Read How To Be A Perfect Girl for Free Online

doing?” she
asked incredulously.
    “I am going to take notes,” he replied.
    Val laughed, “No, seriously, what are you
doing?”
    “Taking notes. Don’t worry Val, this is just
a one-time thing. It’s not like I’m gonna become as studious a
note-taker as you because I paid attention to one Chem lecture.” He
said “studious note-taker” like it was a distasteful idea, but Val
took it as a compliment.
    “Alright, then. If you want, I’ll let you
copy my notes to catch up,” she pulled her first page of notes for
the day from her notebook and slid it across the table to Keenan.
He snatched it up, frowning.
    “You seriously wrote
‘smashes pen with hammer’?” he laughed, “Geeze, you write
down everything .
You might as well set up a tape recorder and use that for your
notes.”
    Val stuck her tongue out at Keenan, “Tape
recorders don’t capture equations.”
    Jenny shushed them; “Fair enough, but
still—I know who I’m cheating off at test time,” Keenan joked.
    “You better not!” Val shot back. Jenny
glared daggers her way, so she decided she had better be quiet for
at least a while. It took her the rest of the class to catch up on
her notes; when Mr. Phillips finished, she looked at Keenan’s
notebook to see what he’d written down. She’d filled four pages of
notes; he’d barely filled a page. “You know I was serious about the
no-cheating thing, right?” Val said.
    “Yeah,” he shrugged, “I’ll get by, even if
you won’t let me cheat. This may surprise you Val, but you can
learn things without taking notes. Sometimes just listening
attentively is enough.”
    Valentina put her materials away; she had
forgotten about the page of notes she’d let Keenan borrow, until he
held it out to her, “Thanks.” She nodded and added it to her
Chemistry notebook as the bell rang.
    For the few Palm Lake students who were
lucky enough to escape the doldrums of extracurricular activities,
the bell after seventh period marked the end of their day. For Val
it meant a short trip to the cafeteria for the third day of Student
Gov in a row.
    They had all been trained
to gather in their class corners without being directed; when Val
arrived, Alex was already there joking with his friends. Jenny was
sitting with the other three Student Gov girls whose names Val had
barely learned, and Aiden and his friend were nowhere to be seen.
Val had been hoping he’d be there, so that she could apologize
again for the day before. Not that any of it was her fault; it’s all that stupid Alex’s responsibility, him
and his stupid social rules . She didn’t
feel like talking to him, so she sat next to Jenny. The other girls
all shared classes with Val, but she found it hard to distinguish
between them; they all had the same tastes in fashion, the same
interests, and today the trio were even wearing their hair the same
way. Across the table, Ella was whispering excitedly with Zoey.
Ella had a face that reminded Val of nothing so much as a mouse—or
maybe a ferret, and Zoey’s chin was so broad that she looked like a
toad in the right light. Sophia was the only member of the Trio Val
would classify as good-looking; even though her cheeks had a
vulpine tilt, her green eyes helped soften their impact. Sophia was
listening intently to Jenny debrief her on the day she’d had. Jenny
wasn’t exactly one of them as far as Val could tell; they treated
her more like a leader—with respect, but also as an
outsider.
    Trying to participate in the boring
conversations of the Trio plus Jenny was a tedious task. Val kept
thinking of things to say and then deciding not to risk it, and so
she just kept quiet instead. As a result, by the time Alex found
his way over Val had hardly said a dozen words.
    “The way you always hang out with someone
other than me,” he began, “I might start to think I’m your least
favorite person in this club.”
    “You’re my least favorite person in the
school,” Val shot back.
    Alex