The It Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the line. “You can’t carry those heavy suitcases all by yourself!”
    Brett groaned and slammed her phone shut. Everyone else carried their own stuff—no matter how loaded they were. Drivers just left their bags on the curb in front of the dorm. It wasn’t as if anybody was going to walk off with your shit. But her parents, Stuart and Becki Messerschmidt of Rumson, New Jersey, babied her as though she were one of their shivering Teacup Chihuahuas.
    Her parents—
shudder
. Her father, the most prominent plastic surgeon in the tri-state area, was known for bragging about the highest percentage of fat he could lipo out of a patient in a single sitting. And the only time Brett’s mom had accompanied her to Waverly, when Brett was an eighth grader and touring the school, Mrs. Messerschmidt had told a particularly WASPy-looking mother that her chin was just
perfect
and had asked who she used. The woman had stared at Mrs. Messerschmidt blankly before finally getting it and storming away.
    Ever since she’d started Waverly, Brett had straight-up lied about her parents. She claimed they lived on an East Hampton organic farm but summered in Newfoundland, that her father was a cardiologist and her mom threw small-scale Canadian charity events. She had no idea why that was the story she’d come up with, but anything was better than the real story, which was that her parents were nouveau riche and the tackiest people Brett had ever met. Everyone at Waverly bought it, except for Tinsley, who last year had answered Brett’s cell phone when she wasn’t in the room and had a lengthy conversation about leopard versus tiger prints with Mrs. Messerschmidt, who was of course calling from her Rumson, New Jersey—not East Hampton—home. That was one good thing about Tinsley not coming back: at least her embarrassing parents would remain a secret.
    “You really don’t have to help me, after driving all this way.” Brett smiled apologetically at Raoul. She’d have to remember to send him some Kiehl’s All-Sport Muscle Rub for when he got home.
    “It’s fine,” Raoul replied in his baritone voice, but Brett thought she detected a slight groan when he dropped her bags and headed back to get the next round from the car.
    When she unlocked her dorm room door, her best friend, Callie, who had a perfect,
untacky
pedigree—her mother was Scarlett O’Hara incarnate and the governor of Georgia, for God’s sake—smirked as Raoul fussed over exactly where Brett’s oversize Louis Vuitton sweater trunk would go.
    “Oh, wherever’s fine!” Brett said quickly. Then she turned back to Callie. “Hey.” “Hey, yourself.” Callie leaned against the window and crossed her arms.
    She looked like she’d spent the whole summer getting twisted and prodded by her Pilates instructor, Claude, and eating nothing but Trident gum. Her hair was shoved into a messy low ponytail, and she had that slightly dazed, you’d-think-she-was-ditzy-if-you-didn’t-know-better look in her hazel eyes. A pale orange cotton skirt and top lay in a rumpled pile on the floor, and now she was wearing a faded baby-blue T-shirt, mini Ralph Lauren terry-cloth boy shorts, and gymnastics socks with little pink fuzzy balls at the heels.
    Where Callie was cute and pretty in a preppy way—she was captain of the girls’ field hockey team, after all—Brett was more unusual-looking. She had pale, milky-white skin and very red bob-length hair. Her green eyes were almond-shaped and both her nose and chin came to mischievous-looking points.
    It was weird suddenly seeing Callie and comparing herself to her again. Last year, Brett, Callie, and Tinsley had been three peas in a pod. But then the E thing had happened and everything had changed. No one knew why Tinsley was the only one who’d been kicked out, but Callie had always had a particular talent for persuasion—freshman year, she’d convinced Sarah Mortimer to go out with Baylor Kenyon instead of Brandon Buchanan, all