So all the stuff Tala had said to Carter hadn't worked, even though Tala seemed to think it did. So now it was up to Ashton Rhodes to set everything straight. Newton High was famous for passing around the popularity crown, but Ashton wasn't ready to give it up just yet - especially for someone as needy and fake as Carter.

On Tuesday afternoon she sought out Jack Echolls, the guy who had somehow been involved in certain situations since the first day Carter had sat at their table. He held the key to the girl's demise, even if he didn't know it yet. 

She had first attempted to talk Georgie and Elena into helping her come up with some clever, destructive plan, but when they had whined and excused their way out of it, she was left to find someone else without much moral limitations. Melody wasn't exactly one to scheme, and Tala had already proven that she had no impact on the social scene. 

Jack Echolls had a girlfriend named Dawn, a girl who followed Sterling Foster around like a lost little puppy. According to Tala, Echolls often strayed from that supposedly exclusive relationship. Dawn, being the clueless cheerleader that she was, never caught on.

Echolls was easy to manipulate, which made him the perfect pawn in Ashton's plan. She had convinced him to lie and say that he had slept with Carter. Not a terribly easy task, but Ashton had threatened to give Dawn a list of all the other girls he had slept with. So it was either lie about one girl, or have the truth come out about a whole bunch of girls. 

That was part one of her plan. Part two was to forward a rather delicious photo to Carter's cellphone. When she had kissed Kiran in the hallways of Newton High, she had made Melody take a photo of it. From a safe distance, so he wouldn't notice.

It was all very brilliant, in Ashton's opinion, and it would undo the stupid crap Carter had done to assure herself a spot at the popular table. 

*** 

You don't bring your homelife to school. You don't let that travesty ruin your other relationships. Kiran Jones had to keep running those phrases through his mind, or he knew he would slip into some sort of depression. He had always been somewhat of a master at keeping his private life completely private. If life was the Olympics, he would win the Gold, Silver and Bronze for the race to keep himself an interesting mystery. For the past couple of days though, he was finding it extremely difficult to mask it all.

On Monday night he had been told that his sister had been put into a hospital, all at the hands of her deranged, son-of-a-bitch boyfriend. They lived in another state, some thousand miles away, and there was no way Kiran could get to her. It had prompted his already-divorcing parents to dive into another massive screaming match, leaving Kiran miserable and desperate for something good to happen.

It was like some evil force was toying with him; giving him what he wanted, like Carter, and then slapping him in the face for daring to be happy. He thought it best to not let Carter know about what had happened. The last thing he wanted to do was overwhelm her with the horrors of his family situation.

So when he walked into the library on Tuesday afternoon, he did it with as much indifference as possible.

He had been looking for Carter for the past half hour. None of the usual suspects knew were she was, and after checking the cafeteria, the field, and some random, empty classrooms, he concluded that the library was the last possible place she could be. He found her in the very last aisle, at the very end of the area. A place that he now realized had become her hiding spot. She didn't have any books with her, or even a backpack. She sat with her legs crossed and her back to a wall, her eyes closed and her head leaned up a little, as if she were asleep. 

What would she do if he just walked up to her and kissed her?

She opened her eyes suddenly, saw him there, and smiled. How crazy was it that her smile could make him forget about all his personal problems, even if only for a second?

"I was hoping you'd show up." Stood up, walked over to him, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him lightly.

He put his hands on her waist and pulled her closer. "I would've shown up earlier if you had answered your cell."

"It's on silent."

"Are you avoiding someone?"

"Yeah, the entire school."

"You know you could always go home. Aren't you done for the day?"

"They'll find me there. The library is the only place most people don't set foot in. I bet you anything Ashton Rhodes and Melody Anders don't even know we have a library."

He had been waiting for a good moment to sneak his next question in. Now seemed like a fair moment. "Hey, can I come by your house tonight?"

"To work on the project?"

The truth was that he wanted to get away from his parents, to be somewhere where he couldn't hear their insipid screams or their worthless cries. "Sure, we can do that."

"Um, okay..." She shifted her eyes downward, and now he was definitely sure that she was showing some hesitation. He wasn't particularly fond of trying to read people. He would rather walk away than try to guess what they were feeling, why they did the strange things they did, and what it could all mean. But with Carter, he couldn't do that. He needed to try and decipher her facial reactions and comments.

"Or we could go somewhere else."

"No. No, it's fine. My parents are going out for dinner at around seven. You can come by then."

"Sounds like a plan. I'll pick up a pizza on the way."

She smiled again, which made him momentarily numb from all the pain he had felt before. She then stepped forward and kissed him again, like a kiss was the answer to everything, the reassurance that everything would be okay. The way her lips felt against his elevated him, and he wanted nothing more than to disappear to some island with her, a place where they couldn't be bothered by his psychotic family or her immature friends.

"By the way," she started after they broke apart, "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"Everything. I got so caught up in all that stupid crap, and I don't even know why. And I kept fighting with you about it. I'm really sorry."

"It's okay. It doesn't matter. It's in the past."

"Are you sure? I was pretty awful to you."

"Yeah, but so was I."

"But a lot of the things you said and did made sense. I kept pushing you away."

"Carter, we're both sorry."

Another smile spread across her face. Another beam of light shone its way into his heart. "How crazy is this?"

"What?"

"This. You and me. It's insane. Two months ago if someone were to tell me that I'd be here, that we'd be like this, I would've laughed in their face."

"Really?" He was about to say that he had always known it would happen, but decided against it, only because he didn't want her to think he had planned it.

"You're Kiran Jones. You're the guy that I won against in a gaming tournament when we were twelve. It's... it's surreal."

"Yeah, it is surreal, because I'd totally beat you in that game now."

"No you wouldn't!" Carter said, a little loudly, somewhat excited. "Let's go, right now. I'll beat you in any game. I'll wipe the floor with those hipster glasses of yours."

This was the kind of relationship he had always wanted. She was everything that, to him, the rest of the school wasn't. Hilarious. Adorable. She always got his jokes and his references. He didn't have to sit and explain to her why something was funny. She just got it.

"Hey, I've been wearing these since way before they became some hipster thing, and you know it."

"I know no such thing."

It was a random, meaningless conversation, but really, it was all he needed at the moment.

***

"This idiotic plan of yours won't work. You should just drop it," Tala said, rather annoyed. She had underestimated the impact of Carter, had misjudged the students of Newton High, and had made the wrong assumptions about her own friends. Still, she was determined to distance herself from that girl, maybe go on as if her infiltration of the popular crowd had never happened. It wouldn't be too hard. Tala was an expert at freezing people out of her life, even if they were still quite popular. 

But right now, Ashton Rhodes was making that difficult. Why drag out something that was pointless now? It was pretty clear that the school didn't want to let Carter give up her crown anytime soon, so why draw even more attention to her?

"What do you mean? Isn't this want you wanted? A way to destroy that bitch?" Ashton asked with a little more confidence than Tala could handle. 

"Not this way. Ignore her and she'll go away eventually."

"No she won't. Not even your speech at Elena's party did the trick. They slut-shamed her for two seconds and then it was back to the same crap as before." There was a hungry, dangerous expression on Ashton's face, something that made Tala very hesitant.

"And you honestly think that by giving her even more attention you'll get what you want?"

"This isn't the kind of attention a girl wants. It'll ruin her. Stupid bitch deserves it."

There had been many times throughout their friendship that Tala had witnessed Ashton ruin a girl's reputation. It happened too often, and too often would the victim end up becoming socially dejected, severely depressed, even missing school so as not to suffer through the effects of Ashton's vicious bullying. Ashton would sometimes involve a whole group of people, manipulating them into participating in the bullying, watching with a satisfied grin as her plans unfolded. Tala knew that this particular plan wouldn't be any different.

They sat on one of the benches behind the school. It was a warm, beautiful day, and Tala breathed in the refreshing fresh air, letting it calm her nerves a little. It was well after the last classes of the day had let out, so there weren't many students still hanging around. Only a few athletes were on the field, doing laps or practicing cheers in the distance. 

"So tonight a text message will go out to every student that matters, and it'll describe in detail exactly what Echolls and Carter did."

"You mean a bunch of lies," Tala rolled her eyes and wondered how she ever got involved. Then again, it was her own fault for trusting Carter in the first place, then taking everything in her own hands and trying to seek revenge for friends who didn't even seem that bothered by it. 

"Hey, with Carter's rep, they could be true."

"She doesn't have a rep. She hasn't done a thing with anyone."

"How would you know? All of the stuff people said about her... who's to say it didn't actually happen?"

"Do you even know how ridiculous that sounds?"

"Whatever Tala. You were about ready to claw her eyes out a few days ago. Now all of a sudden you want to take the moral high road and leave her alone? I'm not about to let some pathetic, useless little bitch take over this school. I'm going to do whatever it takes to shame her back into the hole she crawled out of."

"Do what you wanna do, Ashton. Just don't expect any of us to stand by you afterwards." The entire Carter situation had taken up way too much of Tala's precious time. Time she could've spent doing extra prep work for the SATs or looking into more potential scholarships. She wasn't going to let Ashton Rhodes drag her back into the thick of it.