Excerpt from Being Nikki
by Meg Cabot
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It would have been obvious to anyone looking at me as I staggered into school Monday morning just before the late bell rang, a cup of tea clutched in one hand and my Marc Jacobs tote full of overdue assignments and my MacAir in the other, that I hadn't had a good weekend. I know I looked particularly heinous. I'd tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep not just because Lulu Collins was hogging my Frette sheets and duvet, but because the guy I'm hopelessly in love with? Yeah, well, he's in love, too.
Only not with McKayla Donofrio, it turns out. He's in love with a dead girl.
Oh, and did I mention that he plans to obliterate the company I work for? Yeah.
Not, of course, that I myself was all that enamored of Stark Enterprises. But I didn't want to destroy it, necessarily. After all, I actually liked a few people who worked there.
Not that Christopher had been kind enough to share with me yesterday the details of what he and his cousin Felix intended to do once they'd gotten the information they need. Why would he tell me? I was just some bubble-headed model.
He hadn't put it that way, of course. But it was clear he didn't think I'd "understand" and that I was "better off not knowing."
Of course, part of that was my own fault for pretending not to understand the simplest things about computers when I'd first "met" him.
But there hadn't been any pretense in my reaction to his statement that he was
going to take down Stark Enterprises. I couldn't help myself. I'd been honestly
horrified. I'd blurted out the first thing that sprang into my mind, and that
was, "But... why?"
Christopher had just smiled in an enigmatic way and said, "I have my reasons."
I hadn't missed the way his gaze had flicked, just for an instant, towards my photo.
Great. Just great! It was perfectly obvious now what was going on. My death, as had the deaths of so many tragic heroines before me, had caused another one...the death of Christopher, only on the inside. His heart had died, and created where fun, joyful Christopher used to be—the Christopher I had loved, the Christopher with whom I'd played so many rounds of Journeyquest, the Christopher whom I'd longed to notice me as not just a gal pal, but as a girl—an evil supervillain.
Why had I been so surprised? It happened all the time in comic books. Christopher was now going to use his powers for evil instead of good in order to avenge my death. What other explanation could there be?
Just to be sure, I'd asked, "Well, is one of the reasons what happened to your friend who died at that Stark Megastore? Because I'm pretty sure that was the fault of the protester who shot that paintball at the plasma screen she was standing under."
Christopher had looked at me without expression and said, "And who was responsible for making sure that plasma screen was secured well enough to the ceiling that an assault from a paintball attack wouldn't cause it to come crashing down?"
"Well, Stark," I'd said. "But—"
"Stark has to be held accountable for what it did."
Oh my God! I couldn't believe how upsetting this was.
But also, in a way, how kind of hot it was. I mean, what girl wouldn't want a guy to go on a wild computer hacking rampage against a majorly environmentally irresponsible corporation, just for her? Especially one that was basically holding her in corporate slavery to it, and which had just the day before almost made her get eaten by sharks.
The only problem was, he wasn't doing it for me. Well, I mean, he was, but he didn't know it. Because he thought Em Watts was dead.
And now more than ever, I couldn't tell him I wasn't. Because it was obvious he'd completely lost it. Who knew what he'd do if he knew the truth? In seconds he might spill it all over the blogosphere, in order to get his "revenge" on Stark.
And where would that leave me? And my parents? In bankruptcy court, that's where. Oh, sure, Stark would go down.
But so would the Watts family.
It was bad enough Christopher had been doing all this crazy virus programming and Stark probably knew it, given that they were bugging his place, and there I was, sitting in his apartment. I just couldn't believe any of it was happening. Christopher, my sweet, funny best friend Christopher, had turned into this dark, cynical crusader for global justice? Since when?
"Do you really think," I'd said, trying to figure out how I was going to handle this, "that this is what your friend—Em, I think you said her name was—would want? I mean, what if you get caught? You could get house arrest, like your cousin. Or worse, actual jail time, if you're tried as an adult."
"I don't care," Christopher had said, shaking his head. "It'd be worth it."
A chill had gone up my spine. It was obvious now that Christopher's transformation was a hundred percent complete. All that was missing was his black cape and a jagged facial scar.
"You'd risk possible incarceration," I'd asked in astonishment, "for a dead girl?"
His next words had rocked my world to its core:
"She was worth it," he'd said, simply.
If I could have picked up a knife and jammed it in Em Watts's heart right then, I would have, too, I hated her so much at that moment. Never mind that Em Watts was me. I couldn't look at her picture a second longer. I'd had to get out. I'd had to get out of Christopher's lair-slash-bedroom. Especially because of the whole still wanting-to-kiss-him thing.
And he so very definitely not wanting to kiss me.
Because he was in love with a dead girl.
From Being Nikki. Copyright © 2010 by Meg Cabot. All rights reserved.
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