Free Accidental It Girl by Libby Street

and you know how Franco hates to wait. Thanks. Bye.” The follow-up would come two weeks later…. “All right, I’m here for you now. I got your message. No, no, darling—you cut the green wire, not the red one.”
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    The three “years of silence,” as I like to call them, went something like this: 1989 was all about feeling sorry for myself and watching Disney musicals. Then 1990 was a year of alternately hating Paige with a fury and experimenting with the latest exfoliation techniques outlined in Seventeen . In 1991 I wanted to be Christy Turlington and wished, more than anything, that my mother had taken me with her. Then, near Thanksgiving of 1991, gifts began trickling in.
    At first they were trinkets, small pieces of jewelry, hair accessories that I couldn’t use because I’d chopped all my hair off that summer (when Christy did). Then, at Christmas, a makeup kit arrived—a Chanel makeup kit. New Year’s brought a journal. It was leather and velvet with a lock that looked to have been swiped from a medieval text. By April of 1992 I had amassed quite a collection of things, the value of which I still believe totaled more than the entire contents of my father’s tiny house. The period that followed I have generously entitled “Paige’s Mother-Daughter Adventure”—she began having me over for weekends.
    I had just turned fourteen and was outstandingly awkward and plump. Puberty was very unkind to me. My breasts and hips emerged long before my upward growth spurt, so I resembled a lumpy apple for the first gruesome year of high school. But, as Paige used to remind me, my hair was so pretty—smooth, shiny, and sun-bleached to a honeyed platinum blonde.
    One day, completely out of the blue, Paige sent me a note instructing me, in no uncertain terms, to proceed directly to her house Friday after school. She said she’d spoken to my dad about it and that he knew not to expect me home until Sunday evening. The kicker? The note came attached to a brand-new cashmere Benetton sweater. If I had had any inkling of what cashmere was, or what it cost, I probably wouldn’t have worn it. I would have hidden it under my bed with the rest of her gifts so my father didn’t know I was “cheating” on him with my mother. But as it was, when Friday came around I wore the sweater to school. I loved it—so soft and delicate and creamy white, like an eggshell. All day I got compliments on it, and all day I fanta-sized about what it would be like to hang out in my mother’s enormous house surrounded by all the expensive things that I was sure would make me feel just instantaneously happier. The only thing I was nervous about was the bus.
    Paige lived, quite literally, on the other side of the tracks. This meant that to go directly to her house I had to take a different bus from school. I had to take the cool bus, the bus that all the cheerleaders rode (well, the few not driven to and from school by their much older boyfriends). There were no band geeks or math league members on this bus. It was a bus filled with superlatives—Best Couple, Most Likely to Succeed, Cutest Butt. I was completely petrified. Though not a math league member myself, my best friend at the time (who, incidentally, was infinitely cooler than I) was first chair tuba in the marching band. But when I walked onto the cool bus, I held my head high and tried to look like I belonged. Apparently, my routine didn’t quite hit the mark. The hottest, most popular guy in my grade, Marshall Holmes, tapped me on the shoulder as I passed him and said, “Uh, Sadie. I don’t think you’re on the right bus.”
    He didn’t mean it to be cruel. I honestly think it was well-intentioned concern that prompted him to speak (Marshall grew up to be a very wealthy, very gay doctor and adoptive father of four Cambodian orphans). But, nevertheless, his comment sparked a