She's All That by Kristin Billerbeck Read Free Book Online

and the carbonation and fake sugar will have eaten holes right through them. That’s what you’re doing to your stomach.” Poppy flicks back her hair. “No wonder you stress about simple matters. Your body is completely overloaded from garbage, and the good bacteria can’t overtake the bad in those quantities.”
    â€œThat is disgusting,” Morgan comments in her cool manner, as she looks at the sickly display of my snack life. “We are not going to smell that all weekend just for the sake of science, Poppy. Let them out of their misery. She can’t eat them now anyway.”
    â€œWhat would I do with them?” Poppy asks.
    â€œGet a garbage bag or something. I am not brushing my teeth over pickles drenched in diet soda.”
    I slam the door on the bathroom to avoid the smell and point at the Spa Girls, who are now seriously on my bad side. “You two are so not friends. We came here for me. And I wanted pickles! What kind of friends would deny their friend the wallowing she so richly deserves?” I slink to the floor. “Where did my friends go?”
    â€œWhere did your friends go?” Morgan blinks wildly. “You wanted Steve Collins in college, and we protected you from that as well,” Morgan reminds me. “And Robert, Lilly? Completely not worth damaging your stomach lining for. Clearly, you’re not the best judge of what’s best for you lately. You need us, face it. You would have been in Florida eating the early bird specials by the time you were thirty. We’re rejoicing in the loss of Robert, because he was a loser with a capital L , only out of his mother’s house because this area actually rewards geeks with good pay. And if you’re going to harm yourself, use chocolate like normal women.”
    I’m still not over the pickles. “You two can afford nice things. I can afford pickles. I can’t believe you would be so cruel. It seems to me we all had a fetish for Now & Laters in college. Just because you got money and changed your habits, now I’m supposed to follow suit? How about a little commiseration? Alms for the poor and all that!”
    Poppy slides down beside me. “It’s good to unleash this anger. Tell us about Sara Lang now,” she says with a Zen-like quality.
    I’ll admit, I’m fired up just hearing that woman’s name. “She’s evil. When I think about her black nails and her scary, icy-blue eyes over the well-concealed eye bags—and to give my job to that man!” If you can call someone who wears more eyeliner than me a man. “She actually thinks twenty-five-year-old men want her, when they laugh at her!”
    â€œWhat else? Let it out.”
    â€œShe thinks I can be bought. She offered me big money to be her CFO. As if I’d do a job I hate and work for her!”
    â€œWhat did you say?” Morgan asks.
    â€œShe offered me a finance job,” I repeat. Their looks of pity quickly dissipate.
    â€œAre you going to take it?” Poppy says as she puts her hair into a clip. Poppy has the most beautiful hair you’ve ever seen. It’s an incredible hue of natural red, and it falls down her back in gentle curls. She’s got a speckling of freckles across her nose and deep blue eyes. In other words, she’s everything I’m not. And she wastes it in bad cotton clothing. So criminal.
    â€œNo! I didn’t accept it.” I cross my arms, waiting to hear another reason besides my own happiness to turn down a solid salary. I’m definitely tempted. Then I notice my friends aren’t jumping on the supportive band wagon. “Do you think I should do it?”
    â€œYou don’t want to do finance,” Morgan shrugs. “You could have gone back to finance years ago. What have these years of training been about? All those years of learning how to make computer patterns! How to drape a fabric with CAD? No, you definitely