His family was nobody special either-his dad was a doctor or something. Trey was good for comic relief, but not too gifted in the looks department. I thought about voting for Trey, just to be nice. You shouldn’t be allowed to live, Trey said. Someone’s camera phone snapped at just that moment, like an exclamation point. You’ve got this stupid grin on your face like you already won, and now you’re giving the paparazzi a chance to snap your picture.Īnd that’s wrong? I grinned wider, to bug him, and gave a little wave like people in parades. Someone else might have looked down, trying to act all shy and modest, like they were ashamed of having their name there-but it doesn’t make sense to deny the obvious. I watched the ones who were filling out their ballots glancing over at me. It wasn’t like anything the sub said was going to be on an exam, so we were trying to figure out how to make reading the ballot and scratching in our choices take the entire fifty-minute period. The sub was a new one who might still have been under the mistaken impression that because Tuttle was the type of school that had a salad bar in the cafeteria and offered courses in Mandarin Chinese-i.e., a school where the serious money people in New York sent their kids-we weren’t going to bust on him like public school dregs. No one could compete with my looks and my dad’s cash. Not only was my name, Kyle Kingsbury, there for ninth-grade prince, but I was the sure winner. When I turned Trey’s way, the girl next to him-Anna, or maybe Hannah-looked down. The substitute teacher was giving out ballots for spring dance court, something I’d normally have thought was lame.

It was the last month before the end of ninth grade. When you’re special, like we were, people were bound to notice. One thing my dad taught me early and often was to act like nothing moved me.

I could feel everyone looking at me, but I was used to it.

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