A Fate Totally Worse Than Death Read Online Free Page B

dutifully submit one or two blurry pictures of the Hispanic Student Association’s fall dance, which the Hun editor would squint at and reject.
    Today, however, she was not after Huns. She followed Helga and Drew with her eyes. Then she saw Rhett Jones, realized their paths would cross, suddenly remembered she’d broken up with Jonathan, and went through the detailed checklist described in the last issue of
Pulchritude:
back straight, shoulders high, stomach in, breasts out, fingers relaxed, never clenched, mouth nonchalant, teeth almost touching, gait confident but not pushy. She’d been having trouble with the finger and gait elements all day. Getting out of bed, she’d felt strangely stiff, the ache in her joints progressing to the point that she’d hobbled around the track in P.E. and had toiled to bend back the pop top on her can of Diet Coke at lunch. The pain increased suddenly now, causing her to slow to a stop and miss intersecting with Rhett.
    â€œDamn!” she hissed. She massaged her right hip socket, a maneuver not on her checklist. Afraid she’d lose Helga, she pushed on again. The photograph she planned to take would never find its way into the yearbook.
No
picture of Helga would get in, she’d sworn. The photograph would, however, be seen. Tiffany had already made a copy of the flier posted outside the nurse’s office. She would very soon make many more and put them up all over school, after substituting Helga’s picture for the sketch of the weeping teenage girl, whose face appeared under the bold-lettered confession: “I Didn’t Know
I
Was Carrying a Sexually Transmitted Disease.” This, she figured, would serve notice both to Helga and the guys swooning over her.
    Helga and Drew turned left around the library, leaving her view. Tiffany panicked. She was losing them!
    She forced herself on, wincing all the while, and was relieved to find they’d stopped by the statue of the cougar, Cliffside High’s mascot. Here was her chance—perhaps her last.
    â€œIt goes back to primitive man,” Drew was saying. “Adopting a totem animal that embodies and protects the tribe.”
    Tiffany panted wearily toward them, struggling to remove the camera from the case that hung from her neck.
    â€œStraight out of the Stone Age,” Drew continued.
    Cursing her fingers, Tiffany grimaced, finally got the lens cap off, and crept behind Helga. “Smile!” she said.
    Startled, Helga turned. Her pale blue eyes bore into Tiffany’s own through the viewfinder. At the same instant, the pain in Tiffany’s finger joints flared past endurance. She could no longer grip the camera. She tried to snap the picture, missed the shutter button with her finger, then felt the camera slip from her hands. Mr. Yancy, the yearbook advisor, was passing nearby when it smashed into pieces.

CHAPTER 6
    â€¦â€¦â€¦Danielle lay stomach-down on her bed, her eyes shuttling between her geometry book and the television screen.
The Godfather
, her favorite movie, was on. She glanced down and read, for the thirteenth time, the textbook’s definition of “bisect.” Then she looked up and viewed the scene in which a man woke to find his favorite horse’s bloody head in his bed. “Gross,” she spoke aloud. But effective, she added privately. The Mafia knew how to make a point. She studied angle DEF in her textbook. She looked up and watched an ad for the Army, in which a gun crew scored a direct hit on an enemy health clinic and then celebrated with high fives. She read the definition of “bisect” again. The movie returned to the screen. She opened her compass, using its pointed tip to clean under her fingernails. She sighed. Two men were talking in the movie. She reread the definition of “bisect.” Then the telephone on her night table rang. She shot her hand toward it as if for a lifeline.
    â€œHello.”
    â€œIt’s