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Rumor Has It… the floodgates have opened, and new scandals arise every hour in regards to our false ex-queen. Stay tuned for ALL the Tea dropping throughout the day! But don’t forget to ask yourself, who should take her place?
Gloria Walton
I’m awakened by light flooding the room and my warm cocoon of blankets being throwing open. I curl into a ball, not ready to face Mom and my sisters yet. On the back of that thought comes the sledgehammer blow that always comes with the day’s first thought of my brother.
He’s gone.
“I know you want to bury your head in the sand and hide from this, but you have to go to school,” Mom says.
“Why?” I moan, pulling the covers back over my face.
“Don’t be silly,” Mom says. “Only a guilty person would stay home and hide.”
Gloria Walton, found guilty on a million counts of being a slut, sentenced to social execution.
“You saw the blog?” I ask, still hiding my face so I don’t have to see her reaction, her disappointment. She did everything to make a life for us here, to make us look perfect, to take care of the house with whatever little money we have so no one will know we’re scholarship students. And now it’s all out. Everyone knows. She must be devastated.
“Yes,” Mom says after a pause. “I admit, it doesn’t look good, but we can fight this. You’ll march into school with yourhead held high, show them it doesn’t bother you, and that you’re above such lies.”
“But they’re not lies,” I mumble into my pillow. It’s the closest I’ll come to asking her outright if the part about her selling our panties is true. That’s not the kind of thing we talk about in our family, and I know she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t need the money. It’s not like it’s hurting me. She could have been doing it for years, and I never knew because it doesn’t affect me. I even get new underwear out of it every month.
“The truth is relative,” she says. “Dixie certainly put a damaging spin on things, but people will see it for the biased journalism it is.”
“You really think so?” I ask, uncovering my face at last. And even though she’s my mother, and she checks our faces every night to make sure we took off our makeup and put the generic version of the latest anti-aging creams and tonics that all the other mothers in the garden club are buying their daughters, I feel naked with her staring at my bare face with all its flaws on display.
“Of course I do.” She sighs and sinks onto the edge of my bed. “You just need to do some damage control. How can you bounce back from this if you’re not there?”
I want to tell her I’m tired of bouncing back. I’m not a fucking ping-pong ball. But I know there’s no use arguing with her. She’s a force to be reckoned with, already up and in her full makeup at six in the morning, looking flawless even in a robe with her curlers in. She uses the old plastic ones my great aunt had in the eighties because she won’t spend money on a nice curling iron for herself, especially as the heat might damage her hair and then she’d have to spend more money on it. Money she’ll need to keep my sisters afloat even if I’ve already lost my life raft.
Soon enough she’ll see she’s wasting resources on me, and she’ll cut me off. When you have a limited supply of bandages, you save them for those who still have a chance at making it out alive. You don’t use them on someone who’s already fatally wounded.
I force a smile and get up, going to shower before I start on my makeup. I will suck it up and walk in with my head held high, just like she wants, just as I’ve done every day for the past two years. When I finally can’t stall any longer, I leave my room, relieved to find my sisters already gone. If they rode with the Dolces, that means they’re still in, and if that’s what they want, then I should be happy for them. For the first time in a long time, though, I’m not happy to have Junebug to myself. It doesn’t feel like freedom today. It feels like further proof that I no longer belong to the popular group or anywhere else. I’m alone.
I swing by the bubble tea place on my way, putting off the inevitable for a few minutes. It won’t make it better, but at least I’ll have something good in my day, small as it is.
I pull up to the drive-through window and hand my card through. The scrawny teenager hands it back a minute later. “Sorry, we’re out of the strawberry kiwi,” he says.
“That’s what I always get,” I say with a sigh. “Okay, how about peach mango?”
He shakes his head, looking like he’s trying not to laugh. “We’re out of that too.”
“Well, can I have something else?” I ask, not taking the card he’s holding out to me. The butterflies are back in my stomach in the worst way. “I don’t care what, just give me whatever you have.”
“Yeah, we’re out of that too,” he says, snickering.
“What the fuck?” I demand. “What do you mean you’re out of that? You’re out of everything?”
He nods with mock sympathy. “For you. Now if you don’t mind, there’s a line behind you. If you want to pull over there, I can have a manager come out and talk to you.”
“It’s fine,” I grit out, snatching the card, tossing it on the passenger seat, and shifting roughly. I peel out of the lot, seething with humiliation and anger. Is this what Colt deals with all the time?
I’m at my locker when a palm slaps down on the one beside mine, making me jump. I expect laughter, some asshole ready to harass me now that my protection is gone.
I have a snarky response on the tip of my tongue before I even turn to see Colt Darling staring at me with fury brewing like a storm in his dusky blue eyes.
“Youblockedme?” he demands.
