"You did what?" Vicky demanded.
"I sauntered in with Tyler's arm around me and him kissing my head," I said, as we walked side-by-side down the hall at lunch.
"That works," she said, "But Tyler? Really?"
She made a bit of a face before pausing to glance down at her phone. I hated the way my insides twisted at her disapproval, but thoughts of Tyler's arm around me battled away the bad feelings with fuzzy ones. We kept walking, Vicky totally distracted as she scanned the lockers, until she grabbed my arm to stop me in my tracks.
"Follow my lead, okay?" she said, stowing her phone in the back pocket of her skinny jeans as she shook out her hair and sauntered up to someone I don't think I ever would have even imagined her talking to.
"You're Ernie MacKibbin right?" Vicky purred, stopping in front of the computer club president's locker. I felt a pang of pity when his face flushed almost as bright red as his hair. He pushed his glasses up along the greasy slick of his nose as he turned to Vicky. She towered a good two inches over him, her heels giving her the advantage.
"Y...yes? How do you know who I am?" he said, his eyes hopping from Vicky to me then back again. I smiled, feeling more than a little guilty for flustering him so much.
"Ohmigod you're not being serious, are you? You were like all over the Clairview Chronicle last week!" Vicky gushed, while subtly reaching into her other jean pocket. A ghost of a smile crossed Ernie's face at the mention of the Chronicle, the local town newspaper.
"I didn't know you were interested in chess championships," he said with a shy grin. Vicky offered him a simple, flirty smile and poor Ernie self-consciously pushed his glasses back up again, flushing even redder.
I felt a pang of pity that he had no idea that he was about to be Victoria-ed.
"So...is there something I can help you with?" Ernie asked finally. Vicky maintained her silence as she looked him over with more interest than any A-lister had probably ever shown him before.
"Actually yes there is," she said eventually, looking down at the memory key she'd pulled out of her pocket, "I need you to get something into the school paper for me,"
"Well I'm not really the person to go to about tha-" Ernie started.
"Not like a submission, obviously. I need you to, ah, swap an article for me," she said, offering him that flirtatious little smile of hers again.
"Oh. Okay, but I'm really not the one to go to ab-" Ernie said, moving to close his locker, but Vick caught it with her hand.
"You're the best hacker in Clairview," Vicky whispered, "Don't think I don't know that. You're the only one who can do this for me,"
Ernie's shy grin was gone as he met Vicky's coldly calculating eyes. He swallowed.
"Look, I don't have time for your petty gossip or whatever it is you want me to splice in. I have college interviews and papers to write and-" he said, trying to close his locker again. Vicky held fast, her eyes alight.
"Harvard, isn't it?" Vicky asked, cocking an eyebrow. Ernie blinked a few times, swallowing again.
"How do you know that?" he asked. She grinned, but this time there was nothing flirtatious about it.
"The same way I know that a letter from an alumnus like my father would hop you to the top of the waiting list," she purred, "Because the early acceptances have already gone out and you weren't one of them, were you?"
This time I couldn't help but mirror Ernie's shocked look as we both stared at Vicky. Ernie was now a flustered, tomato-red mess as he cast a worried look around.
"Listen I have a rep to keep up..." he started, shooting a nervous look behind us.
"Emma Baxter, right?" Vicky said, cutting him off, "Because imagine her surprise when she finds out you two won't be going to Harvard together, let alone that you lied about getting an early acceptance like she did. You know she hates liars, right? That is why she broke up with Justin Takana a few weeks ago, right? I guess you'll have to kiss whatever shot you had with her goodbye..."
Even my heart rate had picked up as Ernie gaped like a fish. How Vicky had found all this out simply boggled my mind. I knew Emma Baxter as the modestly pretty student council treasurer who was a proud member of the nerds. To someone like Ernie, she was probably a dream girl and goddess incarnate.
"What I'm offering is actually quite a good deal for you," Vicky said, using Ernie's shocked silence to continue as she contemplated the memory key in her hand, "You swap this article into the school paper and I ask daddy to recommend you to the admissions committee. He went to law school there you know,"
Ernie was pursing his lips as he looked at the innocuous grey memory key Victoria was holding.
"If anyone finds out I did this..." he started, looking as if he was about to cry. Vicky rolled her eyes.
"You don't want the carrot? Fine then, here's the stick," she said, handing me the memory key so she could pull out her phone, "If you don't put this article into the school paper, I'll make sure the admissions committee gets a look at these,"
She opened a picture on her phone and handed it to him, crossing her arms as she stared him down. Ernie's eyes nearly popped from his head as he bent his head over her phone.
"No...no no no! You have this all wrong! I didn't-" he said, the color draining from his face as he frantically tapped at the phone.
"Do you really think I'd show them to you without a backup?" she demanded, snatching her phone back, "They're sitting on a hard drive, all ready to be sent if you don't do as I ask,"
Ernie was glaring at her, his eyes loaded with so much hate that I nearly took a step backwards.
"You're a monster," he said. At that, Vicky smiled as broadly as if he'd called her the most beautiful girl in the world.
"My offer still stands, despite the name-calling," she said, "Get my article into the paper and I'll have daddy put in a good word for you. If you don't..."
She let the threat hang in the air between us as Ernie snatched the memory key from me.
"This is blackmail," Ernie snapped, his hands shaking.
"Only if you choose the stick instead of the carrot," Vicky smiled, "Otherwise you and Emma Baxter have a bright, Harvard graduate future ahead of you,"
Ernie was gnashing his teeth as Vicky turned away with a laugh, pulling me along with her.
"And just in case you get any ideas about reporting this, just know that I have a lot more on what you and all your honor roll friends are doing in Greg Mathison's basement," Vicky called over her shoulder as we walked away.
"What's going on in Greg Mathison's basement?" I asked, wondering what the reclusive honor roll student could be hiding.
"He's a budding horticulturist," she said, "Although his crops are only legal in Colorado and Washington,"
"They're growing pot?" I blurted out, "How do you even know all of this?"
Vicky smiled that dangerous, toothy smile as she handed me her phone.
"I'll teach you," she said, as I scrolled through the pictures she'd shown Ernie. They were harmless enough, just screencaps of pictures featuring Ernie and a bunch of other honor rollers while drunk, high, or both. A few of them featured a red-eyed Ernie flashing the finger, while some of the others showed him passed out in a bathtub. Under one of the pictures, Ernie himself had commented 'the night I committed my first DUI' with the cry-laughing emoji.
For someone who was so smart, I wondered why the hell he'd ever allowed any of this to go online.
"Hardly a model student," Vicky said as I scrolled through them, "But they were buried deep. I had to call in a favor just to get them,"
"A favor from who?" I asked, handing her back her phone.
"One of the IT guys at daddy's firm," she said, "He thought it would be okay to hit on me when I worked there last summer. Now he knows it's not,"
She giggled and I felt compelled to laugh along with her, but I couldn't chase Ernie's desperate face from my memory.