As the room filled and the volume swelled, Hanna ducked down a hallway that featured carved banded agate from Brazil and reached for her phone. She pulled up the yogurt commercial and watched it once more, smirking at Colleen’s constipated face. Priceless. Then she copied and pasted the link into a new text and selected everyone in her Rosewood Day address book as the recipients.
Once that was finished, Hanna’s finger hovered over the SEND button. She looked into the room, watching as the band set up and partygoers schmoozed. Colleen and Mike were sitting at a table with Mike’s lacrosse buddies. Mike was deep in conversation with the goalie, who Hanna always called Frankenstein because of his square head. Colleen was sitting next to him, sipping her sparkling water and looking a little lost. The perfect little actress doesn’t know how to socialize, she thought with satisfaction. I guess insta-popularity is a little harder than it looks, huh?
But suddenly, Colleen’s fish-out-of-water expression sparked a memory. Hanna saw herself and Mona sitting at the best table in the cafeteria. Colleen came up and asked if she could join them, and both of them laughed. “We don’t sit with girls who wear Hobbit shoes,” Mona said, pointing to the square-toed Mary Janes on Colleen’s feet. And Hanna crooned, “The cir-cle of life,” because Colleen had carried a Lion King lunch bag to school until eighth grade.
For a split second, the hurt was obvious on her face, but then she shrugged and chirped, “Okay! Well, have a fun lunch, guys!” Mona and Hanna had collapsed into giggles when she walked away.
The thing was, not that long before that, Hanna had laughed at Mona when she was in Ali’s clique. And not long before that, Real Ali had laughed at Hanna. At the way her rolls of fat spilled over her jeans. At how she couldn’t do a cartwheel in gym. Hanna remembered how humiliated and ashamed she’d felt. And yet, when it was her turn to wear the Queen Bee crown, she’d teased people so effortlessly, like she’d never been on the other side.
Popularity had turned Ali, Mona, and Hanna into remorseless bitches. It hadn’t affected Colleen at all, though—even dating Mike, she’d remained exactly the same girl as before. And now Hanna was being tormented by the worst popular bitch of all—A. Did Hanna really want to do that to someone else?
Her phone suddenly beeped, shrill and loud in the quiet hall. A new text envelope appeared on the screen. Frowning, Hanna exited out of the text she was planning to write and opened the new one. The sender was a series of jumbled letters and numbers.
C’mon, Hanna. Send that video. You know you want to.
Hanna’s stomach felt like it was on fire. Did she want to? She missed Mike desperately. She wanted him to be her date here, not Colleen’s, and for them to go on runs and sneak into the movies and play hours and hours of Gran Turismo like they used to. But could she live with herself if the only way she accomplished that was to send around the video? It reminded her of the way she felt when she wore a pair of shoes or a bracelet she had shoplifted: It was amazing to have a Tiffany toggle around her wrist, but something about it made her feel a little dirty, too. Colleen might have been annoying, but she didn’t deserve her own personal A.
Hanna returned to the text with the video link, took a deep breath, and pressed DELETE. Doing so felt cleansing. Almost . . . good. Like she’d beaten A at A’s game.
A high-pitched giggle swirled from one of the corners, and she whipped around. Footsteps rang out behind her. Suddenly, Naomi Zeigler and Riley Wolfe sauntered up to Hanna, their phones in their hands.
“You’ve outdone yourself this time, Hanna,” Naomi snickered.
“Nice one,” Riley added, pushing a lock of bright-red hair behind her ear.
“What are you talking about?” Hanna snapped.
“That video.” Naomi waved her phone back and forth. “It’s priceless.”
Hanna’s stomach plummeted to her feet. Video? Did Naomi mean what she thought? But Hanna had deleted the text! Had A sent it out anyway and just said it was from Hanna? “It wasn’t me,” she blurted.
Riley gave her a crazy look. “Uh, this sure as hell looks like you.”
She shoved her cell phone in Hanna’s face. Hanna stared at it, fully expecting to see Colleen in the Latvian yogurt commercial, but her own image popped up instead. The first part of the video was Hanna at the pole dancing class. Her skimpy top rode up and her shorts rode down, showing off a strip of her lacy underwear. Her hips looked huge as she did circles and rolls, and when she tried to climb that pole she looked like a deranged monkey. The camera caught an unfortunate shot of her crotch as she tumbled to the ground.
“What?” Hanna whispered.
The video kept going. The next part showed Hanna skulking through the bushes at the King James Mall, staring into Victoria’s Secret with binoculars. The camo made her skin look red and blotchy and her waist so much bigger than it really was. And when she emerged from the bushes, she had a couple of leaves on her butt. The camera zoomed in on them as she followed Mike and Colleen down the concourse.
Hanna peered at the girls, her heart thudding faster. “I don’t understand.”