Vengeance

  SHELVED

  “If you have to study, you can go,” I told Josh as we hurried up the marble steps inside Hell Hall, which was the not-so-affectionate nickname the students of Easton had for Hull Hall, where all the teachers kept their offices. Behind closed doors, phones rang, keyboards clacked, and muffled conversations were carried on. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “Didn’t sound like nothing,” Josh said, jogging behind me. “I can spare a few minutes.”

  I looked over my shoulder at him with a grateful smile. “Thanks.”

  Just then, someone came around the corner on the stairwell and slammed into my shoulder, hard. Missy Thurber, former Billings Girl and class-A bitch, was coming down the stairs and didn’t even bother to mutter an apology.

  “Ow! Don’t worry! I’ll just get out of your way!” I called after her sarcastically.

  She paused on the landing below and shot me a serious and silent look of death. One that actually sent a chill through my heart. Then she kept right on walking.

  “Wow. What’s her problem?” Josh asked as we started up the steps again.

  I cleared my throat, my stomach feeling suddenly queasy. Missy hadn’t spoken to me once in the three months since my birthday, when Mrs. Kane held us all hostage, but it didn’t bother me. Everyone dealt with having their lives endangered in a different way, and it wasn’t as if we’d ever been real friends. But I’d never thought I could feel threatened by her. Until now.

  “I don’t know,” I said warily.

  Josh and I both paused. We’d just arrived at the top floor and could hear angry voices coming from the back office. From Headmaster Hathaway’s office.

  “. . . why you can’t do something about it!”

  “Contrary to popular belief, Sawyer, I’m not all-powerful.”

  “I don’t even understand why we’re talking about this. This whole thing is completely stupid.”

  “Was that Graham?” I whispered to Josh.

  He nodded. “And Sawyer.”

  We hesitated at the threshold of the outer office—the one usually occupied by Headmaster Hathaway’s assistant. Right now the large, airy waiting area was empty, the computer screen atop the wide oak desk blank, the rolling chair tucked in.

  “What should we do?” I asked Josh.

  “I say we knock before they find us out here frozen like a couple of eavesdroppers,” he replied.

  “Good plan.”

  We crossed the room and Josh banged loudly on the door. Instantly the voices fell silent. The door swung open and the Headmaster stood there, his light green tie slightly loosened. He wore no jacket, and his expression was both frazzled and impatient.

  “Hello, Miss Brennan,” he said to me. Then his eyes flicked dismissively to Josh. “Mr. Hollis.”

  Graham shoved past his father, shot Josh a look that was obviously meant to kill, and kept walking without a word. There was no love lost between Graham and Josh. A couple of years earlier, Josh had dated and broken up with Graham’s twin sister, Jen, who had tragically taken her own life soon afterward. Graham held some kind of grudge against Josh over the whole thing, and from the way Mr. Hathaway was coldly staring Josh down, I wondered if he did too.

  “Sawyer, Josh,” Mr. Hathaway said, folding his arms over his chest. “If you would kindly excuse us.”

  Sawyer, who had become one of my best friends over the past few months, ducked his head so that his blond hair fell over his eyes, and slipped past his dad. As he walked by me, he mouthed the words, “I tried.” And then he was gone. A skittering sense of foreboding shot right through me.

  “I’ll wait for you downstairs,” Josh whispered.

  Then he shut the door behind him, and I found myself alone with the headmaster. His office was bright and sunny, the large windows thrown open to let in the fresh spring air. The heavy curtains billowed, then slapped against the molding as the wind died down. Mr. Hathaway gestured at the chair across from his desk, and I sat. He sighed, shoved his hands through his light brown hair, and lowered himself down in the seat across from mine. As he laced his fingers together atop his leather desk blotter, I realized that, for the first time since I’d know him, he looked slightly older than his forty-some-odd years.

  “I’m truly sorry to have to tell you this, Reed, but it looks like the ribbon-cutting ceremony you were expecting to have this weekend will have to be postponed,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. “Indefinitely.”

  My heart dropped all the way through the floor, probably landing somewhere near Josh’s feet four stories below. No. No, no, no, no, no. Hundreds of alumnae were flying in for this event from all over the world. I had alerted the press. I had hired a caterer and ordered fifty bottles of seriously expensive champagne. I’d laid out all that cash for the cocktail party on Saturday night, for the hotel rooms, for the Sunday morning brunch. If I called it off now, I was going to look like a clueless little kid. And the new Billings would be pegged as a failure before the first stone was laid.

  “Why?” was all I could manage to say.

  “Unfortunately, it seems that the plans you submitted are not up to code,” the headmaster said, looking me in the eye. “There’s a new green initiative in the county, and unless the plans are changed significantly, the zoning board is going to kill the project entirely.”

  My fingers curled around the leather armrests on my chair. “What? But the town approved the plans,” I said, my voice pitching itself up in a panic.

  “I know, but now someone has submitted them to the county,” he said slowly, as if speaking to a chimpanzee.

  “Who?” I said. “Why?”

  I kind of sounded like a chimpanzee, actually. I cleared my throat and tried to get my thoughts in order, but none of this made sense and all I could think was that this wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair. At that moment my phone rang, and I felt like I was going to explode out of my skin. I reached into my bag and pressed down on the ignore button as hard as I could. Janice Winthrop wasn’t going to care much about which suite she was booked in when she found out there was no longer an event to attend.

  “I don’t know,” the headmaster said. He tugged a piece of paper toward him and tilted it up to read. “But apparently the plans need to include the following: fifty percent sustainable materials; energy-efficient lighting, heating, and plumbing; and a solar panel to help ease the carbon footprint. Which, apparently, will at least get us a tax break from the state.”

  “Oh my God.” I slumped back in my chair and my fingers automatically fluttered up to touch the locket. The current plans for the new Billings did include some green materials and plans for energy-efficient appliances and light fixtures, but I didn’t recall anything about heating and plumbing, and no one had ever mentioned a solar panel. “What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Brennan,” he said. He tugged out another copy of the letter from the county and handed it to me. “But considering all the difficulties we’ve had on campus lately, I can’t go up against the county right now. So until you figure this out with your design team, the Billings project is officially shelved.”

  THE NEW MISSY

  “I don’t get it,” Constance Talbot said. Sun shone through the skylight at the center of the Easton dining hall, turning her red hair golden. “Who could have sent the plans to the county? We’re the only ones who have seen them.”

  Around the table, my Billings friends wore varying expressions of concern, suspicion, and disappointment. Normally we took up two tables in the cafeteria, but for the moment, every last one of us was gathered around one table, and they were all leaning in over one another so they could hear my story. Even London Simmons and Shelby Wordsworth were there. After the insanity that had occurred on my birthday, we had all voted and decided to relax the rules that governed the Billings Literary Society—the secret club that I had started back in January. In fact, we’d kind of abandoned the thing entirely, giving up on the midnight meetings in the Billings Chapel and all
the crazy talk of witchcraft. It just hadn’t seemed right to go back there, after all the terror and misery the BLS and the book of spells had brought us. And although I knew that Kiki Rosen was still experimenting with some spells on her own, the rest of us hadn’t dabbled at all, content to try to get things back to normal. Which also meant that London, Shelby, and Constance had been hanging out with us again. Everyone was back together. Well, everyone except for Missy.

  “Actually, that’s not exactly true,” I said, leaning back in my wooden chair at the head of the table and tucking my brown hair behind my ears. “My architect and contractors have them, of course—”

  “But none of them would send them to the county if they knew it meant getting shut down,” Tiffany Goulborne pointed out. “They’d be out of a job.”

  “True,” I conceded. “But I also sent them to some of the wealthier alumnae.”

  “WTF? Why did you do that?” Portia Ahronian said, clutching the dozen gold necklaces around her neck. “You have enough money to build this thing ten times over.”

  “I know, but I thought it would be nice to get other people involved,” I said. “The more they feel like part of the new Billings, the more they’ll be invested in its future.”

  “She’s right, you guys. We need the alums,” Rose Sakowitz said, looking around at the others. She looked even tinier and more adorable than usual in a pink plaid sundress with her red curls held back by a tortoiseshell band. “Think of how many times they’ve supported us when things have gone . . .” She trailed off.

  “I think ‘awry’ is the word you’re looking for,” Tiffany put in, shifting in her seat. “Like when Cheyenne . . . passed away and we had to elect a new president? They don’t usually have to come up with two presidential gifts in one year.”

  I squirmed a bit, recalling the amount of cash and all the expensive presents that had been dropped in my lap after I’d been elected in the fall—not to mention the very thorough and useful files on the current Billings Girls and our alums that I’d been gifted.

  “And how Suzel told us about the secret passage at Gwendolyn so we could get to the Legacy last semester?” London added, clicking a rhinestone-encrusted compact closed after checking her lipstick. “She’s, like, a total asset.”

  “Seriously,” Shelby said, checking the end of her dark blond braid for split ends. “The alumnae have been keeping us afloat for years.”

  “Yeah, but after everything that’s happened, can we really trust any of them?” Astrid Chou said as she reorganized her paintbrushes inside a funky, polka-dotted carrying case. “I mean, if this was three months ago, you probably would have sent the plans to Cheyenne’s batty mother.”

  I swallowed hard, my eyes flicking to Noelle. She was the only one not participating in the conversation, choosing instead to sit at the far end of the table and page through Vogue. My phone beeped loudly.

  “Is your phone possessed or what?” Amberly Carmichael asked, pressing the palms of her perfectly manicured hands into the edge of the table. “It hasn’t stopped since we got here.”

  I groaned, pulling my phone out to silence it. “Sorry.”

  Astrid did, of course, have a point. I always thought Cheyenne’s mom, Mrs. Martin, was a cool woman, someone who loved Billings and would have done anything for us. Until I found out she believed in this hundred-year-old curse and thought that five of my friends and I needed to die in order to break it.

  “I don’t know, you guys. Most of the people I sent the plans to seemed really excited. Some of them even donated money,” I told them. “I can’t imagine that any of them would have wanted to sabotage the project.”

  Everyone around the table exchanged wary glances, as if waiting for one of us to confess. Finally Kiki Rosen leaned forward, wrapping her earbud wires around her iPod before she shoved it into her battered canvas backpack.

  “Okay. Forget who screwed us. The real question is, how do we get unscrewed?” she asked.

  “We have to go back to the drawing board. Literally,” I said with a sigh. “I already spoke to my architect and she said she could modify the plans, but since a lot of the materials have already been ordered, it’s going to cost a lot more money. Plus it takes a while to get some of these green materials, so that will cause some serious delays.”

  “How serious?” Amberly asked.

  I licked my lips, dreading what I had to say next. My phone rang again. One more ignore. “Billings might not be ready by the fall. It might not even be ready until the following fall.”

  “What?” Lorna Gross gasped, her dark brown eyes wide. “But most of us will be gone by then.”

  “Everyone but Amberly,” I said flatly.

  “This sucks,” Astrid said, shoving a potato chip into her mouth.

  “Tell me about it,” I replied.

  Suddenly, Lorna sat up straight and leaned back, out into the aisle. “Hey, Missy!” she called out loudly, giving a wave.

  I turned around to see Missy Thurber striding right by our table, her wide-nostriled nose in the air as she completely ignored us. Her French braid swung haughtily down the center of her back, and she didn’t even blink when she heard her former best friend calling out to her.

  This was the new Missy. It wasn’t just me she’d been ignoring. She had stopped returning any and all calls from the Billings crew, had stopped saying hello to us in the hallways, had stopped even looking in our direction, unless it was to shoot me evil glares. It was like all of us, and everything we’d been through together, had been excised from her brain.

  “That girl puts the ‘lone’ in ‘loner,’” Vienna said, rolling her eyes.

  Instead of turning toward the small corner table she’d been occupying by herself for every meal since March, she hooked a left and walked right over to a table full of guys. Senior guys. Popular senior guys and a few of their female hangers-on. Graham Hathaway greeted her with a smile and made a big show of pulling out a chair for her. Missy sat with a self-satisfied twist of her lips. Then Graham ran off to the food line to get her lunch.

  “Since when are those two BFF?” Portia asked, clearly annoyed.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the table where Josh; his roommate, Trey Prescott; and some of his other friends were sitting, and saw that they had noticed Missy and Graham as well. Josh and Trey, in particular, shot Graham annoyed looks as he returned seconds later with a bagel sandwich and iced tea for Missy. I sat back hard in my chair and slumped.

  Call me crazy, but the idea of my worst enemy at Easton and Josh’s worst enemy at Easton hanging out together made my blood run cold.

  MYSTERY TEXT

  I sat in my final class of the day that afternoon, staring out across the quad at the now-silent construction zone. The bulldozers and the backhoe sat motionless in the center of the plot, as if their drivers had up and fled right in the middle of work. It made them look oddly lonely and sad, like great, hulking orphans. Up at the front of the classroom, Mr. Cheever helpfully outlined every item that would be on my calculus final, but I hadn’t once looked up at the board. Instead, my eyes were trained on that damn frozen backhoe, as if simply glaring at it would make it roar to life.

  I had already placed calls to every important county executive I could find online, not knowing which one might be able to help me, but it wasn’t like it mattered. I’d been screened by each of their assistants and no one had called me back. I wished Mr. Lange were still alive. He would have known exactly the right person to contact, exactly how to smooth things over. But me? I was clueless and utterly lost. And I didn’t like the feeling.

  I could have gotten in touch with Chester Worth again, but I tried not to bother him too much. Sometimes I could tell that the tentative phone calls of a naive schoolgirl grated on his nerves, almost as much as the tenth call of the day from Janice Winthrop grated on mine, and just knowing that I might be annoying him made me nervous to call. Somewhere in the back of both our minds, we realized I was not his responsibility, and sooner or la
ter his duty to his deceased business partner was going to wear out.

  If only I could get Noelle involved. That girl was definitely her father’s daughter. It was like she instinctively knew how to get things done, and get them done right. She had a way of talking to people that made them snap to attention.

  But Noelle was off the project and, deep down, I knew why. She was angry at me because that knife her father had taken in the gut had been meant for me. She had never said it, she probably never would, but I knew she was thinking it. She had to be. Because I was thinking it too. I’d been thinking it every day since it happened, feeling the weight of it, the crushing blame. Our father had died to save me. I spent at least 99 percent of my waking hours trying not to let that fact overwhelm me. Which was another reason that rebuilding Billings was so important to me. Staying focused on every minute detail of such an overwhelming project kept me from obsessing on other, more horrifying thoughts.

  I knew Noelle wouldn’t have wanted to lose me, but I often wondered, if it had come down to a choice between me and her father, which one of us would she have chosen to keep alive?

  Someone in the room coughed, rousing me from my thoughts. I looked at the board and quickly jotted down a few notes, but there was no way I could catch up now. I glanced across the two rows of diligent students that separated me from Sawyer and hoped that he was taking good notes, because I was definitely going to need to borrow them.

  Suddenly, I saw something flash out by the construction site. Someone was walking quickly away from one of the trailers. It didn’t look like one of the workers, though. He was too slim, too skittish, too young. He wore a black canvas jacket and a baseball cap and was moving so fast and furtively it made my nerves sizzle.

  My phone vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans, making me jump. Behind me, Astrid snorted a laugh. I yanked the phone out and held it in both hands under my desk, cursing whichever alumna had decided to scare the crap out of me in the middle of class. The text was from an unknown number. Even though this wasn’t completely out of the ordinary—some of the alums had texted from numbers I didn’t have stored in my phone—my heart still pitter-pattered nervously. I’d had some bad luck with mystery texts in my recent past when Noelle and her grandmother had staged her fake kidnapping and sent me on a series of ridiculous tasks to get her back.