The Diamonds (2 page)

There are a lot of things I could tell you about Clarissa von Dyke: she spent five hundred dollars every month to get her hair highlighted; she used to drive a Lexus but then got an Audi; and when she was bored, she poked freshmen with safety pins in the hallway. But that's not the important stuff.

Clarissa was the kind of girl legends were made of. That sounds ridiculous, but it's true. She was a modernday Helen of Troy, outrageously, insanely gorgeous—the kind of beautiful that propelled boys to carry her books and girls to pack celery and baby carrots for lunch.

It wasn't just that she was beautiful, though. Even I liked to think I wasn't a complete mountain troll, but I was still no Clarissa. No one was. Because no matter how hard anybody tried, that indeterminable X factor set her apart from all the other students at Bennington.

The four of us had been best friends since freshman year. Some random girls started calling us the Diamonds when we bought matching diamond pendants at the mall and wore them to school. At first we adopted the nickname as a joke, but then it stuck, and before we knew it, that was exactly who we were—at Bennington, anyway.
Diamonds
. Girls wanted to be us, guys wanted to date us (not Jed, apparently, but whatever), and Clarissa was our fearless leader. While I adored Priya and Lili, Clarissa was the one person I
couldn't live without, the first one I'd ask to the movies if I had two tickets, the first one I'd go to with a problem. With her, I didn't care that I was the supporting role and not the lead; I was happy to be a part of the show.

Lili cleared her throat. “Clarissa,” she murmured as if I were invisible, “say something.”

“Are you okay, Marni?”

I shook my head. Jed had been my first real boyfriend, my first real kiss. Wasn't I worth an inperson breakup or, at the very least, a phone call? How long had he been seeing Darcy behind my back?

I started crying again. All I could muster was “No.”

For Clarissa, that was enough. “You're gonna be fine,” she said, slipping off the sink and holding out her hand. “I promise.”

“I just want to go home,” I slurred.

“You can't,” Clarissa said. “You have to go to gov.”

AP Government was our final class of the day. It was a smorgasbord of United States history with a focus on the Constitution and its amendments, the judicial system—mainly the Supreme Court—and debate. It was the most riveting class I'd ever taken, and not just because my father was a law professor and I'd been groomed to find that sort of stuff interesting.

Here was the problem, though: not only were the Diamonds in AP Gov, but so was Jed.
And
Darcy McKibbon, who wasn't full-on Goth but wore enough black eyeliner, bloodred lipstick, and witchy apparel to make people uneasy.

“No way,” I said, folding my arms. “I won't go. I can't.”

“You
have
to,” Clarissa said firmly. “I'm going to fix this, and we all need to be there for it.”

Clarissa had a knack for making problems disappear. Caught without a hall pass? No problem. Forgot your homework? Hand it in the next day. She was the golden child of the Bennington School—a million students rolled into a single perfect person. One smile and people bent over backward to help her. And, to a much lesser degree, help me. It wasn't hard being a Diamond, truth be told. It was very, very easy.

There's always a catch, though, and for me it was this: if our friendship had been a poker game, my cards would've been facing up on the table, while Clarissa's would still have been concealed, waiting for anyone—including me—to call her bluff.

Clarissa looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and expertly applied mascara. “Okay?”

“What are you going to do?” Priya asked, excitement spreading across her face.

“You'll see,” Clarissa said, soaking up her chance to be secretive. “Rest assured: Jed Brantley is going to regret the day he ever messed with one of the Diamonds.”

She walked over to the door and pulled on the metal handle.

“Don't do anything crazy,” I warned, even though it was no use. Clarissa would do exactly what she wanted. She always did.

Clarissa tossed her hair like she was in a shampoo commercial. “No worries,” she replied with a smirk. “I've got your back.”

“Me too,” added Lili, placing a hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah,” Priya said. “Ditto.”

•
EXHIBIT A
•

I studied my three best friends as they stood with me in the faculty bathroom during the middle of first period, and smiled my first postbreakup smile. It didn't matter that I wasn't as smart as Lili or as funny as Priya or as beautiful as Clarissa (although truly, even now, that word doesn't do her justice). It didn't even matter that my boyfriend had cheated on me. We were a team. And unless something changed soon, this was who I would always be.

A Diamond.

Beautiful. Elegant. Unbreakable.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

—The Second Amendment
to the United States Constitution

People look at you funny after you've been dumped on the morning announcements. It's a special kind of look—typically reserved for those who suffer catastrophic misfortunes or travel to foreign countries for inexpensive plastic surgery—that I never anticipated being on the receiving end of.

I was a Diamond. Things like this weren't supposed to happen to me.

And yet they were. Every step I took, someone was gossiping about how Jed Brantley had dumped me for Darcy McKibbon. It was the biggest scandal Bennington had seen since Mr. Unger, a former economics teacher, had been accused of embezzling money from the school to pay for a mail-order bride from Hong Kong.

By the time ninth period rolled around, I was a complete mess. The only place I wanted to be was in my bed, wearing a comfy sweatshirt, shoveling Ben & Jerry's Half Baked ice cream down my throat and watching
Days of Our Lives
. I had promised Clarissa I'd show up, though, and a promise was a promise.

To say that AP Government was run like any other class would be lying. First of all, since Mr. Townsen was hot, he garnered instant and unwavering attention from all his female students, and secondly, he was incredibly cool, which meant all the guys listened to him as well. A winning combination, really.

That week, we were in the middle of an in-class trial. A
mock
trial, if you will, as a large part of the curriculum was dedicated to dissecting legal procedure and its use in effecting United States law. It focused on the Salem witch trials of 1692. Not typical fodder for an AP Gov class, seeing as how the United States hadn't even been established yet, but Mr. Townsen believed it was one of the most primitive trials on North American soil—a warning to us all of what life might have been like sans our current government. (The Salem witch trials, as I'm sure you know, were totally bogus. They centered on these bratty little Puritan girls who pointed fingers at people for practicing witchcraft. Once folks were accused, their lives were pretty much ruined. It didn't matter that there was no proof. I won't get into a more detailed explanation, because (A) that's boring and (B) just Google it.)

We'd been given a packet of information to study over the summer and were expected to know it by the start of school.

“It's a dangerous thing to have a legal system without checks and balances,” Mr. Townsen had told us on the first day of class, after the bell had rung and we'd settled into our new seats. “To hold trials without proper evidence and condemn people to jail—or worse,
death
—without proof. Don't you think, Ms. von Dyke?”

I'm pretty sure he called on Clarissa because the four of us were whispering together in the corner.

“Sure, Mr. Townsen” was her response. “Whatever you say.”

Instead of recreating the trials, kids in class were portraying the prominent figures of the time, throwing them into our current legal system to be judged for their actions. The point was to see whether in today's world the Salem witch trials would be able to occur.

I was on the prosecution team, which consisted of the Diamonds; a girl named Sareep, who had a mustache and never talked; and Tommy Payne, this obnoxious kid who thought he was a reporter for the
New York Times
but was actually just a lame editor for the
Bennington Press
.

As I approached Mr. Townsen's classroom, I ran my fingers through my hair, attempting to pull myself together. I couldn't let Jed see how upset I was.

The room was arranged into a pseudocourtroom for
the trial. Our desks had been parted, leaving an open space in the center. Mr. Townsen's mahogany desk had morphed into the judge's bench, a stool pressed to its side as a witness stand. Metal chairs were grouped together for the jury; the rest of the desks had been separated into two distinct areas, with
PROSECUTION
and
DEFENSE
written neatly on loose-leaf paper taped to the floor.

The usual suspects were spread throughout the room, shuffling notes and getting ready for the bell to ring. Mr. Townsen stood in the middle of it all, looking incredibly dapper in a tweed suit and a crisp navy tie.

“Ms. Valentine,” he said to me, motioning to the prosecution side. “Please take a seat.”

I plopped into an empty desk next to the Diamonds, refusing to look for Jed. “I'm here,” I groaned. Clarissa was studying her notes. “Can I go home yet?”

“Don't worry,” Lili said, resting her head on my shoulder. “It's gonna be fine.”

Priya nodded in agreement. “It doesn't even matter that Jed and Darcy are sitting next to each other,” she said. “Holding hands.”

“Priya!” Lili said with the intensity of a scream but the volume of a whisper. “Just. Stop. Talking.”

“It's okay,” I said. As long as I didn't see them, everything would be all right. I could pretend this had never happened, that I hadn't been humiliated in front of everyone I'd tried so hard over the past three years to impress, that my boyfriend hadn't thrown me away like the bag of chips you get at Subway that you
don't really want but take anyway because they come free with your meal.

To my left, on the defense side of the room, was Jenny Murphy. Jenny was Clarissa's archnemesis, a beautiful girl with perfect skin and pronounced cheekbones. Jenny was a member of nearly every major club, including mock trial, and had made a name for herself at Bennington as the anti-Clarissa von Dyke.

When I say that Jenny was Clarissa's archnemesis, I should clarify that statement. They used to be friends, back in the day, until Clarissa became, well, Clarissa, and Jenny Murphy stayed Jenny Murphy. She was always looking to take Clarissa down a notch, but it had never happened.

“Okay, guys,” Mr. Townsen said, cueing us to be silent. “Does everyone remember where we left off?”

It wasn't as though we could have forgotten. The day before, Priya had sat in the witness stand dressed as Tituba, the West Indian slave woman believed to have started the witch hunt craze by telling some of the young girls “magical stories.” Priya had taken her role way too seriously; she'd even come to school dressed for the part in an oversized skirt and a head scarf. On the witness stand, she'd spoken with an accent that was a cross between Elton John's and that of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat; she'd been basically unintelligible and, after about five minutes, Mr. Townsen had asked her to sit back down.

“We're going to abide by all the proper rules and
regulations this afternoon,” Mr. Townsen continued. “Marco, are you getting all of this down?”

Marco, a small boy with long, greasy hair, sat in the corner with a laptop on his knees. A modern-day stenographer. “Yup, Mr. T.”

“Great.” Mr. Townsen edged his way toward the bench, a pair of tortoiseshell glasses resting on the bridge of his nose, a black robe over his suit.