Where It Began Read Online Free Page B

except Anita is wearing them because her mother made her. Lisa is the one person still wearing the baggy khaki uniform pants that no other girl has ever worn to school after the first day of seventh grade. Lisa is also the one person at Winston School who admires me for something before I get Billy after four years of total obscurity.
    It is October of seventh grade and I have just figured out that art is the only thing I don’t suck at, but it turns out to be the only thing Lisa does suck at (apart from her apparent inability to shop for clothes that don’t have some Disney character or strange-looking appliqués on them) and that she really really wants to be good at. This is because her parents are seriously religious cinematographers who value art just a notch below how much they value God Almighty.
    It is November and Lisa has started following me to assembly and sitting next to me and Anita, who actually has the potential to be completely regular, except she has to take Hindi language class and Indian dance class and learn to play weird-looking musical instruments and entertain old ladies from her extended family who are visiting her from New Delhi for months at a time. She has to figure out how to modify her uniform in a way that keeps her mother happy but does not involve social suicide.
    At least the stuff she has to do to keep her mom happy doesn’t involve getting people to think she’s hot.
    There we are in December, about as hot as egg salad sandwiches or, in Anita’s case, completely vegan soy wraps. There we are, sitting three in a row, invisible enough to slouch there in the back of the auditorium eating contraband snack food, while Mr. Piersol, our idiot headmaster, slogs from one alarming story to the next in his mind-numbing weekly ascent up Cliché Mountain. Not to mention, Mr. Piersol would appear to be scrounging all his information on teen life off a shady website for urban legends.
    News flash: Boston high school girls caught in pregnancy pact!
    Oh no, boys and girls: Children having children! Look before you leap!
    “Children having icy pops. Look before you lick,” Anita whispers, gazing up at Mr. Piersol, hunkering down in her auditorium seat to eat the lime icy pop that she smuggled in.
    “Anita!” says Lisa. “That could have such double meaning.”
    News flash: Catty clique of mean cheerleaders in Texas cause sad, chunky cheerleader to leap from bridge!
    Oh no, boys and girls: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say it!
    “If you can’t say something nice, welcome to Winston School,” Anita says.
    “That is so mean.” Lisa says. And then she snickers. “Are you by any chance a member of a catty clique?”
    “I want to be in the catty clique!” I say. I am not completely joking.
    “Sorry,” says Anita. “I think you might have to be pregnant first. And you have to look like a Slutmuffin.”
    We don’t look as if we’re members of the same species as the Slutmuffins, as if we are fit to inhabit the same planet, as if our skin is made of the same dewy membrane, or that our hairs were ever genetically programmed to spring out of our scalps and line up in perfect order like theirs.
    Cut to a montage of sleepovers at Lisa’s house with everybody sitting in their sleeping bags watching old Technicolor movies with Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds and making large sheets of semi-inedible marshmallow fudge, shooting at each other with Silly String.
    I don’t know. Maybe all over the country, this is what deliriously happy teenage girls are doing Friday nights, but it seems as if all of the people worth being at Winston are engaging insomewhat less boring activities involving sex and drugs and rock and roll.
    What I want is to be one of those people.
    But I am stuck in my Before and I have no idea, not a clue or an inkling, that I am even going to get an After .

VIII
     
    I AM SO DEEP INTO GABRIELLA GARDINER PRESENTS Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s, trawling through it