The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back (7 page)

"Mother," she corrected. She wanted me to call her "Mother" as a sign of respect, so I basically called her Pearl every chance I got. I guess I'd called her Pearl one too many times.

I knew what she was doing and why, but I chose to play dumb. "Mother? Is Grandma there with you?"

"No, I'm reminding you to call me Mother."

"Sure thing, Pearl." I knew this made me sound like a total brat, but you had to know her.

She glared at me and then said, "We will resume this discussion when you stop being so deliberately obtuse." She disconnected from our video chat.

I let out a squawk of indignation. Had my own mother just called me fat?

Chapter 7

The next morning at school the rumor mill was spiraling out of control. I heard whispers and snatches of conversation saying that Jake had tired of Ella and dumped her. "Hey! She broke up with him!" I told a group of juniors, but I could tell none of them believed me.

I ran into Ella right before English and expressed my total outrage over the gossip.

She just shrugged. "People will believe what they want to believe."

"What if Jake started the rumors?" It would be one more thing to hold against him.

"He wouldn't do that. But even if he did, if it makes it easier for him to let people think he dumped me, I'm okay with that."

See? She was too good to be true.

I stood there staring at her. "How are you not mad?" I'd want his head on a pike. Okay, not really because it's Jake, but a little maiming might be in order.

She spun the dial on her locker and pulled the door open. While putting her books away, she said, "I try not to sweat the small stuff. But like I said, Jake just wouldn't do something like this. His friends, maybe, but not Jake." She got what she needed for her next class and shut her locker.

"Everything will be fine. Go to class." Ella said as she pushed me in the direction of my classroom.

She walked away from me and I saw several sets of eyes follow her, and heard the dramatic "whispers" and giggles as she passed. It wouldn't do me any good to go to each of those people and tell them the truth. Jake Kingston was always the dumper, not the dumpee, and he had the trail of broken hearts to prove it.

Including mine.

My English class was only a few doors down from the headmistress's office. Angry all over again, I stalked over to the bulletin board outside Ms. Rathbone's office, grabbed the pencil hanging down, and wrote my name in big block letters right under Jake's.

"So, you're running for president too?" I could hear the amusement in his voice.

I turned to see Jake smiling down at me, as if he found me funny. "Apparently." I dropped the pencil and went to class. He followed slowly behind me. I threw my bag on the floor and took out my notebook, determined to ignore him. I didn't watch as he slid into his seat and made a point to not study the back of his head.

The bell rang, and Ms. Aprils stood up from behind her desk. She was an extremely tiny woman, and reminded me of a small, brown mouse with her bland brown hair and the beige wraparound sweater she always wore. She took an upside-down hat off of her desk and shook it a few times. I heard rustling paper.

"For your first project of the year, you will be assigned a classic work that you will retell in a new medium. You will select your work by pulling it out of this hat." She held it slightly higher so that everyone could see it.

She walked through the aisles, stopping every so often to allow one of the students to pull a paper out. "Last year we had a puppet show. Another group did an online blog of the character's internal thoughts," she said as she shook the hat up again. "Someone else told the story through a series of tweets. I want you to use your world to tell this tale."

Ms. Aprils walked right up to me and gave me the evil eye as she held the hat out in front of me.

Please not Twain, please not Twain
. She'd fail me for sure no matter what I did if I got him. I reached in and took a folded strip of paper. I opened it and read the words
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen. I tried really hard not to smile. I couldn't have picked a better book. I loved Jane Austen, and Pride and Prejudice was my favorite.

She walked past Jake and stopped at the girl in front of him so she could draw out a title. "The project will be due next Friday." As soon as I picked my paper, I had been thinking I could do a manga retelling, turn it into more of an adventure story by making the Bennet sisters warriors. But I didn't know if two weeks would be enough time.

"And we're going to be working in pairs."

A small groan rumbled through the class, while some girls started whispering and planning to be paired up together. That should be somewhat better. Maybe I'd get paired with someone exceptionally smart and hard-working and we could get the project done quickly.

"I thought the easiest way to select partners was to simply have you turn around. The person behind you is your partner."

I made a strangled noise. I was last in the row. No one sat behind me. Which meant…

Jake turned around slowly and my heart actually stopped. Literally stopped. Like, I worried they'd have to take me to the emergency room to jump-start it back up again.

"You have the next ten minutes to confer briefly with your partner."

"What did we get?" Jake asked. I handed him the strip of paper. He looked at it and then back at me. "I don't really know this story, sorry."

He gave me the movie star smile, and a marching band started a beat in my stomach. Right then I didn't know who I was more mad at—me for still responding like that to him, or Jake for being a total douchebag yesterday and pretending like we were best buddies today. Jerk.

"I think that's sort of the point. That we read the book first and then decide how to retell it." To my disgust, my voice cracked while I was talking to him. I could feel my face starting to flush.

The paper fell from between his long, lean fingers on to my desk. "I'm not sure I'll have time to read a book and do the project. Isn't there like a movie version or something?"

"A couple," I nodded, looking down at the paper on my desk instead of his dark brown eyes. "I actually own the most recent one. We could watch it at my house."

"So, you know the story."

I nodded again.

"That's good."

Jake leaned toward me so that I could smell his yummy boy cologne smell. It was confusing my senses and scrambling my brain. "Any ideas?"

He was all smiles, brown twinkling eyes and shiny dark hair. I had lots and lots of ideas when it came to Jake. Unfortunately, he was talking about the project.

"I…I was thinking we could do a manga retelling. You know, like anime but in a graphic novel."

He looked slightly insulted. "I know what manga is." Then he leaned in closer. What was that cologne? I didn't know what it was, but it made me feel like one of those girls in the Axe commercials who throw the guys on the floor and start kissing them. I had to lean back in order to control myself. I also tried to single-handedly suck all of the oxygen in the room into my lungs and hold it there. If I didn't breathe, I couldn't smell him.

"And that sounds like a good idea," he said. Then he did something so unexpected I was amazed that I didn't spontaneously combust.

He reached out and took my right hand in both of his. My first thought was that my hands which had always seemed too large actually looked small next to his. My second through fiftieth thought was
Jake Kingston is touching me! Jake Kingston is touching me!
Actual tingles started everywhere that he touched and raced up my arm. His hands felt warm and strong. I didn't need to worry about holding my breath, because I had forgotten how to breathe.

Jake turned my hand this way and that way and smiled lazily as if he knew exactly the effect he had on me. "Since it sounds like you already know the story so well, maybe you could just draw everything up and put my name on it. No need for both of us to be tortured. Once you finish, we could grab some dinner and you could tell me what to say in our presentation. What do you think?"

My mind seized on the "grab some dinner" line and realized that Jake had just asked me out! To dinner! I had imagined this moment so many times that it didn't feel real. But it was real! Jake had just asked me to "grab some dinner" with him! Everything inside me started to melt until I realized what he had actually said.

Wait.

My Jake blinders fell off and instead of everything being soft and hazy it was painfully sharp and bright.

I realized he was messing with me, and I was gullible enough to be falling for it. Again. Flirting was as normal and natural for Jake as being a slob was for me. I felt so incredibly stupid to be taken in by it. He was trying to charm me into doing the work for him. I was so, so dumb.

"You want me to do the entire project?" I asked. I wanted so much to have misunderstood, to have been so Jake-crazy that I hadn't heard him clearly.

He nodded and rubbed his thumb over the back of my hand. Yesterday he had asked me to lie for him. Today he was asking for the same thing. I thought I'd made my position on lying for Jake Kingston pretty clear. Obviously, I hadn't. I pulled my hand free of his.

Was this really how he was going to play this? Was he actually going to sit there and pretend like he hadn't been a jerk to me yesterday and that it was okay for him to try and use me now? What had I done that made him think I would lie for him?

It made me sad to think that even a few days ago I would have been ecstatic about this assignment, and now all I wanted was to stay as far away from Jake Kingston and his slimy ways as I possibly could.

"I don't think so."

"What?" he asked, that smile frozen on his face. I realized it didn't reach his eyes. He had been trying to play me. Double jerk.

"Oh, does that usually work for you? You bat your eyelashes and girls just do whatever you want?"

I could see from his surprised expression that yes, that was exactly what normally happened. I couldn't believe he thought he could just flirt and be charming and I'd do the whole project for him.

"Even if that is what normally happens, I am not doing all the work for you. You will do your fair share or my name will be the only one on it."

"I wasn't trying to be like that," he protested, even though that was exactly how he was trying to be. "I'm just really busy with school and football practice and running for president and you…"

"Yes, as you've already pointed out I'm the pathetic loser who doesn't care about this school and doesn't have anything going on in her life."

"Hold on, I never said anything like that to you."

He hadn't. I was definitely putting words in his mouth because I was mad. "It doesn't matter. You still have to do your half of the assignment." I looked up at the clock on the wall. Our ten-minute planning session was nearly done. I felt sick to my stomach, and I wanted to get away from Jake. It might have been the cowardly move, but I didn't want to sit behind him for the next forty minutes.

And if he was trying to get me to do the entire assignment by myself, odds were good that he had no intention of actually reading the book. Or downloading the movie. I'd have to take one for the team here if I wanted him to do his half of the project. "Look, I'll be watching the movie at my house today at 3:30. You can come over and watch it with me." I thought that was very big of me, especially considering the stunt he had just pulled.

"Won't that be a little weird with…"

And, as always, it all came back to my stepsister. I shoved my notebook into my bag. "Ella won't be home until later on. She took someone's shift at work."

I stood up and looked down at him. "Come, don't come. I don't care. But if I do all the work, I'm taking all the credit."

"Did you need something, Ms. Lowe?" Ms. Aprils asked me once she looked up from the Mark Twain autobiography that I was sure she had already read a million times.

"Yes," I looked back down at Jake. "I need a note to go to the nurse's office. I suddenly feel like I'm going to puke."

Chapter 8

My father had been asked to make an appearance at a local art gallery opening as a favor to a friend and Ella was at work. Which left me home alone.

And I felt completely torn between desperately wanting Jake to come over and desperately wanting him to stay away.

I should have done something to occupy myself, but I couldn't manage to concentrate on anything. I just sat there pathetically on the couch and waited. Watched the small hand on the clock tick by one second at a time.

I would give him until 3:30 and then I would watch the movie alone. Not that I needed to. I could practically quote most of the dialogue verbatim. And yes, it was just as annoying as it sounded.

Five minutes left. I started thumping the remote against my leg. Maybe it would be better if he didn't show. If he did come over, what would I say? How could I sit next to him without punching him in the face?

3:26. It was definitely better this way. He obviously wasn't coming. I would just do this project alone and Jake could flunk English for all I cared.

3:27. But I really, really wanted him to come over. Although I forced myself to acknowledge that even if he did show up the reality wouldn't compare to the fantasy sequence I currently had running through my head. The fantasy where based on our being alone together he would suddenly realize that I was The One.

3:28. He was such a complete jerk. Such a total and complete jerk!

3:29. But still so, so pretty.

3:30. What had I ever seen in him? He couldn't even make this tiny effort and contribute?

3:31. Didn't he know that I was his destiny and he was passing up the chance to have our first epic quasi-date? (Although, would it technically count as a date if he didn't know he was on one?)