Rules for Being a Girl - Candace Bushnell Page 0,42

Chloe shrugs. “I don’t know.”

I frown. “Do you not want to go?” I mean, obviously I know things have been weird with us, and I don’t 100 percent believe all the time she’s been spending with Kyra, but it would just be so much weirder to not do this.

“No, we can,” she says, shutting her laptop with a look on her face like I just invited her for a rousing afternoon of digging a hole in the frozen earth. “I just have to shower.”

“I mean, we don’t have to.” Suddenly it does feel like a bad idea, actually: Chloe’s lousy mood, yeah, but also the crowds, the chance of running into people we know from school. Running into Bex. I sit down on the edge of her unmade bed.

“Can I tell you something?” I ask, picking at a loose thread in the quilt her mom made out of all her old day camp T-shirts. “Without you, like, freaking out?”

Chloe raises her eyebrows. “Is it that you got Bex in trouble with DioGuardi?” she asks immediately.

“I—” My eyes widen. “How do you know that?”

“Everybody knows that,” Chloe says, sliding the laptop onto the mattress and climbing out of bed. “Like, the entire school.”

“What? Seriously?” My heart drops. I purposely talked to Mr. DioGuardi on the last day before vacation to buy myself time before the gossip mill started grinding. “How?”

“I have no idea,” she says, though she’s not quite looking at me.

“Well, I mean, who told you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I mean, yeah, Chloe. If people are going around saying—”

“Can you stop messing with that?” she interrupts, nodding at the quilt. “The whole thing is going to fall apart any second.”

“Sorry.” I set it down, wiping my suddenly sweaty palms on the knees of my jeans. “Are you mad at me?” I ask, although the answer is pretty obvious. What I can’t figure out is the why.

Chloe scoops her bathrobe off the back of the closet door, draping it over her arm. “I just don’t understand why you even bothered asking what I thought you should do,” she says, shrugging inside her Bridgewater hoodie. “When, like, you obviously had your own agenda this whole entire time.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I protest. “I don’t have an agenda. What does that even mean?”

Chloe huffs like I’m being dense on purpose. “It means you, like, decided you had this vendetta against him, and now—”

“Against Bex?” I shake my head. “That’s not even—”

“You know he’s probably going to get fired, right?” Chloe cuts in. “And we’ll be stuck with some hundred-year-old sub for the rest of the year who’s going to make us read a bunch of boring crap and write, like, detailed sequence-of-events responses, just because you couldn’t drop the rock about some dumb misunderstanding.”

“Holy shit, Chloe.” I feel my throat get tight, my eyes stinging; in the whole entire history of our friendship, she’s never talked to me like this before. “What the hell is your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem,” Chloe snaps; then, looking over her shoulder at the hallway, she lowers her voice. “I just don’t understand why you’re being like this, that’s all. Like, why can’t you just admit you made a mistake—”

“I didn’t make a mistake!”

“So what, you think he’s in love with you?” Chloe laughs meanly. “Like he brought you to his apartment as part of some super-secret plan to make you his girlfriend?”

“No, of course not.” My eyes are filling for real now, my vision blurring. I glance up at the overhead light, take a deep breath. “You realize you’re supposed to be my best friend.”

“I am your best friend,” Chloe says immediately. “And part of my job is to tell you when you’re making a total fool of yourself.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“I think you’ve lost all connection with reality, yeah.”

“Well . . .” And I shrug, because what else can you say to that? I stand up and sling my bag over my shoulder, wiping my face with the heel of my hand. “I guess today’s not such a good mall day after all.”

“No,” Chloe says, still clutching her bathrobe in front of her like a shield. “I guess not.”

I head downstairs and let myself out, dodging her mom in the kitchen. The boys are still playing in the living room, their trash talk just audible over the clatter of the Cartoon Network.

“Sunk!” one of them says, gleeful. The sound of them laughing is the last thing I hear before I shut the door.

Twenty-Two

My parents and

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