I felt my face flush when the boys looked at me with even more interest.
“What about you, Claudia?” Ben asked. He looked like he would be a teenager until he was fifty.
“Claudia was arrested twice for speed dating,” Marcy quipped. “Her bite is worse than her bark.”
The boys laughed.
“Put me on your dance card,” Ben told Claudia before they walked off. “I’m not afraid of being bitten.”
I looked at her to see if she was offended, but she wore her usual indifference to everything she had seen or heard. I watched her select her food as if she were navigating through potential poison.
“Vegetarian?” I asked when I saw her avoid the chicken and beef dishes.
“Tonight,” she said.
After we had gotten our food and gone back to our table, I attacked Marcy, but half-heartedly.
“How could you make up stories like that about me? I never said I was a prom queen, and I never told you about my grades. Did they believe you?”
“What did she do now?” Terri asked.
“She told those boys stories about us . . . exaggerations!”
“Marcy hasn’t said a serious thing since I’ve known her,” Estelle said.
“What difference does it make?” Marcy said, shrugging. “No one will check up on it. We can be whoever we like here.” She turned sharply to Claudia. “You don’t have to be yourself anymore. Forget all that about your old school. You can be reborn here. Pick out a new you. I have a catalogue in my room if you need choices. I try to be a different person every week.”
I looked across the room at Rob and Ben. Everyone at their table was gazing at us as Rob spoke to them. Who knew what he was telling them now? Once you cast a lie into the sea of gossip, it was like trying to find a drop in the ocean, impossible to retrieve.
“She’s not kidding,” Terri said. “Wait until she starts with her fake English accent. She has a terrible crush on Mr. Edgewater, our lit teacher, and thinks if she speaks more like him, he’ll ravish her.”
“He will . . . someday.”
“Dream, dream, dream,” Estelle said.
“Why not dream? The truth is so boring,” Marcy continued. “Right, Claudia?”
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” she replied dryly. She began to poke at her food as though she were looking for something disgusting, like a hair or a dead fly.
“Huh? What’s that mean?”
“Kurt Vonnegut,” Claudia said.
“He’s an author, right?” Terri asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t care what he is. I hate warnings,” Marcy declared, souring her face. “They are such downers. There are too many ‘bewares’ in the world. We don’t need to add any.”
Claudia retreated after that and didn’t utter another word.
“What did you think of Rob?” Marcy asked me, keeping her eyes, still full of reprimand, on Claudia, who had closed herself like a clam.
“Cute,” I said. “Is he your boyfriend?”
“Not yet, but I’m going to sleep with him,” she predicted without the slightest hesitation. “Not my first, but my first was a disaster, in ninth grade. How about you?”
Everyone, including Claudia, leaned toward me.