Project Paper Doll: The Rules (Excerpt)

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Zane Bradshaw

“I mean, who does she think she is?” Rachel said with a loud huff.

Twelve hours later and she was still bitching about the thing with Ariane Tucker and Jenna Mayborne this morning.

I shook my head. As usual, when Rachel didn’t get what she wanted, she had to make life miserable for everyone.

I was stretched out on two wooden benches on Rachel’s enormous back deck, my eyes closed and my feet hanging off the end—one of the many disadvantages of life at six foot four. But it wasn’t uncomfortable enough for me to move yet. I held a cold beer, my third, on my stomach. Condensation rolled down the bottle past my fingers to cre­ate a damp and chilly place on my shirt.

A few feet away, Rachel and the twins, her nearest and dearest cronies, moaned about Ariane over the slosh and splash of the hot tub.

“Rachel, she’s only been in our class for forever.” Cami Andrews punctuated her disbelief with a slap of water. “She moved here from, like, Ohio. Her mom died and she came to live with her dad.” She paused. “And she was really sick a long time ago or something, but she got better.” I could hear the frown in her voice as she tried to remember the details.

Cassi seemed to be humming “The Star-Spangled Banner” under her breath, for no apparent reason.

“I know who she is,” Rachel said, sounding further irri­tated. “I’ve heard her name before. It’s just like, suddenly she comes out of nowhere and she’s, what, Miss Morally Righteous, Defender of the Annoying? What business is it of hers, anyway?”

In theory, it had been none of Ariane’s business at all, which made it all the more awesome. Not that I could say that aloud.

But the truth was, most people wouldn’t stand up against Rachel even if she was torturing them directly. And quiet, sit-in-the-back-of-class Ariane had come to Jenna’s defense, shocking the hell out of me and everyone else. The good timing of the unexpected special effects—apparently a transformer had blown a couple blocks away, which made the lights pop—hadn’t hurt either, adding a whole Carrie-esque feel to the moment.

Ariane hadn’t flinched, even with Rachel in full-confrontation mode and breathing fire. I never knew she had it in her—an unhesitating lack of fear. I admired the hell out of that.

“She’s in my gym class,” Cassi offered in her breathy voice. She and Cami had seemingly formed a pact early in life that Cami would be the smart one, relatively speaking, and Cassi would be the pretty one. This despite the fact that they were identical twins. Regardless, they each played their role to the hilt. “But she never participates,” she added, sounding confused. “She sits on the bleachers. Or on the grass. But only when we’re, you know, outside.”

See what I mean?

“She was in my Advanced Comp class. I think,” Cami said.

“What are we talking about?” Trey had evidently aban­doned Matty and Jonas in the pool. His feet made splatting sounds on the deck as he approached.

“That girl,” Rachel said, with a pout in her voice.

Oh God, not this again. I could predict how this was going to go. Rachel would be all needy and “love me, love me,” Trey would swoop in and try to save the day, and then Rachel would find some way to bitch-slap him back to the last century. That’s the trouble with having the same friends your whole life—you know what they’re going to do before they do it. Various people on the fringes of our circle flowed in and out, depending on Rachel’s mood, but at the core, it was always Trey and me and Rachel and the twins. Since that first day of kindergarten, when Rachel had picked our table to sit at and scored us all an extra cookie at snack time by telling us to hide the first ones we’d gotten.