Paige sat back, and watched her former sister walk across the school's courtyard. Zoe's heavy black boots clomped against the tile as her dangling cross earrings swung back and forth like pendulums. She was smiling a confident smile like she had just won the lottery.
It made Paige sick.
When she was Jon, Zoe's lifestyle didn't really bother him much - her black outfits and mood swings stressed his mother out, but he accepted her for how she was. Now, she couldn't even look at Zoe Gibson without feeling pangs of repulsion. And she was smiling! How gross. Smiling freaks were disgusting. Unless, Paige giggled at the thought, Zoe was just imagining what it would be like to be her. Everyone else in the school was obsessed with her, it only made sense that Zoe would be too. Give her a cute blonde pixie-cut, trade out the corset for a short mini-party dress and get her in a push-up bra and Zoe might actually pass for cute. The key word was might. No one had ever tried pulling off a freak-conversion before, and frankly, no one ever wanted to. But the concept of bringing Zoe to the pink team intrigued her. It was kind of ironic, actually. She resisted Sarah so much and couldn't understand why she wanted to make Jon a permanent Paige, but now she was thinking of doing the same to another Gibson. She knew exactly why the thought crossed her mind. It was power over other people. Sarah craved it, and now, Paige smiled, she wanted to have more of it too.
"So I told him, like, whatever, I don't speak uh, Mexican " Karyn's joke caused the table to erupt in laughter and brought Paige out of her daydream. She laughed, too - Karyn was such a ditz, and since getting the job at Hooters, had been making them all laugh with her stories of customers trying to order more than wings from her. As she straightened the seams on her tight pastel skirt, and looked back at the posse of cheerleaders, Paige couldn't help shake the feeling that something about Zoe's smile unnerved her. Like it was more than a normal day. But what could it have been?
