Zoey Dean - The A-List

Copyright 2003 by 17th Street Productions, an Alloy company

All rights reserved.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group USA

1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Visit our Web site at www.lb-teens.com

First eBook Edition: July 2008

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-04159-1

If you have to ask, youll never be on

THE A-LIST

Be sure to read all the novels in the

New York Times bestselling A-LIST

series, and keep your eye out for

AMERICAN BEAUTY, coming September 2006.

A-LIST novels by Zoey Dean:

GIRLS ON FILM

BLONDE AMBITION

TALL COOL ONE

BACK IN BLACK

SOME LIKE IT HOT

For Lisa Hurley: The A-Plus List

When Im good, Im very good,

but when Im bad Im better.

Mae West

Prologue

T he moment Cynthia Baltres peed all over an eight-thousand-dollar Herms Kelly handbag was the moment that Anna Cabot Percy decided to make Cynthia her best friend.

That had been thirteen years ago, during afternoon tea at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. The two girls mothers had dragged Anna and Cyn along to a planning session for a charity gala. Before she became Mrs. Alfred Baltres III, Cynthias mom had been a real estate agent on Long Island. Desperate to prove herself the equal of Jane To the Manner Born Percy, shed focused all her attention on arranging the fund-raiser and missed her daughters crotch-grabbing, a signal that she needed a trip to the ladies room.

Cynthia never did take well to being ignored. As Anna stared in disbelief, Cynthia had hopped off her chair, squatted above her mothers purse, and let er rip. Mrs. Baltres turned the same shade of red as her fur-trimmed Versace pantsuit, grasped her doused handbag like it was a long-dead carp, and yanked her daughter off to the loo.

Anna, who would have spontaneously combusted before shed ever urinate in public, had been very impressed. That her own mother, clad in vintage Chanel, continued to sip tea as a waiter mopped up didnt surprise Anna at all. At age five, shed already learned her first lesson from the This Is How We Do Things Big Book, East Coast WASP edition: One simply didnt see what one did not choose to see.

There, in the storied tearoom of the St. Regis, little Anna had a vision of her destiny: Shed grow up to be just like her motherperfectly genteel and perfectly boring. The thought depressed her as much as a five-year-old with an eight-digit trust fund could be depressed. Life had to be more fun if you were shocking and bad. And if anyone could teach her those traits, it was Cynthia Baltres.

In the long run, though, genes had trumped desire, meaning that the friendship had taken but the badness hadnt. Thirteen years later, Anna had yet to do one truly nasty thing. She got excellent grades, preferred literature to movies, did charity work but rarely talked about it, and dated the right boys from the right families.

Sadly, though, the right boys from the right families had thus far generated about as much heat in Anna as Lady Chatterleys husband. But hope (the thing with feathers, as her favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, so eloquently put it) still perched on her soul, singing within Annas heart that someday the wrong boy would make her cry, Dont stop! and really mean it.

Ironically, Anna thought she already knew the boy: Scott Rowley. Hed moved to New York from Boston when he was fifteen, after his parents divorce. Dad had gotten the Beacon Hill manse, the art collection, and the predictably nubile mistress. Mom had gotten the New York brown-stone, the summer place on Block Island, and Scott.

Anna had loved Scott from the first moment shed seen him leaning against a tree outside of Trinity, her school, reading The Onion and laughing aloud. But it soon became apparent that Annas leggy, patrician blond beauty didnt register on Scotts sexual oscilloscope. He went for the exotic: a dreadlocked art student from Brazil, the black-hair-past-her-butt daughter of the Indonesian ambassador to the United Nations, a gorgeous five-foot-nine Ethiopian girl with a shaved head. The only thing that had eased the sting of Annas unrequited love was her realization that Scott never hooked up with anyone born north of the equator.

That is, until three weeks ago, when hed hooked up with her best friend, Cyn.

Though not traditionally beautiful, there was just something about Cyn. Men of all ages sniffed after her. Her mouth was thin and her nose had a slight bump in it, which she refused to fix since, she said, she was not broken. Her hair was naturally dark brown, but she dyed it raven black and wore it in a choppy, sexy, messy style that drew attention to her startling celery-green eyes. Clothes hung perfectly on her skinny slim-hipped body. She could pull off styles that made other girls look ridiculous.

(Anna was well aware that Cynthia had, in fact, started the trend of wearing boys boxer shorts when shed worn a pair to Paris Hiltons birthday party with a vintage CBGB T-shirt and red cowboy boots. By the next afternoon, it was nearly impossible to purchase a pair of guys boxer shorts on the island of Manhattan.)

On top of that, Cynthia was up for anything. On a moments notice shed fly to Bora-Bora in some guys private jet. Once shed gone to the opera with her parents and spent the entire second act of La Bohme making out in the limo with a middle-aged man shed met in the lobbyshe never did get his name. Another time shed gone to a party in SoHo where shed pretended that she was French and ended up going home with a semi-famous painter who, after painting a nude of her, had threatened to kill himself if she wouldnt sleep with him. She hadnt, and he hadnt, but still. Anna loved to hear about Cyns exploits; she got vicarious thrills without having to take any of the risks.

From Annas point of view, Cyn really was All That. But even with her recently acquired rose tattoo midway between her navel and her pearly gates, Anna had been certain that Cyn was still not exotic enough for Scott. Anna had been wrong.

Shed meant to tell Cyn a thousand times that she loved Scott. But since Anna knew Scott would never love her back, divulging this seemed silly. And Anna Percy was not a silly girl.

Now it was too late.

Things had been going so well, too. Anna had been accepted early decision to Yale. Her spring internship at a new literary journal meant she could fulfill her credits without having to take any more high school classes. Then, the day after Cyn-and-Scott had burst onto the scene, Annas nineteen-year-old sister, Susan, had invited Anna to a party in a SoHo loft. Susan, whod just broken up with her latest boyfriend, hated going to parties alone. Shed begged.

Anna had reluctantly agreed. At the party shed been surprised to find herself actually having a decent time, chatting in the kitchen with a Time Out: New York photographer, when she realized she hadnt seen Susan in a while. She excused herself to look for her sister and found her passed out in the rooftop hot tub, naked except for a Randolph Duke mohair duster that floated around her like furry pond scum.

Anna gave Susan mouth-to-mouth, called 911, and saved her sisters life. But Susan didnt take well to Annas methodology (Could you have made any bigger of a scene out of it, Anna?). Neither did Jane Percy, who shipped Susan back to rehab for the second time in a year and then took off for Italy to visit a twenty-eight-year-old sculptor whose work she was acquiring. She explained to Anna that remaining in New York would just be too trying. Besides, she was sure that Anna could fend for herself for a few weeks, what with two live-ins and a day staff of four to assist her.