Beau clamped his lips together. “Nothing.”
Ugh. Spencer turned back around and pushed up the sleeves of her Rosewood Day blazer. Beau had moved here from Los Angeles, and with his high cheekbones, longish dark hair, intentional bad-boy scruff, and beat-up Indian motorcycle, he’d quickly become the It Boy of Honors Drama. To every girl except Spencer, that is. Last month, when all the early college acceptances rolled in, he’d casually mentioned that he’d gotten into Yale’s drama program. If “casually mentioning” was pompously talking about it Every. Single. Day. The Yale reference especially stung today, now that Spencer’s future was so precarious.
“All right.” Pierre tapped his pen against his script, and Spencer jumped. “Let’s take it from the start of the scene. Doctor? Gentlewoman?” He looked at Mike Montgomery and Colleen Lowry, who were in the scene, too. “You’re watching Lady M’s predicament from the sidelines. And . . . action!”
Mike, playing Lady Macbeth’s doctor, turned to Colleen, Lady Macbeth’s maid, and asked how long it had been since Lady Macbeth first walked in her sleep. Colleen answered that apparently Lady Macbeth got up in the middle of the night, wrote something on a piece of paper, then sealed up the secrets tight.
Then Pierre motioned to Spencer, and she stumbled into the scene and started feverishly rubbing her hands. “Yes, here’s the spot,” she said passionately, trying to sound like a madwoman who was wracked with guilt for killing the king.
“Hark, she speaks!” Mike recited.
“Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” Spencer bellowed. She glanced down at the script and said a few more lines. When she got to the part about how she could still smell the king’s blood on her skin, Pierre let out a long sigh.
“Cut!” he yelled. “I need more emotion from you, Spencer. More guilt. All of your evil deeds are catching up to you, making you have nightmares and see blood on your hands. Try to picture what it really feels like to murder someone.”
You don’t know the half of it, Spencer thought with a shiver, instantly thinking of Tabitha. What if the Princeton admissions board somehow got wind of that? What if A told them? She winced and shut her eyes as the scene continued.
“Spencer?” Pierre prompted.
Spencer blinked. A few lines had gone by that she’d completely missed, and now the director was staring at her. “Um, sorry, where were we?”
Pierre looked annoyed. “Mike, can you repeat your line?”
“This disease is beyond my practice, yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep and died holily in their beds,” Mike said.
Spencer glanced at the script. “Wash your hands, put on your nightgown . . .”
But as she was saying the words, her thoughts drifted again. What if Princeton somehow knew about what had happened with Kelsey last summer? The police said they wouldn’t put the bust on Spencer’s permanent record, but maybe Princeton had found out another way.
The summery June night when she’d first met Kelsey swirled in her mind. It had been at a bar called McGillicuddy’s on the University of Pennsylvania campus. The floors were sticky with beer, there was a Phillies game on the flat-screen, and the bartenders were lining up neon-colored shots on the counter. The room was stuffed with summer students, most of them underage. Spencer stood next to a guy named Phineas O’Connell, who sat behind her in AP Chem III.
“You’re taking four APs in six weeks?” Phineas asked her over a pint of Guinness. He was cute in a layered-haired, vintage-T-wearing, Justin-Bieber-goes-emo way. “Are you insane?”
Spencer shrugged nonchalantly, pretending she wasn’t freaked out by the brutal course load. When she’d received her end-of-year grades at Rosewood Day, she’d gotten three Bs for the year—and had slipped to twenty-seventh in the class ranking. That simply would not do. Taking—and acing—four APs was the only thing that would save her GPA and get her into an Ivy.
“I’m taking four APs, too,” said a voice.
Behind them was a petite girl with cinnamon-red hair and sparkling green eyes Spencer had seen around the Penn dorms. She wore a faded T-shirt from St. Agnes, a snotty private school near Rosewood, and a pair of oat-colored Marc Jacobs espadrille sandals that had just come out in stores. Spencer was wearing the same exact shoes, except in blue.
Spencer smiled in commiseration. “It’s nice to know someone’s as crazy as I am.”
“I think I need to clone myself to get all the work done.” The girl laughed. “And murder the girl who lives next to me. She listens to Glee songs nonstop—and sings along.” She put her finger to her temple and made a pow noise, simulating a gun.
“You don’t need to clone yourself—or switch rooms.” Phineas spun a green class ring around his finger. “If you girls are serious about acing four APs, I know something that can help.”