Chapter 37: I Like Being Wrong
The George Residence. Regina's room. After school.
The floor-length mirror in Regina George's bedroom was the kind of mirror that existed specifically to be judged in front of. It was large, well-lit, and positioned at an angle that left nothing to interpretation.
This was intentional.
Karen Smith stood in front of it in a pink t-shirt and shorts, turning slightly, examining herself with the specific dissatisfied attention that the mirror seemed to generate in everyone who stood before it.
"My hips are getting bigger," she announced, not entirely unhappily.
"My calves," Gretchen said, arriving beside her and beginning her own inventory with the practiced efficiency of someone who did this daily.
Regina joined them, studying her reflection with the critical eye of someone who was beautiful and was aware of it and found it somehow still insufficient. "My shoulders," she said. "My dad's shoulders. It takes the whole thing down at least a level." A pause. "And my pores."
She looked at Gretchen.
Gretchen, who had developed a finely tuned antenna for what Regina's looks meant, reached up immediately to touch her hair. "My hairline," she said. "It's uneven on the left side."
Regina nodded.
They both looked at Karen.
Karen had been studying her reflection with genuine effort, but the view from Karen's vantage point — looking downward — was, as a matter of geometry, somewhat obstructed. She tilted her head, tried a different angle, found nothing to work with.
Gretchen caught her eye in the mirror and made a small, urgent face.
Karen looked down at her hand. Extended it. "My nail beds," she said. "They're really short."
Regina regarded this assessment without enthusiasm but without rejection. She shrugged. Technically Karen had the strongest case for complaint and the least grounds for it, which was an irony of the whole exercise that nobody acknowledged out loud.
Then all three phones buzzed simultaneously.
The specific triple-buzz of coordinated arrival.
Regina picked hers up first — she was closest to the nightstand. Read the screen. Made a sound that was not quite a word.
"What?" Gretchen said immediately. Her attention to Regina's micro-expressions was a survival skill she'd honed over two years.
Karen leaned over. "Is it Owen? Is he coming over?"
"No," Regina said.
Karen's face did its small, transparent adjustment.
"Look at your own phones," Regina said, with the measured tone of someone who already knew what they'd find.
Gretchen and Karen picked up their phones.
Karen read hers and produced a sound of genuine delight. "He invited us to audition for Gungnir! Regina, are we—"
"No," Regina said.
"Obviously not," Gretchen agreed, with the speed of someone aligning positions. "We are the Plastics. We don't audition for things. People audition for us."
"But the national competition sounds—"
"Karen." Regina's voice had the patient precision of someone explaining something they'd explained before. "No."
Karen closed her mouth. Then, quietly, to the middle distance: "I just think it would be kind of fun."
Regina looked at her phone. At Gretchen's phone. At Karen's phone. Three identical texts, timed identically, landing in three separate rooms of the social landscape with three different implications.
She thought about Owen Carter, who she understood better than most people gave her credit for.
Owen was not a standard North Shore male. Standard North Shore males were legible — you knew what they wanted, you knew how to manage them, you knew where the edges were. Owen didn't have the right edges in the right places. He was — Regina searched for the word she'd used internally before and found it — atmospheric. Present everywhere, attached nowhere, doing things that made sense three weeks later when you had more information.
She'd made her move on him early. It had been the right instinct — you established the frame before someone else did, that was the first rule — but Owen had received the frame and then simply continued existing outside it, which was not a typical response.
She wasn't angry about it. Not really. She'd catalogued it, filed it, moved on. You didn't waste energy on people you couldn't fully contain. You just watched them and made sure you weren't surprised.
The Gungnir text was not a surprise. The timing — landing in New Directions practice, landing in her bedroom, landing everywhere at once — was calculated and she recognized the calculation.
"He won't get twelve people," Regina said, sitting on the edge of her bed.
"Why not?" Karen asked.
Gretchen opened her mouth, but Regina was already going.
"Because the girls he's thinking of are not choir girls," Regina said. "His whole social ecosystem — the girls he's connected to at this school — they're all people with options. Cheerleaders, girls with actual social standing. And the one example of a girl from that world who joined a choir—" she paused, "—is Quinn Fabray, whose year has been—" another pause, "—a case study in public difficulty."
Gretchen made a sound of involuntary agreement. She'd thought about Quinn's year several times in the context of her own choices and found it clarifying.
"So any girl at North Shore who has something to lose," Regina continued, "is going to look at the choir option and think: Quinn joined a choir, and then everything fell apart very publicly. That's not a causal relationship, but it doesn't have to be causal to be a deterrent."
"That's kind of unfair to Quinn," Karen said.
"It's not about fairness," Regina said. "It's about how people process risk."
Karen was quiet for a moment, holding her phone. Then: "What if the girls he asks don't care about that?"
"What do you mean?"
"Like—" Karen turned her phone over in her hands, "—what if he asks girls who aren't in the same social situation. Who don't have the same things to lose. And what if those girls are actually really good?"
Regina looked at her.
Karen sometimes did this — produced a sentence that was more structurally sound than her general presentation suggested was possible. Regina had learned to take those moments seriously even when they were inconvenient.
"Then it gets more interesting," Regina said, after a pause.
"So you think there's a chance?" Karen said.
"I think Owen Carter doesn't do things that don't have a chance," Regina said. "He's wrong sometimes. But he's not impulsive. There's a difference." She looked at her phone one more time. "He knows we're not going to audition. He sent the texts anyway."
"Why?" Gretchen said.
"Because he wants us to know he thought of us," Regina said. "And now we're talking about him. Which is exactly what he wanted."
She set the phone face-down on the bed.
Gretchen looked at her phone. At Regina's phone. Back at Regina.
"So what do we do?" Gretchen said.
"We watch," Regina said. "And we don't underestimate the thing he's building until we know what it actually is."
Karen looked at her text one more time. Read it carefully, as if it contained more than the words on the screen.
"I think he's going to find the twelve people," she said quietly.
Regina looked at her.
"Just a feeling," Karen said.
Regina studied Karen for a moment — the open face, the clear eyes, the specific quality that Karen had always had of seeing things without the machinery of calculation that everyone else brought to the same information.
"Maybe," Regina said.
Which, from Regina George, was approximately as close to you might be right as the language allowed.
The same evening. Owen's room. The Samson house.
Owen sat at his desk with his notebook open to a page titled simply: Twelve.
Below it, a list. Eight names with checkmarks indicating texts sent. Three names with question marks — possibilities, not yet contacted. One blank line at the bottom.
The responses were coming in. Most were surprised. Several were interested. A few had said yes to the audition outright.
Brittany Pierce had responded in under four minutes with: yes!! when is it!! followed by three exclamation points and an emoji that Owen interpreted as enthusiasm.
Quinn had responded after twenty minutes with: I'll think about it. Which Owen translated as probably yes, needs to process.
Santana had not responded, which Owen translated as furious and interested in equal measure, will respond when she's worked out which one is winning.
He looked at the blank line at the bottom of the list.
The twelfth spot.
He had eleven strong candidates. The twelfth was the one he kept circling back to and setting aside, because the twelfth wasn't a candidate he'd identified yet — it was a quality he was looking for. Something that completed the arrangement in a way he couldn't quite articulate but would recognize when he heard it.
He'd know it when he heard it.
He closed the notebook, opened his physics problem set, and let the choir question sit in the background where his brain could work on it without being forced.
Outside, Chicago was doing its November thing — cold, clear, the lake making itself known at the edges.
He worked until ten.
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