Project Paper Doll by Stacey Kade Page A

preemptively shifted away from me as if I was going to try to drag her.
    Holy shit. Someone had done a number on her.
    I held my hands up. “Wasn’t going to.”
    “Sorry.” She looked around, weighing her options, and then followed me over to the door, moving as if every step cost her. “I can’t be late to class. What do you want?”
    “I need your help.”
    She looked up at me, surprised, and met my gaze directly for the first time. “What?”
    Contact lenses, I realized. She was wearing contacts. I could see the edges of them around the unnaturally dark blue of her irises. Which probably meant that her eyes weren’t blue at all, but some darker color, altered by the tinted lenses.
    Weird. I frowned.
    The vanity of colored contacts did not jibe with what I knew of her. She didn’t seem like Rachel or the twins, obsessed with clothes and expensive haircuts and makeup. She wore jeans and T-shirts mostly, and her hair was always in that half-controlled messy ponytail/bun thing. Once again, she seemed less a whole person and more a conglomeration of parts that didn’t make sense.
    Ariane glanced away abruptly, pink rising in her pale cheeks.
    I’d been staring. And now it was my turn to apologize. “Sorry.” I hesitated, not sure how to approach all of this. “It’s Rachel.”
    She stiffened.
    I hurried to explain. “What you did yesterday, Rachel’s got it into her head that you were deliberately trying to humiliate her and—”
    “It’s your job as a henchman to warn me off, maybe scare me or manipulate me into doing something she wants,” she said flatly.
    “No. God. No,” I said, shocked. We weren’t the freaking Mafia. Though it occurred to me that Ariane wasn’t far from the truth. Rachel was never that direct about it, but her “pranks” had the same effect as a threat: Do what I want, be who I say you should be…or else. And I’d taken part in how many of those over the years? I felt sick.
    Ariane raised her pale eyebrows in question.
    “Okay, yes, sort of,” I admitted with a grimace. “But it’s not what you think…not really. I’m not going to go through with it or anything.…” I fumbled for the words, trying to find a way to explain this that didn’t make me sound like the world’s biggest asshole. I didn’t have Quinn’s gift for spinning awkward truths into silky smooth half-lies everyone was happy to swallow. He was a born politician, but normally I wasn’t this bad. Something about the way Ariane stood there, cool and distant, impassively watching me bumble along…it made me feel exposed, a lower life-form trapped under her microscope.
    “Rachel wants me to ask you to Bonfire Week.” The words came out in a rush. There.
    Looking more tired than surprised, she closed her eyes for a long second—her eyelashes were so pale, they appeared almost white against her skin. “And then?” she asked, opening her eyes.
    “And then, I don’t know.” I raked my hands through my hair. “Dump you in some kind of loud, public, and humiliating way at her party on Friday.” It sounded so dumb now in the face of her calmness. Like, short of suffering some kind of temporary brain damage, there was any chance she would have ever fallen for it.
    “Assuming I would find you irresistible enough to accept you in the first place,” she said dryly.
    Heat rose in my face. “Assuming, yeah.” Hey, it wasn’t that big of a leap. I may not have had a girlfriend, but I’d never had trouble finding dates or, for that matter, hookups. Being Quinn Bradshaw’s little brother had proven beneficial in that one regard, once Quinn himself was out of town and no longer an option.
    “Okay, warning duly noted.” She hefted her bag higher on her shoulder with a sigh. “Thanks for the heads-up.” She started to turn away.
    “Actually…” I began.
    Ariane paused and gave me an amused look. “You do realize it’s kind of pointless to ask me now, right? You just told me the whole thing is a