“Regardless of why you did it, or whether it’s a good idea, it’s still funny. I can just imagine Calix’s stupid face all squinched up with rage. How dare the poorest girl in school stand up to him and his ultrarich friends?” Luke rolls her brown eyes and stands up, stretching her arms above her head. Despite her preference for pants—shorts, actually, even in winter—the school forces Luke to wear the girl’s uniform, complete with pleated wool skirt. “Well, are you going to sit here and sulk all day? Or are you going to stride in those doors like you own the place? I mean, you started the day off with a bang. Don’t disappoint me, Karma.”
Luke pulls out a grotesque, goblin-esque mask with a hooked nose from inside her book bag, sliding it over her face, and then grinning at me. The effect is eerie as hell, especially with the fall leaves whispering in the cool breeze all around us.
“God, this town is weird,” April murmurs, resting one hand on her swollen belly and looking between me and Luke as I pull my own mask from my bag, studying the glittering black tree antlers that protrude from the top. “And this whole Devils’ Day thing is even weirder. Do you just get used to it after a while or something?”
“You never quite get used to it,” I say, slipping the mask over my face. “You just try to survive.”
I’m just one devil among many, situated in the back row of my first period French class. There isn’t a student on campus that isn’t wearing a mask—not a single member of faculty either. No, we take our Devils’ Day celebrations seriously here.
“How do you say you’re going to burn in hell, bitch, in French?” Raz asks, leaning forward and planting an elbow on his desk. He cups his handsome face in the palm of his hand as the fourth member of Calix’s rotten little crew—a girl named Sonja—sneers at me from beneath her red leather mask. They’re all wearing matching masks—Calix, Raz, Barron, and Sonja. The only difference is that Calix’s mask is black while the others all wear bloodred, complete with horns wrapped in dark ribbons, their wicked mouths the only part of their faces still visible.
“Tu vas brûler en enfer, salope,” I answer, before our poor French teacher—Madame Dupré—can react. It’s hard to read her facial expression behind the far-too-pretty white mask she’s wearing. If the whole purpose of Devils’ Day is to confuse the dark spirits, Mrs. Dupré has clearly missed the point. “You might also say va te faire foutre Raz, sale queutard contaminé.”
“Mademoiselle Sartain! Monsieur Loveren!” Mrs. Dupré chokes out, but as horrified as she is, that’s nothing compared to the dark gleam in Raz’s red eyes as he narrows them at me. He might not know what I’ve just said, but Sonja does. Get fucked, Raz, you diseased slag. As I watch, she leans over and whispers in his ear. For years, we’ve been trading insults, bone-deep thrusts of verbal swords that sever bits of the soul. But in the last year, Raz has really amped up his game; I’m almost afraid of him now.
The way his mouth twists to one side makes my stomach roil with nausea. His eyes shine like rubies behind the mask, as red as the blood on my steering wheel.
“Oh, you’re going to regret that later,” he purrs as Mrs. Dupré writes us both up and resumes the lesson, her thin lips pinched just a little tighter beneath her fluffy white mask.
I stare Raz down because Luke is right: I already started this morning off on the wrong foot with Calix and his minions, so why not go all the way? Sonja smirks at me, her lips as red as her mask, before the bell rings and both she and Raz rise to their feet and disappear out the door together.
The way he looks over his shoulder at me, I know I better be prepared.
Their Devils’ Day tricks are legendary, and I’m prepared to be on the receiving end of all of them.
The walls of the school are plastered with posters advertising a lock-in for teens at one of the local churches—and trust me, there are many out here, in every possible faith. This one’s being held at Thorncrown Chapel, a tourist destination with exterior glass walls that proclaims it’s open to all people. Starting at seven tonight, they’ll lock the doors and have a chaperone-filled evening of sober fun inside their glass house of worship.
Hah.
Every student at Crescent Prep knows where the real party’s being held: in the middle of the fucking woods, at a spring known as Devils’ Den. There’s a cave there that leads deep into the earth, to a beautiful trickling stream and bottomless pool that, inevitably, will be filled with drunk, naked teens before the end of the night. Last year, right before the climax of the party, Calix approached me at the edge of the spring and said he wanted to talk.
Like an idiot, I believed him.
That’s how I ended up losing my virginity, in one of the off-season treehouses nearby.
Gritting my teeth, I walk past his little group and ignore their stares, eerie behind the leather of their masks. Today, I’m wearing two masks: the one on my face, and the one that is my face. I can never be my true self within these walls, not without risking everything. And it’s not just Calix and his friends who make my life miserable: it’s everyone. This entire school is filled with monsters—monsters with trust funds and credit cards and malice scribed into their wicked, black hearts.
“Tu vas avoir des problèmes toi ce soir, Karma,” Calix whispers as I pass, his dark eyes flinty. I ignore him, but his words follow me down the hall like an arctic breeze: you’re in for a load of trouble tonight. Thankfully, I manage to get past the Knight Crew without showing my unease, but as soon as I round the corner, my shoulders slump, and I swipe a sweaty, trembling hand down my face.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Luke says, the goblin mask turning her pixie-like face underneath into something truly grotesque. Since freshman year, Luke’s gone out of her way to find the creepiest, ugliest mask in town.
“Worse: the Knight Crew,” I say, licking my lips and glancing over my shoulder as they come around the corner in a group, dressed in the white and purple of the academy uniform, the Crescent Prep logo stitched in silver across their breast pockets. It’s a crescent moon, tilted slightly to the left, skewered with a crossed knife and rod, backed by stars. It’s been the same logo for over a hundred years, when the official motto of the school was spare the rod, spoil the child. Goddess only knows what the knife represented.
Luke grabs my arm and drags me into the classroom, moving into the corner to sit by April while the Knight Crew takes their seats in the front row. Sonja glances over her shoulder, making eye contact with Luke. The two of them have been playing some bizarre cat and mouse game for years.
“Don’t encourage her to look this way,” I grumble, crossing my arms over my chest and knowing that I can’t fault Luke for having a crush on Sonja when I’ve had a crush on each of the other members of the Knight Crew at some point over the last three years. This year, senior year, it has to be different. I’ve only got nine months left, and I’m out of this nightmare forever. I’ll move somewhere big, coastal, someplace where my purple hair and Luke’s Pansexual Goddess t-shirts and April with her baby don’t make people hate us.
“Why not?” Luke asks, dark brown eyes studying Sonja’s bloodred hair and matching mask with interest. “You let Calix trick you into bed last year. Why can’t I let Sonja trick me into the same thing?” My mouth tightens as I turn a glare on Luke, the ugly words I want to say dying on my lips before I can spout them. She’s right: I did let Calix trick me into bed, even when I knew his words were a lie, his intentions rotten, his love a trick.