Free How to Be Popular by Meg Cabot Page A

hand with Mark Finley. The two of them weren’t looking at each other—no gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, going, “I love you…no, I love YOU. No, I love YOU.” Instead, they were gazing out across the sea of faces in the seats on either side of the aisle they were walking down, the way a bride and groom might smile and nod at people assembled for their wedding, or a king and queen might nod to their populace.
    Which is, in a way, what Lauren and Mark are: the king and queen of our school. No matter how much Jason—who followed my gaze, saw who I was looking at, and made a very rude noise—might not like to admit it.
    As soon as Lauren and Mark sat down—front row, since Mark, as senior class president, would be getting up to go to the podium to give us all a back-to-school pep talk, and also rally us to help the senior class raise enough money to send them all to Kings Island in the spring, a Bloomville High senior tradition—andPrincipal Greer finally approached the microphone, the chattering hordes fell silent. They shut up because Principal Greer, who golfs, keeps a club in his office with which he often practices swings—without regard, rumor has it, to anyone who might happen to be sitting in his office at the time. There’s a guy who works at the car wash who only has one working eye, and everyone says Dr. Greer is the one who put it out with his 5 iron the day the guy got sent to his office for mouthing off to Swampy Wampler.
    Dr. Greer started his welcome speech—“Welcome, students, to another school year at Bloomville High”—and Jason, slumped in the seat next to me, slumped down even farther, putting his Converse high tops on the back of the seat in front of him and causing the person in that seat—Courtney Pierce, class suck-up—to turn around and give him an aggravated look, to which Jason responded with, “What? I’m not touching you,” a line he actually learned from my little brother Pete.
    Beside Jason, Becca, clearly bored, took out a purple sparkle pen she’d put on my employee account over at the bookstore ($1.12, seventy-three cents with my thirty-five percent off) and started making little stars on the white part of Jason’s high tops.
    And Jason, after throwing a startled look at me (as if to say, “Do you see what your insane friend is doing?”), just sat there and let her keep doing it. Like he was afraid if he moved, she might plunge the pen into his forearm, or something.
    After Dr. Greer’s mind-numbingly boring speech about how we should use the coming school year to Realize Our Full Potential came Swampy’s reading of the highlights of the student code of conduct: no cheating, no violence, no harassment of any kind, or you will be expelled and have to go to Culver Military Academy or the alternative high school.
    It was hard to see which would be worse. At Culver, you’d be forced to rise at dawn and perform drills. At the alternative high school, you’d be forced to put on performance pieces about your feelings concerning war. It was a lose/lose situation, either way. It was obviously better just to keep from violating the Bloomville High student code of conduct.
    Finally, after she had the place alternately looking at the clock and longing for it to be lunchtime, and snoring, Swampy turned the mike over to Mark Finley, who sauntered up to the podium to thunderous applause that caused some people—like Jason, who’d nodded off—to start in their seats.
    “Oh, man,” Jason said looking down at his shoes. In addition to the stars, Becca had added tiny unicorns.
    “Aren’t they cute?” Becca asked, clearly thrilled by her own artistic prowess.
    “Oh, man,” Jason said again, not looking like he found them at all cute.
    But I didn’t have time to deal with Jason’s shoe drama. Because Mark had started speaking.
    “Hey,” Mark said, his deep voice gruff—but totallycharming—in the microphone, which he’d had to adjust to his own height after the