The Rivals Read Free Page B

if she has an opinion on it too. But for now I’m just glad she’s here, defusing Natalie. McKenna and I have had a few classes together, including government in our sophomore year, which she killed in. She’s a senior and on the student council, maybe VP or treasurer, I’m not sure. She has wild, curly black hair, and she’s always pulling it back, putting it up, wearing sunglasses on her head to keep her hair off her face. Today she’s twisted the crazy strands with a pencil, though a few errant ones have come loose. She’s standing next to a younger version of herself.
    “C’mon, guys! It’s not as if your parents are going to embarrass you by making a dumb speech,” she says, and rolls her eyes, cutting through the tension. Her parents are world-renowned research doctors—behavioral psychologists, I think—who get big bucks to travel and lecture around the world. McKenna’s mom is a Themis alum, and our D-Day is on their lecture circuit, though I’m pretty sure it’s the one pro bono stop.
    The girl next to her clears her throat.
    “Sorry,” McKenna adds, with a nod to her companion. “Alex, this is my sister, Jamie, but you’ll probably get to know her soon enough because she’s in the orchestra too. She plays flute,” McKenna says, and there’s a touch of pride in her voice.
    “I’m a freshman. I just started here,” Jamie says, and she has an eerie confidence for a fourteen-year-old. She looks like McKenna except her hair is straight, the follicular opposite.
    “And Alex here is the kick-ass leader of the Mockingbirds,” McKenna adds, and somehow I manage a combination of “thanks” and “hi” before McKenna keeps going. “C’mon, enough gabbing. We’ve got to go see Mommy and Daddy. Oh, and don’t forget to check out my awesome signs for student council,” she adds, this time to me, as she points a thumb at a poster positioned right next to my Mockingbirds one—on hers is a drawing of a gavel with a smiling cartoonish face on it.
    She heads off with her sister to the assembly hall. I notice that Natalie is right behind them. It crosses my mind that McKenna only introduced her sister to me, not to Natalie. Please don’t tell me McKenna would be friends with that evil witch. McKenna’s got to have better taste than that.
    Martin turns to me and sees my jaw set tight, my lips pressed together hard. “What did Natalie say when she whispered to you?”
    “I don’t want to repeat it,” I say quickly.
    “But I already heard the first thing she said.”
    “And the second thing she said was far worse. Which is why I don’t want to repeat it,” I say, but I wonder again if people see me as someone who stood up for herself, or if they picture me in Carter’s room, drunk, legs open, on his bed?
    Either way, I have become fused to the crime against me. That’s what happens when you take a stand, because then everyone knows what you were taking a stand for.
    Martin and I walk into the auditorium together, and I see McKenna slide into a seat near the front and say something to Jamie. Jamie glances quickly back at me. I look down at the hallway into the auditorium, feeling a pang of longing for the way my life was before my past became public.

THE THEMIS WAY
    An hour later, D-Day is in full swing. Technically, the school calls it Diversity Day , but we’ve coined our own special nickname. It’s like a pep rally, only the energy is radiating from the teachers, the administrators, the headmistress, and the dean herself. All the adults are hooting, hollering, whooping it up from their seats on the stage. Ms. Merritt is leading the show, and she has been trotting out each and every teacher to wax on and on about each of their subjects and how history, philosophy, French, calculus, and so on can all lead to the betterment not just of our nimble minds but, by golly, society as a whole!
    My roommate Maia’s sitting on one side of me, wisely using the time to read her favorite news blogs