Page 25 of The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back

Jake could never, ever know the power he had over me. If he knew, he could destroy me.

Chapter 10

I changed my outfit four times. Which is lame given that we wear uniforms to school. I settled on a black, pleated skirt and the red polo shirt. Despite looking at it in the mirror multiple times, it never magically altered itself into something cute and capable of catching a boy's eye.

Okay, Jake Kingston's eye.

When I'd told Ella about the bet, she'd laughed (for like a really long time—it was starting to hurt my feelings) and then told me to have fun with my Jake rides. I halfheartedly invited her to join us, but to my sheer delight, she refused. She said she'd keep getting a ride with Trent.

I didn't know when exactly Jake would show up, which left me plenty of time to freak out about him driving me to school. In his cute red car. While pacing the hallway, I found Ella in the bathroom.

Scrubbing the toilet. (I told you she didn't care about Carlotta's job the way I do.)

"Hey," she said without looking up at me. "We need to work on your campaign today. You're way behind." She was right. Jake already had posters up all over the school. I suspected Mercedes Bentley was probably behind them—because they were a candid picture of a shirtless Jake laughing. Underneath it said, "Jake Kingston…does a student body good." Yes, I drooled, but as a feminist, I was highly offended. Highly.

Fine. I would admit to stealing one of the posters. In my defense, so did practically every other girl in school.

Fortunately, we weren't able to pass out any swag—no pencils, no candy, no buttons, no cookies, no hundred dollar bills. Campaigning bribery had gotten really out of hand, so the school only allowed posters and fliers. It would hopefully even out the playing field just a little. Maybe instead of winning by an avalanche, Jake would have to settle for just a landslide.

"I had an early meeting for the masquerade ball committee this morning and after I finished, I hung up some of those posters we worked on last night. Plus a couple others you haven't seen yet."

Oh my Buddha. "Are they sparkly?"

Ella stopped her scrubbing gave me a withering look. "It's your campaign, not mine. I'm not a total idiot."

"Could you, like, stop doing that for a minute? It's feeling like some sort of weird symbol. Like my campaign's about to go down that toilet."

"Or you're full of crap." She was teasing, but it was a real possibility. I had to be full of something to think I could dethrone Malibu Prep's reigning monarch.

"Anyway, let me know what you think when you get there." She stood up and took off her yellow rubber gloves, dropping them in her cleaning caddy (it's pink and she bedazzled it). She gave me a knowing smirk. "That is, if you're not too distracted by You-Know-Who."

I was still not in a place where I could talk with Ella about Jake, joking or otherwise. "I haven't even officially declared my candidacy yet."

Before she could respond, there was a knock at the door. My heart went into my throat. Trent would never knock. He practically lived at our house. It had to be Jake, and it was so unexpected. I thought he would honk or something. But he was knocking at the front door. Like, an actual gentleman.

It made me love him more.

But I stood there, frozen. I wanted to move. I wanted to answer the door before he got sick of waiting and drove off.

"That's Jake, isn't it?" Ella asked in a distracted tone as she brushed her hair. I couldn't respond. She stopped brushing to look at me in the mirror. "Tilly? Isn't that Jake? Don't you think you should answer the door?"

Answer the door? She might as well have asked me to perform open-heart surgery. The result would have been the same.

"Tilly?"

Still, I just stood there, not able to respond. Deciding to take matters into her own hands, Ella literally pushed me all the way to the front door. We stopped in the front entryway and she went around me to put her hand on the knob.

"Wait," I whispered. "I don't think I can…"

But she wasn't taking any of my excuses. She just smiled at me and said, "Your prince and carriage await, my lady."

Ella threw the door open, standing behind it so Jake wouldn't see her.

"Hey. You ready?"

I think I nodded, because he turned around to go back to his car. I know I didn't talk, because despite having mastered the fine art of speaking at the age of two, I had apparently forgotten everything I knew. Which was entirely stupid given that I had just spent a whole afternoon with him and had talked nonstop. But it was sort of unreal, as if the whole thing had just been some kind of dream and this was the reality. Like at the end ofThe Breakfast Clubwhen Anthony Michael Hall's character tells Molly Ringwald that it was okay if she ignored him at school despite their day of bonding in detention and she said she didn't ignore friends but you know that it was a total lie and that on Monday most of those people never spoke to one another again. Seeing him was like that—we'd had this bonding-type afternoon and now it was weird.

Jake got in the driver's side and closed his door. Somehow I had managed to follow him and now stood on the opposite side of the car. I could do this. I would just pretend that everything was fine, and soon it would be. Fake it 'til you make it, right?

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