happy outcome I did. She thought I needed a coat, but one that fit into my DangerZone style. She dragged me to her mom's favorite thrift store, an unsavory hole in the wall where Lenore liked to pick up ragged old clothes and repurpose them as quilting materials. I'd never liked it there. The place reeked of musty despair, which—Claudia reminded me—is the exact cologne in which a true emo girl would ache to bathe herself.
She found it immediately: an old black men's wool pea coat, frayed and tattered in places and worn to shapelessness. Blotches of odd discolorations from God-knows-what Rorschached its surface. Claudia thought it had character. I just hoped it didn't have lice. The very idea of throwing this behemoth over my new outfits seemed like a crime, but Claudia was positive it would enhance my mystique. Plus it