Dessert First Read Online Free Page B

too, so I stopped.
    “This year, don’t be a flunktard.” Tracie looked down at me from under her blonde hair and over her California surfer-girl freckles. She’s the head of a little in-crowd of self-congratulating girls everyone had called “the Tracies” since grade school.
    “What?” I said. Some guy bumped me hard in the back then went around us.
    “I hear you’re ineligible for volleyball this fall.” Her expression was vague disgust.
    I was, because of my grades, at least until the first quarter ended on November 1. It was annoying, though, to have Tracie remind me. With the prior go-around of Beep’s cancer, losing all my friends, and my “major depressive episode,” the end of last year had turned into a handed-in-homework-free zone. “What’s it to you?”
    “You’re not a dumbshit.” She shook her head. “Pull your grades up before soccer season.”
    I frowned at her. Her interest almost made sense. I was one of the best players on the soccer team, and because of years of playing club-league soccer with Tracie, I could practically read her mind, so when she stripped the ball and inevitably dribbled up field instead of passing, I’d cover her position.
    “Saw you with Evan yesterday,” Tracie said. She crinkled her lips as if she had a sour taste in her mouth.
    Ah. The real reason for our motivational chat.
    “Maybe this year you should concentrate on your schoolwork,” she said. “Instead of musicians. So we can have a decent soccer season.”
    If that advice had come from anyone else, I might have paid more attention. “Maybe you should learn how to pass the ball. That might help, too.” But I wasn’t done being annoyed or done talking. “You threw Evan away.
Three times
.” And had made sure everyone in the Berkeley-Albany-Oakland area knew that it was her choice.
    She smirked down at me. That was part of her ultimate in-girl mystique: She always broke up with the guy first, even the hot, talented guy. “So?”
    “So you don’t get to decide who he talks to anymore.” Even I knew that much about how the boyfriend thing works.
    She frowned at me. “He only hangs out with you out of pity.”
    Ouch. Had Evan told her that, along with everything else, back when she was his girlfriend? My insides felt scooped out, but I didn’t let that show. “He doesn’t hang out with you at all. Maybe he’s over you.”
    Tracie’s eyes narrowed, her expression fierce. “Ha. If I wanted Evan, I could get him back like
that.
” She snapped her fingers, annoyingly close to my face, a quick flash of pink nail polish. She stepped forward, crowding me.
    I didn’t back up, and I don’t do intimidated. I put my left shoulder forward, like we were on a soccer field, and drove between her and Ashley, bumping them both, hard.
    Ashley dropped her binder. “Watch it!”
    “Get your grades up,” Tracie’s voice followed me, loud over the hallway noise. “Or there’ll be
consequences
.”
    Ooh. Consequences. What was she going to do now? She’d already wrecked everything last year. And whatever she had in mind, it wasn’t as bad as cancer.
    • • •
    To the shock of everyone, by the middle of freshman year, I had somehow wormed my way into best-friend status with Evan. Along with writing songs and playing music together after school every day, we were spending lunches together, in plain view of humanity and even Tracie Walsh. But Evan is an awesome musician and super-hot, so then Tracie swooped in and scooped him up as her boyfriend. So much for my lunches with Evan. He was dragged around instead by Tracie, like a cute new purse with legs. How could he be with her? Tracie was the ruler of her toxic in-group, commanding its endless convulsions of expelling someone through threats that if the other girls didn’t exclude her social victim-of-the-week, they’d be next.
    I’d nearly hurled the first time I’d seen Evan making out with Tracie behind the gym, his hand tangled in her long blonde