The Merciless

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ISBN: 978-1-101-63131-7

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

I
snag my thumb on the lunch tray's metal edge, and a crescent of blood appears beneath my cuticle. It oozes into the cracks surrounding my nail, then spills over to one side, forming a perfect red droplet, almost like a tear.

I swear under my breath. The cut stings, but at least I didn't smear blood across my T-shirt. Nothing says “be my friend” like serial-killer stains on the first day of school. A stack of napkins sits next to the bin of plastic silverware, but the guy in the food line in front of me is blocking it.

“Excuse me,” I say, and the guy turns around. He's good-looking in that athletic, future-frat-boy way where he doesn't really have to try. His brown hair sticks up all over, and he wears a loose, wrinkled shirt, as if he's just rolled out of bed.

Years of being the new girl have helped me perfect my shy half smile. It's as close as I ever come to flirting. I motion to my bleeding finger. “Can you hand me a napkin?”

“Ouch,” the guy says, grabbing a few napkins from the stack. His smile beats mine by a few watts, and I blush.

“Hey, do you need a Band-Aid?” asks a girl behind me, and I turn. She has platinum-blond hair cut short, like a boy's. Oversize black glasses without any lenses sit on her nose, and she wears a neon-pink tank top stretched so thin I can see her black bra through the material. A man's golden ring dangles from a chain around her neck.

“Yeah, thanks,” I say. Next to her, my standard first-day uniform of a gray T-shirt and dark jeans looks comically plain. A few schools ago, I tried layering rubber bracelets around my wrists and coloring on my Converse sneakers with Sharpies, but today my wrists are bare, my sneakers brand-new. It's time for a change.

“Hey, Brooklyn, what's up?” The boy nods at her. They don't seem like the kind of people who'd be friends, but his tone is nice enough. Brooklyn slides her tattered backpack off one shoulder and reaches into the front pocket.

“Hiya, Charlie,” she says to him. “Your brother miss me yet?”

The name
Charlie
fits the cute, athletic guy, and it makes me like him more than if his name were Zack or Chad. A Charlie helps you find your algebra class when you can't figure out your new class schedule. Chad burps the alphabet.

Charlie runs a hand through his hair, leaving it even messier than before. “
Miss
isn't the word I'd use. . . .”

“Ex-boyfriend?” I interrupt to keep from being left out of the conversation. Asking a million questions is New Girl 101. People love talking about themselves. Brooklyn pulls her hand out of her bag and hands me a clear bandage decorated with a tiny picture of a mustache.

“Ex-boss,” she says. “But he'll be begging for me to come back any day now. Hey, cool tat.”

She points to the crook of my hand, where I sketched a serpent wearing a headdress made of feathers. It's called Quetzalcoatl. When I was little and my mom and I still visited the tiny town where she grew up in Mexico, my grandmother told stories about Quetzalcoatl. Grandmother's too sick to tell the stories anymore, but I sketch the serpent in my journal sometimes. And on my hand, apparently.

“It's not a real tattoo,” I admit, rubbing at the drawing with the palm of my other hand. I'll have to wash it off before my mom sees it. She's never liked Grandmother's religious stories. My mom got her US citizenship five years ago, and she says Grandmother's spooky Mexican folktales remind her of all the reasons she'd wanted to move away. “Just Sharpie.”

“Oh.” Brooklyn sounds disappointed, but Charlie raises an eyebrow and nods in approval.

“You drew that? Nice,” he says.

Before I can respond, a dark-haired girl stops in the middle of the cafeteria and clears her throat. The talking, laughing students around us fall silent, as if they've been placed under a spell.

“Can I have your attention, everyone?” she asks, even though everyone's already looking at her. A group of six or seven people crowd behind her, all holding bags and cardboard boxes.

“Jesus.” Brooklyn grimaces, pushing her fake glasses up her nose. Her tone is completely different than it was a second ago, when she offered me the Band-Aid. “Is it time for this shit again?”

“I'm Riley, as most of you know,” the dark-haired girl continues in a clear, peppy voice. “And it's time for the annual school food drive for the St. Michael's Soup Kitchen. I hope this year you'll all help me do God's work and bring in food for the homeless. Last year alone, we collected over five hundred cans!”

Students around us start to clap. It takes me by surprise, and I join a beat too late. The only time kids at my last school clapped for people was when they tripped and dropped their lunch trays.

Behind me, Brooklyn makes a gagging sound.

“Come on,” Charlie mutters. He'd been clapping with the others, but he breaks off to nudge Brooklyn with his elbow. I bite back a smile. I was wrong; he doesn't really seem like a frat boy after all.

Brooklyn makes a gun with her hand and points it at Riley's head, narrowing her eyes.

“
Pew
,” she whispers, shooting an imaginary bullet. She blows smoke from the tips of her fingers.

I raise an eyebrow as I reach past her for a carton of milk. I've hung out with girls like her before, the girls who skip third period to smoke cloves in the bathroom and pierce their ears with safety pins. It's always exciting for a while, but they never become real friends. I usually spend most of my time trying to prove I'm cool enough to hang with them.

Still, beggars can't be choosers. So when Brooklyn winks at me and says “Later,” I smile and wave back.

Charlie shakes his head as Brooklyn walks away, and a few strands of floppy brown hair fall over his eyes. His arm brushes against mine as he leans over the food counter to grab a fork and napkin.

“Don't take Brooklyn seriously,” he says, flashing me a half smile. A dimple appears in his cheek. “It's not so bad here, I promise. See you around?”

My heart does a little flip inside my chest as he walks away. I've been bouncing around long enough to know my crushes never turn out the way I want them to, but I still manage to fall in love every time I meet a new guy with a great smile. I should have learned by now that high school romance isn't in the cards for me. My mom's been a medical technician for the army since moving to the States. I'm at a new school every six months, like clockwork.

This time it's Adams High School, in the tiny army town of Friend, Mississippi. Friend feels like the inside of an oven. The grass is brown, I hear insects buzzing wherever I go, and there are more churches in my neighborhood than grocery stores. I've lived in nicer places, but in the end it always comes down to the people. I hesitate near the cafeteria doors and glance back over my shoulder at Charlie. Heat creeps up my neck. This place has potential.

The students at Adams eat lunch outside, so I take my tray through the side door and head toward the bleachers. Adams High is a one-story-high building made of cream-colored brick with mud-brown siding. The classrooms are all outdated, with peeling linoleum floors and rickety desks. In fact, the only impressive part of the whole school is its football field, a deep-green stretch of Astroturf surrounded by shiny silver bleachers. Above the bleachers hangs a blue-and-white sign that reads
ADAMS HIGH SPARTANS
.
A Mississippi flag billows in the air next to it.

As I look around for a place to sit, a gasp of hot wind blows my curls into my face. I lift a hand to push them away, immediately noticing the smell. It's like milk gone bad, or moldy cheese.

I take a step toward the bleachers, and the smell gets worse. Now it's chicken that's been in the garbage all night, fish left out in the heat. I pull my T-shirt over my nose and make my way under the bleachers.

That's when I see it.

It's a cat. A dead cat. Skin's been peeled away from the cat's body in strips. Flies buzz around its head and inside its mouth, crawling over its tongue and teeth. Red paint clings to the stiff grass beneath the cat's body, and candles surround it, cemented to the ground in pools of black wax. It takes a minute for me to see that the paint is in the shape of a star, with a black candle at each point—like a ritual.

I don't notice that I've started picking at the skin along my cuticles until I feel a sharp stab of pain and look down to see blood pooling around another fingernail. The cat's clouded gray eyes watch me, and the flies' constant buzz fills my ears.

“What are you doing?”

I whirl around, immediately spotting the dark-haired girl from the cafeteria—Riley. Her brown curls pool around her shoulders in perfect spirals, and her eyebrows start wide and taper to needle-thin points, as if they were drawn with a calligraphy pen. There isn't a single crease in her blue dress. It looks like she never sits down.

Riley looks past me, her pale blue eyes finding the skinned body of the cat. One of her eyebrows lifts, but her face remains otherwise unchanged.

“Gross.” There's no inflection in her voice. She could be talking about the lasagna they served at lunch. I take a step away from the cat, nearly tripping over my sneakers.

“I didn't . . . I mean, that wasn't me. I didn't do that.”

Riley turns her eyes on me. They're so pale they change her entire face, making her dark hair and brows seem severe. If I were going to paint her I'd have to use watercolors—only a drop of cerulean for her eyes, keeping them as light as possible.

“Of course you didn't.” She glances down at the cat and shudders. “You're new, right? Sofia?”

“Yeah,” I say, surprised she knows my name.

“Riley.” She points to herself and her eyes grow several degrees warmer. “This is disgusting. I'm impressed you didn't hurl.”

“Me, too.” I wrinkle my nose. “Though I'm not sure I'm past the hurling stage yet.”

“Right. Let's get out of here.” Riley slides her arm around my shoulder and turns me away from the cat. “Come sit with me and my friends today.”

She pulls me out from under the bleachers without waiting for an answer, which is probably a good thing because for once I don't know what to say. Girls I've known who look like Riley don't make friends with the new kid. It's a law of nature—Earth revolves around the sun, summer follows spring, and pretty, popular girls form cliques that are harder to break into than a bank vault. If attending seven schools in five years has taught me anything, that's it.

But Riley seemed genuine when she made her charity announcement in the cafeteria. Maybe she's different. Maybe Friend will live up to its name.

“We have the best spot for lunch,” Riley explains. A few people smile and wave as we climb past them, and though Riley smiles back, she makes no move to stop and sit. “You can see everything that happens.”

“Cool,” I say. Riley steers us over to where only two other girls are sitting.

“Girls, this is Sofia. Sofia, this is Alexis.” Riley points to a girl wearing all white—white skirt, white tank top, white sweater. Her pale blond hair is long enough for her to sit on, and she has a full, round face and wide eyes.

“Hey there,” Alexis says, her voice carrying the hint of a Southern accent.

“And this is Grace.” Riley motions to a girl with velvety chocolate skin and braided hair that she's twisted into a complicated-looking bun at the nape of her neck.

“Nice tie,” I say, pointing to the polka-dot bow tie Grace is wearing as a necklace. Grace's lips part in a smile that's all teeth.

“Thanks! They're all the rage in Chicago.”

“Grace is bringing culture to Mississippi,” Alexis adds.

“Are you from Chicago?” I ask, sitting down on the bleachers next to them.

“My dad was transferred here two years ago,” Grace says. “You ever been?”

I shake my head as Riley sits next to me and places her hands on her knees. Even her nails are perfect—trimmed and clean. I curl my hands into fists so she won't see my ragged cuticles.

“You'll never guess what Sof and I found under the bleachers.”

Sof.
The way Riley says my name is so personal and friendly that I have to bite back a smile. Alexis and Grace lean forward, and Riley grins, a conspiratorial look on her face. She speaks in a whisper.

“A skinned dead cat.”

“That's a joke, right?” Alexis asks, fumbling with the lace at the edge of her skirt. With her long hair and wide eyes, she looks like a Disney princess come to life.

Riley makes a cross over her heart. “Honest. I bet this is grounds for expulsion.”

Grace shudders, nervously tapping a red Converse sneaker against the back of the bleacher in front of her. “They've got to at least suspend her. That's
disgusting
.”

“Wait.” I frown. “You know who killed that cat?”

Grace, Alexis, and Riley share a look I can't interpret. It's like they're trying to figure out if I can be trusted.

“You know that girl you were talking to in the cafeteria?” Riley asks, smoothing a curl behind one ear.

“Brooklyn?” I ask, surprised. I didn't realize Riley saw me talking to Brooklyn.

“Right. Brooklyn. She can be a little strange.”

“Strange how?” I ask when Riley doesn't specify. Skinning a cat isn't strange. It's criminal.

Alexis scoots forward, and one of her knees bumps against mine. “There are rumors about Brooklyn,” she says. “And since you're going to this school, you should probably know about them. They're intense.”

“Rumors?”

“Last year she did a séance in the girls' locker room,” Alexis continues. Her Southern accent gets heavier as she tells the story, and I get the feeling she's playing it up for effect. “I was in there the next day. The floor was all black—like it'd been burned—and the entire place smelled like sage.”