“Well, thanks for the tip,” she replied blithely. “I’ll make sure to keep an eye out for a wannabe loser wielding pills.”
She turned to go again and I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to, but I had to. It was blackmail time.
“You’re wrong,” I said to her. “You do need me.”
Her shoulders slumped dramatically as she turned to me once more. “Oh, really? And why’s that? Are you going to teach me all about the ins and outs of NASCAR?”
“A dig at my Middle America upbringing. How original,” I said sarcastically. I pulled the Chloé bag out from behind my book bag and dropped it on one of the small Coffee Carma tables. “Remember the disc that came with this?”
Noelle hesitated. This time I knew I had her. She had not been expecting this.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “I believe you destroyed it right in front of my face.”
I stared straight into her eyes and just prayed she wouldn’t be able to tell that what I was about to say was a complete lie.
“I made a copy. How stupid do you think I am?” I said.
Inside I knew exactly how stupid I was, but she didn’t need to know that. She studied my face, and I made sure not to blink.
“I still have it, Noelle,” I said. “I can zap that information to the entire school, to the entire Easton community—alumni and parents included—at any time. Everything there is to know about you and all my Billings sisters. Out there for all the world to read and enjoy.”
Noelle’s expression was baffled, incredulous. I had her. I so, so had her.
“Are you trying to blackmail me?” she said merrily. “That is
so
cute!”
Okay. So maybe I didn’t have her.
Her dig got right under my skin. I was losing control of this thing. Losing big time. But I wasn’t about to give up just yet.
“Let me back in Billings, Noelle,” I said under my breath. “Let me back in or I’ll do it. I’ll e-mail all the files to everyone we know.”
Noelle narrowed her brown eyes. “Go ahead,” she said. “There’s nothing on there that I’m ashamed of. And as for the others, if they have skeletons, that’s their problem. Go ahead and send it. The aftermath might actually be fun.”
“So you’re saying you’d rather have all your housemates and friends humiliated—in some cases devastated—than let me back in,” I said, disbelieving.
Noelle smiled ever so slowly, causing my heart to drop to my toes.
“Yes, Reed. That is exactly what I’m saying.”
I was getting nowhere. With Noelle, with Josh, with my schoolwork. That night I sat at a table on the first floor of the library, staring straight ahead at the spines of the books on the opposite shelf. Didn’t even try to pretend I was studying. There was no way I could concentrate.
Noelle was never going to let me back into Billings. Josh was never going to let me back into his life. And no one other than Marc would believe what I knew to be true about Ivy. I might as well just flunk out of school. What could possibly be the point of staying here anyway?
“Hi, Reed.”
Sabine slipped into the chair across from mine and glanced at my textbook. “English? Good. I’m so behind in English. Want to work together?”
I looked at her eager face, her hair pulled back in a thick French braid, and sighed. “Sure. But I need to refuel. I’m just going to go get
some chocolate.” I grabbed my wallet from my bag and stood up. “You want anything?”
“No, thanks,” Sabine said cheerily. So cheerily I was starting to wonder if she thought she could raise my mood by osmosis. So far, not working. But I applauded her effort.
I walked along the wall to the little alcove where the vending machines were housed and waited while a pock-faced boy selected his candy bar of choice. When he turned and saw me, he started visibly then slid away from me like I was on fire. I shook my head and started to feed my coins into the machine. People really were just so juvenile.
“Hello, Glass-Licker.”
Amberly Carmichael strode into the alcove and leaned one shoulder up against the vending machine, so close I could smell the minty freshness of her breath. She wore a pristine white sweater coat with a faux fur collar and that aqua blue scarf around her neck. Her blue eyes narrowed as she stared me down. Even up close, her resemblance to Ariana was enough to chill my bones.
“You don’t get to call me that,” I said through my teeth.
“Actually, I think I can call you whatever I want,” she said. “You’ve become that insignificant. It would be sad, really, if you didn’t deserve it.”
I simply stared at her. I was so stunned by her audacity, I couldn’t even begin to address it.
“Listen, Reed.” She said my name as if its four letters polluted her mouth. “I heard everything you said to Noelle this morning. You
should really work on your blackmail voice,” she said, lowering her own voice to a near whisper. “I know about the disc. And if you think for one second that I am going to let you make any of that information public, you are sorely mistaken.”
Laughter bubbled from my lips. “Oh, am I?”
A cold, angry look flashed across Amberly’s face and my heart halted. Ariana. So Ariana. “I would do anything to protect my Billings sisters.”
Even as my mind drew the disturbing comparisons between this nut job and the other, I had to laugh again. I couldn’t help it. Whatever airs she was trying to put on, whoever she was trying to morph into, this little upstart had been in Billings for a few days. I had been there for over a year. Those girls were more my sisters than they would ever be hers.
“I’m glad you think this is so hilarious,” Amberly said, putting her hands behind her back. “But I want that disc, and if you don’t get it to me by tomorrow evening, you are going to be
very
sorry.”
I could just imagine what amounted to consequences in Amberly’s world. “What’re you going to do? Throw a Build-A-Bear at my head like your little friend did to you?”
For a split second the old, wide-eyed Amberly was back. Clearly she was caught off guard by my insight into her personal life. Noelle would have been so proud of me. If she’d been at all inclined to feel for me anymore.
“Gee, Amberly, thanks for the warning,” I said, seizing my moment. “I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for flying stuffed animals.”
I started to walk away, feeling rather good about myself, but her hand shot out and grasped my arm.
“The bill,” she said, holding a yellow slip of paper up in front of my face. “For the dry cleaning.”
Bitch. Bitch, bitch, bitch.
“You can give me the money tomorrow when you give me the disc,” she said with a smirk.
She sidled out of the alcove just as Sabine walked in. Sabine looked at me, clearly sensing the thick tension in the air.
“Hi, Sabine,” Amberly said brightly as she passed her roommate by.
“Hi,” Sabine replied hesitantly. “What was that about?” she asked me the moment Amberly was gone. She glanced at the dry-cleaning slip in my hand.
“Her bill,” I said, holding it up. “For the dry cleaning.”
The thin paper trembled in my hand. I was bubbling with anger.
“No. I thought she was kidding,” Sabine said, incredulous. “You’re not going to pay it, are you?”
“Um, no,” I replied, crumpling the receipt and shoving it into the pocket of my jeans. “I really don’t like that girl.”
“Join the club,” Sabine said, slipping by me to feed some cash into the candy machine. “I decided I needed some chocolate after all. What do you want?”
“Nothing, thanks,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’m good.”
Chocolate was no longer needed. The adrenaline rush should keep me going for at least an hour. And if I never saw mini Ariana again, it would be way too soon.
I trudged back to my room later that night, my body weary, my eyes at half-mast. I had stayed at the library far longer than I had intended, and I could still feel the hard, uncomfortable library chair pressing into the small of my back. My brain hurt from the number of literary characters and motives and plots Sabine and I had re-crammed in there, and my fingers had atrophied from taking notes. The good news was, I was so tired, I would probably pass out in about five minutes. There would be no lying awake staring at the ceiling and letting the cold, suffocating blanket of loneliness overcome me. No obsessing about my tiny single and everything it represented. No fretting about pills and X’d-out photos and other morbid gifties.
But then, in the dimly lit, carpeted Pemberly hallway, about five steps away from my room, a familiar scent tingled my nostrils. I froze. My heart seized with fear and I tried to breathe through my mouth, but it was no good. The smell was so strong I could taste it.
Cheyenne’s perfume. The sickly sweet floral scent of Fleur. It filled my senses. Someone had sprayed it all over the hall.
No. No, not again. Not again. Of all the presents my stalker had left me, this was always the most haunting, the most visceral, the most . . . Cheyenne.
I stared at the closed door of my room. Someone on the floor was listening to Bach at top volume. My head started to pound along with the racing tempo.
Run. Just run. Don’t go in there. Nothing good can come of going in there.
But where else did I have to go?
Trembling from head to foot, I stepped over to my door. Placed my hand around the cold doorknob. I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer. That I was just imagining things. That my room would be exactly as I had left it. And then I pushed the door open and flipped the light on in one quick motion.
One look at what lay before me and I staggered backward. My vision blurred and I had to brace my hands on my knees to keep from buckling over.
“No.” The word escaped my lips. “No, no, no.”
Somewhere on the floor a door slammed. Startled, I clung to the cold metal of the doorjamb and pressed my hot face against it, my eyes wildly scanning my room. Why was this happening to me? Why?
My bed had been stripped, the comforter balled up on the floor, the pillows uncased and tossed at the foot of the bed. The sheets trailed across the floor. Crushed into the throw rug in the center
of the room—the brand-new, cheery throw rug Sabine had given me—were dozens and dozens of blush beads. Pink and brown powder everywhere.
I started to hyperventilate, breathing in the scent of Cheyenne’s perfume until it started to poison my brain. Cheyenne. She had done this to me that first day of chores last year. That day I had been woken from my bed in Billings and forced to do whatever the residents asked of me. Cheyenne had told me she liked her pillows fluffed, her sheets tight. And when I had talked back to her, she had crushed an entire pot of blush beads into her white and green flowered rug. She’d demanded I clean it up.
Suddenly, my dinner decided to make a reappearance. I turned away from my room and fled for the bathroom. I dropped my book bag in the hallway and clawed off my coat. My knees hit the hard tile in the first stall just in time. Everything I had eaten in the past five hours came right back up. Tears streamed from my eyes as I retched. Luckily the bathroom was empty. Thank goodness for small favors.
Finally, I sat back on my butt and flushed the toilet. I wiped my hand across my mouth and nose and dried my tears, shaking uncontrollably. My temples were pounding, my vision blurred.
My stalker had sunk to a new low. That had been one of the worst mornings of my life, and my first real introduction to Cheyenne. Seeing those blush beads brought her back to me more vividly than any of the other pranks and plants I had endured—even more than the perfume. Whoever was doing this really was trying to drive me crazy.
And maybe they were succeeding. A girl could only take so much.
I pressed my palms into the cool tile at my sides and pushed myself up. I cleared my throat as I stepped tentatively from the stall and around the partial wall that separated the toilets from the sinks and showers. There I found out I was not, in fact, alone. Ivy stood at one of the sinks, smiling happily at me.
“Okay,
that
was disgusting,” she said to me, shouldering her bag. “Bulimia is
so
last century, Reed. Next time you want to toss your cookies, do it in the privacy of your own room. That’s what plastic trash cans are for.”
Then she turned and sailed out of the room, her nose in the air. I stared at myself in the mirror above the sink, my eyes rimmed in red, my nose all puffed up. And just like that I felt another wave of nausea. Because Ivy could not have pulled off this particular prank. She hadn’t even been here last year. There was no way she could have known about my first chore day. No way she could have known what Cheyenne had done to me. I gripped the sides of the sink and stared into my own terrified eyes.
All this time I had been so sure that it was Ivy. But the only people who knew about what had happened that morning were Billings Girls.
After scrubbing the rug in the sink, remaking the bed, and cracking open my window to clear the smell (which took all my strength and about twenty minutes of struggling against years of paint buildup), I finally crawled into bed. Then I lay there wide awake, shivering against the cold streaming through the screen, petrified to close my eyes.
If not Ivy, then who? If not Ivy, then
who
? Who would want to torture me like this? I had plenty of enemies now, sure, but when all of this had started, there’d been no one. No one but Ivy, who hated everyone in Billings. Or Ariana, of course, but she was locked up somewhere. If it wasn’t Ivy, then I was at a loss. If it wasn’t her, then it could be anyone.
If only I could talk to Noelle. She would know what to do. She would know exactly how to sniff out my stalker, how to catch the person in the act or smoke them out or
something
. At the very least she could
talk me down. Make me feel better about the situation. Make me feel above it all. Make me feel safe.
But that was never going to happen. Noelle was never going to forgive me. I was on my own.
As I stared at the swirls in the crumbly stucco ceiling, a thousand thoughts whirled in my head, but one kept squirming its way to the forefront.