Expelled
Author: Emmy Laybourne
Date: 2015-05-05 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Short Stories; Novella; Fiction; Teen
Description: "She has lost sixty pounds in just over six weeks! With no side effects."Li Jing knows that her research, the weight-loss compound she's developed, will change millions and millions of lives. Any risk is worth it to succeed. Unfortunately, the school board doesn't agree, and Li Jing has been expelled with a permanent black mark on her record that will keep her from ever getting a PhD... Apparently conducting unauthorized trials on human subjects is frowned upon-no matter how willing the subject was or how well the compound worked. Author Emmy Laybourne shares the chilling story behind the mira
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Begin Reading

Teaser

Copyright

There she was. Sitting at her desk, one skinny leg crossed over the other, expensive jeans tucked into scuffed knee-high boots. A ratty Indian tunic, supposed to make her seem earthy somehow. Texting some boy on her phone. Li Jing could catch the side of her face and see her mouth was twisted in a clever smile. They all took such pains to be clever, the English majors.

Li Jing SLAMMED the door and Penny jumped, her feet coming down square.

“Jesus, what’s your problem?”

“You told!”

There was a brief hitch in her roommate’s expression of remote distain—a second of fluster. Penny noticed the loaded file box in Li Jing’s arms. Her research.

“Why did you tell?!” Li Jing yelled. She stomped into the room and set the box down by the window.

“I didn’t!” Penny answered. Then a pause, as she set down her phone, “And anyway, if I had, that was my right. Carolann showing up here all the time. In the middle of the night? It was creepy!”

“They expelled me!”

Li Jing should never, never have told Penny about her research.

It was in a moment of stupid pride, back in the second month of the school year when they were both trying to make the best of their mandatory freshmen roommate assignment.

Penny had won an award in poetry and was boasting about it. An award in poetry!

Li Jing must have rolled her eyes, because Penny had said, “You know, Li Jing, poetry does just as much for people as medicine.”

Li Jing couldn’t help herself. “The compound I am working on,” she had boasted, “will change millions and millions of lives.”

And when Penny had snorted in disbelief, Li Jing had told Penny everything. About the natural sweetness of the compound. About the obese mice that were losing weight with no organ damage, no loss of appetite, and no brain damage or dehydration or muscle loss or any other negative symptoms usually associated with rapid weight loss. About the fact that her thesis advisor, the pinched-face Professor Hewitt, who never got excited about anything, had told her to keep her project very, very secret. Penny had flounced out of the room, saying that Li Jing just didn’t get it.

That was the end of the friendly time. Li Jing spent most of her time in the lab, anyway. She didn’t need to have friends over. She didn’t need a place to sit and daydream and make doodles of flowers and cubes while “waiting for the words to come”. Li Jing returned to the room only to sleep—and Penny often slept elsewhere with one boyfriend or another.

It had been an uneasy truce, but they had almost made it to the end of the year. Then Carolann had started showing up at the door. Li Jing’s test subject, Carolann.

“Well, I’m sorry, Li Jing.” Penny always over-pronounced the J and G, making it sound like the first syllable of the word “jingle.” “But I don’t care how genius your research is, you can’t test some drug you are making up on an actual human being!”

“She was desperate for it. She was happy to have it.”

“People are desperate for crack cocaine, but we don’t go selling it to them!” Penny had returned to her texting. Li Jing wanted to smack the phone out of her hands.

“She has lost sixty pounds in just over six weeks! With no side effects.”

Penny stopped, her mouth open.

“You’ve been giving her that stuff for six weeks?! How … how big was she before?”

Carolann was a morbidly obese, middle-aged manicurist from the strip mall a few blocks off campus. Li Jing had been stocking up on ramen at the convenience store when she had seen Carolann for the first time. Carolann had bought an Arizona iced tea and a pack of strawberry Zingers. She had thinning hair, wore too much makeup, and was obviously a townie. Li Jing’s first thought was that she’d make a perfect test subject.

So she had followed Carolann out of the store and watched her go into Supreme Nails.

Li Jing had never had a manicure in her life, but she went right in. Eight dollars, plus two for a tip, but whatever. Carolann had tutted over Li Jing’s short, brittle fingernails and her cracked fingertips.

“I wear latex gloves almost every day,” Li Jing had explained. “For my work in the lab.”

Carolann had expressed only a mild, polite interest, but it was a start. For three weeks after, Li Jing had gone to get her nails done. She’d learned that Carolann lived alone and watched a lot of TV. She didn’t seem to have many friends. And when Li Jing started talking about the compound, and the effects she was seeing in the lab, Carolann got very, very interested.

Li Jing had started her on twenty-five milligrams three times a day, but Carolann had taken it upon herself to increase the dosage, which meant that her weight loss accelerated and she kept running out of the packets of the compound, then coming around, asking for more.

Penny hadn’t liked that. Not one bit. She hadn’t liked people seeing a fat, working-class loser showing up at the door of their dorm room.

Li Jing fished out the dusty suitcase from under her bed and started emptying dresser drawers into it.

“I can’t believe you were testing something you made up in a lab on a real, actual person. I mean, there have to be laws against it, Li Jing. Really, you brought this on yourself.”

Penny was eying Li Jing’s dresser thoughtfully. Li Jing could almost see her planning how to redecorate the room. The school would doubtlessly let her play out the last month of the semester with no roommate.

Penny would migrate her pretentious poetry slam posters and her art prints over to the blank walls on Li Jing’s side of the room. She would take the two twin beds on iron bed stands and push them together into a double. She’d have boys over. Meanwhile, Li Jing’s life was ruined.

“No one will take me for a PhD now,” Li Jing said. “Because you tattled on me, my career is through. I want you to know this.”

“You don’t know that I was the one who told!”

Li Jing had insisted that Carolann not come on campus. She’d explained that what they were doing was against the rules and they could get in trouble, but when Carolann began to drop weight, she kept wanting to talk to Li Jing about it. To show off. She went from 251 pounds to 240 within two weeks. Then she showed up, knocking at the door, maybe a week later at 227. Then she came to the dining hall looking for Li Jing at around 191 pounds, her clothes hanging off her, along with folds of loose skin.

Penny had obviously put it together.

“Yes. You did it. You’re the only one who knew.” Li Jing glared at her as she threw the few clothes she had hanging in the closet into the suitcase and zipped it shut.

“Oh, God! Okay, I did it! I told Professor Stead, okay? Carolann was scary. I was worried she might attack me!”

“You’re a liar! And a coward! Don’t you know…”

“Don’t I know what?”

Li Jing’s fists were in balls. “Don’t you know that if you’re going to do anything … anything great or important or new, that you have to take risks?!”

Penny stood. She tossed her mass of fluffy, wavy hair over her shoulder. “Risks? You could be killing that woman. Maybe you need to be a little more concerned with people than you are with achieving great things, Li Jing. Maybe that’s what you need to learn from this.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go write a poem about it,” Li Jing muttered.

“Maybe I will!”

Then there was a sound at the door and Li Jing’s father walked in.

Li Jing saw his grim expression, his silent rage, and tears sprang to her eyes. She felt herself trembling. For a second, she thought about the glass in the window. She thought about breaking it and jumping out. But they were two floors up. That was stupid.

Chang Wu had brought empty boxes. He was a liquor deliveryman and always had them in the back of his van. He always had liquor in the van too, and now there was liquor on his breath.

Penny stood there awkwardly, eyes darting between the father in the door and Li Jing, near the window.

“I’ll give you guys some room,” Penny said politically. “I guess I’ll … see you around.”

Penny pocketed her cell phone, grabbed her purse, and slipped out. The door closed behind her.

“Father,” Li Jing said in Chinese. “It was a misunderstanding. I will be able to get into another program, I promise.”

He stepped to her and grabbed her arm. He dug his nails into the soft skin of her upper arm. Li Jing cried out.

“Too proud!” he said in Chinese. He turned his head and spat on the floor. “Too much ambition! You’ve always thought you were so much better than everyone else and look where it gets you: expelled!”

His nails were cutting into the skin of her arm. He was shaking with anger and lifting her up. Her body hung at an angle, all her weight borne by her shoulder joint, which seared with pain.

“Pa! Please!” Li Jing cried.

“After what I did to get you here! How hard I work! Expelled!” He threw her down onto her bed and her head cracked against the wall.

Her vision swam with stripes and blotches of light. The pain hit her a moment later.

“I can get into another school,” she said. “My research is working. I’ve discovered what might be a cure for—”

“I am glad your mother died when you were born! She would be so ashamed. She would curse your name!”

Her father threw the first box at her. Then the second. Li Jing brought up her hands to shield her face.

“You pack, Disgrace,” he said, as if this was her new name. He picked up the suitcase she had already packed. “I will wait in the parking lot.”

Li Jing lay there, crying for a few minutes. Her forearm was swelling. Crescent-shaped welts marked the red, bruising flesh of her arm. Two were seeping blood.

She set one of the boxes upright, trying to push out the dent in the corner from where it had hit her.

She started to put into it the miscellanea from her top desk drawer. There were dorm notices, calendars, pencils, a broken eraser in the form of a gorilla she’d been given at a Secret Santa gift exchange. A bottle of nail strengthener she’d bought from Carolann back when she had been researching her as a possible subject. Some sticky coins and just a bunch of trash. She didn’t need any of it. She closed the drawer. Let Penny throw it all out.

There was the hot water kettle, used for tea and ramen. Li Jing couldn’t afford the meal plan—didn’t want to pay so much for it. It was another thing Penny had hated about her. Let Penny throw them out.

Gingerly, Li Jing shouldered her backpack, which contained her cell phone, wallet, computer, and power cord. The weight of the backpack pulling down on her shoulder made her vision swim. Then she picked up the only other thing in the room that mattered to her, the box containing her research.

The evening was mild, the campus as beautiful as a fairy tale. In front of the Stonehouse dormitory were three blooming cherry trees, their petals just beginning to drop in the warm, April breeze. Li Jing had never felt like she belonged at Clayton University. Now, it was official.

She trudged around the building, toward the parking lot in back.

“Hey!” she heard behind her. “HEY! LI JING!”

She didn’t need to turn to know who it was.

She heard footsteps, flip-flop footsteps, and a sweaty palm was on her arm.

Li Jing turned, “I can’t talk right now.”

“I’m at 181! One hundred and eighty-one pounds!” Carolann crowed. “I’ve lost almost seventy-five pounds, Li Jing! My mother said she’s worried about me, I’m so thin! Ha!”

Her eyes were bright, but her skin looked a bit sallow. She wore tight jeans and a sleeveless, green button-down shirt. Loose, crepe-like skin hung off her arms and her neck.

“That’s great,” Li Jing mumbled. “I’m sorry, but my dad’s waiting for me.”

“But I’m out,” Carolann said. “I need more.”

“Well, the experiment is over. I’m sorry, but it has to be.”

The smile fell off Carolann’s face. She drew closer. “You CAN’T!!!” she shouted, right in Li Jing’s face.

Li Jing was hit by a wave of stench. Carolann’s breath—it was dank and sick-smelling. If this was a side effect, it might be a problem. She wouldn’t be able to study it now, though, thanks to Penny Lindstrom.

Li Jing’s head was starting to pound from where it had hit the wall. She needed an Advil. She cursed herself inwardly—she’d left a bottle of it in the room.

“If you just give me, like, five or ten more doses, I’ll be okay.”

“They kicked me out of school,” Li Jing said. “Because of what I gave you. So just be happy with what you got. A seventy-five-pound weight loss, all for free!”

Several students passed by coming from the parking lot. A thin, blond man and a leggy brunette clutching books to her chest. They looked at Li Jing and Carolann and exchanged a snarky glance.

“You can’t just cut me off like that,” Carolann hissed. “I get headaches. I need more. I miss … I miss the sweetness.”

Headaches. Great. Now the data was starting to come in. Meanwhile, the head of the department, Professor Stead, had made it clear that if Li Jing continued to treat Carolann with the compound, he would press charges against her. Her advisor, Professor Hewitt, the traitor, had sat there shaking his head during the meeting. He didn’t stand up for her at all. He should have told Professor Stead about how brilliant her research was. They should have made an exception for her …

“I’m sorry, Carolann. There’s nothing I can do. I’ve been expelled. I can’t even get into the lab to make more.”

Li Jing turned to head toward the parking lot, but Carolann yanked her back, hard. Li Jing’s shoulder screamed in protest and she lost hold of the box with her research. It fell onto the grass, spilling out her files and notes.

“Look what you did!” Li Jing said. A man in a gray suit, some kind of administrator passing by, stopped to help pick up the papers.

“You can’t do this to me!” Carolann said, menacingly low, right up in Li Jing’s face with her rotting breath. Then Carolann reached up and grabbed Li Jing at the throat. She started to squeeze, “You give me more or I tell the cops!”

Li Jing gasped for breath.

Then Carolann went limp and the man in the gray suit was right there, with his shoulder under Carolann’s arm. He pocketed a little metal device which he had just pressed into Carolann’s neck. It looked like a short brass cigarette.

Li Jing drew in a shaky breath as another man in a gray suit came up. His suit was a lighter color, and drawn tight in places over his muscular physique.

“Just put her in the car, Rob” said the first man. Rob took Carolann’s weight and walked her away, around the corner. The way he had his arm supporting her shoulder, it seemed almost like they were both walking, and she wasn’t being dragged.

“Who are you?” Li Jing stammered. “Why did you do that?”

“I’m Rick Phillips, and my employer, Mr. Timothy Almstead, would like a word with you. Would you care to walk this way?” he asked. All the while, he was putting the pages back in her box, closing the lid, lifting the box and handing it to her. Guiding her off, escorting her toward the corner of the building.

“My father is waiting for me,” she said. She knew it was foolish to go with strange men, but they had Carolann.

“It won’t take long, I promise. He wants to talk to you about your research.”

“My research?”

A sleek, black SUV pulled up to them, right on the grass.

“Please, get in,” Mr. Phillips said, opening the door for her. Li Jing couldn’t help it. She was intrigued. She set the box down on the carpeted floor of the SUV and climbed in. It was a relief to sit down. She slowly eased her backpack off her shoulders and set it on the floor.

Li Jing saw that Carolann was sitting up front, slumped against the window, next to Rob, who she realized was the driver. There was tinted privacy glass up, dividing them from her.

Mr. Phillips closed her door, went around the back of the car, and climbed in on the other side. The massive SUV had a custom interior with two rows of black leather seats facing each other, like a limo. He slid into the seat catty-corner to her and opened up a laptop.

He pressed a few buttons and a face appeared on the screen in a smaller window. “I have her here,” he said to the screen. Then he turned the laptop toward Li Jing.

The man on the screen was old. He had bright blue eyes, picked up by an aqua-colored tie. His eyes were the color of the sea on a brochure for a trip to the Caribbean.

“Ms. Wu! What a pleasure to meet you. My scouts tell me you’ve had a hard morning!”

Li Jing nodded.

“Well, look, I know you must be wondering what the hay’s goin’ on here. Let me come out with it. I got contacts, people I pay, in all the best undergrad and graduate biotech labs in, well, heck, not only in the States, but all over the globe. I’d heard, a few weeks ago, about your work with some kinds of fruit extracts. Make you lose weight?”

“But I kept it a secret,” she said.

“Well … there’s secrets and there’s secrets, aren’t there?”

“I don’t understand,” Li Jing said.

“So listen up, then, and you will! I’d like you to come work for me. And when I say me, I mean the Pipop Corporation.”

Now, she realized who he was—Timothy Almstead, the President of the Pipop Corporation. He’d been in the news because there had been an assassination attempt on his life. Some deranged man blamed his obese wife’s death on Pipop soda. Now, it all made more sense. Of course he would be interested in a new diet sweetener. Li Jing sat back against the black leather seat.

“We’d like you to come and work for us. I can offer you two hundred and fifty thousand a year. How does that sound?”

Li Jing coughed at that sum of money. She had no idea what to say to a quarter of a million dollars.

“You’re wondering what’s the catch?” Almstead said. “Clever girl.”

He’d mistaken her boggling as some kind of negotiating tactic.

“The catch is … the work really has to be a secret this time,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’d prefer to, hmmm, how can I say this? How do I say it, Phillips?”

“Mr. Almstead is proposing that you become a part of our top-secret research initiative,” Mr. Phillips explained. “The scientists we recruit agree to limit contact with friends and family. In some cases, we even create new identities for members of our team. Some of them, you understand, come from situations that require them to start anew. Countries that don’t want their top scientists recruited. That kind of thing. They live in our dormitories on our research campus.”

Li Jing was thinking now.

“We could make up a whole new identity for you. You could be Kim Sum or Jang Lang, I don’t know,” said Mr. Almstead. Li Jing didn’t bat an eye at the racism in his remarks. Old men were the worst. And they always thought they were being funny.

“Mr. Almstead,” she asked, “if I come to work for you, I get to continue my research—”

“Heck yeah, why do you think I sent in the SWAT team?”

“On human subjects?”

“We have volunteers, at our lab. They’re paid very, very well,” Mr. Phillips interjected.

“And they know how to keep their mouths shut,” Almstead said from the screen.

“When the time comes … could my new name be Elise?” Li Jing asked.

“Ha!” he barked. Then, “Girls. Can be one of the top scientists in all the world, and still got a pretty name in mind. Sure thing. Why Elise?”

She shrugged.

There had been another Chinese girl in Li Jing’s kindergarten class named Elise. She had been the darling of the class, while Li Jing had remained friendless week after week.

“Want a Chinese last name or a regular one?” Almstead said.

“Zhang,” Li Jing decided. “It is a very common Chinese last name.”

“Elise Zhang. Sounds like a scientist not to screw around with. I like it.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Mr. Phillips said. “We also need to ask Ms. Wu how many people know about the research.”

“Well, almost no one,” Li Jing answered. “My project advisor, and the head of the department, they both knew. And my roommate, Penelope Lindstrom. She’s the one who got me expelled.”

“Oh, believe me,” said Almstead, “all our best scientists got kicked out of school for one thing or another.”

“Is that all?” Phillips asked. “You’re quite certain?”

“I guess it’s possible that Penny could have told some of her friends, but I don’t know. Oh, and Carolann, of course. My test subject. She knows.”

Mr. Phillips nodded.

“I see. Well, Phillips, that manageable?” Almstead crowed.

“Yes, sir. Perfectly so.”

Li Jing got goose bumps all up and down her arms and legs. What did that mean, manageable?

Phillips crooked his arm up and rapped on the dividing glass twice. The driver reversed the car and drove backward, out toward the parking lot.

“What should we do about the test subject, Mr. Almstead?” Phillips asked. “She’s quite unstable. She assaulted Ms. Wu right as we arrived.”

“What do you think we should do about her, Li Jing?” Almstead asked.

Li Jing thought for a moment. “Her rapid weight loss and her growing aggression would be consistent with someone suffering from meth addiction,” she volunteered. “Maybe we could find a place where addicts are and … give her some and leave her there.”

“Thatta girl! You’re one of us, I can tell already! We’ll give her … rather too much meth, if I’m catching onto your idea.”

Li Jing nodded. It had never been a good experiment. No blinds. Only one subject. The dosage hadn’t been monitored as it should have been, she could admit that now. And it had been hard to keep up with Carolann’s increasing demand. Some of the product had not been as pure as it should have been. It had been a sloppy experiment.

The SUV had to make a three-point turn right in front of her father’s banged-up white delivery van.

Li Jing’s breath caught in her throat.

“He can’t see you, through the glass,” Mr. Phillips said.

Her father was leaning on the van and smoking a cigarette, watching for her. She could tell, just from his posture, by the tension in his body and the way he was jiggling one foot, how angry he was. How ready he was to lay into her, as soon as she rounded the corner.

“But we should talk about him,” Mr. Phillips said, as the SUV finished the turn and pulled away. “Would he believe it if you ran away?”

His eyes darted to her arm. Unintentionally, Li Jing thought. She put her hand over the ugly crescent-shaped marks.

“Yes. He would believe that.”

“Did he know about your research?” Mr. Almstead asked.

“No,” she said. Then she closed her eyes. The excitement and the adrenaline were wearing off and her body was beginning to remind her of the beating she had received. Her head pounded. Her shoulder ached. The swelling bruises and welts on her upper arm were thumping in time with her heartbeat. “Wait.”

Li Jing cleared her throat, “You know, I did mention it one time,” she said. She couldn’t quite look at Mr. Almstead on the screen.

“I almost forgot about it. Yes, he does know. He said I should try to sell it.” She knew the lie sounded hollow, but she couldn’t stop herself. “He offered to try to sell it for me.”

She glanced at Mr. Phillips and saw he was looking out the window, away from her.

“He’s very possessive of me,” Li Jing added. “He would try to find me if I disappeared.”

“I see,” Almstead said from the screen. “Well, then maybe we need to take care of that. Do you think so?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes,” Elise Zhang said.

Get ready for a dream vacation that first goes comically, then tragically, then horrifyingly wrong!

Keep reading for a sneak peek of

SWEET

LAUREL

DAY ONE

A GUY WEARING SKINNY JEANS and a neon-blue fedora is leaping into the air, vaulting up onto the backs of the people in the crowd, waving like crazy and shouting, “Baby Tom-Tom! Baby Tom-Tom!” like a man on fire calling for a bucket.

The dock is a zoo. Fans, maybe two thousand fans, are crammed into the space on either side of a red carpet that extends from the limo drop-off point, all the way up the dock, up a narrow gangplank and onto the luxury cruise liner, the Extravagance.

It’s dawning on me that I’ve made a terrible mistake: I walked.

My parents dropped me off way back at the ship terminal after besieging me with last-minute instructions about everything from cell phone usage to alcohol poisoning.

I should have come with Vivika. She begged me to join her in the limo her dad rented for her. But, eh, I felt like I didn’t want to show up like some pseudo-celebrity in a rented limo.

Well, it turns out that when you’re boarding a cruise that’s filled to the brim with wannabe rock stars and reality-TV almost-rans, you want to be chauffeured. A limo means you wind up on the right side of the security guards and the red velvet cords.

I see a curvy, tan girl with a razor-straight brown page-boy haircut get out of a Hummer limo (yes, they make them) at the start of the red carpet.

It’s Sabbi Ribiero, the Brazilian heiress from Teens of New York, along with several wealthy sidekicks. They all look polished and gorgeous, but not quite as polished and gorgeous as Sabbi, herself. Of course.

The fans go ballistic.

Uniformed bellmen start unloading stacks of leather matchy-matchy suitcases and hanging bags and valises and, God, hatboxes (hatboxes!) out of the trunk of the monstrous Hummer.

The lanky fellow in the blue fedora yells, “Sabbi! Sabbi, we love you!” and puts his hand on my head, to push off me like you would a fence post.

“Hey!” I shout. “That’s my head!”

But he doesn’t care. He’s yelling to some off-site friend on his phone. “This scene is insane! I’d give anything to get on that boat!”

Hmmm, I feel the exact opposite way. I sorta feel like I’d give anything not to get on that boat. How did I let my best friend talk me into coming on this—the Solu “Cruise to Lose”? The most famous cruise since the Titanic?

I have to get onto the carpet. Vivika’s already on board and her texts are getting apoplectic in tone. I don’t blame her. I’m late, as usual.

If the ship is going to leave on time it’s leaving in the next, yikes, twenty minutes.

Okay, I tell myself. You can do this. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

Being pushy is not really in my wheelhouse. But I told Viv I’d come with her on this freak show and unless I get through this crowd and onto the other side of the red stanchions, it ain’t gonna happen.

So I start shoving.

“Out of the way! Make way! Coming through!”

I elbow and push, dragging my mom’s rolling suitcase behind me and using my extra-large handbag (which Viv calls “the Boho beast”) as a kind of very soft and lumpy weapon. My guitar, safely strapped to my back in its hard shell, isn’t helping, although I do thwack a few irritating people on the head with it (by accident, mostly) on the way.

Finally, I make it to one of the guards standing at the left side of the red carpet.

“Hi!” I say.

He nods.

“I need to get in.”

He eyes my guitar.

“You gonna play for change?”

“Oh,” I say. “That’s funny. No. I’m actually a passenger.”

He arches his eyes in surprise.

“Yeah, I know,” I say. “Strange, but true.”

“You just walkin’ up, huh?”

“Yep.”

He’s enjoying this now. “Just walkin’. You a local?”

I nod. He’s really having fun. People are pressing up behind me and cursing my luggage.

“Couldn’t get a lift or nothin’?”

I rifle in my purse and come up with my ticket case, a slim padded leather case embossed with the single word: SOLU. Some kids behind me jostle forward as another celebrity passes on the carpet. I think it’s a famous chef guy.

“Ease up, now,” the guard bellows to the crowd behind, “this girl here has a ticket!”

I feel like Charlie Bucket for a second as people around me gasp and stare.

“Who is she?” a girl whispers.

“I don’t know … Nobody, I don’t think,” her friend answers.

Nice. (True, of course.)

I flash the man my ticket. The people around me are now taking my picture with their phones as the guard inspects my ticket.

“Maybe she’s a rock star!” somebody guesses.

Yeah, right. (I’m an amateur classical guitarist.)

“It’s legit,” the guard says, regarding my ticket. People around me literally gasp.

The guard unhooks the stanchion and lets me onto the carpet.

“Hey!” he yells. “We need a bellman over here!”

I shoulder my handbag and pull my mom’s rollaway bag onto the red carpet and stand there like the dork of the century.

Here’s the picture:

• Awkward, slightly chubby girl.

• Most of wavy, strawberry-blond hair escaping the “Easy Crown Braid” hairstyle I tried-really-hard-and-failed to copy from Seventeen magazine.

• Guitar on back.

• Freckles. Too many. Everywhere.

• Combat boots on feet with wool socks my grandma knit peeking out the top.

• Cool white Indian tunic from India Bazaar now crushed, sweaty, and ripped at hem.

• Jeans shorts looking dumb when I thought they’d look rocker classy.

• My face blushing beet red under the numerous freckles.

• My expression clearly showing that I would like to sink into the red carpet and disappear forever.

Also, I should have worn more makeup than Carmex and mascara.

Then, fate intervenes in the form of a slim black man with a magnificent handlebar mustache, dressed in a fashionable seersucker suit with a pocket square in a calming shade of lavender.

He strides toward me, holding a clipboard and looking like he was born and raised to run a red carpet.

“Darling! It’s me, Rich. Rich Weller, the publicist for the cruise,” he says, feigning some prior acquaintance. (As if anyone on earth could ever have met him and then forgotten him.) He kisses me on one cheek, then the other. I think we’re through, then he kisses me again on the first cheek. Three kisses.

“Come with me, sugar,” he says. His tone is intimate and friendly and clearly conveys that he knows I am a fish out of water and is doing his best to try to help me not make an ass out of myself. (Ass-Fish? Fish-ass?) “Leave your bags.”

When I don’t move immediately, he says, “Just drop them.”

I let go of the handle of my mom’s suitcase and, of course, it plonks over onto its belly with an awkward thomp. A grinning Indonesian bellman sweeps in and lifts the bag onto a cart.

“May I carry your instrument, miss?” the bellman asks, gesturing to my guitar. He gives me a friendly smile.

“That would be loverly, Imade,” Rich says for me. Rich takes the guitar off my shoulders and hands it over.

Now I’m conscious of the sweat stains on my back. The tunic, well, it’s a little see-through when you sweat like you’re facing the guillotine, so everyone can now see the back of my bra where the sweat has made my shirt transparent and the chub that flows over and under the band. This just gets better and better.

Behind us, there are screams as a new celebrity (an actual celebrity, I should say) arrives. Thank God, the attention’s off me.

“Tootsie pie, listen to me.” Rich murmurs. “Shoulders up, now. That’s good. Now you go and walk that carpet, sis. Come on, stand up straight or they’ll eat you alive.”

I gather myself up and square my shoulders to the carpet and the banks of photographers on either side.

You can do this, I tell myself.

I take two steps forward, and whack, Rich spanks me on the butt.

“Go get ’em, girl,” he tells me.

The photographers, God love them, don’t take my picture! Oh, a couple do, but most of them are angling to snap some shots of the guy coming up the gangplank behind me (he’s a reality-show God—survived on nothing but grubs for two weeks on some island where apparently all they have to eat is grubs).

At the top of the gangplank, a line is forming—the boarding passengers are backed up.

It’s a check-in line, where you give them your ticket and they hand you some kind of ID card, but that’s not why there’s a backup.

There’s a weigh station.

You hand them your card, then hop on a scale. They record your weight and swipe your card.

Okay, so I knew that this cruise had a weight-loss contingent. The Solu Cruise to Lose has been all over the talk shows and tabloids for months now. Solu is this new diet sweetener that not only sweetens your coffee, but makes you lose weight. And when the divorce between Viv’s parents became final, it seemed pretty clear that Vivvy’s dad would give her pretty much anything she wanted. Well, this was what she wanted. To go on the cruise. (She’s been unhappy with her weight since preschool. I remember her love-hate affair with graham crackers and apple juice.) They say that each of us will lose 5–10 percent of our body weight during the cruise’s seven-day trip.

So I knew all that. And I agreed to go because—well, a luxury cruise? For free?! And living in Fort Lauderdale, we’re always seeing the big ships come and go. I was so excited to actually be on one. To wave good-bye from the prow is something I will never get to do again in my life, I am sure!

But I did not know that we’d be publicly weighed before we were allowed to board the ship!

I fumble in my giant purse for my cell phone. I’m going to do some angry texting to Viv. At least, she could have warned me! She knows I’m shy about stuff like this—weight is private. And, yeah, I could stand to lose five pounds (okay, fifteen) but that’s nobody’s business but my own.

To be weighed in public seems like a big fine to have to pay to go on the cruise.

Then I hear the deep, raspy, heavily accented voice all of America would recognize. Sabbi Ribiero: the infamous, hard-partying, and Maserati-wrecking Brazilian heiress.

She is talking. To me.

“Can you believe this?”

“No,” I say. “It’s so demeaning. It’s insulting. I mean, are we to be weighed like cows? Like luggage?”

Sabbi blinks her twenty-inch-long eyelashes, looking at me like I’m speaking a foreign language.

“I haven’t waited in line since I immigrated to America, when I was six years old,” she says pointedly, like I’m an idiot. To tell you the truth, I kind of act like an idiot because I’m mesmerized by her mouth. She forms each word like it’s a little masterpiece. And her voice is like a jaguar purring.

She cocks a perfect eyebrow at me, waiting for a response.

“I wait in line all the time.” I shrug.

One of her groupies laughs, then cuts it short when he sees no one else thinks I’m funny.

Sabbi tosses her hair and turns her back on me, without another word.

When Sabbi is motioned up to the scale, she removes her aqua-colored leather jacket and hands it to one of her people. She’s wearing a curve-hugging aqua-colored sweater and aqua pants with a little gold belt. She kicks off her gold stilettos and steps onto the scale. (It could be that her shoes are made of solid gold. That would not surprise me at all.)

Sabbi looks right at me, holding my gaze steadily and proudly, as a lady checks the scale and enters the figures onto a laptop, then swipes Sabbi’s ID card and hands it back.

Two uniformed crew members thank Sabbi, help her down, and hold her hands as she slips back on her gold stilettos.

What the hell has Vivika gotten me into?

It’s a relief when I get up onto the deck. Some of the people are super-famous, like Sabbi, and then there are the fat wealthy people. Those are pretty much the two categories—young, gorgeous semi-famous people who look like they are probably here for free, and wealthy people who want to lose weight. I guess there’s a third category—people like me who don’t look like they belong in either category. And jeez! There’s a fourth—people serving the passengers. There’s an awful lot of them!

Waiters in white jackets are circulating champagne flutes on trays lined with lavender-colored linens. The deck looks like a five-star hotel, tricked out in polished wood, brass, and crystal. There are bouquets of lavender-colored flowers here and there. (What’s with all the lavender?)

An elderly man and a frumpy-looking Asian lady are making rounds, shaking hands and welcoming people on board. They must be executives from the Solu Corporation. Standing a few steps behind them is a bald guy with a clipboard who is incredibly muscly, like, about to burst out of his suit. It’s like the old guy has Drax the Destroyer for a personal assistant.

I see “Baby Tom-Tom” with a TV crew, over by the railing.

Okay, so I am now looking at my childhood crush, Tom Fiorelli. With my own eyeballs.

Once upon a time, he was the tubby child star of everyone’s favorite sitcom, The Magnificent Andersons. We all watched him grow up on screen. (By “we all” I mean the entire United States of America.) They canceled the show when he hit fourteen and his voice started cracking. Since then he lost weight and tried to be a serious film star, but his films were bad. Really bad. So bad that I had to leave the theater during Double Fang.

It was about a gang of teen boys who turn into were-vampires at night. (Yes, werewolves who are also vampires. And the film was not a comedy.) Baby Tom-Tom was their leader. His name in the film was ’Cisor. (The film should have been a comedy.)

Maybe he couldn’t make it as a film star because he chose dumb movies to star in, but maybe it was because everyone still calls him Baby Tom-Tom. There’s just no way to take that name seriously.

And there was the whole thing with the pop singer Bonnie Lee Finn. That horrible breakup and the leaked voice-mail messages he left her where he sounded really sad and kept telling her that he did know how to have fun. He could learn to loosen up.

I felt really bad for him.

I crane my neck to get a better look at him, over the heads of the small crowd gathered around him.

He’s only eighteen or nineteen, but he’s handling the large crowd like a pro, grinning and jovial. This is what he does now—hosting stuff. He’s always on a red carpet or talking about who wore what. He’s good at it.

He sure looks like he knows how to have fun, right now.

“Now, lots of people have asked why Solu decided to hold their launch event on a ship. Do you know?” Tom holds the microphone out to a pretty girl in a halter dress. She shakes her head and giggles.

“Anyone?” He offers the mike out.

“Because cruises are awesome?” the girl suggests.

“True! But not just that,” Tom says. He gestures over the edge of the ship.

“Look down here. See those crewmen waiting down there?”

I peer over the side of the boat, with everyone else.

There are two workmen in overalls waiting on a wooden platform that’s been lowered down to sit just above the level of the water. They have cans of black paint with them and large rollers.

“Once all the passengers are on board,” Tom continues, “those crewmen are going to paint a line indicating the ship’s weight. When we come back to this port, in seven short days, the ship will sit at least ten feet higher in the water! That will indicate a combined weight loss of at least five thousand pounds from the Extravagance’s five hundred passengers! And it could be even more!”

The people around Tom cheer. He beams at them all.

I sort of want to raise my hand and say, “What about the weight of the food we will eat? What about the fuel? Won’t those things affect the weight of the ship?”

But I’m not going to be some kind of lame whistle-blower on their promotional idea.

I have to say, it’s weird to look at him.

It’s Baby Tom-Tom, grinning that grin we all know so well.

I feel like I can see ghost images of him over his face—there he is as a toddler, as a saucy seven-year-old, as a chunky eleven-year-old wiseass, and then there’s the present Tom.

The baby fat’s gone now—he has a hard, etched jaw and his body’s lean and muscled. You can see his pecs kind of straining at the fabric of his shirt. He’s not that tall, but he has an electric charm coming off him. And hotness. (Coming off him in waves.)

Have I mentioned the hotness? Because he is scorching hot.

Then something surprising happens: Someone I can’t see says, “Cut,” and the smile drops off Tom’s face. One minute, he seems to be having a great time and the next, he’s totally serious. Over it. Huh. (Maybe he doesn’t actually know how to have fun, after all.)

“Laurel! There you are!” Viv crushes me in a giant hug from behind. “Stop gaping at Baby Tom-Tom like a dork.”

“I wasn’t gaping!” I protest.

She drags me away from the little crowd.

“You have to see our room!” Vivika exclaims. “You’re going to D-I-E die!”

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

EXPELLED. Copyright © 2015 by Emmy Laybourne. All rights reserved. For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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e-ISBN 9781250082336

First Edition: 2015