Piper laughs on demand. Fake, but they don’t care.
Jesus, Duff, Duncan said on Friday, shut the bitch up—
My skin fires so hot Lilia thaws.
“Come on, Jade,” she says, the third time now, and out of nowhere she’s stronger than Piper and dragging me off to the left, through a vaulted entryway, into an empty hall. Shoving all her featherweight nothing against a door and pulling me after her.
The door claps shut.
She locks it.
We’re alone in a girls’ room with a slanting ceiling and a too-big mirror, magnified, so we can see our flaws up close.
She still has my hand. Our arms are pressed together, inside-wrist to inside-wrist. Her pulse flutters too fast. We watch us in the mirror.
Then: “God,” she says. “God damn.”
“What the hell?” I say, because new-girl Jade doesn’t know anything.
She says it again, louder, and then she frays into a high uneven laugh that lasts too long.
this bitch almost makes me miss Lilia’s starfish shit, said Duncan on Friday night.
give her a minute, said Banks, she’ll be gone—
“God!” says Lilia, and she cuts off her laugh and pulls her hand out of mine. Her palm drips thin blood. I’ve cut three claw-marks into her skin.
We both look back into the mirror. The blood runs down her hands. Each streak takes one finger: index, middle, ring. Her eyes measure the silence.
I smile my St Andrew’s smile and say, “Stigmata.”
She scatters into giggling gasps again. “Jade.”
I take her wrist and pull her to the sink. Three red drops bead up on her fingertips and fall all in a row onto the porcelain.
“Pretty,” Lilia breathes, so soft she’s mostly thinking it.
“What the hell?” I say again.
“Just—” she starts, and then she goes quiet for a second. “I’m alive, that’s all.”
I spin the faucet handles and they screech. The three drops wash away and my hand guides Lilia’s under the water.
She finds me in the mirror again and says, “We’re alive.”
“Lilia,” I say, “you’re fucking crazy.”
Her fingers twine into mine, wet and cold. “So are you.”
I don’t tell her she’s wrong.
Her eyes drift wider and float and focus sharp at last. She says, “I can tell.”
Reunion
“You chose the perfect boy,” says Summer, after school.
“Too perfect,” says Jenny.
“The perfect target,” says Mads.
We’re standing against the south wall of St Andrew’s, shadowed in a stone alcove, looking down the golf-course-grass slope to the field. Dark sunglasses and internet intel. “I know,” I say.
“But like, really,” Summer tells me, scrolling. “He’s totally spotless, reputation-wise.”
Jenny wrinkles her nose. “You’re doing him a favor, getting him to kill all his friends. He’s boring as fuck right now.”
“Not boring,” says Summer. “Honorable.”
The rest of us laugh. Jenny says, “God, Summer, you’re such a romantic.”
“He is,” says Summer. “He’s the least asshole boy on the whole team.”
Jenny runs her tongue over her teeth. “The whole team roofies girls.”
“I’m just saying, if everyone he knows does this shit, if they’ve been doing this shit since before it was even them, and it’s just—the way things are, but he doesn’t, he won’t—”
“It’s not a fucking cult.”
Summer’s eyebrows arch. “Close enough, don’t you think?”
“No,” says Jenny with a little scoff.
“Look.” Summer holds her phone out to us. She has a whole album saved already, the grid filling up the screen: GOLDEN BOYS. She clicks on a post: Duncan and Duffy and Connor and Banks at a party, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, a liquor bottle gleaming in Duncan’s hand. Duffy’s caption says, To the nights we won’t remember. Connor’s comment, right below, says, we will, she won’t. It’s not from Friday; it’s not even from this year.
“Okay, fine, so call it a cult,” Jenny says, nudging against Summer. “And our boy still rolls with them.”
“He doesn’t do what they do.” Summer scrolls and scrolls, past Duncan and Duffy and Connor and Banks, past Duncan’s little brother who mixed the drinks on Friday night, past boys from last year and the year before, off studying prelaw and economics now. All slinging comments and collecting hearts on every post. “He won’t. He’ll never really be one of them.”
“He doesn’t stop them, either,” says Jenny. “Very fucking honorable.”
A breeze curls around us in the shadows, hot pavement and freeway exhaust. “He wants to be honorable, but not as much as he wants approval,” says Mads, staring down at the painted-green field. “He’ll sell out enough to stay in with them, but he can still pretend he’s innocent.”
The first few St Andrew’s Preppers are winding down the path to the bleachers. The away team bus pulls up: tinted windows, shiny red-white-blue paint, VIKINGS blazing along the side. “He’ll sell out to take Duncan’s place,” I say. “He’s ambitious.”
“He’s weak,” says Jenny, and she steals Summer’s phone, and Summer lets her.
“Both,” says Summer. “Once Jade gets in his head, he’ll do anything she tells him to do.”
I’m smiling too wide but I don’t care.
“Jade has an eye,” says Mads. “She could see all that just from the picture. Before we spent all weekend digging up their secrets.”
My smile stretches wider.
Jenny laughs into whatever golden-boy portrait she’s flipping past. “God, I love it.”
“Just,” says Summer, “are you sure?” She’s lip-biting the way she does whenever she’s worried about something.
“That’s cute,” says Jenny, and her eyes linger on Summer’s until Summer does a movie-perfect blush. “Cute that you feel so bad for this asshole and not for all those boys you’ve black-widowed.”
Summer still blushes. “That was different.”
“Damn straight it was different. You were just bored. Jade’s crusading.”
“I know the boys I ruin,” says Summer.
“And I know the boys I’m about to ruin,” I say. Lilia’s name lights up on my screen: Meeting at the field in five, see you there?
“Not him,” says Summer.
Mads finally looks away from the field. “If Jade says he’s a target, he’s a target.”
I leave Lilia on read and face them, all three of them, against the gray stone. “He’s a target,” I say.
Mack, the honorable sellout. Strong—and ambitious—and brave—
—but still so fucking weak it turns my stomach.
“Are you in?” I ask even though I don’t need to.
“Yes,” says Jenny.
“Yes,” says Summer.
“Yes,” says Mads.