Page 12 of Dirty Liars
“Don’t worry. Aside from that mess in the hall this morning with Astor Hawthorne, everything seems to be going okay.”
Dana looks relieved, and I don’t bring it up again until we’re already at lunch after class. It takes everything for me to keep my composure at the sight of all the food. I have to remind myself that endless tacos are just a fact of life for these kids, not a novelty. Still … it’s going to be serious work not to balloon up with all this food suddenly readily available.
Dana, on the other hand, just keeps picking at her food until I ask her what’s up.
Her face turns pink. “Oh nothing I …” she pauses, then blurts out, “That girl who saved you this morning, Victoria … she didn’t happen to mention me, did she?”
“Why would …” I stop to think for a moment, and Dana fills the silence with a string of words stumbling over each other.
“She’s the most popular girl in the school, but she wasn’t always. We used to be friends, not that you’d know it now.”
That’s too true. Dana and Victoria, as little as I know either of them, are opposites in the social hierarchy of these kinds of places. If they were friends once, then Victoria would likely never admit it … and I think Dana should know that.
I give her a close look. She keeps babbling on about Victoria until it dawns on me like a sunrise, becoming much clearer with every passing second. This is more than just an obsession over a lost friend.
“You … you like her, don’t you!”
Dana is stunned. She gapes at me, mouth open and working like a goldfish.
“What? No!”
“Uh huh.” I point the shattered corn taco shell at her. “You’ve got a crush on her. A bad one too, from the looks of it.”
Dana looks a little embarrassed, but this time she doesn’t deny it. She just covers her face with her hands.
“Is it that obvious?”
I shrug. “I’m good at reading people. I don’t think it’s that obvious.”
My first lie in a while. I don’t want to make her feel bad.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. She wants nothing to do with me anymore … and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.”
I cringe inside, and I know it shows on the outside.
“Sorry, that has to suck. I’m sure she doesn’t make it easy with the whole … this … thing.” I mimic the way she tosses her hair over her shoulder, and Dana lets out a loud sigh.
“Tellme about it.”
“You can do better,” I say. “Perfect people like her don’t have much room for losers like us.”
Dana snorts, nearly inhaling the tomato she was chewing. “Easy for you to say. She seems to actuallylikeyou … and that doesn’t happen often.” She purses her lips a second, and then blurts out, “she’s not as perfect as she wants people to think. I’m pretty sure her dad knocked up the maid.”
As soon as it’s out of her mouth, her hands fly to cover the bottom half of her face. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Just remind me not to tell you any secrets,” I say, and chuckle.
Now that one secret is out, the rest just comes out like a flood. She’s talking so fast I can barely keep up. So much for thinking she was the quiet type.
“… if she could just see how I want to help her. I know her better than anyone here. I just want to love her, but she just wants to deny it all.”
I felt a twinge of sympathy upon hearing Victoria’s story, but even more hearing the way Dana talks about her. Sounds to me like Victoria isn’t the only one in denial, but I don’t know Dana well enough yet to tell her that.
Turns out that Dana’s inside knowledge extends well beyond the inner workings of her ex-best-friend Victoria’s life. She knows everything about everyone and proceeds to tell me all of it. I knew there would be drama going on in a place like this, but I eventually have to stop her.
“Dana … as much as I would love to know all the details of that random guy’s hookup last year with the old Drama teacher … but I’d rather hear about someone else.”
My eyes scan the crowd, looking for a pair of cruel eyes looking back, and find none.
