Kiss n Tell Read online

  KissnTell

  By Allison Swan Suzy McCoppin

  To Jessica Almon

  who was more than an editor

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Annihilated, Part 1

  Chapter 1: Sketchy-Shady Invite

  Chapter 2: There Goes My BDay

  Chapter 3: Popularity, Here We Come

  Chapter 4: Told Ya

  Chapter 5: WTF, God?!

  Chapter 6: The Other Half

  Chapter 7: The Morning After

  Chapter 8: Back to Hell

  Chapter 9: Everything Changes

  Chapter 10: Anais Martel’s Lets-Ambush-the-Paparrazzi School of Getting into Clubs

  Chapter 11: Internet Mogulettes

  Chapter 12: Blowing Up

  Chapter 13: Entering The Grey Area

  Chapter 14: Rescue Squad

  Chapter 15: My 15 Minutes

  Chapter 16: First Date

  Chapter 17: Winter Formal

  Chapter 18: My Best Friend, the Double Agent

  Chapter 19: Friends or Frenemies?

  Chapter 20: The C-Word

  Chapter 21: A New Day

  Chapter 22: The Sweet Life

  Chapter 23: Certified “GF”

  Chapter 24: Silent Treatment

  Chapter 25: Stockholm Syndrome

  Chapter 26: Breaking News

  Chapter 27: Trouble at the Chateau

  Chapter 28: Holding My Breath

  Chapter 29: No Words

  Chapter 30: Stroke of Desperation

  Chapter 31: Tit for Tat

  Chapter 32: The Hand Off

  Chapter 33: Stella Goes Down

  Chapter 34: Annihilated, Part 2

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Prologue

  ANNIHILATED, PART 1

  It was hard to blink, but I was pretty sure this was not my bedroom or any part of our modest stucco rancher in the Valley. I rubbed my eyes and groaned, feeling the Shu Uemura eyelash extensions—so painstakingly applied the evening before—flake off on my fingers. I shaded my eyes from the hazy morning sun, glanced around at the candy-colored tile and the trippy, midcentury furniture, and a wave of nausea crested in my abdomen. The décor seemed inspired by Peptol Bismol, which only made my stomach hurt more. My hot pink Louboutin floated in the slender swimming pool like some poor soul marooned at sea—the obvious metaphor for my life mocking me, kicking me while I was down. The other one, miraculously, clung to my foot. Yielding a pool stick, I hobbled on one stiletto to fish out the other one.

  I took a closer look around, pinching the drenched ankle strap of my gorgeous, borrowed shoe, careful to hold it an arm’s length from my gorgeous, borrowed dress as droplets shook from its S-shaped silhouette. I was on a rooftop. Cars whizzed below me. The cool, January air was thick with stale beer and cleaning products. There was a bar to my left, an elevator bank up ahead. This was not my house, nor anyone’s house for that matter. It was a nightclub. And, as usual, I hadn’t been here just to party. I’d been here to do a job. Possibly the most important job of my life. A matter of life and death, literally. (And I’m using “literally” in the literal sense here.) I started to panic. My wrists quaked as I rifled through my leather clutch. If I had lost the money on top of everything else, my life would be over. My heart pounded.

  I can’t hold my alcohol. I know that much is true. What I don’t know is how the hell I got here. Not the nightclub, per se, but this whole state of being. I felt like shit. There was dried vomit in my hair. I was hoping it was my dried vomit, but I couldn’t be sure. My boyfriend—well, ex-boyfriend—was not who I thought he was. I was supposed to be in class in Beverly Hills in eighteen minutes, and I couldn’t even remember the last twelve hours clearly. Worst of all, my best friend—well, former best friend—wasn’t here to hold my hair back and tell me everything would be okay. I never imagined I could screw up this badly. I cradled my chlorine-drenched shoe in my arms, let the loneliness and despair wash over me, and cried like a little girl. I guess that’s what I was.

  It didn’t used to be this way. Sometime in November, right around my sixteenth birthday, things started to change.

  1.

  THE SKETCHY-SHADY INVITE

  Vaughn

  “Nice granny panties, asshole.”

  I recognized the high-pitched squeak that was Stella Beldon’s voice as the elastic band of my less-than-sophisticated Jockeys snapped against my lower back. Stella, by the way, is the one and only daughter of world-renowned actor Jack Beldon, though you’d think she was the spawn of Satan. She laughed in my face, which wouldn’t have bothered me much except that she was surrounded by her entire crew, including the distinctly hot Xander Carrington. It was exactly ten weeks ago, back when I was nothing to these people but scum on the scarlet soles of their $1,200 shoes. Back when I had no experience with nightclubs, haute couture, or paparazzi.

  “Hold up, hold up,” Xander objected, raising a hand in protest. Stella shot him daggers for deigning to disagree with her holy word. “She needs the granny panties,” he said, his blue-gray eyes gleaming.

  My heart fluttered. Was it possible Xander Carrington was about to come to my defense? I grinned dreamily at him, hopeful.

  “They’re the only ones big enough to support her schlong,” he retorted, clapping his hands proudly at his own punch line. Everyone laughed. I buried my face in my locker, pretending to ignore them, but, as always, I was dying inside.

  I was one of their regular targets. Another was Anais, my best friend. Sometimes she felt like my only friend. As soon as they had cleared the corner at the end of the hall, I turned to her, forlorn.

  “I told you we should’ve splurged on the Cosabella thongs!” I whined.

  Anais rolled her eyes. “We both know it wouldn’t do us any good.” Anais was the wise one, the sensible one. “And anyway, what’s wrong with granny panties? I happen to like them. They’re comfortable,” she said, shrugging. Sometimes she seemed so unflappable it made me want to scream.

  I collapsed onto my locker, pouting. “Now Xander knows I wear undies fit for pre- puberty,” I lamented. “There are legitimate tweens with sexier panties,” I continued frantically.

  Anais sighed and shut her locker. “We’re late,” she murmured, making her way to the east wing for Pre-Calculus. She didn’t feel my pain.

  “Let me put it to you in movie terms,” I explained, trailing after her. “It’s like Field of Dreams. If you wear Cosabella, they will come!”

  Anais stopped short and narrowed her eyes at me. I inhaled, bracing myself for one of her famous, cutting one-liners, which I think she gets from watching tons of old movies with the Film Society.

  “You’re saying you want a dead sports team to play ball on your crotch?” she snapped.

  * * *

  I was saying I wanted desperately to be part of the in-crowd. But I didn’t exactly fit the bill. For starters, I played the flute. In fact, I was damn good at the flute. So good, Mr. Waters, our grouchy band conductor, would often take me aside after practice, clasp his hands together and just sigh contentedly. (I was his favorite.) To be honest, when I played, and in the few moments after when Mr. Waters’s eyes glistened happily, I felt sublimely confident. Like how I imagine the Shrew Crew must feel all the time. But for me it never lasted long. Because excelling at the flute was the type of thing that impressed grandmothers and college admissions officers—not girls like Stella Beldon. To Stella and all the other socially-blessed students at Cranbrook Academy, I was just a freak in hideous polyester, and my music was just super uncool noise.

  I was also a scholarship kid. One of the few at Cranbrook, along with Anais. Anyone remotely un-evil would be surprised that, in this day and age, people judged us by the
size of our (parents’) bank accounts, but they did indeed. They judged my clothes, which I bought mostly at Urban Outfitters and American Apparel, usually at the beginning of the school year when my parents had some extra money set aside to replace the clothes I’d grown out of. They judged me for wearing the same items over and over again. They judged me for not having my own car, for taking the bus to school, for living in the Valley, for having the wrong shoes and the wrong haircut and the wrong life. It was humiliating and frustrating, because I adore fashion, devouring images from the pages of Vogue and Elle and Harper’s BAZAAR that Anais’s mom sneaks home from the salon where she works. I spend a crapload of time scouring magazines for cheap-o imitations. It also put a huge strain on my relationship with my parents, whom I obviously blamed for not making enough money to give me everything the Shrew Crew had.

  I even went so far as to legally change my name in a lame attempt to deflect the Shrew Crew’s wrath. See, I didn’t always go by Vaughn. My birth name is actually Francis. Sexy, right? According to my Brooklyn-bred, Catholic-Italian mother, it’s a family name, and the name of a saint, which should have magically filled my heart with pride, but was instead the bane of my existence. I guess that meant I was going to hell. But a small part of me suspected that, given the context, God would understand. See, until recently, Stella and company called me Mancis, which I thought had only to do with the coincidental similarity between “Fran” and “man,” so I changed it. I flipped my last name with my first, so I am now Vaughn Francis. Vaughn Francis, the Edgy, the Sexy, the Elusive—as opposed to Francis Vaughn, the Loser.

  Turns out, the “man” in Mancis wasn’t exactly arbitrary.

  * * *

  “I noticed you’re going by Vaughn now,” Odette Abberley cooed in that slick, sickeningly fake television announcer’s tone she had down pat. Odette was Xander Carrington’s girlfriend, second in command in the Shrew Crew after Stella Beldon, and as gorgeous as she was mean. “She doesn’t look like a Vaughn to me,” she remarked, sizing me up. “What do you think, Stella?”

  Stella scanned my lanky frame. “You’re right, it, like, completely does not fit,” she agreed, pacing around me like a lioness in stilettos. The buildup was unsettling. Whatever they were plotting, it couldn’t be worse than Mancis, could it?

  “Vag,” Odette spat to a chorus of giggles. “It’s, like, an ironic name, get it? Since you don’t have one!”

  Sure, I was a tall girl, with one might say freakishly large hands and feet, but I wouldn’t go so far as to describe myself as mannish. My pathologically frugal mother had given me a bowl cut a few years back, but it was growing out. By the beginning of tenth grade, it was more like a salad bowl cut. I had no boobs, no butt, and no curves to speak of. Like anyone else, I wasn’t entirely happy with my appearance, but Stella and Odette’s opinions aside, I didn’t see what was so terrible about it, either.

  It seemed to me that the infrastructure of high school, or at least Cranbrook Academy, allotted very little happiness to its citizens, most of which was bestowed upon the popular kids. They were the only ones allowed to be considered cool, funny or beautiful. The rest of us had to cling to “smart,” or at best, “interesting.” Anais, a self-proclaimed cinephile, would always show me movies meant to lift my spirits, in which the unpopular kids get makeovers and rise above the popular kids only to realize it’s not so great at the top, ultimately accepting who they are and returning to their original status, enlightened. She spoke of a certain dignity in being a subversive outcast among such shallowness and pretension, but as much as I admired her integrity, I would have traded it in an instant to be one of the cool kids. How could I enjoy my enlightenment when practically everyone at school made a show of disliking me? That is, except for Anais.

  Anais was treated just as badly as I was, but I was never quite sure why. I guess to the untrained eye she was a quiet loner whose dark, baggy clothes swallowed her va-va-voom figure. A loner who studied a lot and participated avidly in the Film Society. To me, she was beautiful. She didn’t know it, though. I remember she made me watch Sabrina once, probably to teach me something about karma and the losers ending up on top in the end. I was annoyed at first because it was the old black-and-white version with Audrey Hepburn as opposed to the newer one with Harrison Ford, but it was actually pretty good. Even though Audrey’s a waif brunette and Anais is a voluptuous strawberry blonde, Sabrina reminded me so much of Anais. I always feared that one day someone would realize how attractive she is and pluck her from obscurity. I was terrified she would leave me behind.

  Though we arranged for our lockers to be next to one another, our schedules were totally different. I excelled in math and science, which apparently had to do with my proficiency in music, while Anais was all frontal lobe. She took advanced literature and art history courses, like “Psychoanalysis and the Surrealists” and “Italian Neorealism and World War II.” Needless to say, we spent much of our days apart. We generally had a few bright spots together, like when I read aloud from Perez Hilton in the library while she tried to study, or when we played MASH on the bus on the way home from school, but mostly we just groaned at our lockers before scuttling off to class.

  I clung to her black hoodie like it was the last one in my size in a 75% off bin. She patted me on the shoulder and gently pried my claw from her top.

  “I’ll text you from Statistics,” she assured me. “You’ll be fine. Isn’t Xander in your next class?”

  * * *

  The perfectly manicured Cranbrook Academy, nestled in a botanist’s paradise, framed by a row of haughty palm trees, looked more like a country club than a high school. There were no orange plastic lunch trays or mystery meat. The courtyard cafeteria offered such delicacies as seared scallops wrapped in pancetta, butternut squash gnocchi and, for the health-conscious, organic beet salad. There wasn’t a square foot of linoleum on the premises. The classic mahogany floors set the stage for classrooms outfitted in the Philippe Starck Collection. It was perfect, beautiful, and cold—just like its students.

  To me, the most beautiful, most perfect, and, in some ways, coldest among them was Xander Carrington, who happened to sit in front and slightly to the left of me in Biology, from which point I could gaze at his amazing bone structure. He looked like the miracle love child of Chace Crawford and Robert Pattinson. And he was the reason for every minus on my A-. Odette Abberley leaned forward and whispered seductively in his ear. He closed his eyes nearly completely when he smiled. It was a stoner mannerism, but it was sexy as hell. He bit his lip a little bit and—I was almost positive—glanced at me for a split second before leaning forward and tapping his pen on his desk. It sounded like a horny woodpecker. Mrs. Kensington paced between the rows, lecturing about how chlorine contains carcinogens or something. When she reached Xander, she wordlessly snatched the pen from his beautiful hand, bringing the disruption to a pitiful halt. Xander cowered a little, rubbing his eyes. My heart raced. I know they say love is serious and rare and all that, but I could have sworn I loved him. What was love if it wasn’t the conviction that one little touch could land you in the ER?

  “Hey, uh, Vag—Vaughn.”

  He tapped my shoulder coolly as I scanned over my notes from class. Everyone swished past us to the door as the bell blared. I looked up at him. He was standing over me casually with one hand in his pocket. He kind of swayed a little, like he left his iPod on and couldn’t help grooving to his tunes. From this vantage point, his perfect, water polo-sculpted shoulders looked even broader, his eyes even bluer. I braced myself for impending humiliation.

  “I, uh, just wanted to say, you look…really nice today,” he muttered, his voice groggy, like he had trained it to be deeper, more masculine.

  I looked over his shoulder. Odette and Ava Goldmann, a Shrew Crew associate, were supervising, smiling demonically.

  “What?” I managed, my throat tightening around my windpipe.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  I felt my face burn
up. I stood and collected my things, shoving them one by one into my backpack. Earlier this morning he insinuated I had a penis, and now I look nice? What was the catch?

  “I’m having a party this Saturday,” he mumbled. “You should come. Bring your friend if you want.”

  I stopped, stunned, and looked him in the eye. He instantly looked away. “Anais?” I croaked, gripping the strap of my backpack.

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “Her.”

  I raised my eyebrows. I should have been suspicious of his kindness, but I had wished on so many stars, lucky pennies, and stray eyelashes for that moment. Well, not precisely that moment. I guess in a perfect world, he would have been smiling, maybe even gazing into my eyes instead of avoiding them. Or perhaps he’d take my hand lightly and then release it, embarrassed, concerned he’d gone too far. Regardless, the reality of Xander Carrington extending an invite to me, Vaughn Francis, Vag Mancis, made my kneecaps all gooey. I could have burst into tears. Instead, I just stood there shaking my head numbly until he said something about Facebooking me the details and kind of awkwardly backed away. But by that point I didn’t care. I was invited to my first popular person’s party. And Anais was coming with me.

  2.

  THERE GOES MY BDAY

  Anais

  I don’t know why I always listened to her. She was my best friend, but at a certain point, after a certain number of failures, disappointments, and humiliations, all of which ended with me consoling her—even though it had been her choice to begin with and I essentially wound up as collateral damage—you’d think I’d get my shit together and figure out a way to politely decline. But I never did. Because I’m a doormat. And because Vaughn was my only real friend.

  I have a theory that there can only be one selfish asshole in every relationship. The other person inevitably has to be accommodating. (“Accommodating,” by the way, is my mom’s pageant queen euphemism for “pushover,” a classic selfish asshole characterization.)