The Education of Hailey Kendrick - Eileen Cook [51]
I unlocked the door and cracked it open to see what was causing the noise. Kelsie slid inside, looking behind her to make sure no one had seen her. Suddenly my best friend was James Bond.
I stood there in an old pair of Tristan’s boxers and a T-shirt I’d bought on vacation to New York a few years ago. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. Kelsie wasn’t normally an early bird. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen her up at this hour. Last year we had a fire drill for the dorms first thing in the morning, and Kelsie refused to get up for it. When Ms. Estes tried to get her in trouble for not evacuating, Kelsie did research to prove there was such as a thing as a “right to burn.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
Kelsie pulled a stack of magazines out from under her arm. “I bribed one of the maids to pick these up last night at the 7-Eleven. It hit the Web on TMZ.”
“What are you talking about?”
Kelsie thrust the magazines in front of me. On top was In Touch, the cover story something to do with a reality star who had been caught with someone else’s husband. I looked down at it and then over at Kelsie. I was a fan of reality TV as much as the next person, but it didn’t strike me as the kind of thing that was worth waking up at dawn for. I searched my mind to see if the star was someone related to anyone at Evesham. Kelsie grabbed the magazine out of my hand, flipped through it, and handed it back to me.
Spoiled Heiress Breaks Hollywood Hearts—Boarding School Girl Goes Wild! There was a large photo of Tristan, posing in between his parents outside of some premier, then an inset photo of him turning away from the camera. I couldn’t tell when or where the photo had been taken, but it was framed to make it look like Tristan was upset. Knowing Tristan, he could have been joking around, or hungry, or ticked about the Yankees losing, but the photo was captioned: “The brokenhearted heartthrob.” My heart stopped. At the bottom of the page was a grainy photo of me. It was a picture taken at Evesham. I was walking on campus, and my mouth was open in a way that looked like I was sneering. There was also a small inset picture, my photo from last year’s yearbook.
I felt the blood drain out of my face. I sat down quickly on the bed. “Are you kidding me?” I flipped through the pages. I couldn’t focus on the words. They seemed to shimmy and dance across the page. Tristan had been in the tabloid magazines dozens of times because of his parents, but this was my first time. Unless you count a picture that was in People a couple years ago, where I was blending into the background at a party at his parents’ house. Someone more famous had their elbow in front of my face in the shot. You wouldn’t even have known it was me unless someone told you.
“They’re spinning you as a real ball breaker. How you told Tristan you were cheating on him in front of the entire school. They also make the statue thing into some kind of political statement you were making.”
“What sort of political statement am I supposed to be making?”
“It’s not really clear, sort of an anticapitalist thing. Down with the man, blah, blah, blah.” Kelsie plunked down onto my bed. She pulled the magazine back and flipped through it. “The photo of you is a nasty one. You look like a mouth breather.”
“How can they spin me as some sort of rich spoiled heiress on the one hand and an anticapitalist terrorist on the other?”
“Look, these magazines aren’t the New York Times or Newsweek, you know. They aren’t known for their journalistic integrity.” She flipped a few more pages. “Hey, I hadn’t heard this. Did you know