Awkwardly Ever After by Marni Bates Page A

me back in and gave it his all.
    And he showed me just how very sweet a first kiss could be.

Ever

Chapter 1
    Smith High School now has a student-run publication dedicated to fiction called The Wordsmith . . . and already it is proving itself to be fundamentally ill-conceived and horribly mismanaged. The latest edition included a short story called “Prom and Backstabbing” by junior Jane Smith that was pettiness masquerading as fiction. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Smith is using her new platform as editor of The Wordsmith to further her own personal vendettas.
    It’s time to pull the plug on this failed experiment.
    Â 
    â€”from “Stop the War of Words,”
by Lisa Anne Montgomery
Published in The Smithsonian
    M elanie Morris was a dead girl.
    Or at the very least she was going to be dead to me. No more favors. No more expecting dorky Isobel Peters to magically find a way to bail her out. Not.Going. To. Happen.
    Rope me into hanging out with Notables once? Shame on me.
    Ditch me outside Mackenzie Wellesley’s house with the most obnoxious boy at Smith High School?
    Shame on you.
    Not that Melanie stuck around to hear my opinion of the huge violations to the Friendship Code that she was breaking. She was too intent on her pursuit of Dylan, in more ways than one, and if she hadn’t just left me standing uncomfortably next to Spencer “I Practically Own This Town” King, I would have sympathized with her. She was obviously trying to pretend she felt nothing more for Mackenzie’s little brother than . . . something vaguely little brotherly, but the only person she’d probably fooled was Mackenzie.
    Normally, watching someone else’s social life in a state of flux would have appealed to the future psychologist lurking inside of me, but I couldn’t focus my attention on Mel when I was stuck next to a guy who was probably either a narcissist or a megalomaniac.
    Or maybe he was just a garden-variety jerk.
    Sometimes the simplest diagnosis gets overlooked for a flashier title. I should have known better than to discount the obvious, especially given that I was stuck in a high school that was chock-full of a range of jerks. They came in all sizes and, well, there wasn’t a whole variety in color—Forest Grove being one of those communities in Oregon where everyone looked like vampires who would burn to ash if they ever left town without the protection of a daylight ring.
    But regardless of their pallor, the jerks tended to brighten their days with a little geek hazing.
    And since I happened to be the obligatory chubby freshman girl, I was often the target.
    There were days when I really wished I could move and start over at some other high school—one where no football-playing jerk ever yelled, “Move your ass, Fatty, ” at me in the cafeteria at a decibel level that basically ensured everyone within a fifty-yard radius would overhear.
    I was still trying to live that down.
    Not that anyone mentioned it to my face. It was more of a hushed snicker that buzzed in the background every time I raised my hand in my honors psychology class. One that could have been “geek” or “loser,” but that probably went right for the posterior: fat-ass.
    So even though Spencer King himself hadn’t treated me like trash for the past—oh, year —that didn’t mean plenty of his ilk hadn’t beaten him to the punch. Or that he wouldn’t take advantage of Melanie’s hasty departure by playing a quick game of tease the fat chick.
    Yeah, that was a fun one.
    Ten points if you make her cry.
    Fifteen if you can make her run away.
    â€œAre you coming or not?” Spencer didn’t even pause to hear my answer before he opened the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel.
    I glanced briefly at Melanie’s retreating form and then over to the door of the Wellesley house, where only thirty minutes ago I had been