I’m not their little baby girl. I’m a cruel bitch and everyone knows it. Every teenage girl thinks she and her friends are the mean girls, the ice queens, the wicked witches, but Jenny and Summer and Mads and me—we’re what they wish they were.
Savage.
And after all, little baby Jade waited patient at the top of the preschool playground castle the day Tristan Wilder pushed Summer on the sidewalk and made her spit blood. Waited for Tristan to climb grubby-handed up the ladder and teeter too close to the edge. Waited until the teacher wasn’t looking.
Tristan Wilder went to the hospital the day he made Summer spit blood. And when the ambulance pulled away, Summer’s eyes met mine and her face split into a smile and her teeth glowed red.
I’ve never been anyone’s little baby girl.
“Yesterday,” I say. “Last night.”
I tell them.
But mostly lies. Because the real story is mine, and I already know what I need to do.
I tell them it was a Hillview party. I tell them I went alone; the girls weren’t there; nobody knows but me. I tell them it was a Hillview boy. I tell them I’m not sure who.
I tell them I blacked out before it happened.
When I’m done the silence doesn’t buzz anymore. It sits, vulture-quiet, on the mantel behind me.
My father stands up and walks out.
I can’t look at my mother, so I stare at the painting on the wall and think of the very last act of this goddamn Greek tragedy. Four boys dead on the ground and me, standing over them with a crown in my hands.
Something shatters from the kitchen.
I see it where I’m not looking: my mother’s face shattering, too. She says, Elle, I love you, I love you and then she’s stumbling after my father, unsteady for the first time in her life. A broom brushes against the kitchen floor and crystal scrapes on marble. My parents speak too fast, two languages melting together, hushed and desperate: it can’t be, how could he, how can we, why did, who was—
no.
My mother’s voice gets so quiet I can’t understand it even in the bone-crushing silence.
Then my father’s voice spikes out, clear and loud:
kill the boy
—and I’ve never been prouder to be his daughter. My father, who spends his days slicing scalpels across cheeks and chests. My father with his expensive watch and his once-a-week haircut, who breaks people apart and sews them back together, better.
If I told him the truth, he’d take his scalpel and slice those St Andrew’s boys’ throats himself.
But this is all mine.
When they come back my father’s hands are fists and my mother’s eyes shine.
“Tell us what you need from us,” they say.
And I say, “Let me handle it myself. I need to. I will.”
They look stronger when I say that. Like they know it’s true.
Behind me, the vulture on the mantel spreads its wings, black and huge.
I say, “I want to transfer to St Andrew’s.”
Clinical
My mother goes with me to the hospital. I want to go alone, I told her and my father, but she took my hand in hers and said, You’re my daughter, and that was the end of it. We drive my father’s favorite car, the slut-red BMW convertible, three miles from our house to Cedars-Sinai. The sky is blue enough to drown in.
The nurses give me pills and ask too much. I swallow and lie. The doctor is tired and grave with eyes that dig too deep, and I float away from her white-gloved hands and wait like the vulture from the mantel.
They look at me like I’m something to be fixed.
When they say do you want to talk to anyone I tell them no, and they tell me to wait for a counselor anyway. Out in the hall my mother’s voice edges sharper each time the doctor murmurs to her about police and reports and all the other things I don’t want. My mother says, She’s my daughter. My mother says, No.
I sit on the end of a white-sheets hospital cot in the black dress Summer let me borrow a month ago, for Valentine’s Day, when all four of us crashed hotel bars downtown and smiled daggers at greased-up businessmen and collected martinis and waited for when the men got too close, and then we threw the drinks in their faces and ran back out into the night, stilettos clipping out gunfire, elbows locking us together. Summer’s black dress and my silver heels. Holding my phone in both hands and texting Jenny, texting Summer, texting Mads. Dividing and conquering the St Andrew’s boys. Piecing their whole lives together from their pictures and tags and reckless Connor’s comments about girls who won’t remember.
The woman they want me to talk to comes in so mouse-quiet I don’t even know she’s there until she says, “Elizabeth, right?”
I look up from my phone. My lips twist.
I say, “Wrong.”
She flips a page on her clipboard and her eyebrows furrow. “Elizabeth Jade Khanjara?”
My phone buzzes. It’s Summer: You’re gone. Full ghost, because I asked her to do it: erase every last trace of me so the boys won’t find anything if they decide to dig where they don’t belong.
My eyes meet the mouse’s, and she’s even more like prey when I bother looking her over. “It’s Jade,” I say.
“Jade, then,” she says, and she offers up a careful smile, like if she shows too many teeth she’ll shatter my poor fragile self.
I grin at her, glittering and wide.
She takes a step back and blinks three times, right in a row.
I text the coven, They’ve sent an actual mouse to fix me. If I were broken, I’d be fucked.
“First of all, Jade, I am so, so sorry,” says the mouse.
Terrify her, says Jenny on my screen.
Almost too easy, I text back. Almost not worth it.
“So am I,” I say with a lilt that should tell the mouse what I really mean, and the little twitch she does says she notices, but then she blinks again and decides I didn’t mean it.
She has no idea.
“Jade,” she says, sitting down in the ugly chair across from me, “what you need to know, before anything else, is that there’s no wrong way to be a victim.”
I look up for that. Straight into her mud-and-pity eyes. I flash my teeth again; let the light gleam off them. “I’m not a victim,” I say.
She bows her head. “Survivor,” she says, and that word is worse somehow, with its painted-false bravery.
Survivor, I text. Fuck her. Is that the best she can do?
“Not that, either,” I say. There’s more she wants to tell me, and the words cling to her like dust and rot: who I was and who I am and who I should be. I’m supposed to listen. I’m supposed to believe her.
“I—well, then,” the mouse falters. “Well, what would you prefer?”
Tell her queen, says Summer.
Tell her killer, says Jenny.
Tell her justice, says Mads.
I won’t let her read me her lines.
Fate, I tell the coven.
“Why do you need a word for it?” I ask, all mocking uncertainty.
“I don’t—I don’t know.” She’s grasping and too nervous. “What do you mean?”
My smile is lethal. “I mean those boys didn’t turn me into anything I wasn’t before.”
She opens her mouse-mouth and closes it again.