This is barely even naughty, but hopefully it's fun!
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The next few months of Dilara's life pass relatively uneventfully.
No one from the Charming Team contacts her again, and after the New Year's she only gets automatically generated responses to her emails to them.
So apparently she isn't getting in.
But anyway, it's her senior year of high school. In March, she is actually elected Prom queen, as Jasmine had predicted, though she only barely coaxes Trevor into asking her to be his date.
She and Jasmine and their moms go shopping together for prom dresses, and Dilara manages to talk her mom into letting her buy a tight red dress with a very sexy sweetheart neckline.
When her mom finally agrees, Jasmine gives her a significant nod: they both know that dress resembles the one May wears in her videos with Raoul.
Then prom happens, and it's lovely, although Trevor remains strangely awkward, and then afterwards —
Nothing happens.
Not even a kiss. He drops her off at her house, and they stand on her front porch together.
"Do you think your parents are watching?" he asks.
"Probably," she shrugs, intending to communicate that she doesn't care if they are.
"Oh," he says.
His Adam's apple wavers as he looks down at her.
"Goodnight, Dilara," he finally says, and then turns around to walk away.
She'd been practically in love with him, despite his flaws, but by the time he gets to his car she almost hates him.
Perhaps she could forgive him if he'd grow a pair and treat her with confidence, but instead he starts a rumor that she'd blown him in the car before he dropped her off.
Straightening that out ruins about three weeks of Dilara's life. At first most people take his side. After all, he's a star athlete, and she's, well, a girl. Just a girl.
In the first week, she actually breaks down crying one afternoon in Spanish class. After that, humiliated, she simply tries to give up caring what anyone thinks. Only a few more weeks and high school will be over, and then, she gloats in the privacy of her mind, all of them can go fuck themselves for all she cares.
Some of the girls who don't even believe Trevor's story say that if she didn't blow him, she should have. What, does she think she's some kind of princess, or something?
You blow him then, Dilara snaps.
"I would," one says with mock sadness. "But he doesn't want me. I'm not the prom queen."
"He doesn't want a prom queen," Dilara says, still bitter (despite everything) about Trevor's shyness.
"What does he want then?"
Dilara hesitates for a moment, and then, thank all the gods, Jasmine is there for her.
"A slut," Jasmine sneers, wagging her head cruelly. "He wants a
slut
. And you'd be perfect for him."
"After all," Dilara picks up, "you've practiced so much, you must be so much better at it than I would be."
Jasmine pretends to sniff the air. "Is that cum I smell?" she asks. Then she looks at Dilara's tormentors. "No, I guess it's just your breath."
"God, you're stupid," is the best retort any of them manages.
"You'll probably think of a better comeback later," Dilara pretends to assure them.
"Yeah," Jasmine acknowledges to Dilara, "but she'll have another mouthful of dick by then so she still won't be able to say it."
"Fuck you, bitch," their antagonist barks.
"Fuck yourself, slut," Jasmine smirks, dismissing her with a wave. "Come on, Dil," she says. "Let's get out of here. The smell of cum around these girls is making me sick."
Some of the boys — obviously calculating that their best chance with Dilara is to play the hero — also eventually begin defending her. At first it's some of the relatively more popular nerds (who are in Dilara's classes), and then gradually the more popular boys join in, and her niceness slowly wins more and more people back to her side...
Then one day Trevor loses his temper when one of the artless girls teases him about it in an attempt to flirt. He punches a locker so hard that he breaks his hand. The violence frightens the girls nearby, and then he looks foolish shaking his hand in pain, so everyone suddenly agrees he's a gigantic asshole.
And just like that Dilara is more popular than ever, and the school finds other things to gossip about — who got pregnant, who got into Hedera, and so on.
The whole drama makes her rethink Raoul and May. Sure, the things they say they want are, well, very strange, at least to Dilara, but at least they are up-front and honest about them.
Right in the middle of the Trevor bullshit, she receives a really prestigious scholarship to USCLA, but she wants to get away so badly that she tells her parents that she won't accept it. She has to go to college on the East Coast, as far away from LA and everyone she knows as possible.
She's also gotten into Umber, which is of course an even better school than USCLA, but it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to go there. Their financial aid package is supposed to cover full financial need," but Umber and her parents strongly disagree about how much they can afford.
USCLA's a great school, her parents tell her, so unless you can pay the tuition and all the other expenses, you're taking this scholarship.
She can't really argue. She doesn't have the money, and she can never admit why she needs to leave LA so badly.
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