The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (4 page)

The ethereal girl spun out of her friend’s arms toward the window and suddenly she froze. My heart caught, startled at her abruptness, but it took me a good long moment to realize she was staring right at me. I had mistaken her gaze as flighty and unfocused, but I saw now that it was the exact opposite. She looked right through me, around me, all over me, taking in everything and turning me inside out. Embarrassed, I looked quickly away, pretending to be preoccupied by something in the room, but it was no use. I had to look back. When I did, she was holding her curtains wide with both hands, still staring.

I was breathless. I was caught. But I couldn’t look away. Would she tell her friends? Would she report me? Could I get kicked out of Easton for spying? I stared back, willing her to be kind. Willing her not to tell. For a long moment, neither one of us moved.

Then she smiled, ever so slightly, and snatched the curtains closed.

“Billings House? That’s an upperclassmen-only house. And even if you’re a junior or senior, you have to meet certain requirements to get in.”

“Requirements?”

“Academic, athletic, service. If you meet their requirements, you get an invitation from housing at the end of the year. It’s very selective. You have to be an integral part of the Easton community to live there.”

Her expression said, “You will never live there.”

I had just met Missy Thurber five minutes before and already I felt like choking her. She was the piglike girl who had snickered about the no-boys rule at yesterday’s meeting. She had highlighted blond hair that she wore back in a French braid and a nose that turned up so far at the end that you could almost see into her nostrils. You’d think that a girl with a nose like that wouldn’t have the guts to be so superior, but she managed to look down it at everyone she saw. She also held her shoulders so far back when she walked it
was as if she wanted her large breasts to enter any room a good fifteen seconds ahead of her. Ridiculous. I would never have even bothered talking to her if Constance hadn’t told me both her parents and all her siblings had attended Easton and that she knew everything there was to know about the school. I had looked up the dorm behind mine in the catalog, but other than its name, Billings, there was no information. All the other dorms read “Bradwell, sophomore girls’ housing” or “Harden, junior and senior boys’ only.” Billings just said “Billings House.”

“At the end of the year, we should apply. We should
all
apply,” Constance said in her enthusiastic way as we walked out of the breakfast line and into the Easton cafeteria with our trays of fruit and toast. “I bet we would totally get in,” Constance added to me alone.

The Easton cafeteria was a cavernous room with a domed ceiling that terminated in a small, cut-glass skylight that danced slivers of sun on the tables and chairs below. Unlike Croton High, the furniture here was not made of standard-issue plastic and metal, but real, solid wood. Cane-backed chairs were set up alongside tables with thick legs, and all surfaces shone as if they had been freshly waxed. On the walls were paintings that evoked various facets of life in historical New England. Farmhouses, covered bridges, skaters on a frozen pond. All very quaint and old-fashioned. All almost funny when juxtaposed against the kid with the MP3 player who was executing a sleeper hold on some other guy in an effort to commandeer his portable game system. Or the girls swapping summer
piercing horror stories, lifting their shirts and sticking out their tongues to display their war wounds.

Near the front of the room was a large table with slightly more ornate detailing. Several teachers sat there with their food, talking in low tones or reading from newspapers. A couple of older gentlemen sat back with their arms crossed over their chests, scanning the room as they spoke to one another, eager to pounce if someone stepped out of line.

“You don’t
apply.
They invite you,” Missy said again, rolling her eyes. “How did she even get in here?” she said, not so quietly, to Lorna, the mousy girl on her other side. Lorna had small features overpowered by bushy brown eyebrows and the kinkiest brown hair I had ever seen. She hadn’t said much so far, but she hadn’t left Missy’s side all morning, so I had a feeling I didn’t like her.

“Nice attitude,” I said.

Missy scoffed and took a seat at the end of a table, forcing the rest of us to squeeze between her and the chair behind her to get in.

“Whatever. The point is, not just anyone can get into Billings. You have to be . . . special,” Missy said as she prissily opened up her napkin and laid it across her lap.

“And it’s like once you live there, you’re golden,” Lorna added. “They all get good grades—”

“Even if your grades sucked before. Go figure,” Diana Waters, another girl from our floor, interjected. She was a pixie-ish girl with short blond hair and clear braces. “Plus every captain of every team and every president of every club lives there—”

“They’re achievers,” Missy said. “Women who lived in Billings have gone on to be senators, movie stars, news anchors, novelists.”

“And college? Forget about it,” Diana said. “They get recommendations from all the Billings alumnae and every single one of them ends up at an Ivy. Every single one.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“I shit you not,” Diana said. “Their track record is blemish-free.”

“Yes, it is,” Missy said as she spread some low-fat cream cheese on her bagel. “I can’t wait until next year. To have one of those huge rooms? The cages they have us in now have
got
to be a human rights violation.”

“What makes you think you’re going to live there? I thought you had to be
invited,
” I said pointedly.

“I will be. I’m a legacy,” Missy said. Like,
duh
. “Both my mother and my sister lived in Billings.”

Okay. Now I hated her even more. The fact that someone like that could just have something like Billings handed to her just illustrated everything that was wrong with the world.

“Which basically means they have to take her,” Lorna added with a laugh.

Nice. Maybe Lorna didn’t entirely suck.

Missy shot her a look that made her go instantly pale. “Not that you wouldn’t get in anyway,” Lorna added quickly.

“Check it out,” Diana said, lifting her chin. “Speak of the devils.”

I looked up and there they were, striding two-by-two toward a
table in the very center of the cafeteria. Leading the pack was the girl with the dark hair and the scar that was now hidden somewhere underneath a pristine white linen blazer and black T-shirt. I flushed just thinking about it, knowing it was there when she had no idea that I knew. She was tall—even taller than my five nine from the looks of her—and, I couldn’t help noticing, in flat shoes. She spoke to the ethereal girl, who walked next to her with her head tipped toward her friend, but with that far-off expression in her eyes.

Behind them was the sly girl, whose light brown hair was again up in a messy bun. She led with her hips as she walked, her back straight and her chin up. A gawky brunette boy stared at her as she passed him by and she winked at him surreptitiously. He turned a deep, disturbing shade of purple before sliding down in his seat and hiding behind his manga book. The girl laughed to herself, triumphant.

With her was the cherub, whose blond curls bounced as she scurried after her friends. She was the only one of the four who walked with her head down, her pale skin blotched with pink from some kind of exertion, pleasure, or embarrassment. She hugged her books to her chest and seemed to be concentrating hard on something going on in her head.

They really were here. They really did exist.

“I would kill to be Noelle Lange,” Diana said, leaning her chin on her hand.

“Yeah. That’s gonna happen,” Missy said sarcastically.

“Which one’s Noelle?” Constance asked.

“White blazer,” Lorna said, envy dripping from her very lips. “Rumor has it that Harvard, Cornell, and Yale are all fighting for her.”

“Please. She’ll go wherever Dash McCafferty goes,” Missy said, glancing over.

I saw that the big, blond guy who caught my punt yesterday was now sitting on a table behind Noelle, rubbing her shoulders with his huge hands. She titled her head back, her long tresses tumbling down behind her, and he leaned down for a kiss.

“More like
he’ll
go wherever
she
goes,” Diana said. “I highly doubt Dash wears the pants in that relationship.”

“When Noelle’s in the room, she’s pretty much the only one wearing pants,” Lorna added.

“That’s true. I take it back,” Missy said.

“Who’s the reader?” I asked, noticing that ethereal girl once again had her nose stuck in a book.

“That’s Ariana Osgood,” Missy said. “Her family owns half the South. Which means the rest of the Billings Girls forgive her for being
from
the South.”

Diana, Constance, and Lorna all snickered.

“They’re in oil,” Missy added. “All big, cigar-chomping, bane-of-the-environmentalists types. God only knows how they produced her.”

“She’s a poet,” Diana explained. “She writes half the literary magazine every quarter. She’s really good.”

“The model is Kiran Hayes,” Lorna said. “She’s done Abercrombie, Ralph Lauren . . .”

“Omigod! Yes! She was on the billboard outside my Pilates studio!” Constance exclaimed.

“Omigod! Keep your voice down, you freak!” Missy shot back, mimicking her.

“Wait. She’s an
actual
model?” I asked.

“What? Like you’ve never seen one in the flesh before?” Missy said. “Half the girls in my building back home have done the spring shows.”

I glanced around and noticed that at least half the male population of the room was in fact watching Kiran, most of them practically drooling.

“And then there’s Taylor Bell,” Diana said. “From all accounts, the smartest girl ever to step foot on the Easton campus.”

Across the way, the cherubic girl laughed and had to slap her hand over her mouth to keep from spitting out her oatmeal. Didn’t look like a genius to me, but then again, I’d never seen one of
those
in the flesh either.

“Best schools. Hottest boyfriends,” Diana said. “Yeah. Being a Billings Girl definitely wouldn’t suck.”

I stared across the room at the four girls and the guys who hovered around them, my pulse racing with a new sense of excitement. A few more girls sat down at the other end of their table, every last one of them beautiful and poised, though to me they seemed second-string compared to the four girls I had seen the night before.

“What about the others?” I asked.

“Eh, they’re in Billings too,” Diana said with a wave of her fork.

So I was right. It was Noelle and her friends who were important. Noelle and her friends who were the most worth knowing.

My heart pounded against my rib cage and I pressed my sweaty palm into the thigh of my jeans. I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted to be at that table right then. If I could just enter that inner sanctum, every door at Easton would open up to me. I would never have to worry about being accepted or fitting in. I would be leaving my own crappy, depressing home life so far behind maybe i could manage to forget it altogether.

Easton was a nondenominational school, but it had been founded by Presbyterians back in the early nineteenth century. According to the catalog, they had discontinued group prayer in the 1990s, but they still called the morning, school-wide gathering “morning services.” The daily assembly was held in the ancient chapel at the center of campus, surrounded by the class buildings, the offices of the instructors and deans, the gym, cafeteria, and library—all of which I was eager to explore. Beyond this circle were the dorms, beyond them the playing fields, and beyond them the mountains and trees and clear blue sky. It was a hot morning, normal for early September, but as we stepped through the arched doorway and into the chapel, it was like walking into a cave. Goosebumps popped out all over my skin as the cool air washed over me and I shivered in my lightweight T-shirt. Suddenly, I understood why most students had brought along cardigans or jackets. The high walls were made of cold, musty gray stone and the slim stained-glass windows only allowed the most minor shafts of sunlight to enter.

I hugged myself as I passed by the Billings Girls. Ariana was in the very last pew, reading, while Kiran and Taylor sat near the center of the chapel—Kiran studying her face in a compact mirror, Taylor scribbling in a notebook. Noelle was nowhere to be seen. It was odd, seeing them separated like this. I felt as if they were one entity and should always be by one another’s sides. I took my seat with my dorm-mates near the center of the pews.

“We sit according to class. Boys on the left, girls on the right,” Diana explained as we settled in. Her roommate, a girl named Kiki who could have been Diana’s longer-haired twin, but wasn’t, sat down next to her. I had yet to see Kiki without her iPod. She kept time to the music with her chin as she slumped down in her seat. “Up there are the frosh, behind us are the juniors. and then the seniors are in back.”

I nodded. So Kiran and Taylor were juniors and Ariana, a senior. I assumed Noelle was as well. But where had she disappeared to?

“It’s so archaic, separating us,” Missy said, glancing across at the guys. “What are we gonna do, have sex while they’re reading off the morning announcements?”

“Well,
you
might,” Lorna joked. She glanced at Missy warily after making her joke, waiting for her reaction.

Missy scoffed, but smiled. Lorna looked relieved.

Sitting on benches up near the lectern were at least two dozen adults, including Ms. Naylor, Ms. Ling, and Dean Marcus, whom I recognized from his picture in the Easton catalog. Clearly the others were teachers, advisors, and deans. Most of them looked stern, judgmental, sour, and wrinkly. A no-nonsense group.

I glanced around for Thomas but didn’t see him among the seniors. Hanging on the walls between the windows were long, black velvet banners, each decorated with the Easton crest and a graduating class’s year. Below the year were two names, one female, one male. I was about to ask what those names signified when the double doors to the church closed, darkening the room even further. Everyone hushed and faced forward, so I did the same. A sense of heavy reverence descended upon the crowd and an anticipatory warmth overcame me. Out from two opposing doors at the front of the church walked two boys, freshmen from the look of them, carrying candles that they used to light four lanterns near the lectern. These lanterns gave off a surprising amount of light and bathed everyone in a warm, cozy glow.