I’ve never seen you, I’ve never seen anyone like you—
The dazzle-smiled boy, the only one who could watch me without going blind.
Mads grabs my hand. Pulls me back to her, to here, to now.
“I don’t remember,” I say. It feels like a scream, but it sounds like a whisper.
Her hand locks tighter on mine.
“The boy who gave me the drink—” I say—
I see white. Only white. The statues and the marble floor. The music. The spotlights. What’s your name? he asked, faceless, and I said, I’m Elle. And he said, Elle. Pretty name, but not as pretty as you—
“I don’t remember,” I say, louder. I sit up, sword-straight, and so does Mads. The sun burns our skin so hot that the last drops of water boil to steam. “Did you see him?” I ask.
She knows who I mean. She shakes her head.
I take my hand back. It wants to shake but I don’t let it. I count, one finger scarring the sand: “Duncan. Duffy. Connor. Banks.”
The salt water in my lungs drips into my veins.
“The boy who mixed the drinks—Malcolm,” I say. “The boy who guarded the door—Porter.”
The salt water in my veins blisters through my skin.
“The boy who gave me the drink—”
Someone shrieks so piercing cold it takes my breath away.
“I have to remember,” I gasp. “I have to know—”
Your eyes—he said, and then white, and the hallway, with my talons scraping the floor and the walls bending in, and Connor’s iron grip—
The shriek tears the air open again.
“Jade,” says Mads. “Jade, Jade, Jade—”
The shriek rips sharper. Cruel and ruinous.
“Jade,” says Mads, again and again, until my shriek is a dagger that blots out the sun—
Jade, says Mads.
I stand up. My wings and my scream swallow up the sky.
Backstage
My father, the surgeon celebrities trust with their whole dead hearts, has connections.
My father, the immigrants’ son who buried his father’s accent so deep into the ground that political blind-callers read him the college-educated white male version of their script, knows how to be anyone he needs to be.
My father, the man who said kill the boy, will do anything to make sure his daughters get the very best lives money and sweat can buy.
I don’t quite know how he does it, but when I get home Sunday afternoon there’s a St Andrew’s Prep uniform laid out on my bed.
I wake up so early on Monday that it still feels like night. And I text the coven even though they’re sleeping, and I say, Today St Andrew’s meets its new queen.
Mads texts back before I even set the phone down: Take what’s yours.
The uniform is a white shirt, a blue-plaid skirt, and a blue-plaid tie. White knee socks and a navy blazer. I add my patent leather Mary Janes: Girl Scout buckles and round toes from the front, but deadly sharp heels from every other side. And I do the kind of makeup that makes boys look at you and think, damn, and girls look at you and think, bitch. Old Hollywood instead of the contoured Insta-goddess I was on Friday night. A villainess, not a heroine.
The scratches disappear with the kind of magic those lacrosse boys won’t even suspect.
My lipstick is femme fatale red.
In the mirror I’m something from a two A.M. movie about Catholic schoolgirl vampires. Revenge-black hair, short and sharp; a face that says she’ll pull you to the dark side and you’ll love every second of it.
Summer texts me, Ruin them.
I pose and shoot until the girl on the screen has exactly the look she needs: a smile they’ll read as inviting today, but tomorrow—whichever tomorrow finds them clutching at their throats and choking on blood—they’ll look back and see the vengeance in it, and they’ll wonder how the hell they ever missed it—
—and then they won’t think another damn thing.
I post the picture to my fresh account, brand-new in person and online: St Andrew’s, you’ve met your match. And I tag it just right, the same way those boys and their clinging groupie girlfriends tag everything, so they’ll be talking about me before I even walk in the door.
Bold as hell.
I don’t eat breakfast, but my mother gives me tea in a white cup threaded with gold, and she sits with me and lets me stay silent. When it’s time to go, she hands me a heavy card. My father’s handwriting loops across it under his letterhead: Take the red car.
My mother squeezes my hand so tight it’s almost like we’re only one person.
Then she lets go.
The car waits for me in the driveway, shining in the sunrise light, top down, keys in the ignition. There’s a Tiffany box on the driver’s seat with three lipstick kisses on the robin’s-egg blue: Jenny’s pink, Summer’s rose, Mads’s scarlet.
Inside, there’s a silver crucifix on a silver chain. Bright and big and flashy.
I laugh. The noise jars the dead-stillness and a black cat streaks out of the bushes for the road.
Jenny texts me, Bleed them dry.
I will.
Introductions
I’m the very first St Andrew’s Prepper in the door.
It’s on purpose.
I’ve parked front and center, the best spot there is, so everyone walking in will see the red car and wonder who’s new. St Andrew’s wants to live in the Middle Ages, somewhere craggy and cloud-covered, instead of soaking in the almost-summer sunlight of SoCal in March. So behind the same sky-bound palm trees as every other building in town, there’s a gray stone fortress with jutting angles and diamond-pane windows. When the door claps shut behind me I could almost believe I’m withering away in some castle with bats in the eaves and snakes under the foundation. Secrets in the walls and girls half-dead and locked in the attic.
I’m ready.
It’s dark, but not like nighttime streets or a club when the lights black out before the bass drops and shocks everyone alive. Like a crypt instead. Chandeliers drag down from the rafters and incense hazes the air. My Mary Janes click out a warning to the class pictures on the wall: row after row of sepia-tone fuckboys grinning through glass.
I go to the office first. Good little new girl. Hello I’m Jade, I’m so beyond excited to be here, what an amazing opportunity. They eat it up and lick their lips.
Then I swing back into the hall and hit every classroom on the schedule the thousand-year-old secretary sent to my phone. I introduce myself the exact same way each time: Good morning, brash enough to make them look up but polite enough that they have to smile. And then, before they can answer, I’m the new girl. Jade Khanjara.
They nod. They all look the same—Dr. Farris from biology, Magistra Copland from Latin, Sister María de los Dolores from religion. Books stacked like battlements and eyes that do skittish sideways glances and then settle back to blank. They’re playing defense already, always, because here the students run the show. Boys like Duncan and Duffy and Connor and Banks have fathers who can pay enough to erase any ugly little blemish on their records, the same way their fathers’ fathers did a generation ago.
The teachers know it’s not worth saying no at St Andrew’s.