How Not to Be Popular Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Constant Change

  Chapter One: Act Naturally

  Chapter Two: Pretty Ugly

  Chapter Three: Artificial Life

  Chapter Four: Alone Together

  Chapter Five: True Lies

  Chapter Six: Planned Chaos

  Chapter Seven: Cold Sweat

  Chapter Eight: Terribly Good

  Chapter Nine: Old News

  Chapter Ten: Fine Mess

  Chapter Eleven: Live Recording

  Chapter Twelve: Found Missing

  Chapter Thirteen: Open Secret

  Chapter Fourteen: Stop-Motion

  Epilogue: Starting Again

  About the Author

  Also by Jennifer Ziegler

  Copyright

  For Christy

  Acknowledgments

  A big thanks to the following people for all of their advice, inspiration, and assistance: Stephanie Lane, Christy Cerreto, the Bevill family (Jimmy, Will, Lynn, and Midgi), Julie Carolan, Lisa Holden, Jessica Arellano, Gina McFarlen, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Owen Ziegler, Donovan Gullion, and Allan Amaya.

  And thanks forever to my family.

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….

  —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

  Fair is foul and foul is fair….

  —William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  Prologue: Constant Change

  O h crap. What did I just do? My right hand hovers over my phone, fingertips tingling like the sparking ends of live wires.

  Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn’t have sent that text message calling Trevor a faithless, crap-smeared ape. I’d been reading a lot of Jane Goodall lately and hit Send without really thinking it through.

  Should I text him again? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that. But…what do I say?

  “Tra-la-la-la…keep your smile on!” goes the song on the car stereo. The singer sounds like he’s on helium. “Tra-la-la-la!”

  I can’t take it anymore.

  “Rosie, Les, can you turn that music down, please?” I yell from the back of the car.

  Les turns around in the passenger seat. “Really?” he says, his eyebrows arched in surprise. “It’s not that loud.”

  “No. But it’s not that good either,” I mutter.

  He and Rosie exchange one of their many mind-melding smiles. It’s the one that silently communicates Ah, our daughter. We love her. But she so needs to get in touch with the Universe.

  Rosie lets out a little giggle and turns her attention back to the road. “Such negative energy,” she says, shaking her head. She continues driving along the interstate at fifty miles per hour while humming with the music, oblivious to the traffic zooming past us at twice the speed.

  My heart gives a little guilty thump. I know she’s trying to come up with reasons why I’ve been weirding out today. She has no idea my world imploded an hour ago, when I opened Trevor’s message. First I pretended to be sleeping, so that I could blame my puffy, postcry face on the nap. Then, after I “woke up,” they started playing their Joan Baez tape. I grumbled and pleaded with them to stop, telling them it was putting me back to sleep, when in fact it was just way too depressing. Now they’re listening to some New Age band with lots of high, breathy vocals and tinkly background sounds. For the last five miles, I’ve been picturing fairies frolicking on lily pads and unicorns sliding down rainbows. And hanging out in an animated Smurfiverse is not what I want to be doing right now.

  Les lowers the volume; then he turns around and studies me, stroking his wiry reddish brown goatee. “Why so glum? Come on. Let me see you smile, Sugar.”

  It’s not a term of endearment. It’s my actual name. Sugar Magnolia Dempsey. Yes, I’m named after a Grateful Dead song. Yes, it’s weird. No, I don’t particularly love it, but I just go by Maggie and bribe or threaten teachers never to read my full name aloud.

  “I don’t feel like smiling,” I say from my flat-on-my-back position. From this altitude I can see up his nostrils. Even his nose hairs are wavy. No wonder my hair is the way it is.

  “Well, what do you want to listen to?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Can we just…be quiet?” I ask, holding back a sob. If they sense how fragile I feel, it’ll be all group hugs and chamomile tea.

  Les nods. “You’re right, Shug. Let’s all just meditate awhile.”

  I close my eyes and listen for the squeaking of the old bucket seat as he turns to face forward. Then I flop onto my left side and stare at the small screen of my Nokia again, scrolling through Trevor’s e-mail for the sixtieth time in as many minutes.

  Hey Sugar-Mags,

  I’m sorry to do this in an e-mail…

  Why didn’t I realize at this point? Any message that starts this way is not good.

  I’m sorry to do this in an e-mail but I don’t know where you are and I need to get this over with. I don’t think I can do this long-distance thing. I’m sorry. I suck, I know. I thought I could, but I was wrong.

  I like you a lot. But this is stupid if I can’t ever see you. My dad says I should be a free spirit right now anyway. And I know you’ll be meeting lots of new guys….

  What does that mean? Does he think I’m going to go all nympho the minute I start at the new school? I was going to stay loyal to him! I was! I was going to save up money and visit him over spring break! And he couldn’t even last three weeks?

  I’ll bet anything that Candace Jacobi made a move on him. We used to make fun of how pathetic she was. He’d barely look at her when we were together, but it’s hard to compete with a girl when you aren’t there.

  Stupid simian! I’m sure that’s what happened. I’m glad I called him names!

  Of course…it’s probably not the best way to win him back.

  Anyway, I’m sorry. At least I tried. Good luck with your new scool and stuff.

  Trev

  “Scool.” He didn’t even bother to spell-check.

  I consider texting him again but I feel too mashed up, like the remains of that skunk we passed on the road a little while ago. Instead I lay my head down and completely stretch out in the back of our family car—which, I should mention, is a ’75 Cadillac hearse. We bought it while we were in Santa Monica from a really stoned surfer who called himself Ethan Foam. It’s canary yellow with two black stripes down its sides and I’ve already nicknamed it the Bumblebee. It’s old and clanky and uglier than donkey poo (and I should know—I saw lots of donkey poo when we lived on that farm in Oklahoma), but the one good thing about it is that if you want to lie down in the back, you can really lie down. We’ve even camped in it several nights. We’re among the few people who can claim they’ve ever woken up in the back of a hearse.

  It’s also pretty damn appropriate for how I feel right now.

  We’re moving again. This time from Portland, Oregon, to Austin, Texas. You’d think I’d be used to it. In my entire seventeen years, we haven’t lived anywhere for more than eight months. For the longest time, I really didn’t mind it. I even liked it. I thought it was fun and adventurous to set off for a brand-new destination and start over. But once I turned twelve, it began getting harder. Every time we left a place, I would leave behind good friends and fun school groups. I felt so…interrupted. And yet whenever I try to explain this to Les and Rosie, they say the same things over and over: “Life is short, so why not see as much as possible?” “Humans aren’t meant to stay in one place. If we were, we’d be plants.” I sort of understand what they’re saying, but I sort of don’t. How can they say it’s our normal state to wander when I sure don’t feel n
ormal?

  This time is the worst of all. Not only did I have to say goodbye to my best friend, Lorraine, I also had to leave behind a boyfriend. Trevor and I had gotten together soon after we’d moved to Portland, so we were a couple for almost six months. Things were just starting to get really serious between us when my parents announced we were packing up and heading to Texas. Now I guess I’ll never know what we could have been.

  My crying restarts and I muffle myself with my green sweater coat (which I haven’t needed since we got as far south as Tucson). I really don’t want my parents to see me like this. They wouldn’t understand. Rosie would hug me and say that Trevor and I just aren’t meant to be—that the Universe has other plans for us. And Les would talk about how great it’s going to be in Austin. But he’s wrong. It won’t be great. Nothing will ever be as great as Portland and what I have there.

  Correction: had there.

  Eventually the sobs peter out and that empty, wasted feeling returns. I secretly wipe my eyes on the sweater sleeve and pitch it and my cell phone back into my bag. Maybe I really should take a nap. I need to shut down my brain or do something other than think about Trevor. Of course, I’ll probably just dream about him.

  “Look! A sign!” Rosie suddenly calls out. I push myself up onto my elbows and glance out the windshield. When Rosie sees a “sign,” it could be anything from a list of gas stations at the next exit to a boulder shaped like a heart. This time it’s an actual road sign.

  “‘Austin…three hundred miles,’” Les reads aloud. “We’ll be there just after sunset.”

  “Joy,” I mumble, and flop back down again.

  We were supposed to have made it to Austin from Portland in a week. But traveling cross-country with my parents is like entering a time vortex. They aren’t very good with schedules and fixed destinations. In California they heard about a Renaissance festival and just had to stop. So for three days I watched my dad in tights and my mom in a push-up bustier run around a plywood facsimile of an old English village, saying things like “for-sooth” and “zounds!” Finally we made it to Arizona, where we picked up a really skinny hitchhiker named Turin. He claimed to be investigating UFOs and talked Les and Rosie into driving seventy miles off course to the middle of some desert so that we could drop him off at a point he called the pickup spot. It took us three more days to make it through New Mexico, since Les kept stopping at Indian pueblos. He loves showing off his knowledge of Zuni and Laguna culture by leading around groups of tourists, with his big sun hat and walking stick, looking like a redheaded hippie wizard.

  You’d never know it by looking at him, but my dad is sort of a genius. He has two PhDs from two different schools: one in theater and one in medieval studies. He’s forty-four years old and still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up. Rosie is a forty-year-old flower child. She doesn’t do hallucinogenic drugs (at least anymore) or sleep with everyone she feels a karmic bond with (that I know of), but she’s big on dancing—anywhere, anytime. Like at my junior choir concert last year. While all the other parents sat in their chairs, smiling and looking proud, she leaped to her feet and began an interpretive dance to our rendition of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.” At least she knows what she wants to do with her life. That’s why we’re moving to Austin. She got accepted into this really famous massage school. She’ll finish her course work in four months and then…who knows where we’ll end up?

  And me? Your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes I think I don’t know myself well enough to figure out what I should be. Last summer I started seriously thinking about becoming a cultural anthropologist, like Margaret Mead. The great thing about it is that when you’re doing a study, you stay in one place for a really long time, observing and interviewing. You can’t just take off and leave things half finished. If you do, all the hard work you’ve done up till then will be worthless.

  Of course, last summer I started picturing Trevor in my future too. And look how that ended up.

  I stare out the rear window in the direction we came from—toward Portland and Trevor. A dark shape rolls across the road, followed by a second, smaller one. Tumbleweeds, Les calls them. Uprooted bushes that go wherever the wind takes them.

  Just like us.

  My lips go all wiggly again, so I press them together to make them stop. I need to crawl away somewhere and have a good cry, maybe even call Lorraine. It would make me feel better to hear her cursing Trevor’s name in one of her filthy rants. But then, maybe it wouldn’t. After all, I miss her too.

  If you were to look through my address book and see the hundred-odd entries, you’d assume I was one of those rich teen starlets who carry around hamster-sized dogs in designer sweaters and attend parties every night. But the truth is I don’t have many friends.

  Oh sure, those address-book contacts all start out as my friends. Right before we leave a place, they hug me tearfully and promise to write and call. I get a few e-mails, maybe a phone call or two, in the first couple of months. Gradually the letters get shorter and less frequent. The phone calls become awkward and boring. And then everything just stops. In a matter of months, I go from one of their best friends, to a long-distance buddy, to “this girl I used to know.”

  And now Trevor. Damn! He didn’t even try!

  It isn’t fair. I don’t want to go to Austin. It’s not like there’s anything there for me. Rosie will finish up her certification. Les will run the thrift store of his friend Satya. And me? I just get to repeat this misery all over again—only in a new place and with new people.

  Knowing this makes me mad-sad-scared. I can’t do the new-school drill anymore. If I’m going to leave in a few months, why even bother trying to fit in? I should probably just give up on friends this time around and be one of those creepy loner types.

  Wait….

  Actually…now that I think about it, that’s not such a bad idea.

  I struggle upright, feeling energized. I’ve never considered it that way before. It really doesn’t make sense to find a new crowd of pals if we’re not even going to stay past the holidays. So…what if I just avoided that altogether? What if I kept to myself and did nothing but schoolwork—steering clear of all the social stuff?

  Of course, it would really suck. No one to talk to (except Les and Rosie). No parties. No one to hang out with. Basically no fun at all. School has always been a place where I could feel normal. Could I stand not being one of the “normal” kids? I’ve always been popular, at least a little bit, and I’ve never, ever been a complete loser. So if I wanted to become one on purpose…could I even pull it off?

  Four months of solitude would be better than how I feel right now. If no one likes me and I don’t like anyone, then I won’t have anyone to lose.

  It’s a crazy idea, but I have to admit, it’s also kind of brilliant. No friends, no fun clubs, and definitely no boyfriends. Then, when it comes time to move, it won’t hurt at all. Maybe I’ll even look forward to it!

  I reach for my woven Guatemalan tote and rummage through the contents for a pen and the notepad I keep to remind me of stuff. The frantic, ripped-up feeling that came over me after reading Trevor’s message has eased a bit, replaced by a fierce energy.

  All I need is a plan of action. I’ve never tried anything this bizarre, so I could use a set of rules to make sure I know what I’m doing. Shouldn’t be difficult to think of some. I know how to be popular, and I’ve read tons of magazine articles on the subject, so it seems to me that I should do the exact opposite of what they advised in those handy tips.

  And really, how hard can that be?

  Chapter One: Act Naturally

  TIP: Popular girls never go anywhere by themselves.

  Thus, it must also stand to reason that the unpopular are always alone.

  F irst days of school always make me feel extra alive. My senses just seem magically improved. It’s like I can fully live in the moment and simultaneously float along beside myself, carefully recording everything for later
viewing. And this, I know, will become a treasured memory. The kind that replays in full color and digital surround sound, with credits rolling at the end. This will be the day I finally figure out my life. The day I overcome the burden of being a Traveling Dempsey. Today I begin Operation Avoid Friends (OAF?).

  Knowing I have nothing to lose this time around makes me feel better about the whole situation. To tell the truth, I’m even a little excited about it.

  Of course, this is the first day of school only for me. Everyone else has been here for over two weeks. That’s another thing about my parents: they can’t be on time for anything. First they took their own sweet hippie time making it to Austin; then yesterday they had the entire day to officially enroll me at Lakewood High, but when did we walk in the door? At a quarter to five. The registrar was just about to shut down her computers—something she reminded us of several times as she raced through the enrollment process. Of course Les and Rosie didn’t seem to notice. As Les slowly filled out forms in his ornate handwriting, the lady kept tapping her car keys against her desk. But Rosie just hummed along with the rhythm.

  So here I am, getting my first glimpse of Lakewood’s teen population. The students don’t look all that different from Portland kids. Or Seattle or Berkeley or Boulder or Madison or Santa Fe kids, for that matter. All the typical groupings are here. This is my tenth high school, so as you can imagine, I’ve gotten really good at figuring out the cliques and the power rankings, just by noticing the way kids dress and act.

  Hanging at the edge of the parking lot, under a cloud of cigarette smoke, are the Thugs, aka Burnouts, Stoners, or Fry-Boys. Rockers and Skaters are subsets of this group, and they overlap like Venn diagrams for partying purposes. Trevor was a part of this group in Portland; shaggy-haired Skaters were the dominant breed there, but it’s obviously different in Austin. Here they seem to be of skinnier, squirrelier stock and they aren’t surrounded by a gaggle of admiring girls.