**Officially published as Clique Bait with HarperTeen!**
Payment is usually a part of a basic transaction. You give and then you take. But, at Arlington Preparatory, people take at their leisure. They take their entertainment in the form of humiliat...
PLEASE come back, even just for a day. I'd literally trade my soul to have you here. You know how much I love my soul.
And I think you're forgetting, apart from you Jack was the only one to really speak to me. He's good to fall back on.
Love, Chloe
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I sat cross-legged, my body comfortably wrapped in cotton pajamas and an old fluffy sweater with bobbles on its drawstrings. Even after showering, eating, washing my mouth a million times, and resting, I still felt completely awful. Like someone was bashing a truck into my skull, and my throat was a ragged trail of broken glass.
In front of me, spread out in a messy array on my duvet, was a bunch of lists. All the lists I'd hoarded over the past few months, ranging from menial tasks like getting ready for a party, what I'd eaten in a day, or my evening workouts, to fundamentals like the amount of times Sophie checked her phone at lunch on Wednesday and a list of people close with Jonas that I'd found on Facebook.
They were all being traded for two important new lists. The first, all the things I could do to take down level one. The second, all the things I could dig up on 'Mike', the photographer
Because, although patience was important, I was losing my head. It was clear that for this to work, I needed to minimize my time on level one.
After a sleepless night, and a lot of pondering, one problem became strikingly clear to me, one I hadn't anticipated in my summer of planning. And that was subjecting myself to a personal relationship with William Bishop.
I was good at planning. Well, I thought I was at least. I'd mapped out almost everything, from quizzing myself on the correct pronunciations of fashion brands and how to accessorize them, to how I could discretely come across as unassociated with Monica Pennington. But there was one big thing I hadn't planned for.
How could I have known, having no prior experience with boys, that putting myself in an intimate relationship with one, even a false one, would have an effect on me physically? As someone who always thought logically, I hadn't realized how strong the heart could be.
And no. I didn't love William. In fact, it could have been anyone. Just someone to take away all of my firsts and bring out the stupid, hormonal teenage girl within me, who I currently wanted to strangle with the sleeve of William Bishop's jacket, which was hung on the back of my desk chair.
I hated being out of control. And that's how I was starting to feel around him. As much as I wanted to blame it on the drugs, something about him last night brought forward all the feelings my stupid insides had been developing. Because I couldn't stop thinking about him. It was awful.
