you deserve each other, bon fucking voyage and I hope you get chlamydia, said the same Piper Morello who won last semester’s Outstanding Citizenship award.
“New girl,” says Piper Morello now, Monday morning in the common hall with her sabre slivering the air into jagged little pieces. “Where’d you come from?”
“Hell,” I say before I can stop myself.
Lilia blinks again. The flock nudges like they’re not sure if they should laugh.
“Boarding school,” I say. “New Hampshire. Boring as shit. Cold as shit. They kicked me out.” I spin the crucifix once more: third time’s a charm. “Deo gratias, honestly.”
The First-Communion-purest of them gasps but Lilia giggles a tiny high-pitched trill and then they all join in.
Except Piper. “Kicked out,” she says. “Keep it classy.” And then, “Why?”
I shrug. “Fucked a teacher.”
This time they all gasp, but it’s a shivery-excited gasp. A this-girl-doesn’t-mess gasp.
Piper stays steady. “You’d think he’d be the one to take the hit for that. Not you.”
And I say, “You’d think.”
Lilia takes a long sip of coffee. Leaves a barely-there coral crescent on the lid. She says, “No, you wouldn’t.”
But nobody hears it, not one single girl, because they’re all hissing and giggling back and forth about bold-bitch Jade.
Except Piper, narrow-eyed, two more fingers on her sabre now.
“You fence,” I say before she can make her next move.
“I’m captain of the girls’ team,” she says. “State champion.”
I smile. “For now.”
She laughs and her amber eyes spark. “Find someone who can beat me. Nobody can. Not even the boys.” Her grin sharpens. “Unless you’re saying you can.”
She’s fiercer than I thought she’d be and I’m glad. She’ll fight hard. “It’s the off-season.”
“It’s never the off-season,” she says, and her fingers tap down one-two-three-four on the handle. “Not for winners. I’ll take you on whenever you think you’re ready.”
I tip my chin and say, “Prête.”
And her grin goes thrill-white and she says, “Allez.”
“Piper,” Lilia sighs out—everything she says is a sigh. “You exhaust me.”
Her flock flutters their yeses.
Piper claps one arm around Lilia’s shoulders and Lilia stumbles a step. “Everything exhausts you, babe,” Piper says, antifreeze-sweet. “You do too much.”
“Probably,” says Lilia. “But so do you.”
I like her a little more because of that.
Piper gives Lilia a look that says, I can’t wait until you’re over. Then she shifts back to me: “Did you fence for—what was your old school?”
“No,” I say. I don’t give anything away. In ten minutes when she’s sitting in English, she’ll get my last name from someone in my biology class and she’ll stalk me like we stalked her, but she won’t find anything. I’m invisible now.
And anyway, it’s true. I never fenced for Hillview. Never joined Latin Club or the Indian Student Association. My days and nights and weekends went to my coven: lounging across Summer’s king-sized bed, all four of us tangled together, long arms and long legs and wearing each other’s clothes, scrolling through gossip and lies. Or sitting high up in the bleachers watching Hillview boys play football or lacrosse. Or flying up the coast in Mads’s Mustang, loud music and knotting hair and restless dauntless boredom.
After-school activities are for losers with curfews.
“Then where?” Piper asks.
“France,” I say. Let her figure out I’m lying, eventually. Turn her paranoid and let everyone else decide she’s a bitch with a vendetta. They’ll side with me when I’m done with her.
“Paris?”
I stay coy. “Does it matter?”
Her beading gaze locks tighter. “I know you.”
I laugh at her.
She bristles. “I do. I know you.”
“I’m sure you don’t.” I slip a glance to the rest of them and they shift and smirk. They want her cut down almost as much as she wants to climb even higher.
“I know you,” she says again, blind to them. “I’ll remember—”
“Piper,” Lilia breathes out in a long limp rush of air. “Chill.”
“Yeah,” says one of the flock-girls. “Chill.”
That makes Piper turn. Leaning forward, so her sabre swings in front of her. She gives the flock-girl a look that’s fire and scorn, right in front of Lilia’s face while Lilia’s buried in her phone.
If Lilia wasn’t standing right there, a fragile paper peacekeeper, Piper would send that flock-girl to the guillotine this second.
“You too, sweetie,” says Piper.
Lilia looks up and Piper settles back into line. “Well,” she sighs out, and then she pauses so long her starlings almost suffocate holding their breath for her. “Jade doesn’t want to be late on her first day.”
“Maybe she does,” says Piper. And then, “Let’s wait for the boys. You know they’re going to love a girl like Jade.” Her eyes track down my body and back up again: Slut.
Exactly what I want her to think.
But she slides a look to Lilia, too, and says, “Besides, you want to see Duncan.” She turns it into a test: you’re avoiding him, aren’t you? Shitty girlfriend. Shitty queen. Count your days.
“I’ll see him at lunch,” she says. “Come on, Jade. I’ll walk you to class.”
I’m not ready to go yet. Not until I see the golden boys with their curling smiles and their crooked ties. A crosse clipped to each backpack. Ready to swing and hit and kill.
“Whatever you say, Lili,” says Piper with a smile so plastic I can’t believe Lilia swallows it without choking. “I’ll kiss Dunc for you.”
Lilia’s eyes catch mine for a second again: do. And keep him. “You’re the best,” she tells Piper, and she links her elbow with mine, bone and nerve and frozen-slow blood. “Come on, Jade—”
The boys come in.
The whole room changes. All the St Andrew’s Preppers clustering around the columns in the common hall, all the chitter-chatter energy and show-off laughter—it all goes quieter, stiller, watchful. The floors glow hot and the chandeliers flare from gold to blue-white—
earthquake weather and earthquake light—
—and there’s a tremor, but only barely. Just enough that everyone pretends they don’t notice. But they do.
The boys swing around the corner the same way the girls did. All at once and inseparable. But the girls were a flock of birds, and the boys are a pack of wolves. Their smiles are bolted into place and their teeth are so square-straight it jars.
Duncan. Duffy. Connor. Banks.
The crowd parts for them. They stalk straight toward Lilia and Piper and their girls. Next to me, Lilia freezes to stone.
“Duff!” Piper squeals, and the flock prisses, and the boys yell louder than they need to.
Duncan shoves Duffy. “Still haven’t taught her how to shut up yet, huh, Duff?”