Project Paper Doll Read Online Free PDF

failed.
    Also, she smelled like lemons, but the real kind, not the fake dishwashing-soap stuff. I was pretty sure her hair was lighter than she wanted people to think—the dark streaks were dyed. It was possible there was trouble at home—she’d had splinted fingers four times last year. And I thought she might have a tattoo. The collar of her shirt had slipped back one day on her thin shoulders, and I’d seen the edge of one of those big square bandages. The kind my mom had used on my knees for those massive skateboarding wipeouts in my earlier days. Then, once I’d noticed that and knew to look for it, I saw the faint outline of a rectangle underneath her shirt in the same place every day. It couldn’t have been an injury, not for that long. My next best guess was a tattoo, one she was ashamed of. It happened—an exercise in poor drunken judgment, usually on spring break. Marcos Pyter, one of the middies on our lacrosse team, put his exgirlfriend’s name on his arm after she was already his ex.
    But quiet, obedient, possibly abused Ariane Tucker with an embarrassing tat? I couldn’t make that fit. Then again, I couldn’t make today’s events square with what I knew of her either. And unlike Rachel, I was kind of fascinated.
    “Whatever,” Rachel said impatiently. “So she deliberately misses questions because she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s a brain or something. Who cares?”
    A girl who took on Rachel Jacobs in front of a crowd didn’t strike me as the type to worry about people thinking she was too smart.
    “The point is, she shouldn’t have gotten involved,” Rachel continued. “It had nothing to do with her.”
    Trey rubbed her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, babe, does it? It’s over. Mayborne got the message.”
    I groaned and shut my eyes, bored already with the inevitable fallout. Trey was a good guy, but he seemed doomed to repeat the same Rachel-related lessons over and over again.
    “Trey! No!” she said. “She humiliated me in front of everyone . I can’t let that go.”
    I could have pointed out that Ariane had been far from humiliating anyone. She’d just stood up for Jenna and refused to knuckle under—which, in Rachel’s mind, was probably the equivalent of forcing her to lick someone’s shoes.
    Rachel didn’t handle disappointment well. She hadn’t had a lot of experience with it. Her parents were always gone, leaving extra money in her account and Rachel to her own devices most of the time. Her father traveled for GTX, and her mother was either with him or at a “spa” somewhere. Her grandfather, Dr. Jacobs, adored her. He showered her with expensive gifts—clothes, a car, vacations to any sunny island she wanted. (I’d once seen Rachel end one of these poolside kickbacks to take his call. He was always caught up at work, and I suspected she valued the rare moments of his attention more than anything he ever sent to the house in a big red bow; not that she’d admit it.)
    Despite (or maybe because of ) all of this, Rachel was extremely generous with those she deemed worthy. Trey, Cami, Cassi, and I had an open invitation to her house and everything that she owned, which was saying quite a bit. She treated us like family in place of her blood relatives.
    But she expected blood loyalty in return.
    The water sloshed loudly. “Jonas!” Rachel called in the direction of the pool. “Come here, I need you.”
    “Babe,” Trey protested. “I’m right here—”
    “Shut up. It’s not about that.” Rachel’s voice had taken on a greedy intensity that I knew all too well.
    I didn’t like where this was going. Jonas tended to act first and think later, if at all. In Cub Scouts, on an overnight camping trip in fourth grade, he’d been showing off his supposed knowledge of karate inside the tent and snapped the main plastic support pole, collapsing the tent around us. In the rain.
    I opened my eyes again.
    Jonas jogged over from the pool. “What’s up?” He