Charmed Thirds by Megan McCafferty

popular crowd,” Tanu said accusingly.
    “Well, sort of, but no, not really,” I stammered. “I really hated them.”
    “But did anyone hate
you?”
asked William. “Did anyone throw garbage at
you
in the cafeteria?”
    No matter how I tried to explain it, my high school years came off all wrong, in that they seemed all right. I was lusted after by the most popular meathead jock in our class. I had a boyfriend for several months, a hot one who was also smart enough to beat me out for valedictorian and get into Cornell. True, he dumped me, but it freed me up to be with my first real love, a former sex and drug addict genius who says I changed his life, one who wrote poetry and sang love songs. . . .
    “If you don’t mind me saying,” Jane said. “It sounds like you lived a goddamned charmed life to me.”
    Everyone else nodded in agreement.
    “So shut up about it.”
    I admired Jane’s bluntness. No wonder she became my best friend at school.
    I’ve always known that my high school experience was only terrible because something inside me—my mucked-up brain chemistry, most likely—made me feel that way. So I was a bit surprised when being on the football field just one year after my own high school graduation made me strangely nostalgic for a time that I know is not worthy of such reverence.
    The déjà voodoo really hit me when I saw Taryn Baker, stepsister of the former gay man of my dreams and current peer at Columbia University, Paul Parlipiano. I’d forgotten that Taryn was also graduating today.
    “Heard any good gossip lately?” she asked.
    Taryn had e-mailed me a few times last year, but I hadn’t seen or talked to her since I graduated. So I barely recognized the voice, or the person who went with it. Gone was the mousy whisper, replaced by a Marlboro red pack rasp, and her hemophilic paleness served as an unnerving backdrop for a female faux hawk that was tarlike both in color and texture. Now she’s a pinup punkette just daring people to ignore her. But when I tutored her in math as a sophomore and junior, she was a fade-into-the-paint wallflower. Taryn was so easily missed that she was often witness to shady behavior, which she eventually put to her advantage. Inspired by my own critical editorials in the school newspaper, and fed up with her outsider status, she launched
Pinevile Low,
an anonymous e-mail gossip rag devoted to the school’s dirtiest hookups, breakups, and fuckups. No one was safe from her scrutiny—not even me. (To this day, she’s the only one who knows that I once helped Marcus fake a drug test by peeing into an empty yogurt container.)
    While revealing herself as the mystery muckraker didn’t launch her into the Upper Crust, it did make her a bit of a hero among Pineville’s most unappreciated subcultures. She had no problem persuading a band of misfit wordsmiths to join her on
The Seagull’s Voice
staff, making the school paper
the
cool activity for the uncool. She’d even improved her grades to the point that she could get accepted by Loyola in New Orleans. I was proud to have served as her inspiration.
    “Well,
you’re
the eyes and ears around here,” I replied. “What have you got for me?”
    “Hm,” she said, tapping a black fingernail against her chin. “What former Most Likely to Succeed has fallen on hard times and graced Pineville High with her superior, Ivy League presence?”
    “Har dee har har,” I said. “Is Paul here?”
    “Don’t you know?” she replied. “He ditched PACO . He’s in New Hampshire organizing meet-ups for Howard Dean.”
    I’d had several hello/good-byes with Paul at Columbia, but little beyond it. His former group, People Against Conformity and Oppression, had a lot of campus protests this year—against the climate of racism and intolerance, the mistreatment of TAs, the lack of vegan entrées served in John Jay, and so on. I didn’t get involved with those fights against injustice, but I did join Paul and millions of