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Copyright © 2011 by Lara Zielin. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Published simultaneously in Canada. Text set in Goudy Old Style.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zielin, Lara, 1975–The implosion of Aggie Winchester / Lara Zielin. p. cm. Summary: Sixteen-year-old Aggie feels compelled to investigate rumors that her cancer-stricken mother, principal of her small Wisconsin high school, has rigged the prom queen election to keep Aggie’s best friend Sylvia, a pregnant Goth, from winning. [1. Best friends—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Identity—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. SchoolsFiction. 6. Pregnancy—Fiction.

7. Goth culture (Subculture)—Fiction. 8. Mothers and daughters—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.Z497Imp 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2010017104

eISBN : 978-1-101-51765-9

This is a work of fiction. Although inspired by real events, the names, characters and scenes in
this novel are the product of the author’s imagination.

http://us.penguingroup.com

BY THE AUTHOR OF

Donut Days

There is a big world out there—bigger than prom, bigger than high school—and it won’t matter if you were the prom queen, the quarterback of the football team, or the biggest nerd in school. Find out who you are and try not to be afraid of it.

—Josie Geller,
Never Been Kissed

Chapter One

MONDAY, MARCH 9 / 7:55 A.M.

I pushed open
my car door and stepped straight into a puddle of ice and slush. Fat, wet snowflakes fell like rain. I raised my hand and extended my middle finger toward the sky. The universe could suck it for creating March in Minnesota as far as I was concerned.

By the time I got to my locker, my shoes were soaked and my black-green eye shadow, called “Decay,” was mixed with my mascara and all but running down my cheeks. I almost didn’t notice the flyer taped to my locker until I’d finished my combination. JOIN US FOR A NIGHT AT THE HOFBRÄU HAUS! it screamed.

“Oh, hell,” I muttered. The prom wasn’t until May, but everyone at St. Davis High started talking about it in early March, because apparently you needed two months to get sufficiently excited about how
completely amazing
it was all going to be.

A picture of a busty girl with braids dressed in some kind of feminine lederhosen stared at me. Because of the way she’d been photocopied over and over, there were black spots on her grin, making her look toothless.

Bring your oom-pah and your groove to the junior prom in May
, the flyer went on,
and
RESERVE YOUR TICKETS TODAY!!!!
Your vote counts, so remember to
CAST YOUR BALLOT FOR THE PROM KING AND QUEEN!!!!!!

I crumpled up the flyer and tossed it into the bottom of my locker. Like there was any chance I’d be voting. Or going to the prom, for that matter. I grabbed my books and headed to first period—study hall—thinking about how Sylvia and I were planning on skipping the rest of the day to drive to Brainerd and get our eyebrows pierced. We’d only come to school for first period so the attendance secretary didn’t call home—or in my case, walk across the hallway to my mom’s office, since she was the principal of St. Davis High—asking if we were sick today.

I slid into my seat just as the study hall teacher, Mr. Otts, reached the end of the alphabet.

“Aggie Winchester?” he called out.

“Yeah,” I answered, and then flipped open my chemistry textbook, pretending I knew how to add protons and subtract electrons.

“Hey, Aggie,” Fitz Peterson said from the desk directly across the aisle. I pulled out a pen and uncapped it slowly. With Fitz, I had two choices: acknowledge him and hope he’d shut up or ignore him and hope he’d shut up.

“Fitz,” I replied.

“My dad and I are headed out this weekend to go look at the new Triton boat line,” Fitz said. “You seen them?”

Fitz was talking about bass-fishing boats because we were both in this group, the Bass Masters, together. My dad had forced me to join last summer. He saw one of those ads in a sporting magazine that said GO FISHING WITH YOUR KIDS OR LOSE THE CHANCE TO REEL THEM IN FOREVER, and something in his brain clicked. I guess he thought the way to connect and
really get through to me
was to put me out on the water in a dirty boat with bait and a pole. In the end, I figured it was better than his bonding alternative, community theater, since as a general rule thespians piss me off, and my dad can’t act worth shit.

By all accounts I should have hated fishing, but there was something about looking at all that empty water that cleared my head and helped me think. Not that I ever admitted that, mind you. I told everyone that my dad was making me fish to punish me, and I was just trying to get my hours in.

Anyway, Fitz assumed that I was always up for talking bass, and it didn’t matter that I told him I’d been forced to do it. He was forever blathering on about such-and-such lake or blah-blah-blah lure. Which, okay, at times could be interesting, but part of the reason I liked bass fishing was because nobody talked very much. Everyone was chill. Sort of the anti-Fitz.

“Sorry, I haven’t seen the Tritons,” I said, staring at the atomic weight of krypton.

“One of the new models has a two-hundred-horsepower engine and an onboard battery charger,” Fitz said, his curly hair bouncing slightly. “Think of how fast that goes. You know? You could beat everyone else to the best fishing spots during a tournament.”

“This is study time,” Mr. Otts reminded the class while looking straight at Fitz and me.

“Shut up already,” I whispered. The last thing I needed was detention for talking when I was about to skip.

I clutched my pen, wanting to be mad at Fitz for never being able to shut his yap, but I couldn’t work up to it. He talked with this goofy, ginormous mouth that I swear could fit around an outboard motor. I wished Fitz’s gargantuan mouth made him ugly, but the truth was all his features worked together, meaning he was sort of okay looking. Sort of. Not that I’d ever tell him that.

“Hey, Ag,” Fitz whispered, undeterred, “did you see the prom flyers this morning? You think you’ll go? I swear, prom is the one night when even
I’d
date that ex-boyfriend of yours. Pulling up to prom in that badass car of his? Man, that would be awesome.”

To my surprise, I felt my face heat up. Fitz talked about a lot of crap, but this was the first time he’d brought up Neil. I didn’t know what to say, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that: a) I used to love it when Neil drove me around in his 1969 fully restored Chevy Impala, and b) I couldn’t care less about going to prom, but I did still care about Neil. A lot.

“Did you guys ever spawn like salmon in the backseat of his car?” Fitz asked. “Did you flop around on top of each other?”

Leave it to Fitz to bring it back to fishing.

Fitz wiggled in his seat like a salmon. “Aggie liiikes to spaaaawn,” he singsonged. Except he was trying to be super quiet, so it came out in a whisper-song, which sounded so stupid I wound up cracking a smile.

Fitz stopped wiggling. For a second, his dark blue eyes, the color of a storming ocean, focused on mine. “What do you know,” he said, stone serious. “The bad girl smiles.”

“Screw you, Fitz.”

“Anytime, anywhere, Aggie Winchester.”

I had no comeback for that one, but it didn’t matter. Fitz had finally shut up.

After first period, Sylvia and I climbed into her car and took off for Brainerd.

The ride down there was two hours; the piercing was a pinch that was over in about thirty seconds. We had lunch at McDonald’s, then killed time by sitting on swings in a park.

On the ride back home, I kept flipping down the passenger seat visor to look at the new addition to my face. A silver ring was embedded in my left eyebrow, which had swollen into an angry red wedge.

It looked terrible.

Each time I glanced at it, I hoped the puffiness would fade, or that I’d like it more. But every time I brought the visor down, my makeup looked more smudged, my light brown hair more stringy. And the eyebrow ring just got uglier and uglier.

“You pull that visor down one more time and I’m kicking you out of the car,” Sylvia said, “
while it’s moving
.” She tapped her black fingernails on the steering wheel. “Just chill, will you? Your eyebrow ring looks sick.”

“Can’t I take half a second to get used to it?” I asked, more defensively than I meant to.

Sylvia laughed, and the afternoon sun lit her like an angel. A
purple
angel, since she’d dyed her hair a dark shade of violet and now wore black eyeliner with dark purple eye shadow—but an angel nonetheless. “There’s no getting used to anything, Ag. It’s done. It’s over. Move on.”

I pushed the visor up. Sylvia was right—as usual. The eyebrow ring would look better in a few days. And in the end it would be worth it. It had to be. Skipping school, hanging with Sylvia, wearing all black, and now piercing my face—it was who I was. Or it’s who I
became
anyway, once I learned that wearing pink, doing my homework, and trying out for the cheerleading squad weren’t enough to keep me safe in high school.

I’d worked hard to fit in freshman year, which had gone fine until one of the most popular girls, Tiffany Holland, got caught stealing and selling the answers to Spanish tests. She was hauled down to my mom’s office and suspended for three days. I didn’t think much of it until Vanessa Mackey told me to stop posting mean comments on Tiffany’s FacePlace page. I told her I had no idea what she was talking about, but she just rolled her eyes and told me to knock it off.

That night when I looked at Tiffany’s page, I saw someone had written “u got what u deserved, cheater” and “Principal Winchester ftw!” I’d laughed. It wasn’t me, though I’d almost wished it was. There was no way Tiffany should have been going around selling answers while the rest of us were studying to conjugate irregular verbs.

The problem was, no one believed I
hadn’t
written those comments. When Tiffany came back to school from her suspension, she made it her mission to make people think I was a snitch, the principal’s Wormtongue, the girl who’d run and tell Mommy what she knew about anyone. It was me who ratted her out, she said.

When I told her it wasn’t me, she spit in my face. “Who else would defend the
principal
?” she demanded as I wiped away her saliva from my cheek. “The only loser stupid enough to do that is you.” Everyone nearby tittered in agreement. I pressed my damp hand against the leg of my jeans and wished I could crawl in a hole and die.

It wasn’t long before Tiffany persuaded my friends to stop talking to me. I was a social leper almost overnight. I lost everyone around me, but found Sylvia.

When someone goes Goth at our school, you call it crossing over to the Dark Side, and freshman year, Sylvia had crossed. She was the only one in our class who’d done it. Back then, with her pale skin, dark lipstick, black clothes, and multicolored hair, she was at least as much of a pariah as I was—maybe even more.

She was the only one who would talk to me. And she told me her secret. “Look tough, act tough, and people will leave you the fuck alone.”

She was right. And when people
didn’t
leave us alone, there was always the option of punching them or keying their cars—something Sylvia wasn’t afraid of doing when the mood struck her. There were days I felt like I’d found a friend
and
a bodyguard.

“So what will your parents do, you think?” Sylvia asked, slamming the gas in order to pass a semi. I studied the bare farmland all around us.

“Probably ground me and take away my cell phone again,” I replied.

“And tell you you’re an embarrassment to the family?” Sylvia offered. The dark lipstick around her mouth made her teeth flash bright white.

“The principal’s kid who gets into constant trouble.” I sighed dramatically. I put the back of my hand on my forehead, as if I were aghast at being the blemish on my mom’s perfect image. We belonged to the country club. She played tennis and bridge and ran half marathons. She had zero flaws—except me.

Maybe, finally, the eyebrow ring would be the thing that would make my mom stop buying me clothes from the mall and sticking them in my closet as a reminder of what I
should
be wearing. Maybe now she’d grasp that I was never going to join the debate club or the track team, even though she always posted the tryout flyers on our fridge. Because at the end of the day, it was pretty obvious she wasn’t trying to help me. She was just embarrassed by me.

“So you want to go to that party at Jefferson Talbot’s this weekend?” Sylvia asked, changing the radio station.

“Yeah, cool,” I said, thinking Neil might be there, too. Not that he’d acknowledge me, but I could at least see him. And if that happened, then those moments that bubbled up like a hot spring wouldn’t be far behind—the ones that let me believe Neil still loved me, just a little bit. Even now, four months after he had dumped me, part of me knew I could scratch and scratch but never satisfy the itch to be with him.

“Will Ryan be there?” I asked.

“Yeah, probably,” Sylvia replied. “We texted about it a few times.”

“Texted or sexted?” I asked.

“That’s privileged information.”

“I thought as your best friend I got security clearance on all the dirty stuff.”

“Not
that
dirty.”

Sylvia had never really dated many guys seriously, but I knew she’d pretty much been seeing Ryan Rollings solo for the past few months. Ever since she got the part-time job at Rollings Auto, where she worked in the car wash and he worked in the accounting office (thanks to his dad owning the place). Actually, I’m not sure if Sylvia was seeing him as much as banging him on the sly, since guys like Ryan didn’t really date, officially, girls who weren’t blond, popular, and at least a C cup. Even though, in this case, I wished he did. It seemed like he and Sylvia actually liked each other.

“You think one of these days you guys might actually go on a date?” I asked.

Sylvia shrugged. “Why bother? This is more fun.”

Something inside me whispered,
Careful.
Out loud, I said, “Totally.”

When I got home, my eyebrow ring blew the lid off everything.

“What have you done now?” my mom asked, standing in the kitchen and holding a can of vegetables that she no longer seemed to know what to do with.

I readjusted my bag and shrugged. “Sylvia and I went to Brainerd,” I said, as if that explained anything.

My mom set down the vegetables. She grabbed my shoulders. “Margaret Winchester!” she yelled. “Enough is enough! This behavior needs to stop! Do you hear me?”

She let go of me, and I stepped back. My mom hardly ever put her hands on me. I stared at her eyes, which were bulging in her face.

I tried not to freak. My parents were smart, educated, and reasonable. My mom especially. She solved her problems with logic; she didn’t yell at them. She’d sat me down a hundred times to tell me things like how skipping school was a “precursor to bigger problems,” how drinking at an early age would “do irreversible damage to my brain cells,” how dressing in all black was “not the way to solve my issues.” No matter what she said, though, she never lost her shit like this. Ever.

My mom looked like she might haul off and try to punch me. I took another step back.

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