“Thanks, you guys,” I said. I fingered the lip balm, then pushed it behind the boa. “I mean it. I was having a really crappy day—”
“You were?” Hannah said. “Poor Jane!”
“—but you guys totally made it better.” I smiled at them, so easy to do because they all smiled back. “And I
“Have you gotten it yet?” Mary Bryan asked the next morning.
“Gotten what?” I asked.
She looked at me in a not-fun-and-games kind of way. “You know. To give to Lurl.”
A sick feeling clutched my stomach. I fiddled with one of my new earrings, which were shaped like tiny doves.
“Do you like my earrings?” I asked. “Hannah Henderson gave them to me.”
“Yeah, they’re great,” Mary Bryan said impatiently.
“My whole class threw me a party. It was so sweet.”
“Terrific. And if you want them to
Lunch with the drama kids—no Alicia, where was Alicia?—and then PE. Not my favorite class on the best of days, but today it was horrible. Sure, Coach Shaw exempted me from doing the rope climb, and sure, Anna Maria and Debbie, who were total soccer studs, told me I should try out for the team. Never mind the fact that I sucked at soccer, and that just two weeks ago Anna Maria had shoved me accidentally on purpose with her shoulder during a game of battle ball. I’d gone sprawling, and Anna Maria had hissed, “Stay down, you idiot. Tell the coach you sprained your ankle.”
But today they’d loved me. Great. So really, class itself was fine. It was what happened afterward that screwed with my mind.
Everyone except me was changing out of her gym shirt and shorts. I was still in my normal clothes, since Coach Shaw hadn’t made me dress out. But I’d filed into the locker room with the others so they wouldn’t think I was a snob.
“Hey, Jane,” Anna Maria said, pulling a blue-and-white rugby down over her head. “You going to the Fall Fling?”
“Yeah,” I said. I lounged against a wooden bench. “You?”
She stepped into her jeans. “Hell, yeah. Jodi’s mom is on the planning committee, and she says there’s going to be all kinds of cool shit like bungee cords and climbing walls. You
Debbie jerked her chin toward the end of the locker room. Camilla, a towel wrapped around her waist, was heading from the showers to the nearest row of lockers. Water dripped from her hair onto the back of her T-shirt.
Anna Maria’s face hardened. “Whore.”
“Why is she even here?” Debbie said. “She’s not in our PE class.”
“Bet she’s been using the weight room again, fucking ballerina princess,” Anna Maria said. “Stuart Hill can’t use it, noooo. But our fucking little Camilla can.”
I frowned. The girls’ weight room was separate from the boys’, which meant that Camilla doing her weight training wouldn’t take anything away from Stuart. But I, too, felt a surge of repugnance at the sight of Camilla, and it scared me.
Anna Maria caught my expression. “She’s the one responsible for getting Stuart kicked off the team, you know. Lying whore.”
I tried to cleanse my impure emotions. “I thought he was just on probation.”
“And the crap she told Mr. Van Housen? Lies. Every single bit of it.”
“Huh?”
Debbie stepped closer. Looking at me significantly, she said, “We heard it from Bitsy.”
My stomach clenched. What had Bitsy told them?
“But, um … how would Bitsy know?” I asked. “She wasn’t there, was she?”
“Bitsy knows everything,” Anna Maria said. “And she’s not scared of telling the truth.”
“She’s not scared of anything,” Anna Maria said. “Especially not a slut in a tutu.” She took a step toward Camilla’s locker. “Come on, Little Debs.”
I got a bad taste in the back of my throat, but I followed anyway. It was as if my feet were on some sick sort of auto-pilot.
They caught her unawares. Anna Maria lunged forward and grabbed her towel, leaving Camilla in just her T-shirt and panties.
“Hey!” Camilla cried.
“You think you’re so hot,” Anna Maria said. “But you’re not. Everyone hates you, you slut.”
“You’re such a lesbo,” Debbie contributed. “Prancing around like a freaking ballerina.”
Camilla grabbed for her towel. “I
I returned home to another of Dad’s guilt offerings, this time a silver pendant from Macedonia. The pendant hung from a black silk cord, and it was in the shape of a J, for Jane. Because clearly, in Dad’s mind, I was still learning my letters—or at least still wearing them around my neck, as the fad had been in elementary school.
I could wear the necklace if I wanted to, and people would see it as a kitschy-cool. Soon every girl in school would have her first initial dangling from a cord. Or, more likely, they’d all have my first initial dangling from cords. An army of glittering Js.
Only that would be way too depressing.
I lowered the pendant onto my dresser. Sometimes I didn’t know which was worse: the possibility that Dad would keep sending these inane gifts, when all they did was remind me of what I didn’t have, or the possibility that one day he would stop.
Out of nowhere, a memory wormed in. Me, huddled naked in an empty bathtub, because I didn’t know how to work the faucets. I must have been about five, and usually Mom ran my bath for me. But that night, Dad was on duty. “You can do it,” he’d said, barely looking up from his magazine. “You’re a big girl.”
When he’d come to check on me half an hour later,
As I was brushing my teeth, it came to me that I no longer doubted that all this was real. The offerings, the siphoning of power. Lurl. No longer was I saying to myself, “Oh, baloney. You don’t really
“Um, no,” Keisha said. She dangled the J from her slender fingers, then yanked upward on the cord, caught the pendant in her palm, and shoved the whole thing into the pocket of my denim jacket.
“Not cool,” she said as I stumbled backward. “Lurl told me you put it on her desk, trying to pass it off as a proper offering. Did you honestly think she wouldn’t know?”
“I just thought … I mean, I was only—”
Keisha waved her hand. “Don’t.”
I knew I was bright red, because I could feel the heat in my face. Being scolded by Keisha was horrible, worse by far than if it were Mary Bryan or even Bitsy.
Keisha walked farther away from Hamilton Hall, indicating with a head jerk that I was to follow. She stepped around a tabby cat basking in the sun. It regarded us with indolent amber eyes. When we were clearly, absolutely alone, she said, “It’s been a week, Jane. You’re neglecting your responsibilities.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just …” I knew that nothing I could say would make it better. “I don’t like that part.”
She put her hands on her hips. “What part?”
My voice went even tinier. “The stealing.”
The look Keisha flashed me was wounded as well as pissed, as if I’d been incredibly tacky to mention it.
“It’s the way it works,” she said in clipped tones. “For one to rise, another must fall.”