Dangerous Girls (20 page)

The girl drives her elbow into my stomach, making me gulp for air. Her face is lit up, breathless and bright; nose bloody from one of my desperate blocks. She grins through the smear of scarlet, raising her fist again, ready to smash it down into my face, and from some distant place, I realize: She’s enjoying this. She likes it. The fight, the pain, the struggle.

Her joy is her power.

I snap.

Ducking to the side, I turn to block her fist, then bring my elbow sweeping up in a glorious arc that cracks against her face. Her head snaps back, her momentum lost, and I pull myself up, rolling so she’s trapped underneath me, still dazed. I slam my elbow down against her face, her throat, her chest, again and again. There’s screaming, sharp and grotesque, but the roars of the crowd recede like the waves until I can’t hear anything but my own drumming heartbeat and the dull thud of bone on tile as her head cracks back, blood spilling on the pale floor like blossoms in the snow. It’s almost beautiful, but I don’t care. I’m not here anymore, I’m not anywhere—all I am is sheer, pure rage and fists and skin.

I’m still swinging when they pull me off her, strong arms grabbing at me, slamming me to the floor. The screaming won’t stop; it echoes through the room long after they carry the other girl out. It’s not until they come at me with the syringe that I realize: The screaming voice is my own.

Then there’s nothing but black.

“Where have you been?”

The voice startles me in the dark. I flip on the living room lights and find Elise waiting on the couch.

“Elise?” I stare at her, startled. She’s still in her uniform, neat plaid skirt and blazer. “What are you . . . ?”

“I waited for you,” Elise says, her expression bland and unreadable. “Outside school, like we said.”

“Oh shit.” I feel a flush of shame. “I’m sorry, I forgot. . . . We skipped study hall,” I explain awkwardly, “and went back to Tate’s.”

“I can tell,” Elise says quietly, “It’s written all over you.”

I flush. I’m still breathless from the hours Tate and I spent together, wrapped up in his old quilted comforter and each
other. It’s no wonder she can see, when I still feel Tate’s hands on me, the burning path across my body.

“I called.” Elise’s voice twists, bitter. “I left you a ton of messages. And then I thought, maybe something happened, with your mom, so I came . . .” She stops. “Your dad let me in.”

“My phone died—I never got the messages, I swear.” I take a few steps forward, toward the couch. “I am so, so, sorry. I completely forgot. It’s awful of me, I know. What can I do? You want to order pizza? I was going to just do homework, but we could study together for that test tomorrow, or watch a movie, or . . . anything you like.” I’m babbling, I know, but there’s something so unnerving about her expression, perfectly detached. “Elise?” I ask again, nervous. “I fucked up, I’m sorry.”

The bland look slips, and Elise giggles—but it’s not a happy sound, there’s something twisted about it. “Do you know what it felt like, just waiting for you? I sat there for an hour, until everyone was gone.” She hugs herself, looking painfully young for a moment. “I was worried, thinking about everything that could have happened. An accident, or a car crash, or your mom . . .” She shakes her head, her expression hardening. “And all that time, you were off fucking him.”

I flinch. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Elise leaps up, and I see her face clearer: the out-of-focus smudge to her gaze. “It’s the truth, isn’t it? That’s all you do these days, hump away like a pair of fucking rabbits.”
She laughs, bitter. “And you were always such a good girl. Who would have thought you’d turn out to be such a slut. Well, how was it?” she demands, grabbing my arm. “Go ahead, tell me everything. Is he good? Does he make you come?”

I reel back—from her harsh words and the faint slur in her voice. “You’re drunk.”

“Bzz! Wrong! Guess again.”

“Elise?” My heart skips. I look closer. “What did you take? Oh God, are you okay? Do I need to call someone—?”

“Relax.” She cuts me off, rolling her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. Just a couple of my mom’s pills. Prescription. It’s all good.”

“A couple?” I demand, still panicked.

“Cross my heart and hope to die.” Elise draws an X over her chest, then giggles again. “Irony appreciated, of course.”

“It’s not funny.” I exhale, but the panic doesn’t dissolve; it just hardens into something more uncertain, a dark edge that sends a chill down my spine. I watch as Elise wanders over to the bar in the corner and lifts the stopper from the cut-glass bottle of my dad’s scotch. “Seriously, Lise, put that down.”

“Why?” She dangles the bottle from her fingertips. “Not up for a drink?”

“You’re already wasted.”

“Not wasted enough.”

I go over to take the bottle from her hand, but she pulls
away and lifts it to her lips to gulp. I watch, feeling helpless. This is scaring me, the sudden quicksilver of her moods. She doesn’t mess around with drugs. We drink, sure, and even smoke some weed with Chelsea sometimes, but this is something new, and nothing good. “Talk to me,” I beg. “What’s going on?”

“I told you.” She spins in a slow circle, away from me. “I waited.”

“Fine, I screwed up, I’m sorry.” I hold my hands up, as if in surrender. “What can I do to make it up to you?” I ask, desperation clear in my voice. “Anything you want, I promise.”

“Don’t you get it?” she yells, her voice loud in the still of the dark house. “Sorry doesn’t matter. Not if you love him more!”

There’s silence.

“Elise . . . ?” I whisper. She meets my eyes, defiant and wounded.

“It was us,” she says. “You and me.”

“It still is!”

“But you love him more.”

“No,” I tell her, but she just looks away.

“You should see your face when the two of you are together.” Elise swallows, giving me a sad little smile. “It’s like he’s your whole world.”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

“So?” she yells. “I’m your best friend!”

“Right,” I yell back. “My
friend
! So why can’t you just be happy for me?”

“Happy you’re throwing me away for some asshole who’s going to dump you a month from now?” Elise is wild and furious. “Like I’m fucking disposable? Do you even remember what you said to me? It was us, together, before anything!”

“We still are!”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Not since you gave it all to him. I never thought you’d do this to me, that you’d be such a shallow slut!” Elise whirls around and hurls the bottle at me with a cry. I leap back as it shatters against the wall, dark liquid splashing, shards of glass smashing like crystals on the floor around me.

“What are you doing?” I cry, shocked.

“You chose this!” she sobs. “You ruined everything.”

Fear chills me, sharp and wild. I don’t care about the glass or the mess, or anything but the finality in her tone. Like it’s the end. “No,” I say, shaking my head against the unthinkable. “Nothing’s ruined. I’m with him, and we’re still the same as we ever were, I promise.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“But it’s true!” I don’t know what to do to make her listen. She’s not listening. Panic floods me. I grab her shoulders and shake her, violent with desperation. “It’s still you and me; it’ll always be you and me!”

“Stop it!” Elise cries, but I don’t, I keep holding tight until she shoves me away hard enough to send me flying to the ground among the shattered glass.

I sit up, catching my breath. There’s a dull pain in the back of my head, where it cracked against the floor.

“Anna . . .” Elise takes a step toward me, her eyes wide. “Oh God, I didn’t mean . . .”

I pull myself up by the couch. For a moment, we’re suspended there, across the room from each other. Eyes locked, a canyon of fierce emotion between us. Then there’s a noise from the stairs. Elise looks away, quickly grabbing the throw from the back of the couch and tossing it to the floor, so that when my dad appears in the doorway, the mess is blocked from view.

“Is everything okay?” My dad looks between us, confused. “I thought I heard something.”

“Fine, Mr. Chevalier.” Elise forces a smile. “I was just showing Anna a video on my phone.”

“Oh, okay.” Dad blinks. He’s got that dazed expression on his face, like he’s still gone, off in whatever financial documents he was buried in. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

“No, thank you, I have to go.”

“Okay,” He turns to me. “Call for takeout whenever you’re ready to eat.”

“Sure, Dad,” I say nervously, but he barely gives us another glance, just drifts back upstairs.

Elise waits until he’s gone, then pushes past me, out into the foyer. I trail after her. “Elise. Wait a second, please.”

She turns, her face set, then her expression slips. She gasps. “You’re bleeding.”

I look down. My hand is cut, welling bright red. “It’s fine,” I say quickly. “I can’t feel a thing.”

Elise backs away. “I can’t . . . I can’t be here.”

“Wait.” I follow her out onto the front steps. “Let me take you home, at least. You shouldn’t be out there like this.”

I reach for her, but she flinches away. “Elise?” My voice breaks.

“I’ll . . . see you tomorrow,” she says quickly, her gaze still fixed on my bloody hand. Then she bolts. I listen as her footsteps are swallowed up by the night, remembering the knife-edge to her gaze, something damaged and hard.

Fear shivers through me. I can’t lose her, not even a little. Tate has pulled me in and wrapped me up in this new kind of love, but I’m hers, too—I’ll always be hers. If I have to choose . . .

“Elise!” I call after her, yelling. “Miles and miles! Do you hear me?” My voice echoes out into the dark. “Miles and fucking miles!”

But there’s only silence. I wait on the steps until I’m frozen through, but she doesn’t come back. We wrecked it, I realize, and it feels like my heart splits wide open. Something was
ripped apart and bared to the world tonight, and we can’t ever take it back.

She’s gone.

At last I turn and walk slowly back into the warm, bright safety of the house.

Three weeks later, my mother is dead.

My words are a weapon,

They can cut you like glass.

Or they can smooth and soothe over gaps and cracks, dripping honey.

Sweet and safe.

They can gouge out your heart.

Carve my name into your fair skin,

Write verses in your blood.

Be careful what you say, my friend.

My words are my greatest weapon of all.

“And the defendant wrote this
poem?”

Silence.

Dekker glares. “Miss Day, please. You’re under oath.”

Chelsea looks at me across the courtroom. I haven’t seen her since my arrest; her hair is shorter now, the beachy waves an even brown, neat and preppy. She used to be loud and languid, always laughing; now her expression is apologetic and full of regret.

“Yes,” she says quietly. “In English class, beginning of senior year.”

“And this wasn’t the only violent thing she wrote, was it?”

I feel Gates inhale a sharp breath beside me.

Again, Chelsea is silent. She looks down, toying with the
woven bracelets she has still tied around her wrist, the colorful strands that she and I and Elise all bought at a store in Boston together, knotting them tightly to overlap.

Judge von Koppel leans over. “Please answer the question.”

Chelsea glances up, reluctant. “No, she wrote other things, for class. We all did.”

“Like this.” Dekker lifts a plastic-covered sheet between his thumb and forefinger. “Evidence item two one seven, a short story written by the defendant, describing the murder of a teenage girl.”

“It was an assignment,” Chelsea says quickly. “A college girl got shot, in the neighborhood. It was a big deal, everyone was talking about it, so our teacher had us write the stories about it. I did one, Elise did too. Everyone.”

“But you could choose, could you not, whether to write from the perspective of the victim or the murderer?” Dekker tilts his head, waiting.

Chelsea exhales. “Yes.”

“And Miss Chevalier was the only girl to write from the perspective of the killer.”

“Boys did too,” Chelsea replies. “Half the class.”

“And did the defendant tell you why she chose to take on the killer’s role?”

Chelsea bites her lip, looking over at me again. “She said . . .” Her voice trails into a whisper.

“Louder, please.”

Another reluctant sigh. “She said she liked putting herself in his shoes. Imagining how it would feel to have that kind of power over someone, to end their life. But it wasn’t real,” she protests. “It was writing, that was the whole point. Our teacher always told us to get out of our own minds, and imagine being somebody else!”

“But the defendant had a fascination for violent imagery even out of class,” Dekker clicks a photo up on the display: the cover of my science lab binder. “She copied the words to several songs, some would even say obsessively writing the same lyrics over and over. Let me quote for you, ‘I took a knife and cut out her eye,’” he reads, voice dramatic in the still of the courtroom. “ ‘I’ll cut your little heart out because you made me cry.’  That’s a song by one of the defendant’s favorite musicians, Florence and the Machine.”

They told me not to register any reaction to his questions, but I can’t help shaking my head in disbelief. The photos were bad enough, pulled at random from our online profiles, ripped from any context or meaning, but this? I’d always thought trials were about evidence and witnesses, but those are somebody else’s words that I scrawled on my notebook during a boring class, and now he’s holding them up as some kind of proof for my “violent urges”. Why doesn’t he go further, and pull up my DVR records and all the horror movies I used to watch, curled
tightly against Tate on the living room couch? Why not go through my bookcase for every crime novel he can find?