How to Be Popular Read Free Page B

once did something horrible, something that made you unpopular. What can you do about it? Can you ever live it down?
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Three
    STILL T - MINUS TWO DAYS AND COUNTING
SATURDAY , AUGUST 26, 10:20 P . M .
    I don’t know why I haven’t told Jason and Becca. About The Book, I mean. I’m not embarrassed about it—well, not much, anyway.
    And it’s not like I stole it, or anything. I fully asked Jason’s grandmother if I could have it the day I found it in that old box in the Hollenbachs’ attic, which we were cleaning out so Jason could turn it into his Ryan Atwood pool house/Greg Brady bachelor pad (which, considering he is an only child, makes no sense. Except for the fact that it was easier to turn the attic into his new bedroom than strip the race car wallpaper off the walls of his old room).
    And okay, I didn’t pull out The Book itself and ask Kitty—Mrs. Hollenbach, Jason’s grandmother, who asked us to call her by her first name, so as not to confuse her with the other Mrs. Hollenbach, her daughter-in-law Judy, Jason’s mother—if I could specifically have IT. I just asked if I could have the BOX, which contained The Book as well as some old clothes and a couple of very steamy romance novels from the eighties—which, I must say, have caused me to look at Kitty in a new light, considering the heroine in one of them turned out to like having sex “Turkish-style,” which in the book did NOT mean “while wearing a fez.”
    But Kitty just glanced into the box and went, “Oh, of course, dear. Though I can’t imagine what you’d want with those old things.”
    If only she knew.
    Anyway, so I haven’t told them. I don’t think I’m going to, either. Because, truth?
    They’ll just laugh.
    And I don’t think I could handle that. Thanks to Lauren Moffat, I’ve had five years of people laughing at—not with—me. I don’t think I can take any more.
    Anyway, it turns out driving up and down Main Street? It’s not as fun as sitting around, watching people drive up and down Main Street.
    And making fun of them behind their backs while they do so.
    I can’t believe that all summer, I’ve been longing to be inside a car instead of outside of one, watching the action on Main Street. When it turns out it’s so much better back on The Wall. I mean, from The Wall you can see Darlene Staggs open the passenger door of that night’sboyfriend’s pickup, and barf up all the Mike’s Hard Lemonade she ingested while sunning herself over at the lake that afternoon.
    From The Wall you can hear Bebe Johnson’s little chipmunk voice as she sings along with Ashlee Simpson on the radio.
    From The Wall you can see Mark Finley adjust his rearview mirror so that he can see his own reflection and gently fluff up his bangs.
    You can’t do any of that stuff from the backseat of Jason’s new car.
    And I had to be in the backseat, because Becca gets carsick when she sits in the back. So she was in the front seat, next to Jason. Which meant I couldn’t actually see anything much, except their heads. So when Jason went, “Whoa, did you see that? Alyssa Krueger just took a spill in the middle of the street trying to race in platform espadrilles from Shane Mullen’s SUV to Craig Wright’s Jeep,” I missed the whole thing.
    “Did she rip her pants?” I asked eagerly.
    But neither Jason nor Becca were able to confirm pant-rippage had occurred.
    If we’d been sitting on The Wall, I’d have seen the whole thing.
    Plus, while I understand that Jason is excited about his new car and all, I think he’s kind of gone overboard with the whole thing. Now when he sees another BMW, he practices this thing he calls BMW Courtesy, which means he lets other BMWs cut in front of him—especially if they are a Series 7, the king BMW of them all, or the convertible 645Ci. Which I find personally egregious, because that’s what Lauren Moffat drives, on account of her father owning the local BMW dealership.
    “Oh no, you did not just do