Pretty Crooked by Elisa Ludwig Page A

negativity? What did they ever do to you?”
    “They bug me,” Kellie said plainly, and a chill ran over my skin. I felt like I was seeing a whole new side of her coming out. “Their presence bugs me.”
    “Maybe you need to ask yourself why that is,” Cherise said. Her tone was calm and even, like she’d thought this through.
    “Whatever, Cherise,” Kellie snapped. “Spare me the condescending new agey lectures.”
    Cherise shrugged, obviously trying to resist her own anger. “I’m just saying, it’s kind of juvenile. I think we’re all better than that.”
    Kellie glared at her venomously. “Then maybe youshouldn’t lump us all in together. Maybe there is no ‘we’ here.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cherise asked.
    “It means that maybe you and I are just different.”
    Cherise’s face dropped and I could feel her hurt as acutely as my own. This was about more than the other girls for her—this was an old wound that was just ripped open.
    The waiter came back to take our plates. “All finished?”
    I let him take my pizza. I’d lost my appetite. I was numb with grief as I watched the scene unfold around me. It was all slipping away—I was losing everything I’d been so thrilled to have just a few minutes earlier.
    “So we’re still going to Armani, right?” Cherise asked, breaking the silence. The question was supposed to be directed at all of us, but Cherise was focused on Kellie, offering a peace branch. “Then back to my house?”
    They looked at each other, and I saw something in Kellie’s face harden. “Yeah, I don’t think so. I should probably get going.”
    “But what about the records I wanted to play for you?”
    “I’m not really in the mood for your music anymore, Cherise. I feel like this shopping trip is suddenly not fun at all .”
    Kellie was right about the latter, at least. We settled up the bill and split up to go our separate ways. Dreadweighed on me with every step as I realized that things were probably never going to be the same—or at least not like they had been. I couldn’t unhear what I’d just heard. I couldn’t get the image of Kellie’s face, twisted up in spite, out of my head.
    Cherise and I made our way back outside to the walkway between shops and I squinted at the sudden brightness. It was sunny, as it was every single day in Paradise Valley, but for some reason the light searing through the cloudless sky came as a painful surprise.
    A high-pitched grinding sound was the first thing I heard when I opened the front door. My mom was crouched on the floor in her office; her back was to me but I could see she was surrounded by boxes of documents. The paper shredder was going at full blast, shooting sheets into even strips of ribbons. A knee-high pile of them had accumulated on the floor, while several plastic bags filled with paper remnants sat neatly bundled around the room.
    “What’s going on?” I shouted.
    “You scared me!” she practically shrieked, whipping around.
    “That’s because this machine is so loud. What are you doing?”
    “I’m just organizing my files!” she yelled, too loudly this time. She looked harried, her hair all over the place, and she was wearing the same old sweatshirt and cargosI remembered her wearing the day before.
    “It looks like you’re destroying your files!” I yelled back. “Can you turn that thing off?”
    She turned off the shredder then and stood up, wiping paper dust on her pants. “What’s up? You look upset.”
    I exhaled a despairing sigh as I leaned against her desk for support. “I just found out that some of the people I’ve been hanging out with are secretly a-holes.”
    “Your new friends? What’d they do?”
    The story came flooding out with a new swell of anger. “They’ve been writing stuff on this stupid blog about these other girls. Making fun of the way they look, calling them names. They call them The Busteds because they’ve been ‘bussed in’ from a poorer