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Was it? Again, was there some unwritten rule that to be popular you had to be an ass?
“Everyone wants to be us,” she continued with a coy smile as she reached over and boldly splayed a hand on my bare chest, “but only the lucky ones get to hang out with us. And from where I’m sitting, the view is pretty nice.” She bit her lower lip and tracked her gaze down my body in a gesture I supposed was meant to be sexy. But instead of turning me on, it only made me tense up.
Spine rigid, I stared at her a moment—Gabby Haines, Queen of Lakeview. The small nose, pouty lips, nearly platinum blond hair that probably took hours in a salon chair and a ridiculous amount of money. The most interesting thing about her was her appearance. And for the second time that day, a set of particularly dark, brooding eyes slid into my thoughts. Penelope Ewe. The girl called Skunk.
Something wrenched inside my chest.
She didn’t deserve to be treated like garbage any more than Gabby deserved to be put up on a pedestal. This afternoon, during our tutoring session, she said more to me in that hour together than I can recall in all her time at Lakeview. As it turned out, she was smart. Pretty in a way that came naturally, rather than trying so hard like half the girls I knew. And her analysis and argument of Romeo and Juliet was sexy as hell.
Too bad she didn’t know it.
But she wasn’t a Royal, and she wasn’t cool, which meant she was off-limits to someone like me. An unspoken rule that suddenly seemed dumb as hell.
Maybe I was tired of these boundaries we created. The division at our school. The haves and the have-nots. I didn’t want a label. I didn’t want to be just one thing.
“Why?” I asked, finally.
“Why what?” Gabby blinked, an amused smile spreading her lips.
“Why are we so special? What makes us any better?”
She stared at me a moment, her blue eyes searching mine, as if to decide whether I was serious or not.
When I held her gaze, jaw tight, her smile slowly faded. “I don’t like this version of you. Whatever’s going on, you need to snap out of it.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
She said nothing, so I curled my hand around hers—the one still firmly planted on my chest—and peeled it off, then stood, disgusted with the conversation.
“What’s gotten into you?” she snapped as she sat up, piercing me with a glare.
“I don’t know, Gabs. Maybe it’s that someone called me a jerk today, all of us, actually, and I’m starting to see she’s right.”
“Pfft.” Gabby rolled her eyes. “Of course they did. Let me guess, this person’s a loser? People say that because they’re jealous.”
I thought of Penelope and everything she said. The sincerity behind her words. And there was no doubt in my mind. She was far from jealous. She was accurate.
“Not this person,” I insisted.
“What do you want me to say, Toph?” she asked hotly. “That I’m sorry for being popular and pretty?”
“No, but . . .” I raked a hand through my hair.What did I want from her?I wasn’t even sure anymore.
“The truth is, there’s always going to be someone on top,” Gabby said, squaring her shoulders. “It may as well be us.”
There it was, in that one statement, the dog-eat-dog of high school.
My mouth parted, wondering how I got to this place. One where I kept my foot firmly planted on the heads of others just to keep them down.
I glanced behind me, allowing my gaze to flicker over our friends in the pool. Did I even like JT, Mikey, and Luca anymore? I used to. We shared a bond, a kind of brotherhood only athletes and teammates understood, but beneath that thin veneer of friendship, what were we left with?
When it came down to it, I wasn’t sure I had anything more in common with the people in that pool than I did with anyone else at the school. But we’d started out as friends, and then we became Royals—something bigger than ourselves—and somehow that became the basis for everything. A label and social status dictated my friendships and my love life.
It has served me well all these years. They were my safety net.
Just toe the line. Do what’s expected. Date the cool girl, and everything is easy.
But my time at Lakeview was almost over, and it’s true what they say. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Suddenly, I saw clearly. I was tired of falling in line with what was expected of me. Tired of being the person everyone else wanted me to be.
