Lovely Vicious by Sara Wolf Read Free Book Online Page A

black sedan. He tore it off without a second glance and ripped it in two. A distant wail could be heard as a well-dressed, beautiful blonde girl from drama club had her heart shattered and smeared all over the pavement. She’d been watching for his reaction, and now she had to watch the pieces of her carefully-crafted letterfeelings whisk across the parking lot. I chased the pieces around, grabbing as many as I could, and comforted her for three hours in a stairwell while she cried on me. I pieced the letter back together. It was full of Shakespearian references and a particularly well thought out passage in which she drew comparisons between Jack and Romeo. I informed her she was right – Romeo’s manic mental illness and pigheaded refusal to acknowledge another person’s feelings are mirrored exactly in Jack. She thanked me for that keen assessment by calling me a bitch and storming off.
    Dramaclub Wailer was just the first. In two weeks of stealthily following Jack around campus, I count four love confessions, each more creative than the last. The girl who runs the morning announcements says Jack’s won a prize from the announcement committee, and to come to the PA room after school to get it. She does this every. Single. Day. And yet every day Jack never goes near the PA room – he doesn’t even walk in the same hall as it. He takes a route that leads him around it and makes him almost late for fourth period. I sneak a peek at the PA room after school for a few days; sure enough, announcement girl waits in that room for thirty minutes every day before finally locking up and going home with a defeated look on her face. A girl in art club is working on a marble statue of him (it’s definitely him, everyone knows that) complete with resplendent Greek posture and a perfectly replicated face. She’s left the crotch area blank and goes red if anyone asks her about it, but she’s diligently chipped away at it since Freshmen year, and she’s now a Senior. Another girl writes poetry and leaves it in his locker, and another girl in culinary class is drawing up plans to make him a three-tier cake for his birthday in January.   
    Through all this, Jack is impervious. He reportedly dropped out of art class so he wouldn’t have to see the statue in the studio. With an expression of utter boredom, he cleans out the dozens of new poem scraps that appear in his locker every day. It’s like he’s numb to whatever a girl does to get his attention. No one dares to call his name out loud in the hall. He doesn’t have any guy friends – he keeps to himself at lunch and during recess he’s in the library.
    At first I stayed far away from Jack to quell the rumors, and to maybe-hopefully get Kayla to forget the fact he kissed me. But there are so many rumors now; it’s just one irritating slurry. ‘They’re going out’ is the usual one, the most out-there one is that he’s my pimp and I’m addicted to lean, and my favorite is the one where I’m his long-lost half-sister and we’re doing the incest and doing it hard. None of them are helping my relationship with Kayla, of course, but today she sat at my table and we ate together. In total silence. Which isn’t exactly a step in the right direction, but it’s a step nonetheless. She only started sitting with me after she returned Jack’s wallet to him, which I watched in on. It went much smoother than their first encounter – she handed it over and he actually nodded at her! A positive signal! I don’t see his lips form the words ‘I’m sorry’, though, so technically he still hasn’t swallowed his pride and technically I am not regrettably still at war with him.
    Kayla’s smile lasted for hours after that exchange. It’s incredible how much control he has over her emotions, and how little he cares. Any guy in school would kill to make her smile like that.   And his indifference towards her only makes me hate him more. No one should pour their entire heart onto