Beth snuck to the bathroom and scrubbed the makeup off of her face, using some eye makeup remover of her mother’s she found in the medicine cabinet. While she hated to see her normal reflection in the mirror, she felt relieved that she could be herself again now that she was home, and since there was little chance of the outside world knocking on her bedroom window tonight, she didn’t even have to worry about impressing anyone while she was in her room.
The door to the stairs squeaked, and Beth made her way up in the pitch black carefully, a wave of exhaustion hitting her. She made the last turn and readied herself to attempt to retrieve the chain to the light when her face made contact with what felt like a brick wall. She stumbled backward losing her footing and tripping into the wall. A pain hit her ankle, and she gasped, trying to figure out what had just happened when the light came on.
Shane was standing there on the landing, a menacing look on his face. Beth’s first instinct was to fear for her life, but as she put her weight down on her ankle and an ache radiated up her leg, anger filled her. “What the hell are you doing?” She stood up straight, using the wall to brace herself and take weight off of her injured leg.
“Me?” He growled at her. “What the hell are you doing? What in the world made you think it would be okay for you to dress up like a whore and hang out with my friends? What the hell are you thinking, Beth?”
Despite the pain in her ankle, she took a step closer to him, daring him to push her back. “I think I’m no longer putting up with your bullshit, Shane. My whole life you’ve been publicly ridiculing me in an attempt to make yourself look cool or relevant or some shit. Well, I’m not going to be your punching bag anymore. You wouldn’t talk about Dani or Lavender the way that you talk about me.”
“No, because they’re not little stuck up bitches.”
“If you think I was stuck up before, just you wait.” She glared at him so intensely, he actually shrunk back for a moment.
“I’m not afraid of you, Beth. Stay the hell away from my friends.”
“Your friends are a bunch of assholes,” she replied, crossing her arms. “I don’t give a shit about your asshole friends.”
“Then why were you hanging out with them tonight?”
“Because I can. And not all of those people are your friends, Shane. They might hang out with you, but they don’t like you.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He took a step backward, retreating toward his room, dust from his uniform rising up with each step.
“I’m not sure why you decided that having a lame ass sister would somehow make you seem cool, but it doesn’t, dumbass. If you want to elevate your own coolness, then let me rise to my full potential.”
“What the hell ever. Your potential is the same as your dumbass friends in the broken down car. You think this act will help you get Sammy, but it won’t. He doesn’t like you.”
“I don’t give a shit about Sammy.” She was up in the hallway now, and he was a few steps outside of his pocket-sized bedroom.
“Then what the hell do you want?”
There it was again—the same question she’d been asking herself for the last few hours. Beth stuck her chin in the air, defiantly. “None of your goddamn business.” It was all she could think to say. She didn’t have to answer to Shane or anyone else.
He shook his head. “This will not end well for you.”
“As if you care.”
“You’re right. I don’t. You want to be like the cool kids, go for it. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Beth glared at him, watching him walk into his room and encapsulate himself in the pitch black. She headed to her own solace, considering slamming the door behind her, but then it was a wonder her mother hadn’t already heard that commotion and come to yell at them—or her anyway—to keep it quiet.
She dropped onto her bed and examined her ankle. It was sore, but not swollen, so she didn’t think she’d done any permanent damage. Exhaustion began to creep into her thoroughly confused brain, and she decided to just go to bed. She changed into pajamas, carefully folding her borrowed clothes and sitting them on a chair so she could make sure they got washed properly and not destroyed in the mass of laundry from her own family, and flipped her light off, collapsing onto her bed.
Almost immediately, Beth began to doze off, pushing thoughts of what had happened that night aside. If she thought too much about what she had been able to pull off, she’d be up all night, unable to accept her own guile. Even the steady pinging of tiny aquarium rocks hurled against her window for almost five minutes didn’t rouse her.
Keeping up the façade of being cool was easier once Beth found someone to take her to the mall. She decided it was a little ridiculous to ask the very girls she was trying to impress to give her a ride to buy all of the things she needed in order to do so, and asking her parents was out of the question. Her salvation had come in the form of her old friends, which was sort of ironic considering if Brittany hadn’t agreed to drive her, Beth would’ve had a harder time turning her back on the girls who were doing their best to help them.
Beth had spent nearly every penny of her savings, which was significant, since she had been collecting her scorekeeping money for years, along with cash from birthday and Christmas cards, a small allowance her mother sometimes gave her if she felt she’d been particularly helpful with her little sisters, blackberry money she’d gotten from selling the blackberries she’d picked in her grandmother’s orchard, and her earnings from random babysitting gigs from the last couple of years. All told, when she walked out of the mall, her wallet was significantly lighter, and she really didn’t have nearly as many products in her bags as one might think for having spent almost $300, but what she did have was pretty spectacular.
Her friends had made some purchases of their own, but they all agreed that they were not likely to try and fit in with Beth’s new friends again. All three of them had been unbelievably uncomfortable standing on the outskirts of the conversation, trying to fit in. “That’s just not who we are,” Andi had said with a shrug. “I mean, if it’s important for you to fit in with those guys so that you can get Sammy’s attention, then we will totally support you, but we’ll have to catch up with you some other time.”
Beth hadn’t had much of an answer for that. While she knew she wasn’t willing to admit defeat and give up on inserting herself into the cool kids’ world, at the same time, she had no idea what her reasoning was either. Over the last few days, she’d given up on trying to convince herself it was to win over Sammy. Despite her habit of spending much of the day wondering what it would be like to be his girl, she couldn’t even force herself to think about him anymore. It seemed as if her goal was simply to see if it could be done, and so far, it seemed as if it could. Carly had called her earlier that Thursday before she went shopping with her friends and told her she’d be by to pick her up Friday night at 8:00.
“I don’t know why you need to go out so late,” Evelyn had argued, but when Beth explained she was going to be hanging out with Carly Lyles and her friends, Evelyn quickly changed her tune. She still wasn’t happy about a midnight curfew, but she let it go, reminding Beth to keep her legs crossed at every chance instead.
Beth rolled her eyes behind her mother’s back, wondering why in the world her mom seemed to think Carly was a threat for impregnating her. Of course, she realized that wasn’t really what her mom was worried about, but it all seemed so ridiculous that she didn’t spend too much time thinking about what her mother honestly thought she was going to do.