Bad Girls Don't Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

getting involved, taking a stand, blah blah blah.
    When that camera was off and just the hidden one was rolling, that’s when the real reasons came out. Motives as varied as “the faculty sponsor is hot” to “you get to skip class whenever you want” to “Tim MacNamara’s parents always buy beer when he has meetings at his house.”
    When the guys asked me (on camera) who I’d be voting for, I told the truth, which was that I didn’t give a flying bleep (that’s how it came out on air, at least) who the candidates were or what they stood for, and neither did anyone else in the school.
    I also suggested that, just for fun, everyone who was sick of the pretty people using school elections to perpetuate the social dominance of their tyrannical clique should make a point of voting for a person they’d never heard of.
    I wasn’t really serious. I just thought I was being . . . you know, funny.
    But I guess people have different definitions of funny. I hadn’t counted on them using all of that footage of me condemning my fellow students as the basis for the entire segment. I was just a freshman, the girl with the bright pink hair, nobody to get excited about.
    That was the day Surrey Survey got the ax.
    It was also the day I made my second appearance on the cheerleaders’ Public Enemy #1 list.
    Because the front-runner for Student Council VP was Pepper Laird.
    And she lost the election to the new kid nobody had ever heard of—Carter Blume. Pepper may have been knocked off her throne, but Carter’s popularity soared. Soon he was the pack leader of the preps—the buttoned-up speech-and-debate-obsessed clones. Preps are like cheerleaders, only with less jumping.
    I had no idea how easy it would be to create a monster—in fact, I had created two monsters. Carter and myself. Suddenly, the freshman anonymity that had softened the public’s image of me was blasted away, and once again, I was That Girl.
    So.
    I started to walk toward the clinic. He came wandering after me.
    “So, okay,” he said at last. “Clearly you have no idea who I am.”
    “Clearly.”
    He wanted me to ask. He was dying for me to ask.
    He held open the clinic door for me. The nurse was standing at the counter behind her desk, trying to fish the last cotton ball out of a jar. “Be right there,” she said, without looking at us. Then she disappeared behind the curtain.
    I planted myself in one of the guest chairs, and Carter sat next to me.
    He leaned over and spoke in a confidential tone. “Are you proficient in the Heimlich maneuver?”
    It took me a second to realize he was reading from one of the posters on the opposite wall. “No,” I said. “Sorry to say.”
    I looked at the next poster over, a cartoon about helping your friends fend off depression. A little cartoon girl was looking at her friend and asking, HOW ABOUT YOU, DO YOU EVER FEEL LIKE HURTING YOURSELF? “How about you, do you ever feel like hurting yourself?”
    He paused and let out a half-laugh. “Well . . . only on turkey tetrazzini day.”
    “I don’t think they serve that here.”
    “Right,” he said. “Lucky me.”
    He didn’t say anything else. Neither did I.
    The nurse came bustling out.
    “Carter!” she said. “Are you hurt?”
    “No . . . I’m just here to make sure Miss Warren gets the level of care she needs,” he said.
    He was totally flirting with the nurse, and she was lapping it up.
    “And I thought chivalry was dead!” she replied.
    He stood. “Maybe it is. I opened a door into her head.”
    “Oh, well, I’m sure it was probably an accident,” the nurse said absently, sitting down at her computer. “What was the name?”
    “Warren,” Carter said, looking right at me.
    Forget this. Not about to let him stand around and play hero, I went to the desk, moving closer to the nurse so that Carter had to edge away. “Alexis Warren.”
    She asked a couple more questions, and I kept shifting so that eventually Carter was completely blocked from