Free Theodora Twist by Melissa Senate

You’re not allowed to talk about what goes on or you’re blacklisted forever. Jen and Belle and I have spent many dull Friday nights wondering what does go on at a Samantha party. Belle thinks they sit around and rank all the people who aren’t cool enough or popular enough to be invited. Jen thinks they have orgies. I think it’s just a regular party with a lot of unwarranted buzz. But I don’t know for sure. I secretly really want to know.
    “Look, I agree it’s a great idea as entrepreneurial concepts go,” I say, “but I can’t sell Dora out that way. We used to be good friends.”
    “Key words: used to be, ” Samantha Paris says. “And stop calling her Dora like you’re still her friend. It’s more than a little reaching and a lot pathetic.”
    Samantha Paris is pure evil. I’ve witnessed her and her friends ripping apart girls in the halls, in the locker room, in the cafeteria. How can you eat those French fries when you’re so fat already? she actually said to Leslie Biel a few months ago. I mean, summer is coming. Don’t you care? Look what’s on my tray—and I’m thin. Yogurt. Water. The fry dropped from Leslie’s hand out of pure shock and she turned all kinds of red. She just sat there and stared, not saying a word. No one said a word. Including me, and I was sitting a table away. Finally Samantha just shook her head and she and the Samanthas headed to their table across the room.
    “No can do,” I say. “Sorry.”
    “Oh, wait a minute,” Samantha continues. “I get it. This Dork Loseretta thinks she’s going to be popular by association. Because she’s going to be on the show. Because Theodora has to pretend to be her friend. Well, news flash: you’ll be hot for a month, and then when Theodora leaves, you’ll go back to being a nobody.”
    “Until the show airs,” Avril puts in.
    Samantha Ulrich cuts her a look. “Emily will be shown as the dorky loser she is, doing dorky loser things, like not going to our parties. Ooh, how exciting! I wish I were the nerdy teenager leading the regular life that Theodora Twist will supposedly lead,” she adds, laughing.
    “You might want to rethink this,” Carin says. I wasn’t sure she was actually allowed to speak.
    “Nope,” I say.
    Samantha Paris stares at me with disgust in her eyes. “Consider yourself persona no one-a forever. Bye, Loser Dork.”
    When I finally walk into English class, Samantha P.U. (as Belle once brilliantly dubbed them) are in conference just outside the door, most likely deciding how best to torture me without being caught when the cameras start rolling on Monday. I feel Zach’s eyes on me.
    “Wow,” he says as I sit down in my regular seat, diagonally in front of his. “Theodora Twist is going to live with you for a whole month. Very cool.”
    Too bad you’re not, I think. I hate that I still like him so much. Why do I like a jerk? Why do I want to turn around and stare into that gorgeous face, those incredible dark blue eyes?
    I force myself not to turn around. Which means I’m eye to eye with two of the Samanthas when they finally decide to grace the classroom with their We Rule presence. Samantha Paris and Avril sashay in, eliciting stares as they always do. They sit behind Zach and immediately start flirting. He turns and smiles but doesn’t flirt back; he doesn’t seem to like them much, which is something I’ve always admired about him. At least he has one redeeming quality.
    I open my backpack and pull out my English notebook and my copy of Romeo and Juliet. I pretend deep absorption in act three, scene two, which we’ll be discussing today.
    “How pathetic,” Samantha P. says, holding up an issue of Teen People. Theodora graces the cover. The headline is The Twenty Most Powerful People Under Twenty . Theodora is number four. Her boyfriends, the Bellini Brothers, take spots two and three. Number one, a singer-turned-actress, has the number-one single in the country and the number-one