The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (27 page)

God, I just wished I could talk to him. See him. Hold him. Talk some sense into him. Maybe if I could talk to him I could get him to take responsibility for what he had done. Didn’t he realize how much trouble he had caused? Was he that scared of his parents that he thought this was the only way?

I imagined Thomas out there somewhere, alone, trying to deal
with his issues, trying to make himself well, and my heart swelled so fast I thought it might pop. I was angry at him, yes, but I also missed him. I also worried about him. I just wished that I could see him and tell him that everything was going to be okay.

And then, yeah, maybe smack him upside the head for doing this to me.

It really is amazing, how closely hate and love are aligned.

“Screw this,” I said. I couldn’t think about it now. I was too tired. Too emotional. Too inclined to violence. I folded the note, stuffed it in the very back of my desk drawer, and slammed it closed.

Okay. Deep breath. At least I knew Thomas was all right now. At least I knew he was out there somewhere. And if he had any sort of conscience, he’d have to call me eventually. This note was not enough. We needed to talk. Big time.

After a long shower, and an equally long think, I felt monumentally better. Thomas’s note, while it had opened up a huge can of worms, had actually absolved me from a couple of things I had been stressing over. First, he had broken up with me days ago, which technically meant that what I had done in the woods with Whittaker wasn’t cheating, which made me feel much better. Second, he was gone from school indefinitely, which meant that I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping him and the Billings Girls in separate corners. I wouldn’t have to worry about that anyway, since he had broken up with me.

Yes. I could be very practical about this. Level-headed Reed. That was going to be my new, internal nickname.

That was part one of the plan. Part two of the plan was finding out more about this Legacy thing and getting my ass there so that I could track down Thomas, yell at him for about an hour, and then give him a chance to explain. A very brief chance. After all, Dash had said Thomas would be there no matter what. That Thomas
was
the Legacy. If that was the case, I was sure he wasn’t going to let a little holistic treatment get in his way.

I mean, okay, Thomas wasn’t good for me. He was probably right about that. Technically, after the first week or so of total bliss, all he’d caused me was confusion, pain, and embarrassment. But that bliss part? That had been
really
good. So good that I had slept with him. And I couldn’t just forget about that. He couldn’t just take my virginity and slink off into the night leaving nothing but a note. What we had done meant a lot to me, and Thomas needed to know that. He needed to know that I wasn’t just going to forget him. That I would
never
forget him, even if we weren’t ever going to be together again. I cared about him. And that was that.

I slipped into my terry-cloth robe and cinched it, then grabbed a towel and started rubbing at my hair hard, as if I could rub out all the confusion as well. My head was tipped forward as I walked out of the steamy bathroom, so I didn’t see Natasha standing there until I had walked right into her.

“Oh! God! Sorry,” I said, jumping back. My free hand flew to my chest and I laughed. “You scared the crap outta me.”

Natasha didn’t crack a smile. She didn’t move. Her stare had “doom” written all over it.

“What?” I said nervously. Had she found the note? Oh, God, had she somehow found the note?

“We need to talk,” she said gravely.

“Okay,” I said, trying to egg her into a smile with my own. No such luck.

She walked over to her laptop and flipped it open. “Sit,” she said, pulling out her desk chair for me.

I shot her a quizzical look but did as I was told. “What’re we doing?”

“Just a little slide show,” Natasha told me.

She leaned over me, her breast grazing my shoulder and making me flush with embarrassment, and clicked open a window on her computer. What I saw on the screen at first made no sense to me. It was a photograph of what looked like a tongue. A very up-close shot of a tongue being stuck out at the camera. Then suddenly the view went wide and my heart dropped.

It
was
a tongue. My tongue. It was me. And my eyes were half-closed. And I was laughing.

“When did you take this?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder.

“Just watch,” she said.

So I did. The next picture featured me chugging a beer in the woods. The next, me with my hands on Whittaker’s chest. Me and Whittaker walking away from the clearing together. Me with my arms around Whittaker, my mouth hanging open sloppily, a flask of liquor in my hand. Whittaker with his mouth pressed to mine as I held his face with my hands. Then Whittaker’s hand on my breast.

Dread and shame overwhelmed me as I stared at my own face. My head was tipped back and it looked like I was moaning in pleasure, when in fact I had been about to throw up. It made me look like a slut, like a drunken whore who had lured some guy out to the woods.

“Why . . . why are you showing these to me?” I asked, as the slideshow started up all over again. I turned my face away, from her, from the screen, from the truth of what I’d done.

“Because I want you to understand how very serious I am about what I am about to propose,” Natasha said. She grabbed the chair and spun it around on its wheels so that I had to face her. Bracing her hands on its arms, she leaned forward and looked me dead in the eye. “You do know what these pictures mean, right? You do realize that if I choose to do so, I can get you booted out of here so fast your head will spin.”

Tears prickled at the corners of my eyes. She was right, of course. She had photographic evidence of me breaking some very serious school rules. Even worse, it looked as if Whittaker and I had done it all alone. Even though there had been close to a dozen other people in the woods that night, not a single one of them appeared in these pictures.

“Why are you doing this?”

What was wrong with me? I had believed her when she told me she wanted to be my friend. When had I become so gullible?

“Because there’s something I need you to do for me,” she said, standing up straight.

“What?” I was already her indentured servant. Did we need twisted espionage in our relationship?

“Noelle Lange and her friends are responsible for getting Leanne kicked out of school,” Natasha said. “They set her up.”

Her accusation did not surprise me. On the day that Natasha’s
roommate, Leanne Shore, had been escorted from school grounds after being found guilty of breaking the Easton honor code by cheating, Natasha had accused Noelle of having had something to do with it. I had been there, in the quad, when she had gotten right up in Noelle’s face. But I had thought Natasha was basically insane.

“How . . . how do you know?” I asked.

“I just know,” Natasha said. “The problem is, I have no proof. That’s where you come in.”

Oh, God, no. No, no, no. Please tell me she isn’t going to make me—

“Now that you’re our new scrub girl, you have unlimited access to their rooms,” Natasha said. “I want you to find the evidence I need. I want you to go through everything they own. They have to have kept something. They’re big on trophies. Find me what I need to nail their asses to the wall.”

I stared up at her, my hair dripping cold as ice down my neck. “I . . . I can’t do that,” I said.

I would lose everything. They would find out and they would kick me out of Billings. They would never speak to me again. Everything I had worked for would be gone in an instant.

Plus Noelle would kill me. There was always that.

“Oh, but you can,” she said with a smirk. “Unless you want
that
e-mailed to the dean and the board and every single student and teacher at this school.”

I glanced up at the screen again. Whittaker’s tongue was down
my throat. I tasted bile. I tried to swallow but couldn’t. Tears stung my eyes all over again. These pictures represented the end of me. The end of my life, my future. Didn’t she see that?

“I thought we were friends,” I said blankly. Maybe guilt would work. I was grasping at straws.

“Aw! That’s so sweet!” Natasha trilled. “So, do we have an understanding?”

I stared at her, hard. There wasn’t a trace of regret or uncertainty in her eyes. This was so wrong. Natasha was supposed to be the moral center of Easton. At least, that was what Noelle had once called her, and Natasha had seemed proud of the moniker. Now here she was taking secret soft-core porn shots of her supposed friends and blackmailing people with them. Where was the morality in that?

Of course, she was also president of the Young Republicans club. From everything I’d read and heard my entire life, this was a maneuver of which any politician would be proud.

“Reed? I asked you a question.”

My hands were trembling. I couldn’t do this. Not after everything Noelle had done for me. Not with everything she could take away.

But Natasha could take away more. And I was looking at the proof of that.

The situation was a perfect lose-lose.

“Yeah. We have an understanding,” I said.

“Good. Now get to bed,” Natasha told me, mercifully shutting down the slide show. “You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.”

The next morning I methodically moved through my chores, my mind on ten million other things. For some reason, everyone was up and out of their rooms early, and I was able to make the beds without having to endure snide comments or detailed direction. The entire time I was in Noelle and Ariana’s room, Natasha’s voice played like a skipping CD in my mind.

Nail their asses to the wall . . . nail their asses to the wall . . . nail their asses to the wall . . .

I stared at Noelle’s dresser. It taunted me, begging me to rifle through its drawers. No one was around. It would only take a few minutes. If Natasha made good on her threats, it would mean a one-way ticket back to Croton, Pennsylvania, and my prescription-drug-addict mother and my depressed father. It would mean the end of everything.

And yeah, if I found the proof she was looking for, not only would Noelle and the others hate me, but they would also get thrown out of school. They would be gone and I would still be here, in Billings. Even without them, I would still have a chance, right?
They might have been the most powerful of the Billings Girls, but I would still have the Billings name behind me. That had to count for something. Didn’t it?

So, really, what did I have to lose?

I started for the dresser, but the moment I did, a sickening dread came over me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t look through their private things. I couldn’t help Natasha rat out Noelle and Ariana—the only people who had shown any real concern for me since Thomas left. Yeah, they made me do chores, but they were also my friends. Sort of. And besides, it was just wrong. So I told myself I didn’t have time—that I would deal with it later—and I moved on.

After my shower I pulled my damp hair back into a ponytail, grabbed my books, and rushed out. That was when I heard the party.

“Omigod!
Look
at this luggage! This is divine!”

“Open the big one! The big one!”

A champagne bottle popped and a bunch of girls squealed. What was going on downstairs? It sounded like a bad episode of
The Bachelor.
I slowly walked down the carpeted steps and paused. The entire entry room was filled with white helium balloons. All the girls of Billings were gathered around a pile of elaborately decorated gifts in the center of the floor, while already-opened boxes had been flung against the walls. Wrapping paper littered the room and ribbons had been strung from the banister and the wall hangings. I saw Kiran slip a silk scarf around her neck and tip a glass of champagne down her throat.

It was seven thirty in the morning.

“What’s going on?” I asked, arriving at the bottom stair.

“Glass-licker! Just the girl I was looking for!” Kiran trilled. She grabbed a small box and handed it to me with a flourish. “For you!”

It was an iPod. A limited-edition sequined aqua iPod.

“What? Why?”

Everyone laughed.

“It’s Kiran’s birthday!” Taylor announced, looking more rosy-cheeked than she had in days. Everyone whooped and hollered.

“It is? Happy birthday!” I told her with a smile.

“And on Kiran’s birthday, we
all
get gifts,” Vienna told me, sipping her champagne.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Every year it’s the same thing,” Kiran said, rolling her eyes. “All these presents roll in from designers and photographers and magazine editors and stylists. So much crap I can’t even fit it all in my room.”

“And there are always
tons
of duplicates,” Noelle said, fingering a Louis Vuitton purse.

“So I give it all away,” Kiran said, throwing her hands up with a smile. “Or most of it, anyway. I think I’m keeping the luggage.”

“Oh,” Rose said, pouting. She had clearly been coveting the five-bag set, hovering over it ever since I arrived.

“So that’s for you,” Kiran said, gesturing at me with her champagne glass.

“Really? Even Cinderella gets a gift?” I joked.

Kiran and Noelle looked at each other and laughed. “Even Cinderella,” Noelle said.

Ah. So that was it. No one else wanted it, so I got it. Still, I couldn’t complain. I was impressed that they had thought of me at all.

“Get over here!” Kiran said, throwing her arm around me and pulling me toward the gift pile. “There has to be some more good stuff that hasn’t been claimed. Everyone clear out! Let Glass-licker pick something!”

There were a few grumbles, but the girls backed off. I eyed the pile of designer tags, little blue boxes with white bows, big black boxes with gold ribbon. These were Kiran’s gifts. Kiran’s things. And she was offering to share it all. With me. No strings attached.

“Here! This color would look
amazing
on you, Reed,” Taylor said, holding up a silky red dress.