Free The Girl Who Invented Romance by Caroline B. Cooney Page B

anyway.”
    “But not many that go with purple,” said my mother.
    “Yes, you do,” I told her. “You have at least a billion violet things.”
    “Violet is not purple. Violet is sweet dark lavender. That dress I paid a small fortune for is as purple as strobe lights.” Mother heaved a huge deep sigh and slunk back to her room to try it on.
    “I had no idea high school reunions were so scary,” Megan said to me. “Especially when it isn’t even her reunion.”
    I did not explain Fear of Ellen and how it ranked in our family. I did not want that problem to become Fox Meadow property. “Mom thinks she’ll be on display and she’s nervous. Now go back to telling me about Will. You actually turned him down?”
    Megan gloated. “Yes. I loved turning him down. I felt so good afterward.”
    I lay back on my bed. In the next room I could hearMother rustling, slithering out of one dress into the next. I could feel the many seams of the patchwork denim spread making lines on my skin. I could feel myself inside my clothes. But I could not feel what Megan was feeling.
    “Power,” explained Megan. “Jimmy had such power over me. He could ruin my schedule, reduce me to tears, leave me feeling foolish and ugly and unloved.”
    “But that was Jimmy. This is Will.”
    “You don’t understand,” said Megan. Which was certainly true. “Jimmy likes that drippy little bowling freak better than he likes me. Did you take a look at her? A loser. It’s worse losing out to a loser than to a winner.” Megan made a series of terrible faces and admired each expression in my mirror.
    Perhaps Ellen felt that way. Perhaps now she thought she’d been wrong to leave my father. Did she wonder how Dad could choose Mother after beautiful brilliant Ellen? Perhaps Ellen felt that Dad had married a loser.
    “I’ve never been dumped before,” confided Megan, “and I plan never to be dumped again. I’ll always be the dumper, not the dump-ee.”
    “You mean,” I said slowly, “that you said no to Will because it made you feel better about Jimmy?”
    Megan nodded. “Ooooh, great nail polish,” she said, landing on the gift boxes Faith was always raiding. “I saw this advertised and I meant to get it for myself. May I try it, Kelly? Thanks.” She unscrewed the top and began stroking color over her nails.
    Poor Will, I thought. He had no importance to Megan. She didn’t even turn him down because of him. He wasn’t even worth turning down. She turned him down because of Jimmy, and Will will never know that. He’ll wonder if it was his breath or his personality, his bony face or his smelly feet. (Actually I don’t know if his feet smell. I never had the opportunity, if that’s what you’d call it, to find out; it was just an example.)
    My mother came back into the room wearing another old dress, and not her new one, and Megan glanced over and said, “No! Mrs. Williams. That color is vomit green and the style is for old women when they’re weeding in their gardens. You should not even have it in your house.
    “Anyway, Mrs. Williams, don’t be mad at me for saying this, but it makes you look fat,” added Megan, dealing the ultimate slam on the green dress. “Other people at the reunion will be thin.”
    My mother cringed.
    Megan rammed her point home. “They’ll lord it over you if you look fat.”
    “I’m dieting,” said my mother desperately. “Really. I’m down two pounds.”
    If there is a God, I thought, he could make Ellen gain weight between now and the reunion. Develop a craving for cream-filled doughnuts so she has to show up in size forty-four polyester pants.
    But Ellen was the kind who would never get fat. I knewfrom her yearbook picture. She would always manage to be superior to the rest of us. The way Megan was superior to me.
    Megan was helping with Mother’s clothes, but she wasn’t doing it to be helpful. She was showing my mother that she, at sixteen, knew more about style than Mother ever would.