Free Devious by Cecily von Ziegesar Page B

eager to get the meeting on track. She slunk into an armchair and crossed her legs at the knee. She imagined herself leading a talk show and used her best Tyra Banks voice.
    A chorus of girls answered immediately in the affirmative. “Um, of course!” Verena Arneval pushed her short, pixieish hair off her forehead. “It might not all be like
The Princess Bride
, but it’s got to be out there, right?”
    “Do you believe in love at first sight?” Callie asked, chewing on her pen. She was trying really hard not to think of Easy. She’d known him before they’d starting dating, of course, since Waverly was small. And she’d thought he was cute and sexy and arty, but it wasn’t love at first sight or anything. More like an instant chemical reaction, the moment he touched her. After that, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, but things were never merely physical. It was like they had this deep, almost mystical connection—and despite their completely obvious differences, they both felt it.
    “Definitely,” Jenny spoke up. She hadn’t meant to be the first person to answer, but she’d been thinking about Isaac, the way their eyes had met across the crowded chapel. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily
love
—not yet, at least—but it was something. “Doesn’t everyone?” she asked, leaning against a fat pillow in the corner of the couch.
    “No way,” Kara Whalen interjected. Callie eyed her carefully. Kara had an interesting romantic résumé: after having a brief girl-fling with Brett, she’d started dating Heath Ferro, the self-proclaimed biggest player at Waverly. “Or, at least, it’s overrated. Maybe there’s a connection—but don’t you have to know someone before you fall in love?”
    “I don’t know.” Benny bit her pearly pink lips. “I think it’s totally possible to know someone for years, and then one day… you just sort of see them in a different light.” She glanced, not so subtly, toward the camera, fluffing up her hair.
    “That’s so boring,” Celine announced, snatching an Oreo from the platter Callie had set on the coffee table. She took a tiny nibble, then looked up at the camera. As if suddenly remembering that the chocolate cookie might glom on to her teeth, she set it down on the table. “Of course there’s love at first sight—maybe it’s just not literally, you know, the
first
sight. But yeah—haven’t we all had that moment where you look up and meet some guy’s eye, and there’s just this amazing jolt of connection?”
    “But isn’t that just lust?” Rifat Jones, the gangly captain of the girls’ volleyball team, shifted in her chair, pulling her sweat-dampened hair into a ponytail. Her Adidas gym bag sat at her feet. “How can you fall in love with someone you don’t know?”
    Verena batted her eyelashes at the camera. “That’s the best way to do it,” she said, running her bloodred fingernails through her curls. The other girls giggled and adjusted their hair, almost collectively. Callie bit the inside of her cheek. It was weird that all these girls who showed up practically in their pajamas would be so concerned with how they looked on camera. Didn’t they realize that only Callie would be reviewing the footage? Maybe they thought it would be a part of her presentation, when all the Jan Plan projects were presented at the end of the month.
    “Do you think it can only happen once? That people only have
one
true love?” Callie’s heart pounded as she asked the question. Though she didn’t want to admit it, this was what she most wanted to know—and kind of why she’d come up with this project in the first place. Was there hope for her after Easy? Or did she just happen to peak early in the love department? Was she destined to spend the rest of her life alone?
    “No,” Sage Francis announced, sounding kind of cranky. She glanced back at the camera, too, giving it a funny look. “But the first one is always the hardest to forget,