Free How to Be Popular by Meg Cabot Page B

diminutive Ms. Wampler stepped away from it, to amused chuckles from the student body. “So, yeah. Uh. It’s a new school year, and you know what that means…last year’s juniors are seniors now, and—”
    Here he was cut off by more applause and cheering as the seniors congratulated themselves for managing to make it through the summer without killing themselves in drunk driving accidents or by diving headfirst into the shallow end of the pool (not to mention not drinking any batches of lemon Joy lemonade).
    “Um, yeah,” Mark said when the seniors settled down again, grinning his sheepish little grin. “So, you know what that means. We gotta start saving up for our senior trip this spring. Which means we gotta make some money. Now, I know last year’s senior class made like five thousand dollars doing weekend car washes. And I propose we do the same thing. The Red Lobster out by the mall said we could use their parking lot again, so…whadduya say? You folks up for a car wash?”
    More applause, this time accompanied by whistling and shouts of “Go, Fish,” which inevitably led to snickers about childhood card games.
    I seriously don’t know how our school got stuck with the Fighting Fish as its mascot. Because as mascots go, fish suck. Apparently it has something to do with the fish weather vane on top of the courthouse…which some people suspect is a crappie, the most commonly foundfish in the lake. So I guess things could be worse. We could be the Fighting Crappies.
    Mark looked around the room to see if anybody had anything but “Go, Fish!” to say. I looked around, too.
    But the only person who raised his hand was Gordon Wu, the junior class president (elected solely due to having run unopposed, my class being—what’s the nicest way to put this?—slightly apathetic), who stood up and asked, “Excuse me, er, Mark, but I was wondering if there weren’t some other method by which we might raise funds, other than car washes? You see, some of us would prefer to have our Saturdays free for, um, lab work—”
    This remark was followed by the hissing it deserved from the crowd and several shouts of “Don’t be such a Steph, Wu!”
    I couldn’t believe my good fortune—I mean, that Gordon Wu, of all people, had actually cracked the door open for me to go barging through. Which I did without another second’s hesitation, before Mark could say anything.
    “Gordon brings up an interesting point,” I said, standing up in my seat—so suddenly that Jason started and dropped both his feet from the back of the chair in front of him. He didn’t seem aware of the loud thumping sound they made as they hit the cement auditorium floor, either. Instead, he craned his neck up at me and mouthed, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? SIT DOWN!” while Becca, one finger in her mouth (she’s a nail biter),stared up at me with a horrified expression on her face.
    Silence roared through the auditorium as every face in the room turned toward me. I could feel heat rushing up to my cheeks, but I tried to ignore it. This, I knew, was it. My big chance to show my school spirit, after years of pretty much doing what Jason had been doing a second ago—dozing—through every school-related event I was forced to attend, and not showing up at all at the ones I wasn’t.
    Well, not anymore.
    “We have a lot of very talented individuals in this room,” I went on, glad that no one could see my knees from where I was standing (except Jason. But he wasn’t looking at my knees) since they were shaking so badly. “It seems a shame to waste them. Which is why I was thinking a good way to raise money for the senior class trip this year would be to hold a student talent auction.”
    The crowd, which had been stunned into silence up until that point, began to buzz. I saw Lauren Moffat, her eyes alight with glee at what I was doing (making a public spectacle of myself…again), lean forward in her chair to hiss something in Alyssa Krueger’s