“Are you making some kind of point?” Magnolia asks, pouting her glossy lips and toying with one of her pigtails.
“We’re protesting the Dolce rule,” I say.
She blinks her impossibly long, mascaraed lashes at me. “By sitting at your own table?”
I shrug. “It’s a peaceful protest.”
“Oh,” she says, brightening. “Like Martin Luther King.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “We just don’t like the way they’re treating everyone else. And since they did all that to your family…”
“Sitting here would be social suicide,” says her curvy friend with the unfortunate eyeliner. She’s not talking to me, though she’s looking at me. She’s muttering behind Magnolia’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” says the friend with skin issues. “They just got burned by the Dolces in front of the whole school. We can’t sit here.”
“We didn’t get burned,” I say. “We just chose to form our own pack.”
“What’s in it for us?” asks Magnolia, raising her chin and scrunching up her pouty, full lips.
“You’ll inherit the school,” I say. “We’ll be gone by next year. But you’ll still be here. If you stake your claim now, as a freshman, you can just slide into the top spot next year.”
“We’ll already do that,” says the brunette.
“Okay,” Magnolia says to me.
“What?” her two friends cry in unison. It’s almost funny, how shocked they look.
Magnolia gives a sassy little toss of her bouncy pigtails, keeping her eyes locked on us as she carefully sits, not letting herself look around the room for reactions. She juts her chin out defiantly. “You know, I’m not as dumb as everyone thinks.”
“I can see that,” I say.
Colt snorts and shakes head. “You’re fourteen.”
Magnolia narrows her eyes at him and glares. “So?”
“We’re out of here,” says the eyeliner girl. “We can try next year, when all these scary senior boys are gone.” She grabs the other girl, and they scurry away, leaving Magnolia with us. She visibly gulps, and for a second, I think she’s going to change her mind and bolt.
But then she takes a breath and faces me. “Do you have a speech?”
“Why would I give a speech?”
She rolls her eyes. “Well, you can’t just sit at a table and protest without telling people why. No one even knows what you’re doing. I mean, no one remembers the people who sat at the lunch counters. They remember Martin Luther King. You know why?Hehad a speech.”
I wince. “Can you stop using that comparison?”
“Fine,” she says, rolling her eyes like I’m her mom nagging her to do her chores. “But you don’t even have signs. You’re literally just sitting here on a hunger strike for no reason.”
“It’s not a hunger strike.”
“The freshman has a point,” Josie says. “Right now, we just look like scabs crossing the picket line.”
“And no offense, but scabs are gross,” Magnolia says, wrinkling her cute little nose. “So get on that chair and make a speech like MLK. Or… Katniss Everdeen, if you’d rather.”
“What would I even say?” I ask.
They all just look at me, like I have the answers. Before I can come up with something to say to them, let alone the whole school, Gideon Delacroix starts in our direction. I tense, ready for a confrontation, ready to be told how I should be grateful the Dolces pay me any attention, and I should take the scraps they give me, just like he takes whatever girls they’re done with.
He stops at our table and points to an empty chair. “Is this seat taken?”