A blade in his face, his chest, his throat. Glorious, beautiful, exquisite.
I wanted to push my thumbs into my temples. The other girls were all staring at me, waiting expectantly. “What are you all waiting for?” I pushed the words out slowly and deliberately. “Are you all warmed up? Because it doesn’t look like it. Ten laps around the court. This isn’t the freaking chess club, ladies.” I clapped twice and the noise felt like something snapping inside me, but it got the squad moving.
Fifteen ponytails took off around the baseline. I excused myself into the locker room where I made a beeline for the farthest bathroom stall. I dropped my gym bag onto the tile beside me and collapsed onto my knees.
My breaths were coming in great, heaving puffs that blew my cheeks out and sucked them in tight.
Coughs of crimson. Deep maroon that oozed from holes that shouldn’t exist. Torn shirt, torn skin, torn face. The smell of iron. Hot and pleasant like bathwater.
I thrust my head over the toilet and vomited the contents of my stomach into the bowl. Mouth still dripping, I retched again. Yellow mucus ran from my nostrils.
From outside the stall came the sound of footsteps. “Cass?” It was Ava.
I turned and lowered my backside onto the cool tile and leaned my back against the stall. “Yeah?” I tried to force my voice into a normal octave.
“Are you coming back out?” She sounded like she felt awkward asking. “We finished our laps a few minutes ago.”
My hands were shaking. My stomach was still spasming. “Uh-huh,” I said. “I’ll be right there. Why don’t you lead them in the first cheer?” I knew she’d take this as a compliment. Honestly, I meant it as one.
“Okay.” I didn’t hear feet shuffling away. “Are you sure you’re all right in there?”
I closed my eyes and felt for the zipper on my gym bag. I pulled it open and started rummaging. My fingers found what they were looking for. I retrieved one of the plastic baggies I’d stashed. It contained only one pill. “Yep, don’t worry,” I said, emptying the drop of Sunshine out into my hand. “I’ll be fine.”
TWELVE
Marcy
I’ve always heard that if you want to bring the hurt, you’ve got to hit them where they live.
Unfortunately for the “them” in question, I happened to take things very literally.
I checked the time on my watch as I slipped through the door to Graves Hall on the tail of a legitimate student with a key card. Lena followed closely after.
I had the urge to sniff the air. Like a bloodhound. I was that close. My skin tingled with it. A step through the door and I had landed on Mick’s former turf. The blood in my veins began coursing, pushing the valves of my heart to work overtime.
Short One. That was what I’d called him, the one who’d watched through the lens of his video camera.
He wouldn’t be watching anymore. He wouldn’t be doing anything. A pleasant warmth rose in my gut at the unintentionally conjured memory.
But the dozens of campus activity flyers plastered to the walls of the dormitory snapped me back. If Short One had watched, that meant someone else could, too. The recollection of the blinking red light taunted me.
A recording. A vestige of the night.
That would never do.
A girl, not much older than me, sat on a rolling chair with her feet propped up on a half-moon desk. She looked up from her copy of Vogue and gave us a distracted smile before returning to the glossy photographs in the magazine.
I moved without hesitating toward one of the hallways on the first floor, searching for a flight of stairs.
“What if someone recognizes us?” Lena’s breath was hot on my neck.
“I thought I told you to be quiet,” I replied through gritted teeth. I lifted my gaze to peer up the stairwell. “And there should be no ‘us.’ I asked for the dorm number; I didn’t ask you to come along.”
As far as I was concerned, an extra body was an extra liability and an extra witness, neither of which were items I’d included on my revenge registry.
My boots pounded the steps. Lena trotted after me. With her purple fishnet stockings under a black moto skirt, not drawing attention seemed too much to hope for. “You need me,” she said. “Besides, it’s only fair considering I did the bulk of the work.”
I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t some kind of game. And that I didn’t need anyone, especially not a high school girl with a hero-worshipping complex. “You can be the lookout. But that’s it.”
I found the stairwell. Room 255. That was the number Lena had gotten when she’d called the school asking how to send a care package to her cool collegiate cousin, Mick Holcolm. At least she was proving useful for something. I wondered if she’d feel as cooperative if she knew that her pretend collegiate cousin Mick was dead.