Free The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs by Matthew Dicks

who’d been chasing her since seventh grade. The time that she and Emily had spent on the phone each night, talking about homework and boys, was now all but gone.
    Meanwhile, Caroline’s mother fell behind in rent. The family car was repossessed.
    And Ellie Randoph arrived.
    It was early November when Ellie came to Blackstone High with a confidence usually reserved for star athletes and prom queens, despite the fact that she looked like no one else at school. With her fishnet stockings, black leather boots, and a seemingly endless supply of concert T-shirts, safety pins, and lace accessories, Ellie looked like she had stepped right out of music video, which, for a small town of five thousand people who had yet to see MTV, was unusual to say the least. The older girls didn’t like the way Ellie acted like she owned the school. But Ellie didn’t care. She flirted with the boys and ignored the dirty looks, which turned out to be an effective strategy. By her third day at school she was working as a member of the theater club’s design crew. By the end of her first week, she was walking with Emily to at least half her classes, muscling Caroline out of her usual spot on Emily’s left side.
    It was during one of these elbowing sessions that Caroline discovered Ellie’s parents had bought Caroline’s old home and that Ellie was now sleeping in her old bedroom.
    â€œIt killed me,” Caroline said. “The thought that some other girl, exactly my age, was living in my house, in my room, was awful. The fact that it was Ellie Randolph made it a thousand times worse. I felt like I had been replaced. Perfectly replaced. No. Not even replaced. I felt like Ellie was an upgrade. An upgraded version of me.”
    â€œI would’ve been mad, too. Bitch stole your house, then she stole your friend,” Polly said.
    â€œExactly,” Caroline said, feeling relief in her daughter’s validation even decades later. “The two of them started going to the Lincoln Mall all the time. I wanted to go, but Mom was working two jobs. She was never home, and you can only bum rides for so long. So we’d be walking down the hall, the three of us, and Emily and I would be talking about something that happened in class, then Ellie would mention something that happened in the arcade on Saturday and bam! End of conversation for me. She did that all the time. Even if I tried to join in Ellie would say things like, ‘Sorry, but you really had to be there.’ Even their names were practically the same. It was awful.”
    â€œSo Emily turned out to be a dumb ass?” Polly asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œSounds like she let this new girl control her.”
    â€œI never thought of it like that,” Caroline said. “I don’t know … I think it was just nice for her to have someone who didn’t have to be carried along all the time. Someone on her level. It was a terrible way to treat me, but I understood it. Even back then I understood it.”
    â€œThere comes a point when a person is too understanding, Mom,” Polly said. You don’t need to try to understand why someone is treating you like dirt. You can just hate them for it.”
    Caroline shook her head slightly and smiled. “I don’t get it. You still don’t know how to do a load of laundry, and you answer most of my questions by rolling your eyes, and I can’t remember the last time I heard you say please, but then you say something like that, and it makes me think you’re all grown up. That you understand things maybe even better than me.”
    â€œI know how to do laundry,” Polly said. “I just hate doing it.”
    Caroline smiled again. Twice now in less than a minute. It broke her heart to think how rarely she smiled in the presence of her little girl these days. Somewhere between the sunny days of kindergarten, filled with crayon drawings of their home and