Hallie Hath No Fury . . . (4 page)

*   *   *

When I woke up the next morning and wandered out to the kitchen, yawning, I could tell immediately that something was different. My mother was there, for one thing, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee between her palms. She looked tired, but gave me a smile as I padded toward the refrigerator. “Morning,” she said.

“Hi,” I said around a yawn as I reached inside for the orange juice. “What are you doing here?” The clock on the microwave read 9:30, and usually by this time, my mother was long gone, already settling in to work at the library.

“I finished the book,” my mother said, sounding simultaneously nervous and proud.

“You did?” I asked, joining her at the table with my juice. “That's great. Congrats.”

“Thanks,” she said, rolling her cup between her palms once again. “It's … different from what I've written before. We'll see where it goes.” I opened my mouth to ask why, and what the book was about, when my mother spoke again. “Masha got another job,” she said with a small sigh. “I knew she would only be here temporarily, but…”

I nodded, like I was also sad about this. But the fact was, I'd been ready for Masha to leave. I hadn't liked that she'd seemed to pick up on the fact I'd started thinking about revenge, thanks to her turn of phrase. She'd never said anything about it again, but I'd always felt a little worried that she might say something to my mom about it.

“Well,” my mom said, pushing herself back from the table, sounding more like my mother than she had in a month, “I need to get things back in order. How about you, Hal? Have anything going on today?”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Just a project I'm working on.”

“Well, if you can take a break later, maybe we can get some lunch,” she said as she stopped in the doorway and smiled at me. “I want to hear what you've been up to.”

“Sure,” I said easily, giving her a smile. “Sounds good.” As soon as she left, though, I felt my smile fall away.

If I was careful, my mother would never know what I was up to.

And neither would Gemma—up until the moment I wrecked her life.

CHAPTER 5

Two Years Later

“I'm home,” I called as I stepped off of the elevator and into the expansive living room of our Upper East Side apartment. The fact that the elevator opened right into our home was something my mother hadn't been able to grasp at first. “It opens
into
the living room,” I'd heard her telling my brother on the phone the night after her offer to buy the apartment was accepted. “Directly into it! Can you believe that?”

We'd moved a year ago, and I still caught my mother running her hand over the polished kitchen countertop sometimes when she thought nobody was watching her, a look of wonderment on her face, like she still couldn't believe that it had happened. I'd seen that look less and less recently, though, as she seemed to settle into her new life.

When I'd started last year at my fancy private girls' school, she'd been worried about me fitting in, worried about the transition that I'd have to make from my Brooklyn public school. I didn't tell her that I wasn't worried, and that I knew I'd be fine. If I had, she might have wanted to know why. But I hadn't had any trouble fitting in, mostly because I'd found that everything I'd been learning and studying hadn't just been about revenge. It had been about reading people and controlling situations. And now, it was just second nature.

“Mom?” I called as I dropped my designer tote—I didn't particularly care about labels, but all the girls at school had them—on the polished wood floor and tossed my school cardigan over the chair in the entryway.

The apartment seemed quiet—I was pretty sure my mother had gone to a meeting, though this was a pretty good guess, because she seemed to spend all her time at meetings these days. Sure enough, there was a note on the monogrammed stationery pad on the counter.
At a meeting. Should be home by dinnertime. Want to order in? xoxo ps—do your homework
☺

I smiled at that. It was a joke—my grades were great, and she'd never had so much as a note from one of my teachers about me. It was something I'd promised myself when I decided not to tell her what had actually happened with Paul. I had a feeling that if she knew, she'd no doubt forgive him, which would pull Gemma back into my life. And that was the last thing I wanted … at least for the moment. In a bargaining session with myself, I'd decided if I was going to keep my mother in the dark about one of the great betrayals of her life, I would at least take away the burden of worrying about me. I would get good grades, I wouldn't get in trouble, and most of all, I would never, ever tell her what I was up to.

I set the note aside and headed down the hall to my bedroom. The walls were hung with professionally taken pictures of my mom, me, and Josh, expensively framed and hung at exact intervals. I knew it made no sense, but there was still a part of me that missed the smallness of our Brooklyn apartment, the way I knew my mother was just a few steps away if I needed her or if I had a bad dream.

I stepped inside my room and kicked off my flats. I'd planned on my mother being out—it would allow me to do some of my real work. I crossed to my desk and pulled out the chair. My room had been professionally decorated when we'd moved in, and while I'd shown the decorator some of my ideas, most of them hadn't made the cut, and even after a year, it was hard not to feel that I was living in a set, or a magazine ad. Josh told me he felt the same way, but I had a feeling it was worse for him, since he was only back from boarding school and summer sports camps a few times a year.

I booted up my computer and saw that I had a message from my brother. His first week of school had gone well, practice was good, and he wanted me to tell Mom to increase his spending limit at the bookstore. I smiled as I read it and wrote back a cheerful, joking reply. I tried to push down the feeling I'd been having more and more recently—that my brother and I were strangers who saw each other a few times a year. I wasn't sure if the feeling had started when he began going to boarding school during the year and lacrosse camps in the summer, or if it had begun when I'd started keeping secrets from him.

Feeling as though thinking about this was counterproductive, I closed out my e-mail and pulled up the password-protected file. When things had started to change, my mom had bought me my own laptop, and I'd abandoned my old composition book and gone high-tech. It made me feel better, because this way I knew I wasn't going to be found out if my notebook fell into the wrong hands. I wasn't sure, at this point, what I would even be able to say to explain it.

I pulled open the file and looked at all the research and information that I'd gathered over the last three years. Things had gotten a lot easier when Friendverse had become the social networking site that you
had
to be on. It had been shockingly easy, actually, to gain access to Gemma's profile. And as I started to do research, I'd made sure to become Friendverse friends with her best friend, Sophie Curtis, as well.

I looked down at the Sophie section of the file and brought it up on screen, considering the information. For a while, I'd been thinking about doing something with Sophie to get back at Gemma. Sophie had been her best friend when we'd been kids, and it seemed like nothing had changed in the last three years. They still seemed to do everything together and were constantly messaging each other. I scrolled though one of their exchanges, still a little amazed at the amount of information people would put on the Internet for anyone to find. I guess it had never occurred to either of them that someone might be looking for it. Which was, to say the least, a mistake on Gemma's part.

I shook my head and closed out the Sophie section. Getting to Gemma through her had never felt right to me, somehow. One of the most recent revenge movies I'd watched had hinged on the idea of knowing when to strike. That if you were patient, the moment would present itself. And Sophie and Gemma's friendship had never felt like that. Which meant I'd have to keep waiting.

I opened up Gemma's Friendverse page, which was probably now more familiar to me than my own. I was just scrolling through it, looking for new activity, when my phone buzzed with a text.

     
Lilliana Carter

     3:45 PM

     Hey! Free to hang tomorrow? Party at my house!

 

I read it, then replied immediately.

 

Me

Of course!

Wouldn't miss it! J
☺

xoxo

I set my phone aside and tried to concentrate. I'd had a lot of friends ever since I started at my new school. Lilliana, I was sure, would even consider me her best friend. And I liked her a lot. But I didn't feel really close to her—or to any of the girls from school. It was like, even during slumber parties and shopping sprees, I was just going through the motions, saying the things I was expected to say, while not really being myself. It was something I didn't like to admit to myself, but the last real friend I'd had was Gemma. It was the last time I'd been totally honest and hadn't always had to to hide things. I hadn't realized that this would be one of the sacrifices that people in revenge movies were always talking about having to make, but there it was.

It turned out to be really hard to be best friends with people when you're keeping lots and lots of secrets from them. And not only secrets about my revenge plans—the very fact of what my mother did had to be kept under wraps, and Josh and I had both endured a very long conversation with her new lawyer right before things started to change. With this many secrets to keep straight, it was easier to never share any of them with your friends, no matter how close they thought you were. I was secretly afraid that if I ever started telling someone my secrets, I might never stop.

Needing to think about something else, I concentrated on Gemma's profile page. Her dad had sent her a “Happy first week of school” message, and I clicked on Paul's profile for just a minute. I had just assumed, when Gemma had gotten what she'd wanted and pushed my mom out of the picture, that her parents would get back together immediately. I hadn't at all been prepared for the realization (thanks to one of my many Google alerts) that her dad decided to move away to California and become a screenwriter.

I'd mentioned it to my mother when I'd first found out about it, and she had looked stricken when I'd told her. I wasn't sure if she was upset that Paul had moved away, or that he'd abandoned his novels and was writing animated time-travel movies—or even that I'd just brought him up at all—but I'd learned my lesson and hadn't brought him up again. It made me feel a little better, though, to know that Gemma hadn't been able to get everything she wanted after all.

It looked like there were a lot of posts from her friends about starting high school, and how excited/nervous they were about it. Since my school was a K–12, nothing had really changed this year when I'd entered ninth grade. But it seemed like for Gemma, in Connecticut, it was a bigger deal. I scrolled through her page, then felt my eyes widen. There it was, in her personal updates—
Gemma is taken by Teddy Callaway
.

This had been followed by an exchange with Sophie that consisted entirely of exclamation points, and a response from Gemma promising to tell her all about it.

I felt my heart start to beat a little harder. “Taken by” was the Friendverse code for dating someone exclusively. And that had happened
fast—
I couldn't remember ever seeing a mention of him on her page before.

I clicked onto this Teddy's page, and found it was thankfully not private. I felt my eyebrows rise as I looked at him. He was cute, I had to admit, with blond hair and blue eyes, an earnest look on his face. And it didn't take me long to realize that he was one of those do-gooders, people who are determined to make a difference in the world. I looked through his photo album and his feed, trying not to be impressed by the sheer number of groups he seemed to belong to, or had started. I had to admit, though, that I was surprised that
this
was Gemma's new boyfriend. He didn't really seem like her type.

But that didn't matter, I reminded myself as I clicked back over to Gemma's page, looking at her most recent status update, which was just a heart. All that mattered was that she was happy. That this was someone Gemma didn't want to lose. I could feel myself already start to plan, start to spin out possibilities, when I made myself stop. It was way too premature for that. This might be a one-week relationship that didn't go anywhere. It probably wouldn't last. But it was a possibility. I'd have to keep watching.

I heard the sound, from down the long hallway, of the elevator opening into the living room, and realized my mom was home. I looked at the heart that represented Gemma's hopes, her happiness, for another moment. Then I password protected my file, made sure there was no evidence to be seen, and I went to join my mother.

CHAPTER 6

Eighteen Months Later • April

I pulled into the parking lot of Stubbs Coffee, cut the engine, and let out a long breath. I had been waiting for this moment for years. And now, it was actually going to begin. And I was terrified.

I checked the time on the dashboard clock—I was still okay. I had over an hour to get ready and get over to Putnam Park, the place where I would put my plan—the one that I'd spent years crafting—into place. It was two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon, which meant that I absolutely should have been in school. But when I'd realized, through Gemma's and Teddy's status updates, that Gemma would be busy this afternoon and Teddy would be at a loose end, I knew that this was my moment. And I wasn't about to let a little thing like the fact that I was supposed to be in class stop me.