The Bling Queen Read online

  For Sara Bender and Bridget Highet, who prove that the only accessories you need in middle school are your best friends

  Chapter 1

  Let me tell you the problem with a glitter belt—it’s the glitter.

  I learned my lesson with glitter belts last year, but Deirdre, not so much. Which is why, one by one, piece by piece, I am picking teeny specks of glitter out of Deirdre’s thick strands of red hair. Her hair is so long that its tips sway against the edge of her belt, capturing glitter like wisps of dandelion in a windstorm.

  That’s kind of poetic, actually—“wisps of dandelion in a windstorm.” If I were writing in my language arts journal right now like I’m supposed to be doing, instead of systematically pulling glitter off Deirdre’s head, I might jot that down.

  “Ow!” Deirdre whisper-yells from her seat in front of me. “Do you have to pull so hard?”

  “I think you meant to say ‘thank you,’ ” I whisper back to her. “I warned you not to wear that belt again.” She leans back in her seat and shakes her hair over my desk, two flakes of glitter depositing themselves on my notebook. I tap the back of her head with the tip of my green gel pen—my Thursday color, since it’s my second-favorite—like a stick on a snare drum. Tap tappity tap, tappity tap, tappity tap—

  WHOOSH. Deirdre whirls around in her seat, her glittery hair flying around her, undoubtedly spraying the rest of the room. She and I face off silently, the tiny crinkles at the edges of her eyes matching the ones on the sides of my lips. We call this “glirking”—a glaring smirk. When you’re annoyed but also entertained, want to smack the other person but also want to laugh out loud, you glirk.

  Deirdre and I glirk at each other quietly until she tries to swipe my pen out of my hand, and I am forced to throw my arm up into the air to escape her reach, accidentally tossing my pen onto the floor as I do. Deirdre covers her mouth with her hand, shoulders shaking as she tries not to laugh out loud, while I get up to retrieve the pen.

  “Girls,” Ms. Castleby calls from her desk, dragging out the word with a lilt in her voice, so that I can tell she’s not actually angry with us.

  I take my seat as Deirdre turns to face the front of the room, and then I look over to Bree’s desk. She shakes her head, laughing with no sound.

  “The belt,” I mouth to her, pointing to Deirdre’s waist. “I told her.”

  “I know,” Bree mouths back just as the bell rings.

  “That’s all for today, people.” Ms. Castleby walks to the front of the room as we gather our things. She barely looks much older than us, though she’s been teaching at Twining Ridge Middle School since at least last year. I know because I remember seeing her in the hallways—or more specifically, I remember seeing her outfits. Ninety-nine percent of her ensemble will be normal, and then—bam!—there’s always one piece that catches your eye. Today it’s a scarf that she has tied around the front of her hair like a headband. The scarf is white with tiny yellow stars sprinkled across it, which match her hair perfectly.

  I love everything about it.

  “Remember, tomorrow I’m collecting your journals to read and to grade, so if all of your entries aren’t complete, I suggest you finish them up tonight.” The rest of the class lets out a collective moan, but I don’t join them. I kind of like the journal. Ms. Castleby gives us a topic to write about each day, in case we’re out of ideas, but she’s also okay if we do our own thing. So all of my entries are about clothes, or shoes, or jewelry, or bags, or hair accessories. I almost never write in my journal in class, like we’re supposed to. Instead I do all of the work at home, so I can make each entry perfect.

  This is the first time Ms. Castleby is collecting our journals for a grade. And even though I don’t usually care about my grades as much as I should (or at least, as much as my parents think I should), I really hope she gives me a high mark. Not even because I want to prove my parents’ “You need to focus more on school and less on fashion, Tess” decree wrong, but because this journal is actually fun for me.

  But of course, if Ms. Castleby likes my journal as much as I do, well, that certainly wouldn’t hurt, especially if it resulted in an A+. That way I could show it to my parents and say, “See? Writing about fashion isn’t only one way to get good grades. It’s the best way to get good grades!” This is an especially important point to prove to them right now, since in a few weeks, an antique-jewelry exhibition is coming to a museum near us, and Mom and Dad said we can’t go unless I start becoming more “conscientious.” That’s their word of the year, it seems—“conscientious.” And specifically how I am not conscientious.

  “Also, I’ll be assigning your business plan projects tomorrow,” Ms. Castleby continues as our class begins to file out of her room. I wait for Deirdre to finish untying (yes, untying) her sneakers before I trail her to the classroom door.

  “Deirdre, aren’t you going to trip like that?” Ms. Castleby asks.

  “I tuck the laces into the sides of my unitard—see?” Deirdre explains. “The shoes are more comfortable that way.” Deirdre pulls back the side of her sneaker, revealing the hooks of her stirrup pants hidden underneath. I know she needs her unitard for gymnastics practice later, but it still seems silly for her to insist on wearing it under her clothes all day. I roll my eyes at Ms. Castleby behind Deirdre’s back, and she smiles knowingly.

  “Move it along, whackadoo,” I say, nudging Deirdre toward the door. “Bree, are you coming?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bree answers, cradling her flute case in her arms like it’s a newborn.

  “You know, you could leave that in your locker,” I point out. “It’s not like you play the tuba and it won’t fit.” We all wave to Ms. Castleby as we walk out the door, merging into the hall traffic.

  “I’m a method musician,” Bree answers loudly over the din of the hallway.

  “What does that even mean?” Deirdre calls over her shoulder.

  “It’s like method actors—how they stay in character the whole time they’re shooting a movie or whatever. Something like that,” Bree explains.

  “So you’re becoming one with your flute?” I ask.

  “There are only a few days left before the audition for first chair. And you know they don’t usually give it to seventh graders. If I’m going to stand a chance, I need to come up with a new technique. This is it,” Bree says, lifting the end of her case into the air. Deirdre, Bree, and I all joined our elementary school band in fourth grade, but Deirdre and I were never serious about it like Bree was. We also were never very good. Which may have something to do with why the two of us quit band when we came to middle school last year.

  I twist my Tess necklace around my index finger as we make our way toward our lockers. My parents gave me the necklace for my twelfth birthday, and it’s pretty much my favorite accessory ever. Which is really saying something, because I do love accessories.

  I hang on to the end of Bree’s flute case as she shifts herself over to the side of the hallway where our lockers are, pulling Deirdre and me behind her like an off-the-rails train. I feel the bump of a foot under the sole of my shoe as Bree drags us through the crowd.

  “Oops, sorry!” I call out to whoever I just squashed, looking around for the victim.

  “Watch where your hooves are landing, Maven,” I hear in response. Kate.

  Sorry—Kayte. She added the y this year. As if that would make her more interesting.

  “She said ‘sorry,’ Reynolds,” Deirdre defends me.

  “I really don’t think I stepped on you that hard,” I say. “But sorry if I did.” I try to keep the peace with Kate—I mean, KAYTE—Reynolds more than Deirdre does. To me, she’s not worth the aggravation. She always seems to want to argue, so why give her the satisfacti
on?

  “Again with that necklace?” Kayte juts her chin out toward the chain around my neck. “You’ve worn that—what—three weeks in a row now? Someone’s stuck in a rut.”

  “It’s a classic,” I explain.

  “It went out in, like, 1997,” Kayte says.

  “I love it,” I say, and shrug, trying not to let Kayte’s criticism bother me. Kayte thinks of herself as being the top fashion plate of Twining Ridge Middle School. And sometimes even I have to admit that the outfits she puts together are pretty cool. Even if they’re ugly, they’re usually weird enough to catch your eye. Today, for instance, Kayte is wearing leggings that look like crocodile skin, and her legs are so long and wiry that they seem to go on forever. She’s paired them with a loose-fitting white sweater on top, and it sweeps off her shoulder on one side, revealing a neon-pink tank top underneath. The tank top matches her shoes, which are simple ballet flats, only they’re the color of a Barbie doll’s nail polish. I would never, ever wear this getup, but it certainly makes Kayte stand out in the hallway.

  Now, of course there is one huge problem with Kayte’s ensemble, and that is that she isn’t wearing a single accessory. Not even a stud earring, because—horror of horrors—Kayte’s ears aren’t pierced. And no outfit is complete without an accessory . . . or two or three or seventeen. At least that’s what I say.

  “You’re blocking my locker.” Bree’s voice drifts back into my ear, and I snap out of my Kayte Reynolds wardrobe study.

  “Sorry.” I move to the side and begin twisting my own combination. Bree’s, Deirdre’s, and my lockers are all in the same wall block. By alphabetical fortune, Bree Laurence, Tess Maven, and Deirdre Noir almost always end up in the same homeroom.

  And even more thankfully, Kayte Reynolds rarely does.

  “Someone needs to push her off her high horse,” Deirdre calls above the rapidly quieting hallway noise. If we don’t speed it up, we’re definitely going to be late for Pre-Algebra, and Mr. Dimmer never lets us off the hook like Ms. Castleby does. There’s a reason we refer to him as the Dimmer Switch, after all. A sense of humor isn’t really his strong suit.

  “Just ignore Kayte,” I say to Deirdre. “You only encourage her.”

  “Well, did you see how she was looking at my belt?” Deirdre asks. “It was as if I had a live rat tied around my waist.”

  “I did warn you about that belt,” I say, slamming my locker shut and hurrying toward Mr. Dimmer’s classroom. “Hurry up, or he’s going to lock us out again.”

  “Brownnoser,” Deirdre teases, but she walks in directly behind me, Bree and her flute following us. I slow down my pace as I reach my desk, because on the first day of school, Mr. Dimmer gave me the worst seating assignment of all of my classes—directly next to none other than the self-proclaimed fashion plate herself, Kayte Reynolds.

  Chapter 2

  I slide into my chair and glance over at Kayte, whose phone is so close to her face that it’s making her look cross-eyed.

  “What’s so interesting there?” I ask.

  “I don’t recall addressing you,” Kayte answers rudely, still not glancing up from her phone. I roll my eyes as far up as they will go, looking across the room to see if I can catch Deirdre’s or Bree’s glance. But Dimmer Switch assigned those lucky ducks seats next to each other, so they’re already deep in conversation, leaving me to my own torture. The bell rings, and Mr. Dimmer pulls his classroom door closed with a slam, and locks it from the inside. If you’re late to his class, he knows it, and he makes you suffer. No creeping in quietly with the sound of the bell around here. No, Dimmer leaves you out in the hallway to flounder for a full thirty seconds, which seems much longer when you’re stuck in a silent corridor. And then, after he finally lets you in, he gives you extra homework. Not simple homework either—challenging word problems that will make your head spin.

  I’ve only been locked out of Dimmer Switch’s classroom once, and I’ve vowed to never let it happen again. Though, between Deirdre and Bree, they seem determined to help me break this streak every day.

  Kayte places her phone on her desk while she roots around in her bag for a pencil—no pens allowed in Dimmer’s class—and the screen is still open to what she was looking at. I recognize the logo across the top of the website instantly—Miscellaneous Moxie, my very favorite daily fashion blog. I read it religiously. Like some people read the Bible or celebrity magazines or the classics, I read Miscellaneous Moxie’s daily musings on current fashion. Especially because, just like me, MM (which is what all of the fans call the site for short) is obsessed with accessories. That’s what they write about the most, and they label each accessory-based post “TheBlingZone.”

  MM is where I heard about the antique-jewelry exhibition. The jewels have been circling the country for months, popping up in various cities for a few weeks at a time. The second I saw the advertisement for our local museum, I begged Mom to take me, which I realize now was a bad move. I should have pretended I wasn’t that interested, because as soon as Mom figures out I really want something, she holds it over my head in the name of making me “more conscientious.”

  You would think by now that I would have caught onto this pattern and played it cool about the museum show, but sometimes my excitement about accessories overtakes me and I just can’t help myself.

  I don’t usually read MM until after school—it’s my reward for getting through the day—but with it right there, directly in front of me, I feel my eyes being drawn closer and closer to Kayte’s screen. I’m stretching my vision to see what their post of the day is focused on, just a quick glance at—

  Kayte’s hand—her ringless hand, I might add—slaps down on top of her phone, covering the screen and turning it off in one swift motion, before depositing it into her bag. I run my hand through the front of my hair and let it fall to my right so that Kayte can’t see my face. A strand flutters across my eyelashes, and I pick at the area blindly until I remove it, then I hold the hair out in front of me to examine. Even on its own, the strand stays in a soft wave, not straight but not exactly curly either, not blond but not exactly brunette. Mom won’t let me get my hair dyed yet—not until my freshmen year of high school, she says—but the second I hit eighth-grade graduation, that is my first goal.

  I flip my hair back to the other side of my face as Dimmer drones on at the front of the room about percentages. I wonder if Kayte dyes her hair. It’s so blond that I would think she’d have to, but at the same time she’s always had that hair color—so yellow that from a distance it’s almost white. Similarly, Deirdre has always had her thick red lion’s mane, Bree her stick-straight curtain of black. My hair needs a color. At this point I would settle for almost any color. Even the Barbie doll pink of Kayte’s shoes.

  “Miss Maven, are you with us back there?” Dimmer Switch’s deep voice booms across our classroom, striking me out of my hair salon daydreams.

  “Absolutely!” I call back, smiling widely at Dimmer, which seems to appease him. He pulls at his sports jacket by the collar, tightening it across his shoulders. Almost all of Dimmer’s jackets have oval pads covering the elbow parts of the arms. Deirdre and Bree make fun of this mercilessly, but I kind of love them. They give his jackets, and therefore Mr. Dimmer himself, more personality than they would have otherwise. I wonder why girls’ blazers never come with elbow patches. Or if they do, I’ve never seen them. Maybe I could start creating some of my own patches. My cousin Ava is a wizard with a sewing machine. I’m sure she could help me accomplish my elbow pad vision.

  Although then, of course, Deirdre and Bree would start calling me Mini-Dimmer, or Dimmerer Switch, or Dimmer Switch II. But they just don’t understand creative fashion choices like I do.

  “Tess Maven!” Mr. Dimmer’s voice startles me again, and I sit up straight in my seat with my hands folded on top of my desk.

  “Yes?” I ask sweetly.

  “Would you care to come complete this problem today, or do we have to wait until the Fou
rth of July?” he asks.

  “Sorry,” I say, hurrying up from my desk. “Wait, you want me to come up there, right?” I hear Kayte snicker. I really need to start paying more attention in this class.

  “If you’d be so kind,” Mr. Dimmer says, staring at me. I walk slowly to the board, examining the problem my whole way up. I look down at my fingers, longing for the days when they were useful enough math tools, before these x’s and y’s started ruining all the fun. It’s only then that I notice it—the missing ring.

  My infinity ring, the one I wear on my right pinkie finger. I just bought it two weeks ago, and it was a little loose, and Mom kept telling me not to wear it on my pinkie, but I insisted and—

  “Oh no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” I hear myself speaking, and feel my feet grind to a halt in the middle of the aisle, only halfway to the board.

  “I— I think I— I need to—” I stammer, and I see Deirdre and Bree looking at me with concern from across the room. “Will you excuse me? Please, Mr. Dimmer. It’s an emergency.”

  I start walking toward the door before he can answer, and his flustered “Very well, then” response makes me think that I must look like I’m going to be sick. I jog through the empty hallways all the way to the nurse’s office. Not because I’m about to throw up, but because that’s where the Lost and Found is located. I barge through the door and rush to the corner where the bins are kept, bypassing Mrs. Latara’s questioning look.

  “I just— I need to— I lost something,” I explain without stopping. “Has anyone turned in a ring?”

  “I don’t police the Lost and Found, dear,” Mrs. Latara answers curtly, and I hope I never have to go to her with a real medical problem, because she doesn’t seem all that helpful. I dig through the bins one by one, quickly and then more carefully. Nothing. Even when my ring isn’t in the box with the other lost jewelry, I look through every other container, just in case it got mixed up with something else.