The Teenage Guide To Popularity [COMPLETE]

Chapter 10: I Was Five, And He Was Six,

There's a feeling you get when something scary or exciting happens. Your insides feel light, like you're falling down a rabbit hole. Your heart could be floating, but your mind is racing at a thousand miles per minute. No matter what you do, you can't shake the feeling away. In the case of Carter Vance, she had no idea how to process it. There it was though, tingling her skin, making her question the moment, as if maybe it was all just a strange dream.

"Tala's gonna freak if she finds out," Ashton Rhodes said, amused by the situation. She folded her arms across her chest and smirked.

Tala wasn't the problem. It was Leigh that Carter thought of. Leigh who was her best friend. Leigh who had been head-over-heels in love with Kiran for years. What would she think? This is not happening. This is not happening, Carter thought, but no matter how many times she blinked, Kiran didn't disappear. How am I supposed to go with the flow now?

"Looks like Kiran got you. You guys are next, okay?" Elena nudged Carter forward. She had been going around, making sure every guy was finding the girl whose name he picked. Since many of them had disappeared in the party crowd, Elena had become a little frantic trying to pin-point everyone.

"I've changed my mind. I don't want to play," Carter muttered.

"What? But you said you liked the idea."

"I did. I do, it's just... I... I feel a little sick. I think I drank too much."

"You're fine. Please, please, please go. Everyone's watching, and if you go, maybe they won't think it's such a bad idea."

"Why would it matter to them if I went?"

"People like you," Elena said. Was it true? All Carter did was sit at the Popular table one day. Was that really all it took at Newton High? Probably not. There had to be more to it than that, because if that's what did it, it hadn't been a challenge at all.

Either way, she was not going in that closet with Kiran. It was a cruel twist of fate, a nasty joke that some evil, unknown force was playing on her. She took a step back and faced Elena, "No one will care. No one's even paying attention."

"Just go into the closet with him. You don't have to do anything. Just stand there. Please?" Elena whispered in Carter's ear.

Go into the closet with him. There's a phrase I never thought I'd hear. This was not Carter's idea of what being popular should be like. Being forced to go into a storage closet was like something out of a pre-teen cable show that no one remembered. Not even a high school story. Not even worth a second screening. Rolling her eyes in defeat, Carter headed for the closet without bothering to see if Kiran was following her.

Tala and the unknown guy had just come out through the door. They looked disheveled, as if they had been wrestling, and it made Carter sick to her stomach. Not because she found anything wrong with what Tala had done, but because she didn't like the idea of herself doing that with Kiran. He wasn't visually unappealing. He didn't suffer from poor personal hygiene. Overall there was nothing wrong with him, and perhaps some other girl would be overjoyed to be stuck in a dark, small space with him. Not Carter. Not Leigh's best friend. It was very, very wrong. On many levels.

Carter marched through the door without speaking a word to anyone. Tala was staring at her with great amusement. At least it was now certain that Tala wasn't that interested in Kiran.

The closet was much too dark for her liking. It was too cramped and too dingy, and it gave Carter the impression of a victim being stuck there, waiting for the horror-movie killer to come hack them to death. She found a small nook with a flat piece of cardboard on top, and sat down. The sound of the door closing startled her a bit, and the two of them were swallowed in darkness.