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popular, and the undeserving girlfriend of the only guy I’d ever cared about, she actually, I hated to confess, had a brain in her head. Shocking, I know, but we shared a lot of the same advanced-level classes.
    â€œYeah, I read it over the weekend.”
    â€œPerfection. I was over at Craig’s for a lot of the weekend, and so, as you can imagine, I just didn’t have time to skim it. I was hoping you could give me the basic gist on our way to class. You know, in case Phyllis calls on me?” Beth had the insouciance to call our teachers by their first names.
    â€œWell, I mean, it’s
The Sound and the Fury
— William Faulkner is tough to condense into talking points. It’s pretty enigmatic.”
    â€œNever mind then,” she said, looking annoyed. “I guess I’ll just fake it.”
    It was something she was highly proficient in. Her whole high school career had been about faking it. Her popularity was built on an elaborate ruse to make people forget where she came from and force them to only focus on where she was going.
    Certainly her looks and her attitude all screamed upper crust, but I knew better. She and I had gone to grade school together. We’d been in the same Girl Scout troop and the Brownies before that.
    I’d seen the beat-up, hubcapless, seventies-era Chevy pick-up truck that her dad drove to the docks every day. He worked as a longshoreman when he wasn’t out to sea for weeks at a time during crab season. Beth’s mother had died when she was eleven, so now it was just her and her dad. It must have been lonely for her, in a lot of respects, but she never let on that there were any chinks in her armor. She was evidently a master at stretching a dollar, always coming to school looking polished and fashionable. I suspected she borrowed threads from more well-to-do friends like Kristy, and I’d even heard that she got a small stipend of spending money from her dad’s brother, who owned a chain of movie theaters in Anchorage.
    No one would have judged Beth for any of this. Seventy percent of the kids in school were from blue-collar stock, including yours truly. But she insisted on pretending that she was no different than any of the “black gold” crew: the kids whose fathers did big business for the oil companies. Craig’s father was one of these men, having been transferred here to spearhead exploratory research while the Feds debated whether or not to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
    Speaking of wildlife, Beth’s furrowed brow and glowering eyes combined with her thick application of liquid eyeliner currently made her resemble a bird of prey.
    â€œYou know, Craig always tells me that you’re a sweet girl, which is why I thought I could ask you for help, but I see that I was wrong. Or maybe
he
was.”
    I so did not want to be having this discussion. I could tell that there was going to be no way to extricate myself painlessly from the conversation. Behind her on a bulletin board was a too-precious motivational poster of a kitten hanging from a tree limb. I took its message, “Hang in there,” to heart.
    â€œWell, Craig
has
been known to have bad judgment about certain things, that’s true,” I disingenuously replied. Beth’s blonde head reared back ever so slightly, as if she weren’t sure whether to take this as a personal affront or not.
    â€œIt’s fine to have a crush on him, Skye — most girls do,” she sighed. “But if you’re harboring any Disney-style delusions about being his hideous, taffeta-clad prom date come spring, you can purge yourself of those grand fantasies right now.”
    First Lenny, now Beth. What was it with everyone and prom? “He and I will naturally be Prom King and Queen,” she said, glaring up at me. “So you’ll just have to content yourself with being his fawning fool, which is pretty much what you look like