Wrath

Chapter 3

They’d decided to go old school.

E-mail would have been more efficient, and a Web site might have been snazzier, but after serious consideration, Beth and Miranda had decided that neither had the technical prowess to put something like that together undetected. And plausible deniability was key.

E-mails could be traced. Circuits always led back to their source. But paper was untraceable-and as editor in chief of the school paper, Beth had access to all the printing equipment she needed.

She pulled the stack of flyers out of the printer as Miranda ejected their disk and wiped their work from the computer’s memory.

“Behold,” said Beth, holding up the crimson sheet crammed with dirty little secrets. “Our masterpiece.”

Miranda grabbed a copy and quickly scanned the elegantly designed layout.

“Unbelievable, isn’t it, that they were able to accomplish so much in their short, sordid lives?”

“I’m not sure ‘accomplish’ is the right word,” Beth said, reading out a few of her favorites. “‘HG used to steal money from the collection plate. AM is impotent. KG is afraid of the dark.’ I’m not sure what it is they’ve accomplished.”

“Other than making asses of themselves,” Miranda said, and laughed. “Well, thanks to us.”

They’d included some gossip about a bunch of randoms, too, just for cover. But that was a diversion. Soon everyone would know that KG was so desperate, he had to trick girls into sleeping with him; that sometimes HG still stuffed her bra. Neither Miranda nor Beth knew much about the mysterious new girl from the East Coast, but before everything came down, Harper had passed along a bit of juicy info about Kaia and Haven High’s resident pothead that was too weird not to be true.

“Are we really doing this?” Beth asked, as she split the pile in half and handed one stack to Miranda. It was almost 6 A.M., which meant there’d be plenty of time to spread them all over school before even the most diligent early bird appeared for his worm.

“Definitely.” Miranda swung her long, reddish hair over her shoulder and looked defiantly up at Beth. “It’s exactly what they deserve.”

“I guess…”

“No second thoughts,” Miranda ordered. “They screwed us. Both of us. Because they thought we’d put up with it.”

And Beth remembered the surprise in Kane’s eyes when she’d pushed him away for the last time. The mocking look in Harper’s every time Beth dared confront her, as if knowing that sweet, quiet Beth would always be the one to back down first. And she remembered the way Adam had treated her when he’d thought she was the cheater, his cold, unrelenting cruelty, the unwillingness to bend, to trust, to forgive.

Now she was supposed to just get over it? Because betraying Beth, well, that didn’t really count? “You take the science wing, I’ll hit the lockers by the cafeteria,” Beth said determinedly. Forget moving on. Forget backing down.

“That’s better,” Miranda cheered, locking up behind them. “Let’s get this done.”

Did you hear?

Is it true?

I heard he was a virgin when he slept with Kaia.

And when she blew him off, he cried.

Well, I heard Kane wanted Beth so much he posed naked with Harper and they doctored the photos.

They didn’t just pose-he and Harper totally did it on the locker room floor.

No, I heard it was on the soccer field, and Kaia was in it too. Threesome, baby.

So who was taking the pictures?

Could Kaia really be hooking up with that skeezy stoner?

Didn’t you hear? She’s a total nympho.

Why do you think they threw her out of her last school?

Did he really-?

And then she-?

How could they-?

I don’t believe it, but…

You won’t believe it, but…

It doesn’t make any sense, but…

Trust me.

It’s true.

“Oooh, Harper, you must be soooo humiliated!”

Harper rolled her eyes. She’d been (barely) tolerating her lame sophomore wannabe-clone for months now, but the Mini-Me act was getting old. Especially now that the girl had dug up the nerve to speak to her in public. As if Harper was going to dent her own reputation by acknowledging Mini-Me’s existence-or, worse, giving people the impression that they were actually friends.

“We just want you to know we’re there for you,” Mini-Me’s best friend gushed. Harper couldn’t be bothered to remember her name, either, and since the girl was decked out in the same faux BCBG skirt and sweater set that Harper had ditched last season, MiniShe would suffice.

“What are you talking about?” she hissed, through gritted teeth. Under normal circumstances she would have just closed her locker and walked away. But something strange was going on today. She’d been getting weird looks all morning, and once, difficult as it was to believe, it had almost seemed like someone was laughing-at her.

“Oh, Harper, we don’t believe any of it,” Mini-Me assured her.

“Of course not,” Mini-She simpered, her head bouncing up and down like a bobblehead doll. “Well, except that thing about-”

“None of it,” Mini-Me said firmly, giving Mini-She an obvious shut your mouth glare.

“None of what?” Harper was getting increasingly irritated by the twin twits-and by the sensation that something very bad was about to happen. Or had already happened, without her knowing it, which was worse. Harper owned this school, and nothing happened without her say-so.

“You mean you haven’t…” Mini-Me’s eyes lit up. She tried to force a concerned look, but her eagerness was painfully clear. “Oh, I hate to be the one to show you this, but…” She pulled a folded red flyer out of her back pocket. Harper had seen them floating around that morning, but assumed it was just another lame announcement about the next chess club tournament or some charity drive for the community service club. “Maybe I shouldn’t show it to you,” Mini-Me said, waving the folded flyer out of Harper’s reach.

“But at least we can be there for her, when she sees it.” Mini-She patted Harper’s shoulder, and Harper squirmed away with a grimace. “We’ll always be there for you, Harper, no matter what anyone else says.”

“You’ve always got us,” Mini-Me agreed. “I mean, we don’t care if you wet your pants or slept with a million guys or-”

“Give me that,” Harper snarled, snatching the flyer out of Mini-Me’s hand. She unfolded it slowly, forcing her hands not to shake.

The words leaped off the page.

All her darkest secrets, all her most embarrassing moments, her deepest fears, all laid out in black print, stretching across the page for anyone to see. It had been published anonymously-the cowards way-but Harper didn’t need a byline to know whom to blame. There was only one person who knew all her secrets-the one person she had trusted never to betray her.

Harper smiled, though it felt more like a grimace of horror. Hopefully the Minis would be too dim to tell the difference. Then she shrugged. “Is this all?”

“All?” Mini-Me squealed. “Don’t you get it? ‘HG’-Harper Grace. That’s you.”

Harper rolled her eyes, almost thankful for the Minis’ presence; the familiar sense of disgust was helping her suppress all those less desirable emotions. Helplessness. Humiliation. Despair.

Focus on something more constructive, she warned herself. People can only hurt you if you let them. Don’t be a victim.

“See?” Mini-She chirped. “Like it says right here, ‘HG was so desperate for AM that she…’”

Harper tuned her out-after all, she already knew the story. It was more important to regain her focus and start working on damage control. But cool, calculating strategy was impossible when one unquestionable fact kept drilling into her brain.

Miranda had betrayed her. No one else knew what she knew.

She wouldn’t have done it on her own, Harper was certain ofthat. She didn’t have this kind of nastiness in her. She would have been goaded into it by someone else, someone so pure and innocent that no one would ever suspect her of spewing such poison.

“What are we going to do?” Mini-Me moaned. As if there were a “we.”

“Who needs to do something?” Harper asked, crumpling the flyer into a ball and tossing it over her shoulder like the trash it was. “You know what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

“You don’t even care?” Mini-She asked, eyes wide and adoring. From the expression on the Minis’ faces-impressed and totally devoid of pity-Harper grew certain that she’d be able to fix this.

These last few weeks had been the most lonely and miserable of Harper’s life-something like this could have been a fatal blow. And yet, she marveled, perhaps Beth had done her a favor. Because she suddenly felt invigorated. She felt offended and insulted, righteous and wronged, empowered and enraged.

She felt like herself again.

And it felt good.

Beth and Miranda met up in the second-floor girls’ bathroom after third period to compare notes. The school was buzzing about the already legendary flyer-half the student body had memorized it, and the other half had used it as a springboard to create and pass along wildly unlikely rumors of their own.

“I can’t believe we actually did it,” Miranda whispered, checking under the stalls to make sure they were really alone.

“You should have-” Beth quickly stopped talking as two babbling juniors burst through the door. Miranda turned on the faucet, pretending to wash her hands, while Beth peered into the streaked mirror, applying a new coat of transparent lip gloss.

“You think she, like, did it to herself?” the tall brunette asked, smoothing down her hair and using her pinkie to rub in some garish blue eye shadow. “But, like, why?” She dug through her overstuffed silver purse and pulled out a large gold hoop, wide enough to fit around her wrist, and clamped it onto her earlobe.

“Oh, puh-leeze,” the shorter, pudgier one said, locking herself inside an empty stall. Her bright yellow platform shoes tapped against the linoleum. “She’s mad crazy for attention, you know she’d do anything.”

“But we’re talking total humiliation hot zone-”

“Massive meltdown territory, but does she seem upset? Negative. You know she’s, like, loving every minute of it.”

“I don’t know,” the tall one said, now perched on the sink, fiddling with her nails, which were painted cotton candy pink and so long that they almost curled back toward her fingertips. “Maybe it was some nobody, like, you know, some bitter loser who wanted-”

“As if.” A laugh floated out of the stall. “How would some loser know all of that? No, it had to be-”

Finally, Miranda couldn’t help herself. “Did you ever think that maybe-”

“Uh, excuse me?” the brunette said, glaring. “Were we talking to you?”

The shorter girl burst out of the stall and quickly slathered on a layer of hot pink lipstick. She didn’t bother to look in Miranda’s direction-or make a move toward the sink. “Was she, like, eavesdropping on our conversation?”

“Whatever. Forget her.”

“Her who?” the other girl cackled as she pushed through the girls’ room door, the brunette following close behind.

Miranda and Beth stared at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter. “Were they for real?” Beth asked in wonderment.

“Oh, yeah, like, totally, I mean, you know, whatever,” Miranda said, giggling. “For reals, dude.”

“And that makes us the losers?” Beth asked, grinning.

“Apparently.” Miranda stuck out her hand to shake. “Nice to meet you, I’m nobody. And who are you?”

“Someone who would never walk out of this bathroom without washing her hands,” Beth joked.

“I think we’re missing the key point here,” Miranda said, trying to stop laughing. “Did you hear the way they were talking about ‘her’?”

“Harper,” Beth filled in.

“Right. Obviously. Like she was this pathetic nonentity, desperate for attention…”

“Humiliated,” Beth said, raising her eyebrows.

“Pitiful,” Miranda added, shaking her head.

“Defeated.”

Miranda grinned and slung an arm around Beth’s shoulders. “And all by a pair of bitter nobodies. Who would’ve thought?”

The curiosity-seekers had been swarming Kane all morning-and by lunchtime, it seemed half the school had surrounded him, desperate for insider information and some notoriety-by-association. Outwardly, he smiled, preening under the attention. But underneath, he was fuming. It was Beth. It had to be. No one else could know some of the things she’d printed, the few secrets he’d been foolish enough to share.

That was the worst of it: the realization that he’d brought this on himself. After swearing to protect himself, he’d left himself raw and exposed.

Not again-never again.

After spotting the flyer, Kane had quickly started his own campaign of disinformation; judging from Kaia’s and Harpers animated smiles and the naked curiosity of their eager disciples, it seemed the girls had chosen to do the same. They sat at separate tables, each the center of a small whirlpool of people, flowing past to catch a moment with the stars. The horde surrounding Kane was, of course, the largest.

“She begged me to take her back,” he confided to the second-string point guard. “It was getting pathetic. I mean, tears is one thing-you know girls. But when she started showing up at my house in the middle of the night? It’s not like I wanted to call the cops…”

“Let’s just say, I now have a pretty good idea of what it must feel like to kiss a cold, dead fish,” he confided to the sympathetic blonde from the cheerleading squad.

“And the smell… you know, she works at that diner, and all the onions, the grease, the sweat…” He shook his head, and the busty freshman patted him sweetly on the shoulder. “It was nauseating. I have a very delicate stomach, you know, and sometimes…”

“Sure, she couldn’t get enough of it,” he bragged to the gawky junior who managed the basketball team. “But what was I supposed to do? She was-well, let’s just say Adam’s pretty lucky he never made it to home base.”

He almost felt sorry for Beth. She was like a dolphin, playing at being a shark. Which was a dangerous game: You were likely to get eaten.

The note the teacher had handed her had been short and sweet: Report to my classroom. Now.

Okay, maybe not so sweet.

“Jack,” Kaia said simply, stepping into his empty classroom and closing the door behind her. “Bonjour.”

Powell was perched on the edge of his desk, fingering a red sheet of paper. Kaia recognized it immediately, with little surprise.

“You said you’d stopped seeing him,” Powell said coldly, placing the flyer carefully down on the desk. “I thought I’d made my position perfectly clear: I don’t like to share.”

Kaia strode toward him and took a seat at one of the desks in the front row, aware that his gaze was glued to her long, tan legs, barely covered by a green suede miniskirt.

“Do you really want to discuss this here, Jack?” It was a violation of every rule he’d set for them, and it stank of desperation.

“There’s nothing to discuss.You told me you’d stopped. You told me you wouldn’t, with-that. And now I read…”

Kaia laughed. “Are you going to believe some piece of trash you probably confiscated from one of your clueless freshmen? Just how gullible are you?”

Powell’s skin turned slightly red, whether in anger or embarrassment, Kaia couldn’t be sure. She could put him out of his misery right now, confess to the dalliance with Reed, and suggest he find himself another student to play with-or maybe even pick on someone his own age. But Kaia wasn’t quite ready to finish things, and she certainly wasn’t going to let some loser with a printer and a grudge force her hand.

She got up and walked slowly to the door, as if to leave, then paused with her hand on the knob. “Do I really need to defend myself?” Kaia asked. “Or can we stop this game and play another…?”

Powell hopped off the desk, walked toward her, and then did something he’d never done before on school grounds. He touched her.

Placing his hand over hers on the doorknob, he turned the lock.

“We can table this for now,” he told her, his lips inches from the nape of her neck, his fingers digging into her skin. “You’re a smart girl, Kaia. You know better than to screw this up. Take this as a warning.”

He pulled her roughly toward him, and she let him, hyperaware of the people in the hallway, just on the other side of the door. Only a few inches separated them from discovery, a thought that turned her on far more than Powell’s hands roaming across her body.

Yes, Kaia was a smart girl, and she almost always knew better. She just never acted on it.

Where was the fun in that?

The whispers flew back and forth over Miranda’s head. No one thought to ask her what was true-most likely, no one thought of her at all.

Without Harper, I’m invisible, she thought, pushing around the soggy food on her tray. She had no appetite. Not when Harper was at the center of an admiring crowd, soaking in the attention. Miranda had just given her more of what she loved the most. From across the room, Miranda couldn’t see the self-satisfied grin on Harper’s face, but knew it was there. And she couldn’t hear the spin Harper would put on everything to cast herself in a good light-but she knew Harper would. A spotlight. It all seemed so obvious now, that this was how their feeble plot was doomed to end.

Teaming up with Beth, blandest of the bland, to take on Haven High’s dark queen? What had she been thinking?

Beth wasn’t as bad as Miranda had always thought, and was probably undeserving of all the hours she and Harper had put into mocking her behind her back. (Miranda had long ago perfected her Beth imitation, which never failed to send Harper into uncontrollable gales of laughter.)

But “not that bad”? What good was that, when you were going up against someone who had It? Someone who could mold minds, bend wills, make the world into exactly what she wanted it to be. Harper had It, and Beth didn’t. Neither did Miranda.

Together, they made one big, fat nothing, and Miranda was beginning to wonder if she might have been better off alone.

Spin control only took a small portion of Harper’s attention, and she devoted the rest of it to watching Miranda, pathetically slumped over a table on the other side of the cafeteria. They’d fought before; their friendship was built on fights. But this was different.

Miranda could never hold a grudge-and so Harper had never had to worry that, eventually, all would be forgiven. She’d learned that lesson in sixth grade, when the two of them had their first huge fight while rehearsing their sixth-grade performance of Macbeth (suitably abridged for attention-deficit-disordered twelve-year-olds). It had started small: an argument over who got to use the “real” (plastic) sword and who would be stuck wielding a wrapping-paper tube covered with aluminum foil.

Harper won, of course, bringing up the unassailable point that the whole show was named after her character. It seemed only logical that she, as the star, get the best of everything-lines, costumes, makeup, and, of course, swords. But Miranda had given in grudgingly, and only after hours of endless argument; by the time Harper finally took the stage, plastic sword in hand, she and Miranda hadn’t spoken for a week.

When the climactic scene arrived, Miranda had the first good line. “Turn, hellhound, turn!” she cried as Macduff, the one man destined to take down Macbeth.

Harper spun to face her challenger. They stared at each other across the stage, readying themselves for the sword fight, gritting their teeth and narrowing their eyes as if the fate of the kingdom truly lay on their shoulders. Their teacher had been very specific: Cross “swords” three times, and then Miranda would slice off Harper’s head. In a manner of speaking, of course.

Miranda swung, Harper parried, jumped back, sliced her sword toward Miranda, who blocked the blow with her wrapping-paper tube and danced around the stage, taunting Harper under her breath.

And Harper, who’d been planning to lie down and deliver the greatest death scene Grace Elementary had ever seen, couldn’t bring herself to lose the fight-and, by definition, her dignity-in front of all those people. She swung wildly, and Miranda’s flimsy sword bent in two-at which point Miranda screeched in frustration and launched herself at Harper. The two of them stumbled to the ground, writhing and rolling across the stage, pinching and poking, tickling and tugging hair… until their eyes met and, simultaneously, they burst into uncontrollable giggles.

Harper and Miranda had spent that weekend in an intense, forty-eight-hour catch-up session, sharing every detail of the painful hours they’d spent not speaking to each other.

“I was sooooo bored,” Miranda had complained.

“You were bored? I fell asleep standing up,” Harper countered.

“I had to play Jeopardy Home Edition all night with my parents.”

“I spelled out the names of everyone I know in alphabet soup.”

“I missed you,” Miranda had confessed, laughing.

Even then, Harper had known better than to confess that she’d missed Miranda more.They’d laughed about it for years, and sometimes even now when Harper was being particularly bitchy, Miranda would call her a “hellhound”; Harper always replied with her own favorite line: ‘Lay on, Macduff, and damn’d be he that first cries, “Hold, enough!’” It was the code of their friendship, and its meaning was simple. They would never turn into their characters; they would fight-but never to the death. They would always stop in time, just before landing the final blow.

But here she was, watching Miranda pick at her food, scared to go over to her, scared not to. If Harper stood over her pleading, “Lay on, Macduff”-meaning, Yell at me, hit me, hate me, and then, please, forgive me-would it fix anything?

Not likely, Harper decided-not if Miranda had been behind the gossip flyer. That was a death blow. Harper may not have seen it coming, but she knew when it was time to lay down her sword and leave the stage.