The Best Laid Plans
sports. That could be your in. If you just tried a little harder to fit in, maybe get some cooler clothes. Do something with your hair … ”
    He may as well have asked her to sprout wings and fly. She was lonely, but she liked herself. She liked her clothes. She liked beating them all in sports and kicking their asses in math. Dumbing herself down would have been ridiculous, and so would changing herself to fit in with people who weren’t going to accept her as she was. She never caved on that.
    But it didn’t mean that sometimes she wished she could have. It would have been a lot easier if she’d been able to shed some of that boisterous personality and been accepted. One of the popular girls, Carly, had been nice to her with no agenda. She was the quietest of them and one of the prettiest, but her face had some acne scarring. Maybe it made her self-conscious, or insecure. Maybe it made her realize that appearances weren’t everything.
    But she’d been legitimately nice to Jayne. They been assigned seats next to each other in computer lab, and Jayne had helped her out with some programming because Carly had been failing. But the friendliness always ended when the bell rang. Jayne hated it, but understood why Carly ignored her outside the class. Carly’s life was all about pleasing her popular friends. But Jayne knew that wasn’t what a real friend should be.
    Maybe that’s why it hurt. Because they’d all happily, or unhappily, ignored her to be friends with people who were in truth friends to no one. Even her own sister had betrayed her, though more recently. A couple years ago, Charlene was relegated to Jayne’s memories with the rest of her tormentors. She was dead to Jayne. Nothing but a painful memory.
    Jayne’s bath had grown cold and the champagne was gone. Rejecting the temptation to drain and refill it again, she pulled the plug and stood, wrapping a towel around herself. Thoughts of her past had made her hyper aware of her present. Carrying the glass back to her kitchen, she gazed around at her reality.
    Expensive, yet tasteful furnishings in a place her parents never could have afforded. Expensive hardwood floors, and Italian marble counters. As soon as she’d made enough money, she’d paid off her parents’ mortgage. Financially, she sat pretty, and she’d done it herself. She hadn’t had to win a lottery, or have anything handed to her. She hadn’t had to marry for money or dig for gold like she heard a lot of women talk about. All of this was her creation, made possible by her brain and hard work.
    But she had to admit that if not for those girls in high school, those betrayals, she might have taken a different path. She had all that she did because she’d wanted to show them. She wanted to make herself more successful than any of them. By herself. On her own terms. Not piggybacking on someone else’s success. She wanted them to know it was her own ambition, that the result was all her, erasing any doubt they may have had that she was a successful somebody.
    And maybe make them see her for who and what she really was. Worthy, powerful, someone to be respected and noticed.
    Until today, she’d truly felt good about herself. Confident. Powerful. Beautiful.
    But the insecurity she’d felt inside when she’d thought it was Sarah Bray, ringleader for the popular bitches, all that had been eclipsed. She’d reverted inside to that lonely girl in high school. The one nobody wanted to talk to. Not where anyone could see.
    It was like finding out her identity was really an elaborate costume that could be stripped away from her at any moment.
    And she didn’t know how to make that feeling disappear. But there was one person she knew who was guaranteed to make her forget all about feeling this way. Someone whose hands and mouth and body made it impossible to think at all.
    Tightening the towel around her, she moved to the coffee table to grab her phone, then perched on the couch.
    Malcolm.
    Eight

Similar Books

Secret Story

Ramsey Campbell

Bright Arrows

Grace Livingston Hill

The Art Forger

B A Shapiro

The Whiskey Sea

Ann Howard Creel

Bugging Out

Noah Mann