How to Be Popular Read online

  I didn’t get a chance to really pester him in the car, but fortunately I got a call at home a little later from Kitty, letting me and Catie know that our dresses were ready—along with Pete’s and Robbie’s tuxedos—for our final fittings and asking if we wanted to come over.

  “We’ll be right there,” I said, and went and got Catie—who was already doing homework, since fourth grade is the first year they give it in Greene County, and Catie was so excited about it, she couldn’t wait (as this kind of nerdiness is typical of me and the rest of my family, I didn’t become alarmed)—and Pete and Robbie, who were watching MTV2 in the family room, having figured out Mom’s password for the parental V-Chip again.

  Then, telling Dad where we were going and leaving Sara in front of Dora the Explorer (so he wouldn’t figure out that we knew about the password), we all ran across the lawn to Jason’s house, where the wedding finery was waiting.

  I don’t consider myself a super fashiony person. I mean, aside from the thigh-highs, which I changed out of as soon as I got home, I don’t dress up much.

  But the bridesmaid and flower girl gowns Kitty picked out for us are really something special. Sleeveless soft pink—but not in an annoying, girly way—satin shells with even paler pink chiffon floating over them, they are covered all over the hem with clear crystals of different sizes that catch the light and glitter…but not in a trashy, Princess Barbie way. I could totally remove the deep pink sash and wear the dress to the prom. You know, in the unlikely event anyone were ever to ask me.

  And the best part of all is, Grandpa is paying for them. Because if it had been left up to Mom, we’d have had to wear matching dresses from the Sears sale rack instead of beautifully handmade gowns from Kitty’s own personal seamstress and dress designer.

  “Hello, kids,” Kitty said when we came to the back kitchen door, which is the only one the Hollenbachs use. Their house, which Kitty grew up in, is one of the oldest on our block, a huge Victorian farmhouse (although the farm part got sold off long ago to build other houses on, like mine) with a fancy parquet entranceway the Hollenbachs never use. The house has a butler’s pantry and maid’s room (the attic room Jason had recently moved into), and a button under the dining room table you can press to ring for the maid in the kitchen, which Jason and I used to press so many times when I’d go over there to play as a kid that his mom finally had it disconnected.

  “Would you like some lemonade?” Kitty asked.

  Which is one of the reasons I’d liked coming over to Jason’s house so much when I was little. For one thing, it was the only house on the block with central air-conditioning, so it was always nice and cool.

  But for another thing, his mother always had things like lemonade and fresh orange juice to serve. At my house, the only thing there is to drink, besides milk, is water. From the tap. My dad says we can’t afford to have juice, even frozen concentrate, since it’s so expensive (and besides, whenever by some accident it shows up in our fridge, it is immediately consumed by Pete), and he won’t let any of us have soda or Kool-Aid, because all that sugar isn’t good for you.

  Jason can have as much sugar as he wants. And as a consequence, he never wants it.

  We glugged down about two gallons of lemonade (Pete drank practically a gallon all on his own) before Kitty could finally persuade us to climb the stairs and try stuff on.

  But when we did, it was totally worth it.

  “Oh,” Kitty said when Catie and I came out of Jason’s old room, which had been converted into an impromptu sewing room. With race car wallpaper. “Look at you two! Like a couple of princesses!”

  Catie looked down at herself in her flower girl dress, which was exactly like mine, only in miniature, with just slightly less décolleté, and said, “D’you really think so?” looking extremely pleased with herself.

  “I definitely think so,” Jason’s grandmother said. Mrs. Lee, Kitty’s seamstress, studied us both, then came up to me and said, grasping the darts beneath my armpits, “It needs to be taken in a little here.”

  “Yes,” Kitty said, nodding. “Just a little.”

  Pete, who was tugging uncomfortably on his bow tie—dyed the same pink as our dresses—let out a snort. I looked down and saw that Mrs. Lee was talking about my boob area, where the dress was sagging a little. That’s because when she’d first fitted me, I hadn’t had my new, correctly fitting bra, so I’d been all over the place. Now I was correctly proportioned—but the dress wasn’t.

  “Shut up, Pete,” I said. “Will you be able to do it in time?” I asked Mrs. Lee, worriedly.

  “Oh, of course,” Mrs. Lee said. “I can do this in a jiffy.” To Catie, she said, “Yours is perfect. You can take it off now.” She looked at Pete and Robbie and said in a less friendly voice, “You, too.”

  The boys whooped and began stripping off their cummerbunds and jackets, almost before they even left the hallway for the bathroom, which was the boys’ dressing room for the day.

  But Catie looked about as ready to take off that dress as she was to eat a dirt sandwich.

  “What’s YOUR dress going to be like, Mrs. Hollenbach?” she asked Jason’s grandmother.

  “Call me Kitty, dear,” Kitty said with a laugh. She’d asked all of us to call her by her first name, especially now that she was going to be our grandmother. But the littler kids kept forgetting.

  “It’s not as pretty as yours,” Kitty assured us. “But I hope Emile will like it.”

  “He will,” Catie assured her. “He’s warm for your form.”

  “Catie!” I cried, shocked.

  But Kitty and Mrs. Lee were laughing.

  “Well,” Catie said, looking up at me with a defensive expression on her face. “That’s what Jason said. I HEARD him.”

  “Speaking of Jason,” Kitty said, “where IS that boy? We have to make sure his tuxedo fits, too.”

  “Here I am, Grandma.” Jason appeared in the doorway, spooning cereal into his mouth from a salad bowl. Not a bowl you’d put a single serving of salad in. But the actual wooden salad bowl itself, into which he’d poured an entire box of Honey Nut Cheerios and about a gallon of milk, his usual after-school snack.

  “Oh, Jason,” Kitty said with a sigh when she saw this. “What’s your mother going to say when your supper’s spoiled?”

  “I’ll be hungry again by dinnertime,” Jason said with a shrug.

  Kitty, who shared Jason’s bright blue eyes and slender frame, but not his height or overlong dark hair—hers was cut into a pageboy, as pure white as Grandpa’s hair, which is why they made such a cute couple, despite what Mom might think—shook her head.

  “Must be nice, right, Stephanie?” she said with a wink at me. “To be able to eat like a horse and never gain an ounce?”

  I didn’t say what I wanted to, which was, “Yeah, but at least we don’t look like one,” meaning a horse, meaning Jason.

  But I didn’t think his grandmother would appreciate this little witticism. Though it would have served Jason right for being so mean to me in school all day.

  Mrs. Lee made Jason go into the bathroom to change into his tuxedo. When he came out, followed by Pete and Robbie, who were back in their civilian clothes, he was still eating from the salad bowl.

  Even so, seeing him in a tuxedo gave me something like an electric shock. Because he looked so handsome in it. Like James Bond, or somebody. If James Bond had ever eaten cereal out of a salad bowl.

  “Dude,” Pete was saying, gazing up at Jason, whom he worshiped for being over six feet tall and owning his own car, “the new 5 Series has got five-liter capacity, ten cylinders, 383 lb.-ft. maximum torque—it’s the BOMB.”

  “I know,” Jason said, chewing.

  “What about your parents, Stephanie?” Kitty asked, a little too casually, as Mrs. Lee fussed around with Jason’s cummerbund. “Any chance they’ll be joining us Saturday after all?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, not meeting her gaze. I really liked Jason’s grandmother, and my
parents’ behavior—mostly on my mom’s part, since my dad was just doing what she told him to do—embarrassed me. Grandpa’s wedding was way more important than any stupid superstore opening in town. I don’t know why my mom couldn’t see that.

  “Oh well,” Kitty said with a sigh. Her smile, like her eyes, was still bright. “You never know. There’s still time. I’m holding places for them at the reception, just in case. Jason, darling, are you going to get your hair cut before the wedding, or are you going to let it hang in your eyes like that?”

  “I thought I might wear it like this,” Jason said, and finger-combed his bangs over his eyes, so that he looked like the Snyders’ sheepdog. Pete and Robbie giggled delightedly at this.

  “Oh, Jason,” Kitty said with a sigh. But you could tell she loved her grandson’s teasing.

  Which was when I noticed that Robbie had found Jason’s cat, Mr. Softy, and was trying to pick him up, and that Catie was trying to take the cat away from him.

  “Catie, leave Mr. Softy alone while you’re in your flower girl dress,” I said, and Mrs. Lee and Kitty immediately sprang into action, Mrs. Lee grabbing Catie by both hands and hauling her away from the all-black cat, who was known for his copious shedding, due to being a Persian, and Kitty distracting Robbie—and Pete—by asking if they wanted to come downstairs for homemade ice cream sandwiches.

  They did, leaving Jason and me alone in the hallway, eyeing each other in the awkward silence that followed. After he flicked his hair back, that is, so he could see again.

  It was especially weird since Jason and I don’t HAVE awkward silences. Ordinarily, we have so much to say to each other, it’s like a race to see who can get it all out before the other one interrupts.

  Now, however…silence.

  I didn’t think it was due to his hotness in a tux, either. I couldn’t help but think our not having anything to say to each other was due to The Book.

  I don’t know why Jason couldn’t just be happy for me. I mean, that I had finally got people to think about me some other way than as the girl who spilled the Big Red Super Big Gulp on Lauren Moffat’s D&G skirt. It wasn’t like I was going to forget about him and Becca once I got popular. I fully planned to bring the two of them along to all the parties I was bound to start getting invited to.

  So what was he so mad about?

  Jason was the one who broke the silence.

  “Did you see what she did?” he demanded sort of angrily.

  “Who?” I asked, thinking he meant his grandmother and wondering what she could have done.

  “Your friend Becca,” he said. And thrust out his foot to show me the soles of his high tops, the ones Becca had drawn on during the convocation.

  “On the tops, man!” Jason cried indignantly. “She drew on the tops!”

  “So?” I couldn’t believe this is what had him so hot under the collar. “Is your tongue broken? You could have asked her to stop.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” Jason said. “You know how she is. All sensitive.”

  “You are not,” I said, holding up a hand, “laying the blame for this one on me.”

  “Why not?” Jason demanded. “She’s your friend!”

  “She’s your friend, too,” I reminded him. “Or wasn’t she the one you took to Pizza Hut for lunch today?”

  “Oh, like that wasn’t a living nightmare. I’m telling you, there’s something weird going on with that girl,” he said. “Something even weirder than—”

  He broke off. I stared at him.

  “Go on.”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing. Look, I gotta…”

  “What?” I demanded. Suddenly, I felt hot in my bridesmaid’s dress, despite the air-conditioning. “Just say it. Something even weirder than what’s going on with me. That’s what you were going to say. Right?”

  “Well.” Jason was spinning his cummerbund around, trying to unfasten it without putting down the salad bowl. “You said it. Not me. But, now that you mention it, yeah. What happened to you? What was all that today? I thought you hated that stuff.”

  “Here,” I said, not being able to stand his fumbling around a second longer. “Let me do that.” I went up to him and undid the cummerbund. “I don’t see what’s wrong with just giving the school spirit thing a try. I mean, not all of us are happy about being a social reject.”

  “I thought you loved being a social reject,” Jason said, looking genuinely surprised. He held up his fingers like they were shaking a sugar packet. “‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter!’ Remember? We have fun being social rejects.”

  “I know,” I said as gently as I could. I was using empathy, because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “I just…I’m tired of being a Steph, you know?”

  “But that’s your NAME,” Jason reminded me.

  “I know. But I’m sick of that girl. I want to be someone different. And not,” I added quickly, “Crazytop, criminal mastermind, either. I want to be Steph Landry…but a different Steph Landry. A Steph Landry who’s…well”—I couldn’t look him in the eye—“popular.”

  “Popular?” Jason repeated, like it was French or something. “POPULAR?”

  But before he had a chance to say anything else, Mrs. Lee came out of the guest room, looking pained.

  “Stephanie,” she said. “Do you think you could come in here and convince your sister to take off her dress? She seems to want to keep it on until the wedding.”

  “Sure,” I said. And I handed Jason his cummerbund. “Talk to you later, Jase.”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking it from me. His expression, I saw, was a mixture of confusion and…well, there’s no other word for it: hurt. “Whatever.”

  Except that what did he have to feel hurt about? He wasn’t the one Lauren Moffat and her heinous cronies hadn’t let pee for two days during Girl Scout camp. He wasn’t the one all the girls ganged up on at once during dodgeball and pummeled with those stupid red balls. No one in our town ever said, “Don’t pull a Jason,” or, “You’re such a Jason.” Did they?

  No. They did not. It was all well and good for Jason to say it like that—“POPULAR?”—but he didn’t know, did he? He didn’t know what it was like. He was a freak by CHOICE. He didn’t HAVE to be a freak, with that body and those parents and this house. He could have been as popular as Mark Finley, if he’d wanted to.

  He just didn’t want to.

  Something I would never, ever, in a million years, understand.

  * * *

  Popular girls…

  Never:

  Show off their looks, talents, or possessions.

  Allow boys to get “fresh” with them.

  Gossip or say spiteful things about others.

  Tease or mock other girls.

  * * *

  Thirteen

  STILL D-DAY

  MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 7 P.M.

  The talent auction was definitely on. And, so as to get the school year off to a financially advantageous start, it was on for Thursday night. I know because I got an e-mail from Mark Finley telling me so.

  Yes. I, Stephanie Landry, got an e-mail from Mark Finley.

  I have no idea how he got my e-mail address. But I guess if you’re Mark Finley, Bloomville High quarterback, senior class president, and paramour of Lauren Moffat, you can get anybody’s e-mail address you want.

  I about died when I checked my e-mail account on the family computer, and there it was—Mark Finley’s name—in my inbox.

  It wasn’t exactly a love letter, or anything. It was just a very factual, businesslike note to let me know he’d reserved the gymnasium—which seats more people than the auditorium—for the purpose of holding the talent auction, at seven P.M. Thursday night.

  But it was still an e-mail from Mark Finley. My first e-mail from a popular person. Ever.

  But apparently not destined to be my last, either. Because Mark’s wasn’t the only e-mail I got. Quite a few people wanted to volunteer their services for the talent auction. I had offers
as varied as baby-sitting services to stump removal to an accordion concert in your home.

  I had no idea the students of Bloomville High were so talented.

  Then I noticed some e-mails that looked…well, not quite right. That’s because their subject lines said Usuck and Ih8U. Plus, they all came from someone whose user-name was SteffMustDie.

  Nice. They couldn’t even spell my name right.

  I knew what these were. I even had a pretty good idea who they were from.

  But that didn’t make it any easier. It didn’t make me feel any less sick when I clicked on them. Because I had to click on them, of course, even if just to delete them.

  WHY DON’T YOU GIVE UP AND STICK TO YOUR LOZER FRIENDS, FREAK, one not-so-friendly missive asked, not necessarily grammatically correctly.

  STOP SUCKING UP, BROWN NOSE, she advised me, in the next.

  And, yeah, okay. It hurt. They made my chest feel tight, those e-mails. Like I couldn’t breathe. Who could hate me that much to want to make me feel that bad? Especially when I hadn’t done anything to anybody—well, except spy on my next door neighbor and sprinkle sugar in Lauren Moffat’s hair.

  But she didn’t know that was me. And she was the one who’d started it, with the Don’t Pull a Steph stuff.

  I’ve seen movies where girls got sent mean e-mails from their peers. In the movies, the girls always freaked out and started crying and printed out the messages and ran to tell their mothers, who then complained to the principal of their school, who then made it his mission in life to find out who was behind those messages.

  In the movies, the principal always finds out and suspends the perpetrators, who, by the movie’s end, apologize to the victim. And then they all become friends after they realize it was really just a big misunderstanding…usually after some pretty teacher the screenwriter based on herself intervenes and teaches them all to be More Empathetic.