This is WAR (15 page)

When Lina finally came to a door that looked vaguely bathroom-like, she took a chance and pushed it open only to slam directly into one of the most beautiful girls she’d ever seen. Her chocolate skin glowed in the dim lights and her eyes matched the tiny waves licking the edge of the boat. Lush black hair hung down her back and her emerald green dress grazed the middle of her lean, muscled thighs. Lina was pretty sure the girl worked at the Club. She probably made a killing in tips every night
.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t even knock.” Lina crossed her arms in an attempt to hide the tattoos that lined them. She wanted to disappear and be noticed all at the same time.
She settled for hunching forward and letting the longest strand of her white hair hide her eyes, as if that might make her look like less of a giant, awkward loser who had just barreled into a bathroom like some kind of cretin
.

“Lina Winthrop?” The girl grabbed her hand and squeezed gently. “I’ve been meaning to introduce myself.” All of the warmth that Lina had been hoping for in her random kiss upstairs poured into her stomach and flowed down her legs at the touch of the girl’s hand
.

This is what it’s supposed to feel like.

She imagined the girl leaning closer, giving into everything she’d been trying to fight for the last eight years of her life. The girl’s lips would graze her own, gentle and light like a butterfly, and she’d tug Lina closer
.

“It is Lina, right?” The girl pulled her eyebrows together in confusion and Lina shook her head
.

“No, um, I mean yes. Yes, I’m Lina. And you are?” She sounded ruder than she meant to
.

“Mari. I’ve seen you at the Club. I’m a server. Is everything all right? You look lost.” Lina hadn’t realized that Mari still held her hand. She squeezed gently and then leaned in close, her breath tickled Lina’s neck. “Bet I can help.” Blood rushed to Lina’s cheeks, and it felt like her entire body was blushing. And then, so fast she couldn’t be sure if she’d just imagined it, she felt Mari’s lips on her ear. “You look like you could use a drink.” The girl giggled and handed Lina her glass
.

Lina didn’t think, she just tipped her head back and let the cool liquid slide down her throat. The drink burned its way down into her stomach, and she involuntarily squeezed her eyes shut as the alcohol coursed through her body. When she opened them, Mari’s lips were just a breath away from her
own, and more than she had ever wanted anything in her life, Lina wanted to close the space
.

But this wasn’t how Lina had envisioned her night going. This wasn’t who she envisioned spending her night with. This wasn’t who Lina was supposed to be
.

“I’m … good, thanks. I’ve gotta go.” Lina turned and rushed back up the stairs not caring what she looked like. She just had to get out of there. She had to stick with her original plan
.

And like a sign from a God she never really believed in, the phone she’d been handed when she boarded the ship buzzed in her clutch
.

Mariner’s Cove. Now.

She was being summoned by her mystery date. Lina knew this was it. Tonight was the night she’d finally let go of everything and forget all of the other weird shit. She was just a normal girl who didn’t really enjoy guys. Sexuality existed on a spectrum like anything else, and she happened to fall in the place where it didn’t feel all that good. Maybe if she finally got it over with, maybe then she’d feel differently. Surely instinct would take over. Or something. As Lina made her way through the winding hallways, the boat began to tip and sway. Her head swam. She couldn’t quite find her footing. How strange. She must have drunk more than she realized
.

When she finally found the room, she was happy to see the bed. She collapsed into its white expanse without even remembering what she was there to do
.

Until she saw Trip Gregory
.

“You made it.”

Her mouth tried to form some type of response but her lips refused to move the right way
.

“This is going to be fun. Promise.” Trip smiled, the whites of his teeth blending together into a solid strip, his eyes spreading out and then in
.

Lina began to fade. “My friends … I … um, I’m supposed to find them.” The words slipped out of her mouth. She needed an escape. Something about Trip in the tiny room unsettled her
.

“They’re fine. Willa’s with James. It’s just you and me.”

Those were the last words she remembered him saying before she blacked out completely
.

Later, when her eyes fluttered open, Lina was alone. She heard the fireworks exploding outside the window. Her heavy eyelids only allowed her to see the briefest flashes of red, white, and blue. She wished she were on deck so she could really see them. There was something cozy about fireworks, the way they warmed the night sky, their burnt campfire smell. But tonight she was so tired. It was impossible to keep her eyes open, like there was someone scrubbing her corneas with tiny brillo pads. Sleep seemed to drown her, and this time when the darkness swallowed her up, she was too tired to try to claw her way out
.

Minutes or hours or days later Lina opened her eyes and came to a few realizations rather quickly. The first was that she was fully dressed. The second was that the bed was wet. The third was that she wasn’t alone
.

She remembered the fireworks, her dry mouth, and heavy eyes. And then Trip. What the hell had he done to her?

But when Lina rolled over to examine the snoring boy passed out next to her, Trip was nowhere to be found
.

Instead, Lina was sleeping next to a very soaked, very unconscious James Gregory
.

And that’s when she heard the sirens
.

Chapter 17

Back to the drawing board. 9 2morrow. Same place.

Sloane read Madge’s text over and over again, the words swimming in front of her eyes. She wondered what a drawing board looked like. Obviously, she knew that Madge was referring to a theoretical drawing board and not an actual, physical board, but the question sort of got stuck in her brain. Like when one of her uncle’s old school records got a scratch and kept playing the same snippet of a song over and over again. Sloane’s brain was like that. Sometimes it just got stuck.

And her stupid, scratched, stuck brain couldn’t stop imagining a drawing board for the War. Would there be pictures of the Gregorys with bull’s eyes printed over their faces? Or maybe pictures of Willa. Her school picture, the snapshot of her and Sloane in Aruba, the sun glinting off Willa’s blonde hair. Or maybe even a picture of her when they pulled her out of the lake that night. Sloane hadn’t wanted to look, hadn’t
wanted to see, but she was there when they fished her friend from the dark water. She
remembered
.

Willa’s body, bloated and blue from her time under the surface, was another mental sink hole. Sloane dug her fingernails into her palms, worked to switch the image, tried to conjure up Aruba, white sand, Willa’s crooked smile, and the sparkling water—but no matter what, she was only ever able to see death. The scratched record in her head played on. As she walked toward the secret entrance to the Club’s attic she thought about songs and how supposedly soldiers used horrible pop songs to torture terrorists in remote island prisons. Sloane imagined playing a manufactured pop song over and over again for the Gregorys, while at the same time forcing them to see the image of Willa, still and cold. That was a revenge she could wrap her head around.

Sloane knew the girls’ original plan was doomed. The doubt had already taken root and grown like a thorny vine, tightening around her so that the key she wore every day felt more like a noose than anything else. These were Gregorys. They couldn’t be damaged by naked pictures and drugs. Nothing could end their reign at Hawthorne. But she never quite found the right moment to tell the girls. Or really, to tell Madge. She saw the determination in her eyes, knew what happened when she set out to win. And she was scared for her. But more than anything, she wished Madge would grieve for Willa like a normal person. The truth was Sloane didn’t really understand how destroying the Gregorys was supposed to make them feel any better about losing Willa. In fact, so far, this whole revenge scenario had only made Sloane feel worse.

But in the end, it didn’t matter what she thought or felt. This was the central reality of her life: Sloane knew she was dumb. She said dumb things all the time, did dumb things.
She’d learned to compensate for being an idiot by shutting up and agreeing with whatever everyone else said or did.

Getting by was so much easier that way.

Sloane made her way up the stairs, counting them one by one in her head as she ascended, a childhood habit that she could never quite kick thanks to parents who attempted to make every second of her life a teachable moment of some sort. Her earliest memory was of the time her mother forced her to read
Corduroy
out loud at one of the many social gatherings her parents hosted. Each memorized word slipped from between her lips, her voice loud and strong. She knew enough to change her inflection on certain words and to read slowly as though she were truly sounding out the words for the first time, decoding the secret message. But it was a good thing she knew the book by heart because as she “read,” the story distracted her. The little girl, Lisa, claimed she loved Corduroy just the way he was as she fixed the strap of his broken overall. But Sloane didn’t buy it. Lisa didn’t want to make Corduroy more comfortable; she wanted him to look good. Lisa was embarrassed by her beat-down bear in the same way her parents were embarrassed by their dumbass daughter. Even as a little girl she noticed her father flinch when she stumbled over a word. Her parents wanted to parade her around like some kind of trophy they had received for being geniuses. But those genius genes hadn’t been passed on. She knew it. They knew it.

And Willa knew it, too.

Sloane had been running late, as usual, when she’d walked into her room to find Willa staring at her PSAT scores that she’d accidentally left out on her desk. Yet another dumb mistake.

“I thought you were a National Merit scholar?” There was
a trace of fear in her voice, the same slight quiver she heard in her parents when she said something outrageously stupid.

If Lina had seen her test results, she would have pretended that it never happened. But Willa was never one to pretend. She always spoke her mind. She always asked really annoying questions. It was one of the things that Sloane hated the most about her dying. All of these people, they remembered Obituary Willa. The real Willa was more than an angel. She was the one who’d busted Sloane for lying about her PSAT scores and called her on it—to help. The one who stayed Sloane’s best friend even after she knew Sloane was a fraud. The one who helped Sloane keep her secret.

Muffled voices drifted from beneath the attic door. She hoped she was just late enough. Not so late that she made people worried or annoyed, but the kind of late where you rushed in seemingly frenzied, and the project or the lab—or, in this case, the doomed plan—was already underway: responsibilities assigned, leaders established. For Sloane, running behind was a lifestyle. It cemented her role as a follower, and being a follower minimized her chances of looking like a jackass. If anything in her life came close to an art, it was tardiness.

With a deep breath, she turned the aged bronze handle. “Sorry I’m late, guys.” One by one, she examined their faces. Lina’s dark eyes softened ever so slightly. Not annoyed. Rose, whom Sloane still couldn’t get a read on, smiled when she saw her. Not annoyed. Madge smoothed her perfectly straight hair and avoided making eye contact. Semi-annoyed. But then again Madge was pretty much always semi-annoyed. “What’d I miss?”

“We were just discussing these,” Madge said, turning toward Sloane. She wore a crisp white T-shirt. Weird. It must
have been brand-new because there were still creases along the center and sleeves. She’d never seen Madge in a T-shirt. “They’re for sale in the pro shop.”