Nantucket Blue - By Leila Howland Page 0,3

wouldn’t talk to her the following Monday at school. Treated her like the plague. As if this weren’t enough, she did it again with John Dwyer, a sophomore, on an overnight science trip. By September she was known as Nora the Whora. Even I knew she’d done it with a freshman on top of Joey Rivera’s laundry machine last weekend at his party. For a junior girl to go after a freshman guy, that was bad. That was desperate.

It didn’t have to be that way. There was another path.

A few years before, a shy but very big-boobed senior named Jenna Garbetti started to get a reputation. “Can’t get any? Call Garbetti,” the saying went. Instead of looking for validation in all the wrong places, she cut her raven locks into a flattering bob, quit going to parties for a couple of months, studied really hard, and took a silk-screening class at RISD. By April, she’d won some art award and been accepted to Yale. In other words, she turned the wrong kind of attention into the right kind of attention, and by the Spring Dance, she was back on top. Last year, when the senior girls asked me to hang out in their lounge with them and they actually listened to my stories, when I found out Greg Goldberg and Liam Hardiman had an argument over who would ask me to the Arden Spring Fling, when even teachers started telling me that I looked like the girl on the bicycle in the Maybelline commercials, I promised myself that if I started to attract the wrong kind of attention, I’d use the Jenna Garbetti method: lie low, look good, and learn.

“Good game, good game, good game.” Nora and I were three bodies away, then two, then one. When it came time to shake, I put my hand out, but she turned away, leaving me hanging.

As usual, Arti Rai’s mom had brought us mini bottles of Gatorade and made us chocolate cupcakes, this time with peanut butter frosting. As the team gathered around the bench, giddy and hungry, I hung back and made eye contact with Jay. He was standing with the Alden kids, but he was looking at me. He smiled and drew a line across his neck to suggest he couldn’t possibly leave the Alden camp to congratulate the enemy without risking his life.

I laughed at his pantomime, which he dropped immediately when Chris caught on to his traitorous ways. He shrugged at Chris as if nothing had happened, then looked over his shoulder at me and winked. I was about to wink back when Edwina MacIntosh drew herself up to her full six feet and shook my hand. We called her Ed behind her back.

“You have star quality, Cricket Thompson,” she said, nearly crushing my hand with hers. Sometimes she wasn’t aware of her own strength.

“Thanks, Miss MacIntosh,” I said. I’ve been going to this school since kindergarten, so Ed and I are not exactly strangers. Hell, I’d been here longer than she had. Both my mother and grandmother were Rosewood girls, too.

“Judy, wait one moment,” Ed called with a finger in the air as the ref walked by.

“So you know how that party was supposed to be at Chris’s house?” Jules said, handing me a cupcake and starting in on her second. Jules has her mom’s brown ringlets, ski-jump nose, and strong, slim legs. She also has the metabolism of a cheetah.

“Yeah?”

“Well, there’s been a change of plans,” she said with a full mouth. “I guess Chris’s parents decided not to go to the Cape after all.” She planted her stick in the ground and leaned against it, a makeshift chair. She crossed her ankles.

“So where is it?” I asked, peeling the cupcake wrapper and watching as the Alden crew filed onto their bus, painted the same red as their uniforms.

“Nora Malloy’s,” she said, and licked frosting from her fingers.

Two

“I’M KIND OF SCARED.” I sat up on the twin bed closest to the window—the one that had pretty much become mine in the last few years, since my parents’ official divorce—and pulled up the leg of my jeans to show my bruise. “Nora did this in public. Who knows what she’s capable of on her own property.”

“Oh, please. There’s nothing she can do to us,” Jules said, one arm folded over her bare stomach as she stood in front of her closet in her underwear and bra, considering what to wear. I heard her brother, Zack, come up