Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend by Louise Rozett Page B

written on every desk I sat at, hearing “Slut #2”
in the halls a few times doesn’t really feel like a big deal to me.
“Slut #1,” however, is apparently a huge deal.
    Tracy spent the day with her head held high, ignoring the
chant of “Number One! Number One!” that followed her through
the halls. But I did take her into the bathroom a few times to
cry. And when I tried to tell her that the list doesn’t matter, she
freaked out, saying, “Of course you think it doesn’t matter, Rose.
You haven’t slept with anyone. If you had, you’d be way more
upset, trust me.”
    I have no idea if that’s true or not. Maybe it is. Or maybe my
perspective is just different because of what I went through last
year. But either way, I decided to keep my mouth shut for the rest
of the day. I didn’t even jump for joy when she said that there was
no way in hell she was going back to cheerleading now.
    I turn on my phone as I leave Camber’s room and see a text
from Tracy telling me to meet her at the car if I want a ride home
after detention. I head to the stairs, and through the huge glass
window, I see the playing fields beyond the tops of the teachers’
cars, impossibly green and covered in sports teams. I see the
cross-country team running warm-up laps around the track and I
wonder if maybe I’m supposed to be out there—if my dad would
want me out there, especially since I didn’t make it last year.
    I feel a twinge of guilt about the fact that I’m not running anymore, and then I think of Vicky’s email wishing me good luck
on the first day of school. “Be what you want, not what anybody
else wants,” she wrote. At the time, I figured it was just cheesy
advice she’d gotten from the inside of a first-day-of-school Hallmark card. But I kind of get her point now. It’s easy to keep doing
things just because other people want you to, even if you don’t
want to anymore.
    I can’t stop looking at the emerald-green fields. They look like
they should be in a movie about the world’s most perfect high
school. The people on them are living perfect high school lives,
in their perfect-fitting team uniforms. They are exactly where
they are supposed to be, doing exactly what they are supposed
to do. And me? I already had my first detention of the school
year and made the slut list. What is it exactly that I’m supposed
to be doing?
Singing.
    But if a singer only sings when no one is listening, is she really
a singer?
I go down the stairs and push the door open just in time to
see Jamie and Regina heading through the teachers’ lot to the
mall parking lot—together, again. Frustration washes over me—I
haven’t heard from Jamie since he showed up at Tracy’s.
There have been about fifty different moments in the past few
days when I was going to text him. But I worked super hard to
distract myself, and I didn’t do it. If Jamie wants to take me out,
he’s going to have to call me and tell me what the plan is.
I watch as they stop walking and face each other. It used to
be that when I saw Jamie and Regina together, I would get so
jealous I couldn’t even see straight. And I do still get jealous, but
it’s different. Because something about Regina is different. She
seems…defeated or something. She can still kick ass and intimidate people, but I can tell something is wrong.
At first, it looks like Jamie and Regina are laughing together
and I almost turn away. But they’re not laughing—they’re arguing.
Then I realize something else. I’m not the only one watching them.
Conrad is so engrossed in what’s going on between Jamie and
Regina that he doesn’t notice me standing ten feet away, watching him watch them. He crouches down and gnaws on a fingernail as bits of their conversation drift over to us. It’s just a word
here, a word there—not enough to figure out what they’re actually talking about.
Regina takes off in the middle of something Jamie is saying,