Mads doesn’t answer.
“What?”
“You can’t do it alone,” she says. Almost what Jenny said yesterday.
“I can do anything.” The words swish sabre-sharp.
She scoots closer until there’s no space between us. Summer would say, You don’t have to, not without us. Jenny would say, Don’t lie, even though I’m not.
Mads says, “I know.”
But then she says, “Remember when we learned to fight?”
Six years ago. Here, in this same room with the windows shadowed by palms and banana plants green through every drought. Mads and me running in together too fast for even Jenny and Summer to keep up. Matching bloody lips. The first day we knew we had wings.
The first day Mads’s father let her be her real self at school.
We got ready together, in matching girl-uniforms, like it always should have been. We wore our gold Best Friends necklaces outside our white shirts instead of hidden underneath. She painted my lips and I painted hers with a shiny perfect tube I stole off my mother’s vanity. Bright red, halfway between Mads’s color and mine.
We walked into school with our hands clutched together like the twin-C logo on our stolen lipstick. Ready. Daring them to say anything.
They didn’t. Not with all of us, Jenny and Summer and Mads and me, linked elbows and whispering—
laughing—
eyes quick and narrowing—
—so every girl in school knew we were the ones to watch and the ones to watch out for. The cool girls. The mean girls. We were middle school six months early, wearing our shiny new crowns before anyone else knew a monarchy was coming.
We were glossy red-lipped victory. The other girls didn’t even dare.
Then the last bell rang and Mrs. Maddox called me up to her desk to ask me why Kimberly Kostos was crying after lunch and blaming me for her broken phone, screen shattered against a table corner when she stared too long at Mads. It took two minutes of big eyes and smiling to trick Mrs. Maddox into thinking Kimberly made the whole story up—
—and when I got outside Jenny and Summer were scrambling and stuck at the edge of a half-circle of boys, and Mads was caught against the wall with two of them too close. Pulling at her skirt. Twisting her necklace.
She was stone-still with her head high. Fear and pride on her face.
And I was angrier than I’d been in my whole life. I shoved in but the circle crushed tighter together and I couldn’t get to her—
I shouted her name, Mads—
One of the boys laughed mean and said her deadname instead, and the other one slashed his hand across her face and smeared lipstick and blood across her skin and stained his palm guilt-red. Fake, he said, like you—
She pushed him. He fell. But there were too many of them, and she was alone, and I hated them so much I could feel it in my teeth—
And I ran hard at the circle and smashed through and fell almost into the wall so it was two of us now. Mads and me, together.
She shouted loud and I screamed, Get away get away get away. They laughed. Far away Summer and Jenny shrieked. The boy with the red hand staggered back up and said bitch and swung and hit me in the mouth, the same as Mads, and my scream got louder and my words came back new: You’ll pay you’ll pay you’ll pay.
Mads found my hand and pulled so I looked at her for just long enough to read her face, and then we were both screaming and rushing at the two of them. Hard enough that they stumbled back. Fierce enough that the circle broke for us before we could break it ourselves.
We ran—
fast and hard without stopping, without looking back—
until we weren’t running at all—
—until we flew.
Back to Mads’s house, through the gate and through the doors and straight to her father. Tall and never smiling and always in suits that shone like mirrors. There were three men with him, the same kind of men who were always coming and going in black-windowed cars when Mads and I were playing in the yard.
He sent them away. They didn’t ask questions.
Then he took Mads and me outside and past the courtyard to the training room. In the farthest corner her two brothers were dancing angry graceful circles in the boxing ring. Their coach shouted. They hit harder.
Her father said, You need to learn how to fight.
Mads said, Yes, sir.
I said, We’re going to kill them.
Her father went to the case on the wall. Needle-thin swords hung under the glass. Shining. Tempting.
He took out two of the blades. He said, You have to be brilliant.
I reached for one.
He said, You have to be patient.
I didn’t reach again, but I didn’t look away from the blades.
One came up and tapped under my chin. It wasn’t sharp, but it felt like power.
He said, Make your rage fight for you. It’s your greatest gift.
We learned to fight. With our sabres and our claws. With schemes and patience.
With rage.
“They’re afraid of us,” says Mads. The same girl she was then, standing in that circle with blood on her face but her chin up. “The Hillview boys. And the girls.”
She’s right. We made them afraid—
of Summer’s daisy smile painted over her black-widow heart—
of Jenny’s candy necklaces and fire-fast rumors—
of Mads’s fists looped with gold rings and her eyes that watch close—
of my forever-long plots so good that by the end they’d be begging me to get it over with, please, just get your revenge and let me sleep again—
We never needed other friends. We never wanted other friends.
She reads my mind: “We made them afraid.”
I say, “We made them ours.”
She nods. Then she says, “Porter. Send him to me after.”
I say, “Done.”
We stand up together.
We go to the glass case and get out our weapons.
We’ll fight with rage.
Ghosts
At night I sit in my bed under the window in the almost-dark. My phone glows with texts from Mack—
Jade, it sounds crazy but I think we were meant to meet like this—
Meant to be together—
It always had to be us, to change everything—
Partners in greatness.
Every time his words flicker onto the screen they warm my hands.
We don’t talk about Duncan or Connor or what we have to do. But it glistens underneath every text anyway. We know what we aren’t saying.
We know it so well we don’t have to say it.
When my phone stops lighting up I leave it next to me and unfold the page Summer printed. Search for the dazzle-smiled boy again. Knock all the matching faces against my memory to try to bring him back. It was Banks on the dance floor, Banks with the drink, Banks with the boldest best laugh—
—but I have to see his smile on the page. See it clear, right in front of me, so I can see it again when I watch the life drain out of him. It’s missing still, no matter how hard I stare at his teeth. No matter how much I test the rest of them: gleaming Duncan and all his wolves. Little-boy Malcolm, tight-lipped, and his clambering second-rank. Duffy and Porter and even Mack.
Every boy but one.
On Monday night, after Connor fell, I took out the long silver knife and stabbed it through his picture. Ripped his smirking face out of the page.