Chapter 115: Regina Knows
Regina had spent the previous evening on her laptop.
The ingredients label from the granola bar, photographed and run through a nutrition database. Then the energy drink Cady had been bringing, its formula cross-referenced against athletic recovery products. Then a thirty-minute search through the relevant nutritional science, because Regina George did not do anything halfway when she was trying to confirm something she already suspected.
By ten o'clock she had her answer.
High-calorie athletic recovery nutrition. Engineered for weight gain in endurance athletes. Not harmful. Not a supplement. Exactly what someone would bring to a person they wanted to gain weight, presented as something else entirely.
She sat with this for a while.
She had been gaining weight since the fourth week of school, eating these things every day, trusting the person who brought them because the person who brought them had seemed trustworthy. Had seemed eager to please. Had seemed, honestly, a little naive about how this school worked.
Regina understood now that she had been reading naivety when she should have been reading patience.
She went to bed.
She slept well, which surprised her, but she thought about it and understood why — the uncertainty had been worse than the answer. Now she had the answer and she knew what to do with it.
She came into the cafeteria at lunch with the specific, focused energy of someone who had made a decision and was executing it.
She saw Cady at the center table.
She saw Mike beside her. Lina at the end. Karen and Gretchen.
She had the energy bars in her jacket pocket — three of them, retrieved from her room that morning as evidence rather than snacks. She had the energy drink, the specific brand, in her bag.
She walked to the table.
Mike saw her coming. He registered her expression and her posture and the specific quality of someone who had arrived with a purpose, and he put his fork down.
"Cady," Regina said.
The table went quiet.
Cady looked at her.
She didn't perform surprise. She didn't manufacture anything. She just looked at Regina with the direct, steady attention of someone who had known this moment was coming and had decided to meet it honestly.
"You've been giving me high-calorie weight gain supplements," Regina said. "For six weeks."
The table was very still.
"Yes," Cady said.
One word. No hedge, no elaboration, no attempt to redirect.
Regina looked at her.
She had been prepared for several versions of this moment — denial, misdirection, the confused performance of someone pretending not to understand. She had not been fully prepared for this version, which was Cady looking at her and saying yes with the specific, settled quality of someone who had decided not to lie about it.
"Why?" Regina said.
Cady thought about this honestly.
"Because I came into this school not knowing how it worked," she said. "And the first thing that happened was you and I read each other wrong, and I made choices I'm not entirely proud of." She held Regina's gaze. "Janis asked me to be inside the Plastics. I agreed. The energy drinks were part of that. I kept bringing them because I told myself it wasn't harmful and it was reversible." She paused. "I'm not going to tell you it was okay. It wasn't."
The cafeteria had the specific, particular quality of a large room in which something real was happening and everyone had noticed.
Regina looked at her.
She looked at the table — at Karen, whose expression had the specific quality of someone who had known and was waiting to see how this landed; at Gretchen, who was looking at her hands; at Mike, who was watching the whole exchange with the quiet, lateral attention he gave things that mattered.
She reached into her jacket and set the three energy bars on the table.
"Janis Ian," Regina said.
"Yes," Cady said.
"She planned this."
"She asked me to do it," Cady said. "I made the choice."
Regina looked at her for a long moment.
Something moved through her expression — the anger was real and present, but underneath it and alongside it was the specific, complicated quality of someone receiving honesty they hadn't expected and didn't quite know what to do with.
"You just admitted it," Regina said.
"Yes," Cady said.
"To my face."
"Yes."
Regina picked up the energy bars and put them back in her pocket.
She looked at Mike.
He looked at her.
She said: "You knew."
It wasn't a question, but he answered it.
"I knew some of it," he said. "Not all of it."
"And you didn't tell me," she said.
"It wasn't my situation to manage," he said. He said it without apology, which was the honest answer. "And I wasn't going to tell you something that wasn't mine to tell."
Regina absorbed this.
She picked up her bag.
She looked at Cady one more time.
"You're still sitting at my table," she said.
"I know," Cady said.
"That's a conversation we need to have," Regina said.
"I know that too," Cady said.
Regina walked out of the cafeteria.
Not a retreat — a departure. There was a specific difference, and everyone watching understood which one it was.
The table sat with the residue of it.
Gretchen looked up from her hands.
"She took it better than I expected," she said, quietly.
"She took the honest version better than she would have taken the caught version," Karen said. She said it with the specific, private knowledge of someone who had been watching Regina operate for two years. "Regina respects people who don't run from her."
Cady looked at her food.
"I need to go talk to Janis," she said.
"After school?" Karen said.
"After school," Cady said.
Mike looked at her across the table.
She looked back.
"You okay?" he said.
"Yes," she said. She said it with the specific quality of something true that also required continued verification. "I think so."
At the edge of the cafeteria, Janis and Damian had been watching.
Janis had come in ten minutes after the center table situation had resolved, gotten her lunch, and found their usual table near the far windows. Damian had arrived thirty seconds later with the specific, alert energy of someone who had read the room walking through it.
"She told her," Damian said.
"Yes," Janis said.
"The whole thing? To her face?"
"Pretty much," Janis said.
Damian looked at the center table, where the lunch conversation had resumed with the careful, adjusted quality of people recalibrating after something significant.
"That's not what I would have predicted," he said.
"No," Janis said.
"Is that a problem?" he said.
Janis thought about it.
"Regina said it's a conversation they need to have," Janis said. "Which means Regina's thinking about terms rather than retaliation." She ate a fry. "Which is actually more dangerous."
Damian looked at her.
"More dangerous than retaliation?" he said.
"Retaliation is reactive," Janis said. "Terms means she's reorganizing around new information." She looked at the center table. "Regina George when she's organizing is a different thing than Regina George when she's angry."
They sat with this.
"Cady handled it well," Damian said.
"She handled it exactly right," Janis said. There was something in the way she said it — not resentment, more the honest acknowledgment of someone watching a person they respected do something they'd done correctly.
"The next conversation," Damian said. "Between Cady and Regina. What does that look like?"
"I don't know," Janis said. "That's the first time in this whole thing I genuinely don't know."
She ate her lunch.
Damian ate his lunch.
Outside the cafeteria window, the September afternoon was doing what September afternoons in Texas did, which was being warm and specific and completely indifferent to the social mathematics happening inside.
After lunch, walking to afternoon classes, Cady came alongside Mike in the hallway.
"She said it's a conversation we need to have," Cady said.
"I heard," Mike said.
"What do you think that means?" she said.
"I think it means she's deciding whether to be your enemy or your acquaintance," Mike said. "And she's going to make that decision based on what you do next."
Cady walked beside him.
"What should I do next?" she said.
"What do you think you should do?" he said.
She was quiet for a few steps.
"Go talk to her," she said. "Directly. Not through intermediaries. Not managed. Just — go have the conversation."
"That sounds right," he said.
"It's going to be uncomfortable," she said.
"Most things worth doing are," he said.
She nodded once.
They reached the junction where their afternoon classes diverged.
"Thursday," she said.
"Thursday," he said.
She went to class.
(End of Chapter 115)
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