Chapter 25: The Burn Book Rules
North Shore High School. The athletic field. Free period.
"The Plastics," Joanna repeated.
"The Plastics," Janis confirmed, with the flat satisfaction of someone delivering a diagnosis.
Damian watched them cross the field. "If North Shore were a magazine, they'd be the cover. Every issue. Forever."
"Some people," Janis said, pulling at a blade of grass, "are genuinely grateful when one of them acknowledges their existence. Like — actively proud of it." She shook her head. "Which tells you everything."
Joanna studied the group with the focused attention she gave to new ecosystems. Three girls, moving with the easy authority of people who had occupied the center of a social space long enough that they'd stopped noticing they were doing it.
"Walk me through them," she said.
Janis pointed. "Far left — Karen Smith. She has been the kindest person in that group since the beginning of recorded time, which unfortunately means she has also been the most consistently taken advantage of." Karen was attempting to catch a football that a boy had thrown her way, missed it cleanly, laughed about it with total sincerity, and tried again. "Last year she sat next to Damian in English and asked him how to spell 'Wednesday.' Not as a joke."
"She seems genuinely sweet," Joanna said.
"She is genuinely sweet," Damian said. "That's the tragedy."
"Middle right — Gretchen Wieners." Janis's voice shifted slightly. "Her dad invented the Toaster Strudel. She knows every piece of gossip in this school, which she stores apparently in her hair." Gretchen was talking with animated precision to Karen, hands moving, hair bouncing. "She's not mean, exactly. She's just — deeply invested in the social architecture and terrified of the person who built it."
"And the one they're orbiting," Joanna said. She'd already identified the center of gravity. "Regina George."
"Regina George," Janis said. The name landed differently — not dramatically, just weighted with history. "Don't let the surface fool you. She's smart. She's strategic. She's been running this school's social calendar since freshman year and she's very, very good at it." A pause. "She's also capable of being genuinely kind, which makes her more dangerous, not less, because you can't discount her entirely."
"What does she want?" Joanna asked. Because that was always the useful question.
"Control," Damian said simply. "Not maliciously. It's just — she needs to be the organizing principle. The thing everything else relates to."
Joanna watched Regina move across the field. She had the physical ease of someone who had always been looked at and had learned to inhabit that attention rather than fight it.
On the field's far edge, Regina's eyes moved briefly across the lawn, found Joanna, paused for exactly one identifiable beat, and moved on.
"She noticed you," Janis said.
"I know."
"That's the starting gun," Damian said. "Now we wait."
Three days later. Lunchtime. The cafeteria.
Owen had a make-up session with Mr. Kowalski during lunch — a scheduling conflict that meant Joanna was navigating the cafeteria independently for the first time.
She'd been doing fine. Janis and Damian had a standing table. The routine was establishing itself.
She was crossing toward it, tray in hand, when Regina George looked up from the Plastics table and smiled.
"Hey. New girl. Come sit with us."
It was said warmly, casually, in the specific register of someone extending a favor. Around the table, Gretchen looked attentive. Karen smiled with genuine openness.
Joanna did the rapid calculation: declining was an active social choice with its own consequences. Accepting was information-gathering.
She sat.
"So — Africa," Regina said, with the warmth of genuine curiosity that was also, Joanna noted, genuine evaluation. "You actually grew up there? Not like, vacation."
"Nairobi, mostly. My parents are academics. My father does public health research."
"That's so interesting." Regina tilted her head. "Were you homeschooled the whole time?"
"My whole life."
"That sounds amazing. So much freedom."
"It was structured," Joanna said. "My mother has a doctorate in education. The curriculum was rigorous."
"Still." Regina smiled. "You got to grow up there. That's incredible."
She said it the way people said things when they were building toward something else, and Joanna clocked it without reacting to it.
"Your bracelet," Regina said, shifting. "Is that handmade?"
Joanna looked at her wrist. "My mother made it. It's a Maasai pattern — she learned it from a researcher at the station."
"I love that." Regina looked left, then right, with the expression of someone about to confer an honor. "Okay, here's the thing. We don't do this for everyone. We'd like you to have lunch with us this week."
"I appreciate that," Joanna said. "Though I usually sit with—"
"Starting tomorrow," Regina said, with the pleasant finality of someone who has already moved on. "We'll see you then."
The next day. Lunchtime.
Joanna had not worn pink. She'd noted the implied expectation and made a deliberate, low-stakes decision not to comply with it, partly to gather information about what happened when you didn't.
Regina noted the absence of pink and said nothing, which was itself information.
The conversation was managed by Gretchen, who approached it with the structured energy of someone covering assigned material.
"The thing about close friendships," Gretchen said, building on a thread Joanna had missed the beginning of, "is that you check in with each other. On everything. Clothes, decisions—" a brief, careful glance at Regina, "—boys." She paused. "Like, if you're interested in someone, you make sure your friends are okay with it first. Because some situations are just — off the table."
Karen was looking at the table. Specifically at her food.
Joanna looked at Gretchen. "That seems like it could produce a lot of situations where people don't say what they actually want."
Gretchen blinked. "It's just — it's how friendship works."
"Is it?"
Regina came back from the food line with cheese fries, set them down, and looked between Gretchen and Joanna with the attentiveness of someone who had heard the tail end of a conversation and was calculating how it had gone.
"So, Joanna." She sat. Ate a fry with the studied casualness of someone who had mentioned they were watching their calories. "You and Owen seem close."
"We've known each other about a week," Joanna said. "Our families are friends."
"He's great," Regina said. The word great carrying a specific cargo. "We were — we had a thing, earlier this year. It was complicated." She arranged her expression into something that communicated fond, slightly melancholy retrospection. "He said I was the most interesting girl he'd ever met."
Joanna said nothing.
Gretchen, reading the pause as a cue, leaned in. "The thing is — there's kind of an unspoken rule. You don't pursue a close friend's ex. It's just—"
"We weren't officially together," Karen said suddenly, quietly. Then she looked at her tray as if surprised by her own voice.
Regina looked at Karen.
Karen ate a small bite of her sandwich.
"It's complicated," Regina repeated, to Joanna, with a smile that didn't acknowledge what Karen had just said. "But the feeling is still there, you know? So it would just be — considerate, of the friendship — to keep some distance."
Joanna looked at Regina with the clear, direct gaze she used when she was thinking carefully.
"I'm not pursuing anyone," Joanna said. "Owen has been helpful during my first week. That's the full extent of it."
"Of course," Regina said warmly. "I know that. I just wanted to — you know. Put it out there. So there's no weirdness later."
She smiled again, and this time it was completely without edge — warm, open, the smile of someone who had said what they came to say and was now entirely comfortable.
It was, Joanna thought, a very good smile. She understood why it worked.
She also understood that the conversation had been structured in advance. Karen's discomfort was real. Gretchen's lines had been rehearsed. Regina's entrance timing had been deliberate.
Joanna picked up her fork.
She thought about what Janis had said on the field: She needs to be the organizing principle. The thing everything else relates to.
And she thought about what Owen had said about mathematics: The elegant path isn't always obvious. But once you see it, it's the only one that makes sense.
She ate her lunch.
Watched Regina's table.
Gathered data.
After school, she found Owen at his bike.
"How was the Kowalski session?" she asked.
"Fine. How was lunch?"
Joanna unlocked her own bike — a secondhand one her father had found on Craigslist the previous weekend. "Informative."
Owen looked at her. "Regina George found you."
"She did."
"And?"
Joanna thought about how to summarize it accurately. "She established a social claim, delivered it through Gretchen with Karen as an uncomfortable witness, and then smiled like none of it had happened." She paused. "It was impressively efficient."
Owen was quiet for a moment. Then: "What did she claim?"
"You," Joanna said simply. "Prior relationship. Current feelings. The expectation that I would therefore keep an appropriate distance."
Owen looked at the middle distance with the expression of a man running several calculations simultaneously.
"For what it's worth," Joanna said, "Karen said — quietly, but clearly — that it wasn't an official relationship."
"Karen's right," Owen said.
Joanna nodded once, filing this. "I told her I wasn't pursuing anyone. Which is accurate."
"It is," Owen agreed.
They started walking their bikes toward the exit.
"Owen," Joanna said after a moment.
"Yeah."
"Is she actually still interested, or is this a territorial thing?"
Owen considered this with what felt like genuine honesty. "Both, probably. With Regina it's hard to fully separate them."
Joanna nodded slowly. "That's what I thought."
They reached the street. The afternoon was cold and direct, the way Chicago afternoons were getting now that October was properly underway.
"For the record," Owen said, "you don't have to navigate this alone. The Regina situation has a logic to it once you understand the full picture."
"I know," Joanna said. "Janis gave me the framework. I'm filling in the details."
She got on her bike.
"Also," she said, looking at him with the clear, level gaze that he was starting to recognize as her default, "you should know that whatever Regina told me, it didn't accomplish what she intended."
"What did she intend?"
Joanna considered. "To make me uncertain. To make the friendship feel contingent." She straightened her handlebars. "It had the opposite effect, actually."
She pushed off and started down the block.
Owen stood at the curb for a moment, watching her go.
Tier One, he thought.
He got on his bike and followed.
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