Very Bad Things
Authors: Susan McBride
A
LSO BY
S
USAN
M
C
B
RIDE
The Debs
Love, Lies, and Texas Dips
The Truth About Love and Lightning
Little Black Dress
The Cougar Club
The Debutante Dropout Mysteries
Blue Blood
The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club
Night of the Living Deb
Too Pretty to Die
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2014 by Susan McBride
Jacket art copyright © 2014 by Dean Turpin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McBride, Susan.
Very bad things / Susan McBride. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “When a photo of Katie’s popular boyfriend Mark having drunken sex with a tattooed girl at a party goes viral at their exclusive boarding school, Katie is devastated. Mark swears that he doesn’t remember anything. But Rose, the girl in the photo, is missing—and Katie receives a gruesome present in the mail: a badly wrapped severed hand with a red rose tattoo”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-385-73797-5 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-385-90704-0
(glb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-385-37102-5 (ebook : alk. paper)
[1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Boarding schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M478276Ve 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013021675
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
To Christina
,
for all the pep talks while I wrote
(and rewrote) this book—
you’re the best cheerleader ever!
SECRETS ARE GENERALLY TERRIBLE.
BEAUTY IS NOT HIDDEN—
ONLY UGLINESS AND DEFORMITY.
—L. M. MONTGOMERY
“I
had the same dream again last night, the one where I wake up and someone’s standing over me. I can feel him there. And I can hear him breathing. He says my name in this creepy whisper.”
“
Him?
Could you see a face?” Dr. Capello asked, watching Katie from beneath a fringe of dark bangs.
“No,” Katie said. “Only shadows.”
Dr. Capello made a soft
hmm
sound. “Sometimes dreams about being watched mean we’re feeling scrutinized or judged.”
“I guess so.” Katie shifted in her seat. She did worry a lot: about graduation, about her mom alone in St. Louis, about being with Mark. Maybe Mark most all. Not everyone was as happy as she was that they were together.
“Are you feeling threatened?”
She shrugged, though the question made her uneasy. “Not really.”
The boarding school’s consulting psychiatrist leaned forward, arms on her knees. “Is there anything else you remember about the dream? Any details?”
“Just that I can’t move. I want to get up, but I’m paralyzed. I try to call out, but I have no voice. And then I smell it.”
“What?” Dr. Capello’s chair creaked.
“Roses,” Katie said, and exhaled slowly. “It’s always roses, and something else kind of rank. My heart’s racing when I wake up, and I’m gasping for air, like I’ve been underwater too long.”
“But no one’s there, right? You take back control, reassuring yourself that it’s only a nightmare.”
“No one’s there.” Katie met Dr. Capello’s eyes. “It’s just me. But I have a hard time going back to sleep. I smell the roses even afterward, like it wasn’t a dream at all. Like it was real.”
“ ‘T
he moon is distant from the sea, and yet with amber hands, she leads him, docile as a boy, along appointed sands.…’ ”
Katie Barton stopped. “C’mon,
think
,” she told herself. She had to recite the Emily Dickinson poem for a lit class the next morning. It was almost midnight, and she was having a hard time staying awake. Her brain felt like mush. She wished she’d smuggled in some coffee, even if it was the rank stuff from the cafeteria. Trying hard to focus, she squinted at the sputtering light over the metal desk, buried in the midst of the library’s upper stacks.