Getting REVENGE on Lauren Wood (4 page)

“This isn’t the universe. This is you and dad deciding you want to chant for a year.”

“It’s more than chanting,” my dad said, as if that was the point. Both my mom and I gave him a look, and he stopped talking and went back to scratching his hives.

“Your grandmother is really excited,” my mom said.

“What about what
I
want?” I gave a noisy sniff. I wouldn’t let them treat me like a five-year-old—easily distracted.
Sure we’re ruining your life—but look over here, a shiny grandma!
Hell no. I wasn’t falling for it.

“This is a huge opportunity for your dad and me. Living at a center like this is something that we’ve always wanted to do, and now the school is offering the funding to make this possible. You don’t need to be afraid of Lauren.”

“I’m not
afraid
of Lauren,” I said. I loathed her, but I wasn’t afraid. What else could she possibly do to me?

“You should walk back there with your head high. Heck, I
doubt any of those kids would even recognize you now,” my dad said.

“Nice way of saying I used to be fat.” I turned and faced the wall resting my head against the cool plaster. Trapped.

“I didn’t mean you were fat. It was more your old nose I was thinking about,” my dad said.

“Great, so I was fat with a big nose. This conversation is doing wonders for my ego.”

“What your dad is saying is that you’ve grown into a lovely young woman. The only power Lauren has over you is what you give her. Hating her just feeds the negative energy. I’m asking you to think the situation over. Grandma is going to give you a call tomorrow morning to talk about it, but if you want my advice, you go back there and you show them that they may have knocked you down, but you didn’t stay down.”

“What if I think about it and decide I still don’t want to do it? What if I want to skip the whole holding my head high thing and instead stay right here and feed my negative energy?”

My mom gave a tired sigh, no doubt thinking I had been switched at birth and somewhere out there was her real child who loved natural fibers, didn’t shave her legs, and wasn’t difficult about keeping her energy positive.

“We love you. You’re the most important thing in our lives. If this is something that you absolutely can’t do, then we’ll turn down the grant. But before we do that, I want you to think about it, okay?” My dad patted my back a few times before
slipping out of the room. My mom took a deep cleansing breath and walked out after my dad.

I could hear my bedroom door shut quietly behind them. Great, a one-way ticket to Guilt Trip. I could either ruin my parents’ dream or move to hell’s backyard.

I glanced at the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door. All around the edges I had taped different pictures—fashion ads from
Vogue
, copies of old vintage movie posters, and some of my pencil drawings. In the upper-right corner, half buried under other photos, was taped a picture of Lauren I’d printed off her Facebook page. I stood up and looked closer at her photo. Lauren hadn’t changed much, aside from the black mustache I had drawn on with a Sharpie. She had the same wide smile and strong nose. If you asked me, she was bordering on a horse face. Her hair was longer than in eighth grade, but otherwise I would know her if I saw her.

I looked at myself in the mirror. It had been only three years, but I’d changed a lot. I’d lost thirty pounds the summer I moved. The silver lining of having my life ruined was the stress just melted those pounds off. In New York I walked everywhere and took up yoga. Although I hadn’t lost any more weight, what remained, shifted. My braces were gone and I had stopped chewing my fingernails a year or two back. My old nose, as my dad called it, had been a bit beaklike. A year after we moved to New York, I fell down a flight of stairs and landed on my face. I was pretty out of it when they took me to the hospital, but I still
had the wherewithal to beg the doctor for a better nose before he put me under for surgery. I may have been raised in an all-natural household, but on my own I had discovered the idea of better living through chemistry—or at least better hair. My former white-girl ’fro of frizzy short hair was now shoulder length, straightened, and highlighted. I had bought a bunch of vintage clothing over the past few years and had my own style. My boobs had also finally showed up. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was hot, but I looked pretty darn good.

I stood straighter and pulled my shoulders back. It was quite possible that my old classmates wouldn’t even recognize me, especially since they weren’t expecting to ever see me again. Out of sight, out of mind.

Chapter Six

T here is nothing normal about my family. You would never see a picture of us in the encyclopedia under “typical family.” My parents don’t worry about normal parent stuff, like what time I come home at night or my grades. They worry I might buy clothing made in sweatshops and that my love for meat is some kind of character flaw. When I first got my period my mom threw me a “welcome to womanhood party,” where she and her hippie, non-armpit-shaving girlfriends got a little drunk on homemade red wine and sang songs about the cycles of the moon. I was the kid in third grade who, instead of bringing cookies to school on my birthday, brought all-natural organic zucchini cupcakes made with applesauce instead of refined sugar. Even the teacher couldn’t choke one down.

My grandma doesn’t fit the typical grandmother mold either. She doesn’t knit or wear sensible shoes. She paints her toenails bright red and wears high heels. She drinks scotch neat and cuts her hair supershort and styles it so it’s spiked up in different
directions. She looks less like she should be at a bingo parlor and more like she just stepped off a set for MTV. She couldn’t be more different from my mom if she tried. You would never know they were related except for the fact that we have the family pictures to prove it. My grandma was the one who got my ears pierced and convinced my parents that a hot dog or two wouldn’t kill me.

I sat on the kitchen counter the next afternoon, talking to her on the phone. My parents were in their room so I could have privacy, but I could hear them practically pressed up against the wall trying to hear what I was saying.

“So your folks are going to go off and stare at their navels, huh? I never did get that ‘learning how to breathe’ thing. Comes natural to me, in and out, regular as clockwork. Given how dumb some people are, you would think more people would just keel over dead if breathing had to be learned.”

“Yeah.”

“Come on now, I know this place isn’t as great as New York, but I’ve got cable and I’ll let you order pepperoni pizza. We’ll even get real cheese instead of that soy crud your mom buys.”

“It’s not that. It’s school.”

“Is this about that snot Lauren?” she asked. One thing I like about my grandma is she doesn’t worry about negative energy; she just calls things as she sees them. “I never was crazy about her. She was a pushy kid, even as a toddler. And her parents? They’re so busy social climbing it’s a wonder they
don’t have nosebleeds and a fleet of Sherpas trailing them.”

“My parents say the universe is giving me a chance to come full circle, that this is an opportunity.”

“Might be on to something.”

“Huh?” My mouth dropped open. Was my grandma finally going hippie? Had my mom worn her down with all the talk of chi over the years?

“Look, I don’t think the girl is worth another thought, but it’s clear she’s still stuck in your craw. If she’s bugging you that much, then you should do something about it instead of stewing. You’ll be going away to college soon. You need to lighten your load.”

“Get her out of my craw, so to speak.”

“Exactly. Maybe the universe wants you to come back here to teach her a lesson. Lord knows the girl could use it. You know I’m crazy about your mom and dad, but I’m thinking karma could use a helping hand. ”

I didn’t say anything. I just thought about what she’d said. That was the first time it occurred to me that instead of just thinking about revenge, dreaming about it, I could actually make it happen. Lauren would never see it coming. She would never expect it.

I hung up with my grandma and went back to my room. I pulled the picture of Lauren off my mirror and stared into her face. Revenge didn’t have to be a daydream. It could be reality. All it would take was a bit of planning. I could screw her just the same way she screwed me. Maybe my parents were right and it was time to move back. I crumpled up Lauren’s picture and tossed it into my trash can. Nothing but net. I went back out to tell my parents the news. Well, part of the news. I kept the bit about the revenge plan to myself.

Chapter Seven

I planned my move back to Terrace with the same level of care and detail employed by nations going to war. My parents, who never met a self-help book they didn’t like, were huge fans of goal setting and visualizing your perfect future. How would the universe send you your heart’s desire if you weren’t clear about what you wanted? I forget which book my mom had gotten it from,
The Secret
, or maybe
Energy for Life
, but she was big on writing down what you wanted. Somehow this was supposed to help the universe bring it to you. The universe apparently has short-term memory loss issues. It needs things written down. My mom was always saying, “The difference between wishing and goal setting is that goal setters have a plan.” I wasn’t sure I bought into the whole theory, but why take the chance? I thought about every facet of my plan very carefully. I made lists and diagrams. I kept a three-ring binder with all of my notes separated by color-coded tabs. On the first page of my binder I wrote my new
mission statement in large block letters so that the universe would be sure to see it, even if the universe had bad eyesight:

GET REVENGE ON LAUREN WOOD

Revenge is a tricky thing. I wanted Lauren to pay, but pay in a very particular way. For example, it might be momentarily satisfying to do one of the following:

1.
Push Lauren out in front of a speeding dump truck

2.
Slather her with BBQ sauce and set a herd of hungry pit bulls on her

3.
Pour honey in her hair and then tie her down on an anthill

4.
Dress her in a bathing suit made out of herring and then push her into shark-infested water

However, all of these things would be over quickly. I’ll admit it doesn’t sound nice, but I wanted her to suffer a bit longer. I wanted her to know what it felt like to have everything taken away. Then there was the added factor that it would be difficult to make a bathing suit out of tiny stinky fish, and I was pretty sure you could do some heavy jail time for pushing people into shark-infested water or into the paths of speeding dump trucks. I wanted Lauren to pay, but I wasn’t looking to spend the next forty
to life wearing an orange jumpsuit. Orange is so not my color. No, my revenge plan was going to have to be more creative. Plus, I wasn’t even sure where I could find a pack of hungry pit bulls.

I made a list of the things that were important to Lauren:

1.
Being popular

2.
Her boyfriend

3.
Getting the lead in the school play

4.
Her status as a cheerleader

Once I had the list, the basics of the plan were already framed out. I had to become more popular than she was. I had to steal her boyfriend out from under her, ensure someone else took the lead in the play, and get her kicked off the cheerleading squad.

Now I just had to figure out how to make those things happen.

The popularity angle was going to be the easiest to tackle. High schools have a social structure more strict than a Hindu caste system. By the time you get to your senior year everyone knows exactly where he or she belongs compared to everyone else. You could try to change your status—you could get a new wardrobe or take up a new sport, for example—but it would only take a few days before everyone would shove you back into the place where they felt you belonged. There might be a few people who shifted ranks, but it was highly unusual. I would have the advantage of being a new kid. No one would know exactly
where to put me, but they would be trying to sort it out from the first moment they met me. I had to stack the deck. I couldn’t
become
popular at Lincoln High. I had to
be
popular from the moment I walked through the front door. I spent hours thinking about what made one person more popular than another. When I was done I taped a list to the mirror in my bedroom so I could study it. It was a thing of beauty.

The Popularity Scale

Attractive
: Assign yourself up to 10 points, depending on your level of hotness, zero points being seriously ugly and 10 points being supermodel hot. Bonus 2 points for being fit and in shape versus merely thin. An additional 2 points for hair that looks like a shampoo ad. Minus 1 point if you flip it around way too much. Bonus 3 points for big boobs. Minus 5 points for being attractive but too slutty. Plus 1 point for good use of makeup. Minus 2 points for mild disfigurement such as bad skin, crooked teeth, or bad breath.

Sporty:
Assign yourself 5 points for general athletic ability as defined by ability to run without falling over and catching a ball without getting smacked in the face. 5 bonus points for being on key school teams such as football, cheerleading, basketball, or soccer. Minus 2 points for being on dorky teams such as archery
or fencing. Bonus 2 points if you have a leadership position on a team. Minus 2 points if you never play and instead always sit on the sidelines.

Rich:
Assign yourself 10 points for being filthy rich, 5 points for possessing mere wealth, zero points for being middle class, and minus 5 points for being poor. Bonus point for each item of designer clothing that you own or for accessories such as handbags that cost more than a small used car. Minus 5 points for purchasing your wardrobe at Wal-Mart. Give yourself 2 points if you shop at a funky vintage shop, minus 2 points if you buy your underwear at a thrift store. Some things should never be secondhand.