Josie shrugged. Between the dreams, her mom, and the nightmare that had become her existence at school as teen-gossip topic du jour, okay wasn’t really a word that applied to her life anymore.
“That good, huh?” Penelope said, reading between the lines.
“That good.” Josie unwrapped her bean-and-cheese burrito and cracked open a soda while Penelope munched on a bag of Fritos. They ate for several moments in silence, until Josie heard a laugh from the corner of the cafeteria. A light, glittery giggle, and one she knew only too well. Before she could stop herself, she turned around and saw Madison sitting next to Nick at the varsity track team’s table, her head buried in his arm.
Nick turned and at that moment caught Josie watching him. His eyes flicked down to Madison, still snuggled next to him, then back up to Josie, a look of apology in his eyes.
Yeah, like that was good enough.
“You’ve got to ignore it,” Penelope said in her matter-of-fact way.
Josie turned back to her. “Ignore it? How the hell am I supposed to ignore it?”
“I don’t know,” Penelope said. “But you’ve got to figure it out. Stat.”
“Why bother?” Josie threw her arms wide. “Everyone already knows. It’s only matter of time before I’m the butt of every joke at the school.”
“Oh, you already are.”
“What?”
Penelope nodded. “Yeah, apparently the new word for when your boyfriend cheats on you with one of your friends is Byrned. It’s trending on Twitter. Even more popular than the unexplained animal attacks.”
Josie groaned and sank her forehead onto the table. She appreciated that Penelope always called it like she saw it, but every once in a while a little tact might have been helpful.
“My point is that you’ve got to start acting like it doesn’t bother you. Or at least don’t stalk him at track practice, okay?”
“Is there anything I do that’s private anymore?”
Penelope shook her head. “Zeke and Zeb told everyone about it in homeroom yesterday. By lunch, it was all over the school that you were stalking Nick and Madison.”
“Shit.”
“And it’s not going to help you, okay? You don’t want him back.” It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a suggestion. Penelope was laying down the law. “So do what you have to do to move on. Because Nick and Madison already have.”
3:30 P.M.
As soon as she got home, Josie made a beeline for her bedroom.
Time to purge.
Penelope was right. She’d been pining away for Nick, waiting for him to realize how miserable he was without her and to ask if she’d take him back. But no more.
She plugged her iPod into portable speakers and scrolled through her song list until she found suitably angry music. P!nk. Perfect breakup music. She pumped up the volume and hit play.
Josie grabbed her plastic garbage can and planted it in the middle of her room. Everywhere she looked, something reminded her of Nick. A memento, a tchotchke, a gag gift. Little things, sentimental only because she’d given them that power.
The movie ticket from their first date was pinned on her corkboard. She ripped it down, sending the pushpin spiraling off to the other side of the room, and dropped the ticket in the trash.
She caught sight of the three-inch-tall lime-green bunny that sat on her dresser. Nick had won it at the county fair in one of those rigged ringtoss games and given it to her. Josie snatched it up and launched it into the garbage.
“Two points!”
This was turning out to be more fun than she’d thought.
Photos, gone. Concert-ticket stubs from his favorite band, gone. On the dresser, Josie grabbed an old vase with a red silk rose sticking out of it. They’d gone to Ocean Beach for the day and he’d bought the fake rose from a boardwalk peddler while they were chowing down on hot dogs and French fries beachside. Josie had put it in her favorite vase—an old fifth-grade art project that converted a wine bottle into a mosaic piece of “art”—and given it a spot of honor on her dresser. Now she wanted nothing more than for both flower and vase to be out of her sight. She was about to dump both in the trash when she paused.
The vase was different.
Crazy, Josie realized. A standard wine bottle, probably one of her mom’s favorite chardonnays that seemed to fill up the recycling bin with alarming frequency these days. It had been covered with small squares of chopped-up glossy magazine pages—bits of color and texture, movement, and shadow all layered upon one another to form a pop-culture mosaic. The bottles had then been covered in two thick layers of glue, left to dry for what seemed like months, and finally sent home on the last day of school as the prized fifth-grade “art” project.
But Josie had loved that stupid thing. She remembered how her parents had donated magazines to the cause. Her dad’s Newsweek stack and her mom’s bedside collection of InStyle—both had been ravaged for just the right colors and patterns. And the fruit of her labor had sat on her dresser for years.