All You Never Wanted

Tighter

Where I Want to Be

Sons of Liberty

Picture the Dead

The Julian Game

Tighter

Picture the Dead

Where I Want to Be

She gets into the car and then she can’t drive it. Can’t even start the engine for the gift of the air conditioner. She is a living corpse roasting in sun-warmed leather. She can hear the quick death march of her heart. Her cell phone is slick in her hand; at any moment it might squeak from her grasp like a bar of soap. She needs to make one phone call, and she wishes she could make it into her past. Into last year. Or two years ago.

The houses are brick or stone fortresses guarded by holly and boxwood. Not to shut out the neighbors but to discourage them. It works. Alex realizes that she’s never spoken with anyone from Round Hill Manor Estates. Not the people on either side of Camelot. Nor the people behind the hedges across the road.

In an emergency—short of screaming—she wouldn’t know how to get hold of a single soul.

She feels like screaming now.

This story is nasty and everyone is spellbound and that’s power. They’re all hooked and I’m in focus, I’m mixing up this thing like I’m the smoothest bartender in the newest club for people who’ve all decided at this moment I’m one of them. And if there’s guilt down my spine, it’s nothing like the heat on my skin as I raise my voice to land it. Lies take nerve, which I’m working on. But nobody needs to know that.

“Don’t quote me, but it took Gavin a week to cut the bubble gum out of his pubes.” I paused. “Watermelon-flavored.”

A moment. My breath held and a drum of blood in my ears. Oh, come on. Please believe it. It’s way more fun to believe in it.

And then. Release. The table flooded over in laughter.

“Thea! Gross! That is so, so wrong!” The McBride twins were both buzzed on my words. Half-mast eyes while their minds writhed, thinking about who they should text or tell, and so what if my story wasn’t one hundred percent or even ten percent true?

There are icky things people don’t want to hear, like maybe if you peel some dead skin off the side of your toe and eat it. Nobody wants to know that. Then there’s a Nasty that people love. And I’m good for that. I can bring that—even if it half scares me. There’s a reward for the risk. Now all Emma—or was that her twin, Ali?—had to do was shift her chair so I could put down my tray.

The Figure Eight was made from two pushed-together round
tables in the cafeteria, where the McBrides sat at opposite ends like Cloned Queens of Disdain. And if it was too crowded, which it always was, you squeezed for exceptions, right? Except that with every ticking second, I could feel my alter ego, the girl I called Gia, curling up and smoking off into nothing as my real self touched down. Gia was my Topshop mannequin muse. Which sounds ridiculous, I know. A plastic muse. But there was something about her. Even when we’d stripped her naked or tarted her up in some cheap knockoff trend, Gia somehow held on to her value. She was made from style and indifference.

She was the girl I wanted to be. Could be, with practice.

The verdict on my bubble gum story would come from a McBride. Who both were studying me like we hadn’t all grown up together. Hadn’t done bus rides and field hockey and detention since middle school together.

Maybe they were remembering bookworm Thea. Maybe they’d forgotten that I’d already sat at the Figure Eight a handful of times this year.

Give it up, McBrides. Give me a seat and I’ll invite you all to my house on Saturday night.

Give it to me and I’ll never give it up.

Maybe they did know this. Maybe that was why they were hesitating?

“Theodora Parrott?”

I whipped around and almost bumped against Mr. Quigley, school secretary–slash–walking fossil, standing way too close. Had he overheard me? No way. Q was 186 years old and deaf as a worm. But my defenses zipped to attention. Whatever I’d done, I didn’t need the blue slip.

“The front office wants you,” wheezed Q. “Outside line. It’s your sister.”

At the mention of my sister, everyone got sober. And now my chance to sit was officially shot. All eyes were on me—everyone was looking for my worry. I shoved my lunch tray at Q’s sternum. A little hard, for the joke. “Um, then, can you deal with this? Thanks.”

“Oh!” As he jumped back, his knobbed fingers reflexively took the sides of the tray. I spun off, loose and free. Style and indifference. Thankful for the easy laughter in my wake, and hopeful that nobody would talk too much about Alex behind my back.

Insufferable
. Last week, Mom called Alex that. For missing school, which is Al’s new talent. Except
insufferable
means nothing, since we all had to keep right on suffering Alex no matter what she did.