Messy (26 page)

Brooke resettled herself against the huge old maple tree on Colby-Randall’s main lawn and tried to focus on what Jennifer was saying, but her mind was elsewhere. Specifically, in Brady Swift’s mouth. “So what’s the problem? Brie didn’t want to talk?”

“She should treat me with respect,” Jennifer said, tugging some grass out of the ground in irritation. “She is your employee, and I am one of your oldest and dearest and most loyal friends. She doesn’t get to say, ‘Jennifer, I don’t have time for this, I have a manicure.’ ”

Brooke shrugged. “Maybe she really had a manicure.” At Jen’s furious expression, she quickly added, “But I will make sure she knows that if she runs into you again at Barneys, she should cancel it.”

“That’s the least she should do,” Jennifer said airily. Then she added, “But since you brought up Max…”

Brooke stretched lazily. “I can’t control who she goes out with, Jen.”

“It’s so
rude
.” Grass was being uprooted by the violent
fistful now. “She’s dating my ex! Of, like, a week! That violates the Girl Code, doesn’t it?”

“It would,
if
you had ever been friends,” pointed out Arugula, who had been absorbed in her iPhone on Jen’s other side. “But you loathe each other. Ergo, I’m confident the only code you have in common is the penal code preventing you from running each other over with your respective cars.”

“She was so
in my face
about it, too! Kissing him in the bar…” Jen’s tone went from aggressive to wounded. “It really sucked, seeing that. I didn’t think…” Her face crumbled as she trailed off into silence.

Brooke sat up. “I’m sorry, Jen,” she said sincerely, feeling slightly guilty for her small (
very
small, though, really) part in encouraging Max and Jake. She rubbed Jen’s arm sympathetically. “I’ve been kind of caught up in my own stuff.”

“It’s okay,” Jen said quietly. “I understand. You have a big movie taking up all your time.” Her voice took on a wistful tone. “Jake was kind of all I had to focus on.”

Brooke didn’t know what to say. Now she felt massively guilty for her somewhat larger than “very small” part in encouraging Max and Jake.

“First of all, every woman should have something to sustain her emotionally other than just some man,” Arugula said. “Second, at least you got to yell at him about it.”

“That’s true,” Jen allowed, twisting a strand of brown
hair around her finger. “It was kind of like old times.” She brightened. “Maybe it’ll make him nostalgic! He always liked it when we fought.”

At that moment, two of the school’s basketball players crossed the quad. “Hey, Maneater,” one yelled, and wolf-whistled. Brooke blushed prettily and waved.

“Oh, right, how many hits has the YouTube video gotten?” Jen asked, a bit peppier now.

Ari pecked at her phone. “Fifty thousand so far,” she said. “How many of them were you, Brooke?”

“Only about twelve,” she lied. It was more like fifty. But she couldn’t help it—whoever had gotten the cell-phone video of her and Brady making out had been at a really advantageous angle. She looked great—her nose wasn’t in the way at
all
, although she had mild concerns about her chin—and it perfectly captured the heat of the moment. Brooke could still feel his kiss all the way to her toes.

“Way to go, Berlin!” Chaz Kelly shouted, giving her a chunky thumbs-up from the parking lot. “You’re an animal!”

“The commenters aren’t so charitably disposed,” Ari said, skimming the page.

Brooke blanched. “What are they saying?” she squeaked, snatching the phone from Ari. “Is it my chin? I knew it was my chin.”

“Oh, they aren’t talking about you,” Ari said. “They’re
murdering
the song that’s playing. The one Teddy McCormack wrote.”

Brooke scrolled down and read a few of them. “Artless whining from a nasal loser,” she read aloud. “Oh, God, this one called it ‘eunuch rock.’ ” She frowned. “Poor Teddy. Molly said he worked really hard on that.”

“Well, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s an ‘emo angst bag,’ ” Arugula quoted. Brooke glared at her. “I didn’t write it,” Ari protested. Then she paused. “But I may have written the eunuch one.”

“That’s my sister’s boyfriend you’re talking about,” Brooke huffed. “Kindly leave out the snide comments.”

Brooke stood up and brushed off her pleated DKNY mini. “Okay, I’m off—I have to turn in this week’s homework to Headmistress McCormack and then I’m due on set.” She smiled. “Nancy solves the mystery today, in an actual dress. Such a nice break from my homeless rags.”

“I know what you mean,” Jen said, scooping up her books. “On Thursday I did an infomercial for a company that makes neti pots and they put me in a shirt from Wet Seal. I mean, can you imagine?”

The three of them headed into the main building. Brooke hadn’t been on campus much in the past month, and it was satisfying to find her old stomping grounds totally unchanged: The student din nearly overshadowed the light classical music piped in on the PA system, the air still smelled like Lysol and chalk, and people continued to gawk and whisper whenever she passed. Maybe even more than usual, now that she was Hollywood’s most promising up-and-comer.

In fact, something was definitely different about their attention today. Instead of seeing the standard cocktail of admiration and mild fear in her fellow classmates’ eyes, Brooke saw confusion, with traces of…
amusement
?

“Excuse me, Brooke?” said a smooth, cold voice from over her shoulder. Brooke whirled around to face the most wretched human being on the planet: her longtime archnemesis Shelby Kendall, the anchor of the school’s TV station and heiress to the tabloid
Hey!
, a blisteringly (and inconveniently) beautiful Angelina Jolie in a world of Paris Hiltons, and a daily thorn in Brooke’s side. Shelby’s red Serious News blazer matched her lipstick to a T; she wore it over white skinny jeans with leopard pumps.

“Shelby,” Brooke said pleasantly. “Trying to make the eighties happen
again
, I see.”

“We’re on live for CR-One, covering Colby-Randall’s most cherished blogger and member of the literati,” Shelby sneered coolly, jamming a microphone into Brooke’s face. “We’re just all so inspired today by your brave antitechnology stance—what prompted it?”

Brooke looked blankly at Shelby. “Have you hit your head recently?” she asked.

“I might ask you the same,” Shelby said, tilting her head in faux-concern. “For someone who has
cleaved
to the Internet so intimately this past month, I thought calling it a ‘succubus’ was a surprising choice.” Shelby shot her a smug smile. “Would you care to elaborate?”

Brooke’s mind spun wildly. She hadn’t taken a single sip of alcohol on her date with Brady. She hadn’t gone anywhere the following day except to get her brows waxed. As far as she knew, nothing Shelby was yammering about had anything to do with her.

Ari finagled a spot in her peripheral vision.
The blog
, Ari mouthed, waving her phone in the air. Brooke realized she hadn’t checked it yet that day. She’d been letting Max go on autopilot after the success of their first several entries. Suddenly, it seemed urgent that she escape and see what “Brooke” was talking about today.

“Shelby, if you need help with your reading comprehension, I’d be happy to lend you one of my on-set tutors,” Brooke said, turning to leave. “Ian once taught a chimp to read, so hopefully he won’t have too much trouble with you.”

“Such
warm beauty
in your words,” Shelby said, catching Brooke with her hand and squeezing her arm. The assembled crowd tittered. Brooke felt herself go pale. For the first time possibly in her entire life, she was the only person not in on the joke.

“I don’t have time for an interview, actually,” she fumbled, shaking off Shelby and scurrying away.

“Of course,” Shelby called after her. “So much
typing
to do. Ta-ta!”

Brooke didn’t give Shelby a backward glance; instead, she stormed into the principal’s office and dumped her
file folder of homework papers on the receptionist’s vacant desk. Ari followed and silently handed Brooke her phone, cued up to OpenBrooke.com’s latest:

OPENBR
KE.COM

Precious Open Brookers, I’ve got an English assignment you might feel compelled to embrace to your collective bosoms: I’m to take a novel and imagine how it would be changed if social media existed in its universe. At first, of course, I aimed to cleave to my old favorite, my comrade-in-snark, my friend-against-phonies, the dearly departed but ne’er forgotten J. D. Salinger, but it’s simply too easy to envision the indolent existentialist funk into which Holden Caulfield would descend upon being forced to parse his worldview into 140 characters or less.

Heathcliff and Cathy could have sated their guttural yen to sup on each other’s spirits by DMing their love letters on Twitter—private passion naught but an Internet outage could intercept, thus irretrievably and detrimentally changing the course of
Wuthering Heights
from a searing lovelorn drama to a lukewarm revision of
You’ve Got Mail
. How about Jane Austen? Wayward Lydia in
Pride and Prejudice
, who
disappeared with the sly knave Wickham, would be unable to resist making herself the mayor of Gretna Green on foursquare, and would have been dragged back to Longbourn well before dawn. And imagine the Facebook stalking between Jane and the Bingleys, or how Darcy might’ve vanished for good after Lizzie excoriated him on her Wall for his aloof prejudice and impenetrable pride. It would rend their romantic journeys into shattered oddments of a story arc. Or, take
To Kill a Mockingbird
: Scout would’ve had an online journal recounting her travails (much like this one, but spiced with her unique flavor of innocence), but the inevitable parody Boo Radley Twitter feeds would demystify the man and his magnetic myth! Each of these tomes would have been the poorer—a shadow, a joke—for the inclusion of these modern miracles of connectivity.

Indeed, it causes one pause: If social media would have laid waste to the purity of our classic love stories, mutilated our morality plays, and turned starkly simple coming-of-age moments into chilly digital snapshots that couldn’t equal the warm beauty of the thousand words, then what is it doing to us—ourselves—in this very moment? In yearning to know more, are we condemning ourselves to settle for less?
With our hands overflowing with technology, yoking us to the superhighway succubus, are our hearts and minds the emptier for it? Or is being able to intertwine fingers with one another from thousands of miles apart worth pouring out our souls through our laptops and not our eyes?

Pensively,

B.

After a long moment, Brooke realized that her mouth was hanging open. Nobody—except maybe Arugula—used so many SAT words, sentence after sentence. In fact, that entry read like a cracked-out, pretentious parody of Arugula. Had Max totally lost her mind? What was going on with her?

Brooke forced herself to relax her face (nothing was serious enough to court wrinkles). She and Max had been getting along fine; Brooke had even started to enjoy the friendly bantering that had grown from their bickering. The makeover she’d given her had been fantastic. And Max herself had been very helpful in keeping Brooke’s conversations with Brady on track once they’d met up the night of the concert. In fact, Max’s smoothness had probably paved the way for Brooke and Brady’s lip-lock, and that wasn’t the sort of favor you did for someone you hated. But as Brooke reread and reread this pompous
entry, she couldn’t help thinking that it had been written to make her look like an idiot. To wound her.

And it had worked. Brooke had never anticipated that Max McCormack, of all people, would turn into someone who had the capacity to hurt her. It was a very unwelcome surprise.

“Brooke!” a voice said warmly.

Brooke snapped her head up and saw Headmistress McCormack walking out of her office, followed by Max, who was cradling her own cell phone as if it had just been returned to her after a long confiscation (which, given what Brooke knew of Max’s disciplinary history, it probably had been). The light in Max’s eyes seemed to dim a bit when she saw Brooke’s face.

Guilty
, Brooke thought.
Guilty, guilty, guilty.

“So nice to see you being so conscientious about turning in your assignments,” Mrs. McCormack said, blithely picking up Brooke’s folder, unaware of the simmering tension between the girls. “I hope Maxine’s tutelage has been helpful.”

“Oh, yes,” Brooke said, never taking her eyes off Max. “Max has been
unbelievable
.”

Max’s eyes flickered with what Brooke would swear was defiance. “Anytime,” she said, with exaggerated sweetness. “I just hate to see a fellow student suffer from her own academic inertia.”

So it
was
deliberate
, Brooke realized.
She knew people would think the entry was absurd.

The two stared at each other for several awkward seconds. Brooke tried to pour a gallon of betrayal into her face, punctuated with some hurt and a little rage. Max simply wore an innocent expression that seemed to become more angelic the more Brooke allowed herself to seethe.