The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel by Sarah Miller

he can prove to himself he’s cool, because he is a loser and he knows it!
    I could hate him. I could get myself there.
    Predictably, it started to rain. Buffalo, like love, couldn’t stay beautiful long. In just a few minutes, the winter wonderland would be a sodden mess.
    I heard a sound like water dripping into a bucket. Even with the covers over my head, the sound grew louder and louder. It was definitely water. It wasn’t rain. It was water trickling into more water, but with soothing regularity. It was the sound of a fountain. I sat up.
    I knew my family did not have a fountain. Buffalo wasn’t exactly an in-home fountain kind of town.
    I lay back down and shut my eyes. The fountain sound persisted.
    Probably I had gone a little crazy.
    Then I heard a voice: I know Madeeson likes these shoes, and she could only pretend she doesn’t like them because she knows eef I could get them how awesome I will look in them.
    It was Pilar Benitez-Jones’s voice. The musical tone. The use of the conditional when the past tense would have been more appropriate. The accent that was pretty much gone except for the occasional inability to produce a soft “I” sound.
    If I wear these shoes tonight, that guy will for definitely geeve me that job.
    There was no question it was her.
    Great. I was back inside of Gid’s head, but he was shopping with Pilar Benitez-Jones.
    I imagined their cozy morning conversation. She had tucked her perfectly shaped chin into her creamy shoulder, and said, “Come shopping with me.”
    Gid’s eyes blazed with desire as he stared at her. “Oh, yes,”he said. “I never went shopping with Molly once, because I hate it, but I love you so much I will go.”
    I had wanted to be back in his head. I guess I deserved whatever I got. Gideon had decided not to go to St. John with his buddies and had gone to LA with Pilar? I had never been to LA, but I just knew they were there because I saw blond people in loose, casual, expensive clothes toying with their sunglasses, and this is what I had always pictured people did in LA. Outside, satiny palm fronds waved across a blue sky.
    I had worried about them kissing, and when I woke up thirteen hours later, they were going out?
    Gideon and Pilar were on a romantic vacation in Los Angeles, and I was going to have to watch all of it through Gid’s eyes.
    “I really don’t like those shoes, Pilar.” This was Madison Sprague’s voice: lockjaw edged with sneering impatience. “They definitely have this thing about them where they want to be sexy, but they’re just, like, not.”
    How was it that Pilar had just talked shit about Madison to Gid with Madison right there? She wasn’t whispering to him, either.
    This didn’t make any sense. Gid shopping with Madison and Pilar. Unbelievable. He didn’t even like to listen to me and Edie talk on the phone. “It makes me feel like I’m going to turn into a girl,” he would complain. But now Gid wasn’t complaining, even to himself. Was he having fun with them? I didn’t see how. The place was boy hell: racks of belts, glass cases full of jewelry, wall units stuffed with expensive folded jeans, girls tittering to each other, “Oh sweetie! That is so cute on you!” and “I swear to God, he is going to die when he sees you inthat.” I did locate the source of the fountain sound: a concrete wall streaming water into a square concrete tub decorated with tiles reading HOPE, HAPPINESS AND ADVENTURE . Santogold pulsed out of invisible speakers.
    Pilar’s voice again: With the right shoes and the right way I put my hair, I will be the eentern to Elias Ganz. Not Madison. And she is trying to stop this from happening, but it weel.
    So apparently every time Madison walked away, Pilar said something nasty about her to Gideon. I had always tried to keep my bitchiness to a minimum around Gideon, thinking it was kind of a turnoff, but apparently Pilar was too good-looking to worry about that sort of thing.
    Someone answered