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  But that’s high school.

  “I did it for me.” I suspected she could tell I was lying. I had done it for her. But that still didn’t make it the wrong thing to do. “The guy’s a jerk.”

  Isobel pushed her glasses higher up on her nose, and I knew she was every bit as uncomfortable discussing what had just happened as me. “You didn’t need to punch him.”

  I shrugged. “Nothing else came to mind.”

  “Just . . . don’t do it for me again, okay?” I winced as another wave of pain rolled through me. My thrashed limbs sure wished I had been more like Gandhi and less like Mohammed Ali. I forced a grin anyway.

  “I’ll take that under consideration.”

  The five-minute warning bell sounded, and my friends melted into the surging crowd of students hurrying for class, although not before Logan sent Scott a glare that said: You hurt her, I kick your ass.

  And I’ll enjoy doing it.

  “So we’re done then?” Scott asked casually. He tapped his camera when I stared at him blankly. “You’ve got your story, I’ve got my photos. Your master plan is complete.”

  “That was not my master plan,” I insisted, even though I doubted he would believe me. “I didn’t show up to lunch thinking, Hmm, I think I’ll get into a fight with a football player today!”

  “But you don’t regret it. Even if you could go back and change how things went down, you wouldn’t.” He made it a statement, not a question.

  “Sure I would.” I gestured to the eye that was definitely going to have one hell of a shiner. “I would’ve ducked, for starters.”

  A quick grin flashed across Scott’s face, before it disappeared just as abruptly as it had arrived.

  “You never answered my question.”

  “Which one? You asked a few.” I rubbed my forehead and fervently hoped that I didn’t have a concussion. I already had way too much homework to slog through without that slowing me down.

  “Are we done with the story?”

  “I think I’ve got more than enough material about bullying.” I shouldered my backpack. “And now I have to get to class, or risk double detention.”

  Scott nodded, but prevented my hasty departure by reaching into his own backpack and handing me a can of Pepsi.

  I stared in confusion at what looked like a peace offering. “Um . . . thanks? Not really my drink of choice but . . . uh, thanks.”

  Not the most gracious of thank-you speeches, but I half expected him to shake the can, pop it open, and spray it right in my face.

  Instead, he took a firm grip on my hand and directed it upward until the beverage pressed against my swollen eye. I hissed momentarily from the bite of pain, until the chill of the can numbed away the worst of it.

  Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.

  “Wait, why are you being nice now?” I demanded before I could lose my nerve.

  He grinned. “That’s for the kick-ass photo shoot. You make a pretty good model, Grammar Girl.”

  I would’ve glared at him for the Grammar Girl part, but my eye didn’t permit it.

  “And you’re back to being yourself. See you later, Scott.”

  He tossed me one last amused look before strolling into the nearest classroom. Alone at last, I hobbled to my next-period class thinking about Scott’s last comment. Me? A model? I was the least model-like person at Smith High School. Models get noticed wherever they go—like the queen of the Notable crowd, Chelsea Halloway. Now she could have made the scene in the cafeteria look like an upscale photo shoot. Even under our school’s crappy fluorescent lighting her long blond hair looks like something out of a freaking shampoo commercial.

  But maybe I wasn’t quite as boring in front of a camera as I’d originally thought.

  That was kind of cool.

  Chapter 6

  Detention is nothing like The Break fast Club.

  I sat down in my hard plastic chair hoping there would be some group bonding, maybe a little dancing, a few heart-to-heart moments set to eighties music. John Hughes shouldn’t have given me such high expectations. I stared at the graffiti carved into my desk, isolated in a room full of slackers, while a bored-looking Spanish teacher focused more on paper grading than on inmate guarding. Most of the kids were either listening to music or texting their friends, probably about the overwhelming lameness that was detention at Smith High School. With nothing better to do with my time, I flicked my iPod onto shuffle and started working on the newspaper story.

  There was quite a ruckus in the cafeteria this week.

  Ruckus? That was my big opening line?

  I slashed it out and tried again.

  The Truth Behind the Padding: What You Didn’t Know About the Smith High School Football Team.

  That sounded like they were slipping socks into their jockstraps.

  Cafeteria Menace Strikes Again!

  Lame.

  My head started spinning, so I sipped my soda and hoped that the sugar infusion would help me organize my thoughts. I knew the worst was over. Considering everything that had happened, I definitely had a story. I just had to find it. My shoulder ached and the right words refused to come. Not for anything that Lisa Anne or Mr. Elliot might want to read, anyway. If they’d allow me to hand in fiction . . . well, that would be a different story. I can happily scribble away for hours if I’m not expected to produce something serious, like an essay comparing famous books written by dead white guys to other famous books written by, oh that’s right, more dead white guys.

  I tapped my pencil against my desk and told myself to snap out of it. The only way I would ever get anyone to support my idea was if I built up my credibility as a staff writer.

  Tuesday afternoon and the cafeteria line was long.

  That had to be the worst opening line yet.

  Ignoring my notebook, I rested my battered face on the cool surface of my desk and waited for my incarceration to end.

  “Hey!” The tip of one bright red Converse sneaker nudged me. “Are you the girl who punched Alex Thompson?”

  My head jerked up, brushing my notebook with enough force that it landed with a loud thump under the very shoe that had disturbed me.

  I slid my gaze up to see my fellow detentioner. Deten-tionee? I wasn’t clear on the correct title. Slouched in the chair next to me, wearing loose jeans, chipped black nail polish, and layers of silver necklaces, was one seriously intense girl. She didn’t look goth, precisely, but she hadn’t exactly restrained herself when applying her eyeliner. Girls that hard-core generally ignore me.

  Then again, everyone generally ignores me.

  “Um, yeah.” I nodded, then had to shove my bangs out of my face. “That’s me.”

  She leaned forward, her voice lowering. “How’d it feel?”

  “Actually, it felt pretty good.” I pointed at my increasingly colorful eye. “Well, this part not so much. I’m Jane.”

  Maybe The Breakfast Club wasn’t quite as off base as I thought.

  “Sam,” she replied. Then her chocolate-brown eyes narrowed into an intense don’t mess with me look. “Never Samantha.”

  “So what did you do to land in detention?”

  “Me?” She might have thought her wide, toothy smile looked innocent, but it was pretty obvious to me that it contained nothing but mischief. I couldn’t help grinning back. “I was busted sneaking into the boys’ bathroom.”

  “Oh.”

  I had no idea what I was supposed to say to that.

  “By Mr. Taylor.” She rolled her eyes, as if landing on the wrong side of our superconservative principal was no big deal.

  “I don’t mean to pry but . . . what were you doing in there?”

  Sam shrugged. “Pry away. It’s not exactly a secret that I’ve been taping condoms to the bathroom stalls for months. This time he got lucky and caught me red-handed.”

  I laughed. “I’m sure Mr. Taylor loved that.” It was no secret that our principal tried to squash student activities that ran co
ntrary to his own views.

  “Detention is a small price to pay for my convictions. Plus, this will make a great college essay. Fighting the system and all that.” Sam pulled out a condom from her backpack. “Need one?”

  “Um . . . I don’t think so.” I nervously eyed the little packet. If Kenzie was sitting in detention with us, she would have found it absolutely hilarious that Jane Smith, romance novel connoisseur, couldn’t so much as look at a condom without blushing a brick red.

  Or maybe she would be too distracted pocketing one for herself to even notice.

  I instantly tried to erase that thought.

  Just . . . no.

  Unfortunately, Sam didn’t appear to pick up on my discomfort as she tossed the condom Frisbee style onto my desk. “Why’s that?”

  “The closest thing I have to a boyfriend is a friend who happens to be a boy. And since he’s in a serious relationship with a really great guy . . . your, uh, well . . . it would be wasted on me.”

  Sam laughed. “You still might want to keep it, just in case.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “In case he stops being gay?”

  A loud snort escaped her. “In case you decide to have consenting penetrative heterosexual sex. Or you can use it for dental da—”

  “Got it!” I hurriedly cut her off, my cheeks turning three shades darker. It seemed unfair that she could say stuff like “consenting penetrative heterosexual sex” without sounding even the tiniest bit insecure, and yet I couldn’t handle another second of our conversation. I knocked the packet off the desk and into my open backpack in one fluid movement—not because I wanted it, but because I didn’t want anyone to see it sitting there.

  “Never hurts to be prepared, I guess.”

  Sam nodded and then gave me a once-over. Boring jeans. Plain shirt. Ordinary silver studs in my ears.

  “No offense, but if it weren’t for your bruise, you would look way too straight-edge.”

  This time it was my turn to shrug. It wasn’t like Sam was telling me anything I hadn’t heard a thousand times before—and the words stung far worse when they came from my Notable older sister.

  “None taken.”

  But when Sam picked up my notebook, I couldn’t hide the way my whole body tensed.

  “What’s this?” Sam raised an eyebrow and flipped it open to the story I had scribbled when I was supposed to be paying attention in my AP Calculus class.

  “It’s nothing. Really. Can I have it back?”

  But Sam began to read aloud.

  “Jane Smith lived a boring li fe. . . .” I winced, but Sam either didn’t notice my discomfort or chose not to care. “. . . until the day she felt compelled to defend a friend with her fists.”

  “You can stop anytime now.”

  “Don’t interrupt. This is getting good.”

  Jane fell in love with fighting. She began to crave the kick of power behind each punch. She lost herself in the thrill of battle, the rush of adrenaline, the beauty buried beneath the crunch of bones. It didn’t come without a cost: realignment surgeries, suspensions, extensive parental lectures. Her frequent hospital stays made it impossible for her to graduate from high school on schedule, and she was forced to watch the ceremony from the bleachers.

  Alone.

  Jane Smith never attended college. The only job she ever managed to hold down was at a sleazy bar where her fists were her first and last line of de fense. Her nights were spent pouring drinks, slapping away randy hands, and breaking up drunken tussles while tone-deaf girls in skin-tight skirts abused Shania Twain’s biggest hits on the karaoke machine. Jane’s days were spent in a dingy apartment with a revolving door of men who all had one thing in common—none of them stuck around.

  Jane Smith died trying to separate two belligerent patrons at the bar. More specifically, she died when a knife accidentally collided with her eye. As the world dissolved into a pool of red, Jane prayed that she would never again have to hear “I feel like a woman!” howled into a microphone. Never have to hustle drunks out after last call. Never have to return to her barren apartment and her sleazy one-night stands. And for the first time in her life . . . Jane Smith got her wish.

  “Did you write this?” Sam asked curiously. “It seems way too twisted for you.”

  “Yeah. I wrote it today because . . . well, it’s just something that I do, imagining ways to die.”

  Something I also preferred not to share with anyone.

  She raised one inky eyebrow. “The Shania Twain karaoke was a nice detail. I liked it.”

  Those few brusque words were quite possibly the nicest compliment I had ever received. Writing fictional deaths was one of the few things that made me feel like I had control over my destiny, especially when my sister was around. It was the one place where I could create a future for myself that didn’t include comparisons to Elle.

  But while I loved doing it . . . I never knew if any of it was good.

  My work wasn’t exactly something I could pass around for a writing critique, unless I wanted to spend a lot more time in the guidance counselor’s office.

  Which I really, really didn’t.

  “Thanks. It’s what I do when I get bored in class.”

  “Wicked,” she muttered, her eyes locked on mine. “How do you usually die?”

  “Um . . . it varies. Nothing I actually expect to happen. Death by boredom, death by pencil sharpener, that kind of thing. I don’t have a death wish or anything.”

  “Then why did you get so freaked out when I started to read it?”

  I hesitated. “It’s just . . . I know it might be stupid, but my writing is important to me. That’s why I’m trying to get our school newspaper to have a fiction page.”

  Sam’s raccoon eyes widened. “You write with all those pretentious journalism kids?”

  The sad truth was that I couldn’t even say in all honesty that I wrote with them.

  “I’m the go-to grammar girl,” I admitted sheepishly. “But not all of them are pretentious.”

  “If you say so.”

  I mulled it over. “They’re just a little intense. They’ll warm up . . . eventually.”

  “Well, good luck. I don’t envy you. I wouldn’t want to work with that Lisa Anne Mont-something girl. She freaks me out. No one should have that many extracurricular activities.”

  “Ah, but she’s applying to Harvard,” I said, as if that explained everything, which it kind of did. “I’ll be fine.”

  She slumped back in her seat and shrugged. “Maybe. I tend to be a bit on the pessimistic side. After all, things can always get worse.”

  I grinned and pointed to my black eye. “Really? Because I’m pretty sure that getting my butt kicked in the cafeteria counts as an all-time low. Actually, I take it back. This detention is me hitting rock bottom.”

  I really believed that too.

  Until I found out firsthand that actually hitting rock bottom hurts way more than a punch to the face. Even if it never leaves a bruise.

  Chapter 7

  My mom wasn’t exactly thrilled to pick me up from school.

  Luckily, she was too preoccupied with my face, specifically the dark blue bruise forming over one eyelid, to harp about the inconvenience of shuttling me home every time I miss the bus.

  Or maybe not so luckily, considering the way her jaw dropped open when she caught her first good look at me.

  “What happened, Jane? You look like you’ve been mugged!”

  Sadly, that wasn’t an inaccurate description.

  I did my best to shrug the whole thing off. “Nothing, Mom. I had a small accident in the cafeteria. I tripped.”

  Into the fist of a two-hundred-pound football player.

  I just kept that last part to myself.

  “It looks worse than it is, I promise.”

  My mom examined my face while we idled at an intersection, and I found myself mentally trying to will the traffic light to switch to green so that she would have to pay attention to the ro
ad.

  No such luck.

  “You fell?” she repeated in disbelief.

  “Mm—hmm.” I kept my voice noncommittal. I didn’t want her to guess the truth, but I also didn’t want to lie. Still, when she asks, “How was your day, honey?” she doesn’t want “Gee, well, today I got into a fistfight” to be the answer.

  It can’t be the answer.

  So even though that was exactly what happened, I carefully skirted the truth.

  “You know me, total klutz. I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”

  That was all it took to get my mom assuring me that, No, I wasn’t a klutz. It was all her fault for letting me drop out of ballet lessons when I was seven, and that if only I had continued I would be every bit as graceful as Elle.

  A lecture that I had grown so accustomed to hearing that I could tune it out effortlessly.

  Our car rolled past the neatly lettered SMITH mailbox and the white picket fence before pulling into the garage.

  “Why don’t you go use the makeup I got you for your birthday? I’ll call you when it’s time for dinner. How does that sound?”

  Like something only an alternate-reality version of myself might be interested in doing.

  I bit the inside of my cheek to keep myself in check. “Uh . . . sure. That sounds great, Mom.”

  Shoving open the car door, I tried to make a hasty getaway to my bedroom. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck deflecting more questions or nodding along to more lectures.

  I didn’t make it past the kitchen.

  “God, what happened to your face? It looks like roadkill. More so than usual, even.”

  Oh, the joys of having an older sister. Scratch that. Oh, the annoyances of an older, more popular sister taking time away from college (and her precious sorority sisters at the Theta Beta Omega house) while she waits for her internship helping the homeless to begin. That’s right: helping the homeless. She can’t even be straight-up vapid and shallow the way sorority girls are in the movies. Instead, she lounges on the sofa in the living room simultaneously filling out grant proposals and watching crap television. And mocking me whenever possible.