Confessions of a Hater Page 14

  That’s one reason I had been pleasantly surprised that my shots at the self-involved popular crew didn’t get Abby Invisible eighty-sixed. This school had proven itself a bit more tolerant of self-expression than I expected.

  But satire is a completely different story from broadcasting over the morning announcements that one of the most popular girls in school has (mythical, but whatever) herpes.

  Even if everyone knew she totally deserved that shit.

  Anyway, Anya put herself squarely in the crosshairs for us, so we did everything we could to coach her up for her eventual interrogation. Anya’s always had an appreciation for performance art anyway—what else is great stand-up comedy than performance art—so she came correct with the aptitude. Xandra helped out with some of her acting tricks, and we all pitched in by trying to hit her with every torturous interrogation tactic we could think of—short of waterboarding, bamboo shoots under the fingernails or watching an entire season of Toddlers and Tiaras. I swear those kids and their makeup are scarier than evil clowns! I just hope someone will document at least one girl’s evolution from Toddlers and Tiaras to Teen Mom to Intervention to Hoarders.

  Anyway, of course, Anya kicked the living shit out of it. I so wished I could have been there to watch but from what it sounded like, her performance was inspired. I’ll relate what happened as best as I can recall what Anya explained to me:

  Anya sat outside Principal Dash’s office for forty-five minutes, which Anya said felt like approximately three weeks. Eventually, the door opened, and Skyler walked out. She walked up to Anya, smiled slightly (hinting at Anya’s impending demise), then walked right out the door. About a minute later, Principal Dash called Anya into his office.

  Inside were Principal Dash and Mr. Muñez, and the looks on their faces told Anya this would not be a pleasant conversation. I won’t bore you with the play-by-play, but they took turns trying to wear her down about Operation Herpes, which Anya says she found odd—hadn’t Skyler already provided them with the whole enchilada?

  Here Anya was, like, totally ready with her whole defense, and these guys are still asking where the tape came from?

  “I don’t know!” Anya replied, for the fifteenth time. (She might have been exaggerating there—I’ll bet they only asked her twelve times—but that’s what she told me, so whatever.)

  “Anya, you really expect me to believe you have no idea where the tape came from?” Principal Dash asked.

  Xan had trained her well. Anya explained that someone had stuck the DVD through the slats in her locker on the morning of the announcement, with the note:

  ANYA, THIS IS TIME-SENSITIVE MATERIAL THAT MUST BE PLAYED ON THIS MORNING’S ANNOUNCEMENTS. IT’S VERY IMPORTANT, SO MAKE SURE EVERYONE LISTENS. THANK YOU.

  –PRINCIPAL DASH

  (We’d created the actual note, of course, for the little bit of extra oomph that hopefully gave our story. Plus we totally knew he’d ask for it.)

  “And you really thought that was a note from me?” Principal Dash asked.

  “Well … yeah!” Anya said. “You’re busy with, you know, principal stuff. You even had a meeting this morning, right? I figured you just dropped it off in my locker.”

  “And when you watched it, you didn’t wonder why I would ask you to play a DVD on the morning announcements in which an underclassman supposedly declares—to the entire school—that she has an incurable venereal disease?”

  “I didn’t watch it before I played it on the announcements,” Anya said.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t watch it, Mr. Dash. I’m sorry. I was running late this morning, and I was afraid I’d be late for the morning announcements entirely, and I don’t want to lose the gig.”

  Mr. Muñez shook his head. “So, Anya, you just played something, without any idea what it was, over the morning announcements?”

  “I thought it was from Mr. Dash!” Anya said. “The note didn’t say watch it. It said play it.”

  “You know that any major changes to the morning announcements have to be cleared by the administration,” Principal Dash said.

  “I thought you’d already cleared it, because I thought you wrote the note,” Anya replied.

  “Anya, that’s a little hard to believe,” Mr. Muñez said. “Look, we know you and Skyler used to run in the same circles. And we know that all changed once you came back to school after your … um … extended absence.”

  “My pregnancy,” Anya said, taking the opportunity to put them on the defensive.

  “Um … well … right,” Mr. Muñez said.

  Anya relied on the principle we had drilled into her over and over, the principle that, if anything, best defined the Invisibles:

  The best defense is a good offense.

  “Look,” Anya said defiantly. (Well, she said it was defiantly, and knowing Anya, it was definitely defiantly.) “I got a DVD in my locker. It said it was from the principal, and that I had to play it on the morning announcements. So I did. And then it turned out to be some prank from someone trying to make Skyler look bad. I’m really sorry that happened, but I don’t know who made this video.”

  That’s when she pulled out the move Xan had taught her, step by step: Anya closed her eyes and bowed her head, then made the sign of the cross over her chest, and said: “I swear to God. I swear to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

  (Sure, we know Anya’s a total atheist, but these faculty goobers were totally taken in by that stuff.)

  (Well, mostly.)

  “Anya, given what we know, that’s still a pretty hard story to swallow,” the principal said.

  Emily had warned Anya about this move, the we-can-prove-you’re-not-telling-us-the-truth maneuver. Credit Emily’s experience with having to talk her way out of more than a few questioning sessions with Paul Blart types at the local malls.

  Don’t fall into that trap, Emily had told Anya. They’re trying to mine information from you. Play dumb and try to get information from them.

  “Mr. Dash,” Anya replied, “what are you talking about?”

  “We talked to Skyler,” Mr. Muñez interrupted. “She told us everything that happened.”

  “Great,” Anya said. “So what happened?”

  “We want you to tell us,” Mr. Dash said.

  “Um … I just told you I don’t know. Skyler does, right? What did she say?”

  As Anya tells it, the men just looked at each other in silence. And that’s when Anya knew it for sure: Skyler hadn’t told them anything. Why, she had no idea. But for some reason, Skyler played dumb.

  This was way better than we could have ever hoped for. We’d already set up Xan with a whole defense, but she never even got called in to the principal’s office. She walked away scot-free and so did I and Dahlia too.

  Anya wasn’t as lucky. We figured she might face some punishment, and indeed she did. Obviously the principal didn’t completely buy her story, but she was helped immensely by one thing:

  He couldn’t actually prove she was full of shit.

  That made it pretty tricky for Mr. Dash to throw the book at her, despite how public and huge the Herpes Humiliation had been.

  He called Anya back into his office later that day and laid out his ruling: one week of in-school suspension (ISS), plus one day of detention every week for the rest of the semester. His rationale was that Anya should have known better than to broadcast something on the morning announcements sight unseen, that she shouldn’t have taken for granted that something came from him without speaking to him in person, and that running late that morning was no excuse for being party to something that so embarrassed one of the students.

  He had a point there—I mean, half the school was referring to Skyler as “Vicky Valtrex” by fourth period, and that doesn’t even include the ones calling her “Suzie STD” or “Becky Blisters.” (If you included our crew, she was being called all three.)

  Mr. Dash wrote out an apology and “correction” that Anya was mandated to read the next day
on the morning announcements, advising that the “student-related announcement from yesterday was entirely false, the result of a cruel unfortunate prank, the likes of which will not be tolerated at West Hollywood.” She concluded by saying she would be taking an indefinite (and, of course, also principal-mandated) leave from the morning announcements.

  It was pretty tough, but it was in line with what we expected, and what Anya had been braced for—she knew it was a calculated risk, and she expected she’d be doing some sacrificing for the cause.

  We’d all made that commitment to the Invisibles. No risk, no reward, right? There was no point in banding together if we didn’t put ourselves in positions where we had to put up or shut up.

  And we sure as shit weren’t going to shut up.

  Not anymore.

  Still, it would have been a whole lot worse if not for Skyler’s inexplicable refusal to sell us all down the river. We had elaborate plans to minimize that damage, sure, but we never had to bother with them.

  Word got around that Skyler’s family was furious, they wanted Anya expelled from school and worse, but the other shoe never dropped. Still, we all felt for Anya. The after-school detention part sucked, but getting out of classes for a full week didn’t seem too awful—even if you were stuck in the library.

  The worst part of it was she was going to miss driver’s ed, and with no chance to make up the class before the test, she was going to have to take it again and wait until next semester to get her driver’s license. We all promised to be her chauffeurs during her waiting period—it was the least we could do. She had taken one for the team.

  * * *

  Anyway, in light of the herpes announcement, whether or not it was indeed a prank, the school implemented a new zero-tolerance rule. (Like I said, schools love zero-tolerance rules. Don’t force us to think or use any discretion, just lump everything into one pile! Zero tolerance!)

  This one regarded pranks. There would be a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who did anything remotely resembling a prank. Nothing surprising there.

  When Chris and I caught up after school, I braced myself for the worst.

  “Wow … go big or go home, huh, Hailey?”

  I gave him a slightly sheepish look. “You mess with the bull … you get the horns?”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t say she had horns,” Chris said. “You said she had herpes.”

  “Technically, it wasn’t me,” I said, not even trying to sound sincere. “It was some video stuck in Anya’s locker with a note—”

  “Nice try,” he said, “but you know no one buys that. Got away with it though, huh?”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  He looked a bit pained, which bothered me, then he stepped closer, which thrilled me. Though I was really worried about what was coming next.

  “Look, Hailes,” he said, giving me some weird variant nickname I immediately loved, “I’m not mad for me. I mean, no one thinks I have herpes. No one thinks Skyler has herpes. It was obviously a prank, and it was pretty smooth, I gotta say.”

  “Um, thanks,” I said. “So if you’re not mad for you, you’re mad for … Skyler?”

  “I’m not mad at all,” he said. “Mad isn’t the right word. It’s just … look, I know Skyler can be awful. I mean, awful. I mean tripping blind orphans who are sightseeing at Grand Canyon awful.”

  “Probably not the best group for sightseeing,” I said.

  “Valid point,” he said.

  “So what’s the but?”

  He sighed. “But … I don’t know. I’m not saying she isn’t ripe for pranking—she deserves to get as much as she gives—but … I don’t know. Guess I can’t help but feel sorry for her a little.”

  “Really?” I replied. “That makes sense. Like watching the Harry Potter movies and feeling bad for Voldemort.”

  “Yeah, I’ve never seen one of those,” he said, and it didn’t look like he was kidding. “Anyway, it’s cool. It’s just—you’re really smart, Hailes. You’re really funny.”

  “Thanks,” I replied. Hailes.

  “And you’re a killer artist … you have all this potential.”

  “Thanks again…”

  Chris looked me dead in the eye. “So don’t fuck it up.” And he walked off.

  So I was knocking that around for the following few days. In fact, it was still fresh on my brain when I returned from school one day to find a real surprise outside my house:

  Skyler Brandt.

  * * *

  It had already been ten minutes and nothing drastic had happened. Curiosity was getting the best of me so I finally just asked Skyler what was going on:

  “So when do your friends jump out of the bushes to beat the crap out of me?” I asked, suggesting we were in some kind of chola gang war. “Force-shampoo my hair with something to make it all fall out? Kidnap me and force-feed me cupcakes for a week so when I get back to school I’m fifteen pounds fatter? Actually that sounds kinda good. I’m amenable to that.”

  Skyler chuckled at my remark. It was a surprisingly understated response from her, possibly the first genuine-sounding thing I’d ever heard pass her oft-venomous lips. You’d almost think she was human—if you didn’t know better.

  “No one’s in the bushes, Hailey. It’s just you and me.”

  “I knew I should have patted you down.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m unarmed. You’re mostly safe. Really, all you can get from me is herpes—right?”

  Ouch. Nice touch. Skyler was a bitch, no question whatsoever, but she wasn’t exactly stupid. Too bad she always used that quick wit for evil.

  We walked to the small park down the street. I really didn’t know what to expect, though getting duct-taped upside down to a tree—a picture that would be immediately uploaded to Facebook by one of Skyler’s minions—certainly crossed my mind.

  Her humor reminded me of a section of Noel’s diary:

  Don’t take yourself too seriously. Being able to laugh at yourself is super-important. If you’re someone who can’t laugh at yourself, other people are probably doing it for you. (And they’re not laughing with you, they’re laughing at you.)

  It was almost like Skyler had been privy to the diary as well—but I knew she wasn’t. I guess charm and the how-to’s of being cool came naturally to the Skylers of the world. I knew she had to be infuriated over the Herpes Hoax, and I was right at the top of her hit list.

  Then again, Noel wouldn’t have backed off or run into her house, terrified of the evil meanie. She would look her in the eye, cool as ice. So I played along, followed Skyler to the park, braced myself for the worst, and then … nothing.

  At least so far.

  “Can we get on with it, Skyler?” I asked. “I don’t have all day. I’m sure you want revenge. Do your worst. I can clean fish guts off my shit six days a week and twice on Sunday.”

  She smirked. “We don’t have school on Sunday.”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past you.”

  Skyler chuckled again. It sounded genuine. Again.

  “Hailey, like, you expect the worst,” Skyler said. “Of course you do. You should. I’ve, like, destroyed girls’ lives before, left them broken and pitiful, and they hadn’t pulled anything as fucked up as what you pulled on me.”

  I had no idea what to say. So I didn’t say anything. What would Noel do? Stare her down. So I stared her down, looking as tough as I could, but mostly thinking, Please don’t duct-tape me to a tree. Go the cupcakes route if you need to do something drastic. Red velvet is my favorite but I’m open.

  It seemed like she was still waiting for a response, so finally I gave her one. “I didn’t start it,” I said. “You could have left me alone. Just because I didn’t want to be part of your clique—”

  “That’s exactly what started it,” Skyler said. “You’re a pretty girl. You dress decently. I know that. I know everything that’s going on. If we hadn’t met, you think I would have spent a single extra second concerning myself with you? With
all the freaks and fashion tragedies, all those Walmart ensembles, cluttering the halls at West Hollywood? Gawd, they could keep me occupied for years.”

  “So what’s the issue?” I asked, now genuinely curious.

  “You turned your back on me,” she said. “It was, like, betrayal. I barely knew you, but I took a chance on you, and you—well, you ‘dumped’ me. I don’t get dumped. I damn well don’t get dumped in front of the whole school.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Let me finish. I know what you’re going to say: ‘Yeah, but you’re shallow and whatever, and I’m all deep and I’m an artist and I’m all funny and shit.’ Fine. Great. Whatever. You think I don’t get you? I get you, Hailey. You think I would have let you in if you didn’t have something going on? I’m not an asshole, Hailey. I get you. The problem is, you don’t get me.”

  Now it was my turn to chuckle, especially because any concealed minions would have attacked me long ago. I think.

  “Really?” I asked. “You’re a shallow, bitter, style-obsessed bitch. What’s not to get?”

  Skyler flashed a shark’s smile, reminding me who I was talking to again. “Well … why do you think you’re not suspended from school? Like, why do you think your buddy Xandra wasn’t suspended? Or how about Dahlia?”

  Shit. She knew Xandra’s name now. Mental note: Warn Xandra.

  “Yeah, Hailey, I know who Dahlia is, and I know she edited the video. And my old pal Anya, my old bestie? Why isn’t she looking forward to taking the GED at this very second?”

  The shot at Anya infuriated me. “You did way worse to her.”

  Her face was placid, unfazed. “You weren’t here then, sweetie. But … yeah, maybe I could have handled that better. Like, sometimes I just start talking and I’m surprised what comes out. You know how that is. Like you and your buddies telling the whole school that someone has a fictional case of herpes. It just comes out—whoops! Or … like me telling the administrators that if they check the cameras in the media center—they have security cameras in there, you know—they might find out how your little broadcast came to be in the first place.”