The Teenage Guide To Popularity [COMPLETE]

Chapter 26: Times Like These,

So all the stuff Tala had said to Carter hadn't worked, even though Tala seemed to think it did. So now it was up to Ashton Rhodes to set everything straight. Newton High was famous for passing around the popularity crown, but Ashton wasn't ready to give it up just yet - especially for someone as needy and fake as Carter.

On Tuesday afternoon she sought out Jack Echolls, the guy who had somehow been involved in certain situations since the first day Carter had sat at their table. He held the key to the girl's demise, even if he didn't know it yet. 

She had first attempted to talk Georgie and Elena into helping her come up with some clever, destructive plan, but when they had whined and excused their way out of it, she was left to find someone else without much moral limitations. Melody wasn't exactly one to scheme, and Tala had already proven that she had no impact on the social scene. 

Jack Echolls had a girlfriend named Dawn, a girl who followed Sterling Foster around like a lost little puppy. According to Tala, Echolls often strayed from that supposedly exclusive relationship. Dawn, being the clueless cheerleader that she was, never caught on.

Echolls was easy to manipulate, which made him the perfect pawn in Ashton's plan. She had convinced him to lie and say that he had slept with Carter. Not a terribly easy task, but Ashton had threatened to give Dawn a list of all the other girls he had slept with. So it was either lie about one girl, or have the truth come out about a whole bunch of girls. 

That was part one of her plan. Part two was to forward a rather delicious photo to Carter's cellphone. When she had kissed Kiran in the hallways of Newton High, she had made Melody take a photo of it. From a safe distance, so he wouldn't notice.

It was all very brilliant, in Ashton's opinion, and it would undo the stupid crap Carter had done to assure herself a spot at the popular table. 

*** 

You don't bring your homelife to school. You don't let that travesty ruin your other relationships. Kiran Jones had to keep running those phrases through his mind, or he knew he would slip into some sort of depression. He had always been somewhat of a master at keeping his private life completely private. If life was the Olympics, he would win the Gold, Silver and Bronze for the race to keep himself an interesting mystery. For the past couple of days though, he was finding it extremely difficult to mask it all.

On Monday night he had been told that his sister had been put into a hospital, all at the hands of her deranged, son-of-a-bitch boyfriend. They lived in another state, some thousand miles away, and there was no way Kiran could get to her. It had prompted his already-divorcing parents to dive into another massive screaming match, leaving Kiran miserable and desperate for something good to happen.

It was like some evil force was toying with him; giving him what he wanted, like Carter, and then slapping him in the face for daring to be happy. He thought it best to not let Carter know about what had happened. The last thing he wanted to do was overwhelm her with the horrors of his family situation.

So when he walked into the library on Tuesday afternoon, he did it with as much indifference as possible.

He had been looking for Carter for the past half hour. None of the usual suspects knew were she was, and after checking the cafeteria, the field, and some random, empty classrooms, he concluded that the library was the last possible place she could be. He found her in the very last aisle, at the very end of the area. A place that he now realized had become her hiding spot. She didn't have any books with her, or even a backpack. She sat with her legs crossed and her back to a wall, her eyes closed and her head leaned up a little, as if she were asleep.