Free The New Husband by D.J. Palmer Page A

day I was poor Maggie Garrity, the girl whose world had been turned upside down, and the next I was a rat-fink bitch of the highest order. All of my lacrosse friends turned into frenemies. I started getting tagged in social media posts of parties I wasn’t invited to. Someone flagged me on Facebook for being inappropriate (FYI, I wasn’t, and I don’t use Facebook anymore).
    There was other bullying going on—like posts that went up on social media implying my father was a pedophile and may have abused me; a website listing that basically advertised a young girl looking for hot guys and included my mobile phone number. (FYI, I got a new phone number.)
    None of this, not one of the attacks against me, got pinned on Laura, but trust me, she was behind it all. In the end, it didn’t really matter.Laura could be suspended or not; I could do all of the self-esteem-building stuff the guidance counselor recommended, read all of her pamphlets on how to deal with bullying—I’d still eat lunch alone.
    It wasn’t like I could go clique jumping (really, that’s not a thing), and the other activities I was involved in (student council and newspaper club) I had picked because that’s what the lacrosse kids were doing, so those were now off-limits. I could have made waves with the principal, because bullying is such a big deal these days, but instead I played it down. The only thing I’d get by calling out my bullies would have been more bullying.
    Justin quickly realized that his allegiance was with Laura, and just like that he acted like I didn’t exist. Which brought us to this point: me eating lunch alone with a stupid boot on my foot, my dad gone, and terrible Simon in my house.
    There were two chairs between me and Jackson and Addie, or Jaddy as they were better known, a new school couple who were so in love I could have sat on Jackson’s lap and he wouldn’t have noticed me. I was stabbing a grape with my fork, imagining it was Simon on the receiving end, when a boy came over to my table.
    I knew him, of course, because Seabury isn’t a big school and everyone knows everyone here. But if we’d exchanged a dozen words with each other over the years, I couldn’t have said what they were. Benjamin Odell was not an athlete, but he was a mathlete—one of the best math students in the school, in fact, though I didn’t know what class he was taking, because it was so much higher than everyone else’s level.
    Ben was rail thin. Whatever muscle he had went to moving his limbs, not much more than that. To me, it looked as though his mother cut his short brown hair, or maybe he did it himself, because it was a little lopsided in the front. Somehow it was sweetly endearing, a throwback to grade school, when most of us didn’t realize what we actually looked like. He had a gap between his front teeth, and his wire-rimmed glasses seemed flimsy for such thick lenses.
    â€œCan I sit here?” Ben said to me.
    Ben was a rover during lunch period, a real rarity. He’d sometimes eat with the band kids (he played some instrument, I wasn’t sure which), sometimes it would be with the other mathletes, or sometimes, sin of all sins, he’d sit with whatever teacher was assigned lunch duty. Today he wanted to sit with me, and I couldn’t figure out why.
    He brought his lunch from home, but I didn’t think he had an allergy like I did, because he was never in my nut-free classes in grade school. All us “nut cases,” as we affectionately called each other, were usually grouped together out of convenience.
    I nodded my head toward the empty chair next to Jackson. Sit, I said without saying it, and down went Ben.
    He organized his food: some kind of sandwich with mustard, a batch of baby carrots, a carton of milk, and a few cookies. I had a cheese sandwich, cut-up cucumbers, those grapes, and brownies Mom had baked. She did that from time to