I was. It was true. Under Alicia’s grouchy demeanor was a great ache of need, and I felt bad for letting her down.
“Anyway, one day you’re going to be so busted,” she said. “You’re not supposed to have food in the library.”
I sighed. A Nutrigrain bar here and there was not going to ruin civilization.
“Or maybe you were off being cool with MB,” she accused. “Were you?”
“No,” I said. “Although if you would hush for a minute, I’ll tell you what did happen.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“Tell you what?” Rae asked, strolling into the room. She wore a T-shirt and panties, the front of which was damp from her pubic hair. I quickly raised my eyes to her face, which was just as startling, but in a different way. Rae was a permanent makeup artist, and as part of her training, she’d had permanent makeup applied to herself so she’d know what it felt like. And because she’d wanted it. So now, even though she’d just stepped out of the shower, her face looked perfectly made up.
Well, not
. That was the startling part. The trainer who’d done the initial application had been too conservative for Rae’s taste, so Rae had waited until she had her certificate and then she’d given herself a touch-up. Now her eyeliner was dark and thick, extending past her lids like catwoman. And she’d always thought her lips were too thin, so she’d gone back with the tattoo gun to make them look fuller. Now her lips were super-sized. And very, very red.
“We’re talking about the Bitches,” Alicia said to Rae. “Tell Jane what you told me.”
Rae turned and took me in. It was like being sized up by a damp mannequin. “You don’t know?”
“Know
“Bitsy,” Alicia corrected. “And Mary Bryan Richardson.”
“—but other girls. Other Bitches. One from each grade, four total. And always the most popular girls in school.”
Inwardly, I groaned. She was acting as if this were privileged information, when anyone at school could have told me the same thing.
“When I was a freshman, the Bitch in my grade was Jennifer Mayfield,” Rae said. “We all wanted to be her. We were so jealous we could spit.
We never did.
I checked Alicia’s reaction. Her legs were drawn to her chest, with her arms around her knees. Her black hair hung in bone-straight chunks. She jerked her chin, as if to say,
“Why?” I said.
Rae tapped her thigh with violent purple nails. “Haven’t you noticed that whenever they enter a room—your Bitches, my Bitches, whoever—everything stops and then starts up again, with them at the center of things?”
“Yeah,” I said, like
Don’t jam your hands in your front pockets, or else.
“Fine,” I said to Rae. “Then why
Rae regarded me with disdain. “Crack jokes if it makes you feel better. But the world is a hell of a lot bigger than you think. All sorts of things go on that you know nothing about.”
Alicia scooted closer. “Finish telling her about Jennifer Mayfield.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”
“Well, like I said, Jennifer was tapped to be a Bitch,” Rae said. She got to her knees and stretched her body, reaching for the brush on Alicia’s dresser. She grasped it and sat back down. “But it fell apart.”
“What do you mean, it fell apart?”
Rae tugged at the tangles in her hair. “She pissed them off. Or else she just wasn’t good enough. She never figured it out.”
“Did she care?”
“Did she
“But Bitsy and Keisha and Mary Bryan weren’t around when you and Jennifer were in high school. They’d have been in, like, elementary school.”
“Have you been listening to anything I’ve said? They’re all the same, year after year after year. They may not start out that way, but then they
“I don’t know how, no one does, but there’s more going on than everyone thinks.” Rae stopped brushing. She lowered her voice. “Something bad happened a long time ago. Really bad.”
“And that would be?”
She tilted her head. “Have you ever heard the saying, ‘She sold her soul to the devil’?”
Rae’s expression didn’t change. Her face was long, and there was nothing in her manner that suggested she was kidding. Despite myself I got a chill.
“The school covered it up, but everyone knows,” she said.
“Not me,” I said.
Rae gazed at me. “There was a girl. Her name was Sandy. She cared too much what people thought of her, because she was super needy. She really, really, really wanted to be popular.”
Rae plowed on. “But Sandy was the one who did it.”
“Did what?” I asked. I plucked at my jeans, then made myself stop. I told my body to relax.
“They went to an empty storage room in Hamilton Hall,” Rae said. “One of those rooms where no one ever goes—”
“Up on the third floor,” Alicia contributed.
“—and performed a ritual in the dead of night.” Rae leaned forward. “They offered a sacrifice, and the sacrifice was accepted.”
“What … was it?” I said. I couldn’t believe I was asking.
“They awakened some weird creepy power—and I’m not making this up,” Rae said. “That shit is out there, like when you feel someone watching you, only when you turn around there’s no one there. Or like when you do the Ouija board, and it really does work.”
“That happened at Lisette’s slumber party, in seventh grade,” Alicia said. “You remember, Jane. It said that a boy whose name started with a C was going to ask Lisette out, and one week later she was going steady with Casper Langdon.”
Rae silenced Alicia with a look of disdain. To me, she said, “I’m telling you, it’s out there. Shit that no one sees.”
My heart was doing something I didn’t like. I swallowed and repeated my question. “What did they sacrifice?”
Rae pressed her oversized lips in a line. “A cat.”
“A
Later that night, I phoned Phil.
“Janie!” he said, his voice all happy. “Hey!”
“Mom said you called last night. Sorry I didn’t call back.” Which was true, in a general sort of way, but I wasn’t worried because I knew Phil wouldn’t hold a grudge. “So what’s up?”
“Not much,” he said. “Just wanted to tell you how hot you looked in that blue dress you wore.”
“Ha, ha,” I said. This was the kind of thing Phil did, throw out a compliment in a joking way so that it didn’t have to mean anything. Because “hot” was such a stud-boy word, and Phil was so not a stud.
“I mean it,” he said. “I wanted to tell you at school, only I didn’t want the other guys to notice and start slobbering all over you.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. These days Phil and I were more out-of-school friends, anyway. Partly because our classes didn’t overlap, but also because when we were in school, Phil had other stuff to worry about, like guys dumping his lunch and giving him flats. Phil was kind of scrawny, and he liked science more than sports, which made him an obvious target. Plus, he’d never developed that cynical veneer that Crestview guys thought was all important. Phil was an eager beaver in a school that didn’t give a damn.
I sat on my bed and kicked off my shoes. I lay back and stared at the ceiling, at the frosted-glass light fixture that had been there since the dawn of time. Dead bugs made dark splotches in its center. “So want to hear something weird?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to a party Friday night.
In bed, as shadows played on my walls, my thoughts spiraled back to Rae’s story about four girls who would do anything to be popular. Silly, stupid story—yet in the dark, even stupid stories misbehaved.
I remembered something Mom told me once, about two girls in her hometown. They’d snuck to a cemetery late at night, because they’d heard that if you stuck a knife into a fresh-laid grave, its ghost would rise from the dead. One of the girls knelt on the grave and plunged the knife deep. She tried to stand up, but she couldn’t, and she screamed that the ghost had grabbed her. The other girl fled, and when she returned with her parents, she found her friend collapsed over the grave, no longer breathing. She’d stabbed her nightgown when she’d stabbed the grave, pinning herself to the ground. Her panic overcame her, which meant she’d basically died of fright.
Although, come on. As I replayed the story in my head, I realized that it couldn’t have really happened. What teenager has ever died of fright? It was just a story Mom passed on after hearing it from a friend, from someone whose brother’s cousin’s fiance had actually known the two girls. Or whatever. It was a story Mom told me for fun, to make goose bumps prick my arms.
But stories couldn’t hurt you.
I imagined four girls giggling as they made their way to Crestview’s empty storage room, the beams of their flashlights skittering off the walls.
And then, at some point, the giggling would have stopped.
I dreamed of cats, of sharp claws tapping through darkened halls.
Wednesday was a waste. Thursday was a bigger waste. In the daylight hours Rae’s story faded to just a whisper, but the fact of the Bitches remained, making me hyperaware of everything I did. How I held myself, how I talked, how I laughed. And all because of the remote possibility that one of the Bitches might be around to notice.