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It was a photo of two random glamorous girls —
No, wait — it was a photo of Marnie and me. From the premiere.
I stared at myself — my luminous skin, the rosy pink of my cheeks, my large doe eyes. My hair was perfect, the red dress so elegant.
I’d never seen myself look like that before. I never even knew I could look like that.
And next to me, Marnie embodied retro awesomeness, from her wild sequined dress to her glasses.
“Wow us,” I said quietly.
“It gets better,” she said, grabbing the phone and scrolling down. “Look at the caption.”
Can you say “totes adorbs,” Stalkerz? Gorgeous Hollywood starlets Ramona Claiborne and Bernadette Middleton arrive at the premiere of the new Kurt Conrath flick The Never Time.
“We’re … on … Starstalkerz,” Marnie said. “Willa, you and I are on Starstalkerz.”
I’d heard of it. It was one of those gossip sites that has its own TV show and is always posting famous people’s mug shots.
“No, Ramona and Bernadette are on Starstalkerz,” I said. “And I’m sure the website will take the photo down when they realize that Ramona and Bernadette aren’t real people.”
“Look at the comments!” Marnie practically shrieked. “Look — ‘Bernadette is so beautiful I hate her.’ Someone hates you because you’re pretty. And this one — ‘Where did Ramona get those glasses they R so kewl I want them.’ Someone wants my glasses. People want to know who we are. They want to be us.” Marnie’s face was animated in a way I’d never seen. “Willa, here’s what I’m thinking — we find a way to get into every party and event we can find. We always go as Bernadette and Ramona. Soon we’ll be the It Girls. We’ll have fan pages and thousands of followers. I mean, if we handle this right, we could get … like, I don’t know — our own reality show!”
I scrolled back up to the photo. “But how did they even find out your name was Ramona? We decided that after we went inside, didn’t we?”
Marnie gave me a saucy smile. “Well … I might have written a press release from a publicist about Ramona Claiborne and Bernadette Middleton, Hollywood’s hottest new BFFs.”
“Wait — you actually put in writing that I’m Kate Middleton’s cousin?”
She gri
“Marnie!”
“Oh, stop acting scandalized. What are you, a pilgrim?”
“You mean a puritan? No … but that’s lying about a real person.”
“Lying?!” She drew back, pretending to be scandalized. “On the Internet? No! I don’t believe it! I’m pretty sure Kate Middleton is too busy trying on tiaras to care whether someone halfway across the world is pretending to be her distant relative. I mean, think about it. Can she prove you’re not related?”
I ignored her crazy talk and stared at the picture. “Won’t we get in trouble when they find out?”
“For heaven’s sake, no,” Marnie said, rolling her eyes. “This is Hollywood, Willa. I don’t even know how old my own mother is. Everyone lies, and there are no consequences. It’s like a magical fairyland!”
My plan for avoiding Chemistry went off without a hitch, so for seventh period I lay on a cot in the nurse’s office, thinking about Marnie. After a while, the nurse left me alone, so I pulled out my phone. It took me a few different combinations of search terms, but eventually I found what I was looking for:
A photoblog called MARNIE + WYATT = FOREVER.
As the posts loaded on the page, one by one, I felt like I’d been spun around a hundred times and dropped down on a balance beam.
Photo after photo of Wyatt and Marnie. Sitting together at a football game. Holding hands. Him giving her a piggy-back ride. Him standing behind her, resting his chin on her shoulder. Tenth-grade Marnie had a short chin-length bob and wire-frame glasses. In every photo, she was smiling brilliantly.
It was surreal, seeing them together. I felt an unpleasant twinge, and told myself it was because this was confirmation that so much of what Marnie had told me was outright lies.
Or maybe, I mused, flinching at a photo of him kissing her on the cheek, there’s more to it than that.
The pictures spa
And then there was one of Marnie standing in the courtyard at school, holding a dozen balloons. The caption read, Surprising Wyatt on our 6 month a
I tucked my phone back in my purse and closed my eyes, thinking, My life could not possibly get any more complicated.
I was wrong about that, though. So wrong.
After all I’d been through, all the care I’d taken to stay out of trouble, in the end it was a human, not a ghost, who got me called into a parental after-school judgment session.
It was Marnie, who I thought was supposed to be my friend.
I sat at the dining room table with Jonathan and Mom. My stepfather’s iPad sat on the table, and the front page of Starstalkerz stared up at us. The website, to my incredible non-delight, had added the following tidbit to the item about Marnie and me:
EDITOR’S NOTE: Whoops, Stalkerz! As many of you pointed out, this glamorpuss is NOT Bernadette Middleton, despite her claims to the contrary — in fact, we have it on good authority that her name is Willa Cresky and she’s the newly imported stepdaughter of Infinity Realms director Jonathan Walters. Gotta watch out for those east coast girls. Hey, she may not be royalty, but we’ll give her this — she looks great in red!
That was it. Not a word about Marnie, or the fact that she was lying, too. Not a word to say that I hadn’t been the one to start the story, or send out a stupid press release.
Jonathan’s publicist had called him that afternoon in a red-hot fury, claiming that his new stepdaughter was a total embarrassment to his public image.
“What would make me feel better, Willa,” Jonathan said now, “is hearing some explanation as to why you thought it was okay in the first place.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“But you went along with it,” Mom said.
“I don’t know if you understand how reputations work in the real world,” Jonathan said. “Your word is your bond. When you get a reputation for not telling the truth, it can follow you forever.”
I nodded. After a half hour of useless attempts to defend myself, quiet acquiescence seemed like my best chance to get out of there before my twenty-first birthday.
“We’re not angry, exactly,” Mom said. “Just disappointed.”
But I could tell by the way Jonathan frowned that he was a little angry.
I apologized again. And then they rehashed it again. And that happened four more times and then they finally told me I could go up to my room and think about what I’d done.
As if I didn’t have any other problems to think about in my spare time.
I’d forgotten how delicate my old computer was. If you pushed the screen open too fast, or a millimeter too far, the whole display would turn a very alarming shade of muddy green. I pulled it closer and held my breath until the backlight came on again.
Then I clicked on the folder labeled DAD’S STUFF. It was only a backup, meant to be deleted after he transferred all of his files to the new computer. But I never got around to deleting it.