G-H-A-S-T-L-Y.
Yates smothered a laugh with her hand, and Jing punched her in the shoulder.
The camera panned over Main Character, a horrifically generic new girl who was Not Like Those Other Slutty Girls. She naturally didn’t have friends, because that’s what happens to people who act like condescending pricks to everyone who approaches them, so she logically set her heart on befriending conventionally attractive Jock Boy for some reason. Unfortunately for her, Jock Boy was revealed to be the newest boyfriend of Bitchy Cheerleader, the school’s uncontested tyrant who ran the student body like some sort of forties Mafioso. Bitchy Cheerleader was, from my perspective, ridiculously hot and deeply cool.
Despite his relationship with Bitchy Cheerleader, Jock Boy flirted with Main Character, and the two of them acquired some sort of instant magic love connection despite having zero chemistry. I wasn’t sure if that was a legit thing with heterosexual kids, but it wasn’t any more convincing in this movie than it had been in any other movie Hollywood ever made prior to this one. Main Character and Jock Boy nearly screw in the passenger’s seat of his Italian car. Of course, they don’t commit the deed, because Main Character feels the need to remind him and the audience that she’s Not Like Those Other Sluts. It broke Jock Boy’s heart. He called Bitchy Cheerleader to voice his doubts about their relationship, outright admitting to cheating in the process, an admission which spelled out his obvious and much deserved demise.
Bitchy Cheerleader took it upon herself to correct the whole situation. She invited Main Character to a party of hers, which Main Character attended in the hopes of flirting with Jock Boy some more, but when Main Character arrived at the ritzy Victorian mansion she’d been directed to, she didn’t arrive at a party. Instead, Bitchy Cheerleader and all her friends stood waiting. They’d donned their pastel robes. They all smiled at her. They offered her a pink robe of her very own.
“Join the sisterhood,” said Bitchy Cheerleader. She handed over the scissors. “We used to make Valentines with these. Stupid gifts for stupid boys who use us, screw us, leave us. Now we use them for better things. I know you cheated with him, but I will forgive you if you kill him for us. For yourself. For the sisterhood. We don’t need boys like him. They’re better off dead.”
Main Character hesitantly accepted the scissors. She used them to slash at Bitchy Cheerleader’s face.
The finale of the movie was a tempest of jump scares and bloodbaths, but it was ultimately uninspiring, as Main Character found obviously hidden Jock Boy, who had been tied up and left on Bitchy Cheerleader’s bed. The camera shook as Main Character cut off his zip-ties and led him downstairs, where a pissed-off group of hooded girls laid in wait. They ran, hid, screamed too loudly. They both miraculously made it out alive. A few of the sisters didn’t. Bitchy Cheerleader stared down the camera and vowed revenge.
Credits rolled.
Lights went up.
The four of us unceremoniously climbed to our feet.
“Lame,” I said. Every single vertebra in my spine popped when I stood up. My back sounded like Rice Krispies. I rolled my shoulders, snatched up my bag. “She shoulda joined the cult. The sisterhood had their collective shit together. Fuckboy wasn’t worth it.”
“Agreed,” said Jing, “Also, that was gross as all hell, Sideways. Tell your skeleton to chill.”
Yates had a huge, weary smile on her face. She glued herself to my side and pressed her face to my shoulder. “I’m not going to sleep tonight,” she said. “I’m never going to sleep again. Or turn off the lights. Or touch scissors.”
Daisy snickered. Somehow, over the course of the movie, she’d managed to eat the vast majority of that mega-jumbo popcorn without snagging any in her hair or teeth. She was still tossing candy in her mouth faster than moms around here pop Xanax. “Aw, was Yatesy scared by the big bad movie?”
“Bite me!”
Daisy made grabby hands at Yates’ shoulder and smacked her lips, wagged her brows, cackled like a cartoon robber. “Better run, pretty kitty. I vant to suck your blood!”
Yates squeaked, and without warning me beforehand, scrambled half up my back. She tossed her arms around my neck, looped her legs around my waist, and said, “Sideways, save me!” into the hair above my ear.
I toppled forward. Fuck. I grappled at the back of the seat in front of me and sucked in a breath. Yates adjusted herself on my back, and I coughed once, twice, thrice, until it occurred to her that her headlock was choking me to death.
When I could breathe again, she felt like next to nothing. She was annoyingly light, and, let’s call me stocky.
I piggybacked her out into the aisle.
Jing had started down it ahead of us. She slammed to a stop mid-step.
I hovered a step behind her. My brows screwed into a V.
Blocking our way was a boy built like an ice chest. His friends were identical, all Ralph Lauren generics with snapbacks and matching haircuts. They stood behind him in a loose formation, and their laughter curdled something in my stomach.
It was the Austin fucking Grass posse.
I fucking hate the Austin Grass posse.
Wasn’t sure if Austin recalled kneeling on my hair and markering slurs all over my face after PE when we were fourteen. Wasn’t sure if he recalled any of the subsequent little torture bouts, either. I knew this, though: I sure as fuck remembered.
He gave Jing a sloppy little chuckle, the kind of chuckle that all high school boys of this delineation seemed to possess: two isolated huh-huhs that triggered a round of answering huh-huhs from the rest of his pack. “Jing. So, what was that party about, baby? You into some sorta Satanist shit now? That shit was legit freaky. Man, my boy Tony nearly pussied out and went home, he got so freaked. How’d you do it? Does scissoring give you magic fucking powers, now?”
“As if I’d spill how I did it to the likes of you,” Jing’s expression hardened into an icy, imposing smile. That exact look had terrified me when I was twelve, rendered me slack-jawed and reverent at fifteen. I was quickly growing to admire that look as the world’s most unparalleled statement of Fuck you, I’m the true Plantagenet here. “Didn’t you scream like a little kid when the lights cut out? I think you and your boys have something in common.”
“Nah. No way. You got it wrong,” Austin snickered, and his buddies snickered with him, but the snickers shriveled when Jing pulled out her phone and conjured up the video she had shown me. She didn’t start it, but the sight of it alone was enough for his face to fall off-kilter.
She twisted her lips into a smile.
Austin’s mouth twitched. His gaze lasered over her shoulder and rested on me, and then the hyena laughter was back. He looked behind him at his friends. The group of them shared some wordless affirmation—I swear, West High boys have a hive mind—and looked back at Jing like we’d just dealt him a Royal Flush. He cleared his throat and smiled. “Playing for Team Lesbo now? It’s a damn shame. You’re hot as hell, you know that, Jing. You could bone any guy you wanted. You’re too pretty to play on that team.”
“Better watch out,” chimed Yates, the parrot on my shoulder. “Sideways might curse you for being such an asshole.”
“She made all that chalk crawl on Jing’s walls,” Daisy added from behind me. “Who’s to say she couldn’t make your pecker shrivel up like a raisin?”