LITMIR.BIZ

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to be seen doing that.

      Being lizard-like, they were perfectly suited to this lung-deflating heat. I passed them on the way out the door after school, sitting all in a row on a concrete bench, passing around a tube of shea butter.

      ‘Hey, Jane,’ Tracey said as I passed. ‘Come here a second.’

      I don’t like being ordered around, but I also didn’t feel like causing a scene by ignoring them and walking past. I compromised by stopping and moving a step or two closer so that I was within earshot but hadn’t actually gone all the way over to where they were sitting.

      ‘How’s Allison?’ she asked. ‘We heard she was sick earlier.’

      It was said innocently. There was barely a trace of malice in that stone-white, heart-shaped face of hers. But just that they were asking was enough. The temptation to say something to her that would send her groveling back to the sinkhole she had obviously crawled out of was strong, but I remembered my lecture from earlier in the day. I needed to be moderate. My attacking Tracey wouldn’t help Ally.

      ‘Recovering,’ I said, as breezily as I could.

      ‘Guess she didn’t manage to get a little, then?’

      ‘Yes, she did.’

      That wasn’t me who said that. The voice came from behind me. The lanky sophomore from the bathroom trailed up, thin and long as a shadow. Lanalee hooked around in front of me and squared off in front of the A3. Her rust-colored hair was hanging long and free now, all the way down her back. She reminded me of one of those Renaissance women who got locked up in towers and had to let guys climb up their hair to rescue them.

      ‘I’m her little,’ she said. As she spoke, she was casually unwrapping a Twinkie. She consumed this in three easy bites, snapping the golden crumbs off her fingers.

      ‘Who are you?’ Elise said, taking in Lanalee in a long and totally undisguised up-and-down glance.

      ‘Lanalee Tremone. I just transferred her from Bobbin.’

      All three of them looked surprised at that one. Bobbin was the best school in the area. It had the highest population of celebrities’ kids anywhere outside of New York or LA, and it was famous for its ‘make your own curriculum’ police. Bobbin students started their own businesses or went to live on goat farm communes in France or staged massive art installations where they all got naked and painted each other’s bodies with condiments. It was about as different from St. Teresa’s Preparatory School for Girls as it was possible to get. Going to Bobbin instantly made you interesting.

      ‘Why are you here if you went to Bobbin?’ Tracey asked.

      ‘I got into a little trouble there. My great-grandparents thought I needed a more structured environment, and they were paying the bill.’

      This caused a bit of visible doubt in their eyes.

      ‘What house did you live in at Bobbin?’ Lai asked.

      ‘Walker.’

      ‘Walker? I partied at Walker!’ Lai leaned forward. ‘Do you know Paul Weller?’

      ‘Tall Paul? Yeah. He lived in the room on the corner.’

      ‘You know Alex Rye?’ Lai asked, her eyebrow arching.

      ‘Rye? He ended up blowing the door off of his room last year doing a science experiment of a very illegal nature.’

      ‘Allesandra Fuller?’

      ‘Look, do you want to borrow my facebook so you can look these people up?’ Lanalee said. ‘I’m not sure you actually know them. And no one parties at Walker anyway. We went to Hepp House for that. I don’t know what you were doing, but I doubt it was very interesting.’

      A cool silence now. It was time for the A3 to reload and fire, and they clearly had nothing.

      ‘Let’s go,’ Lanalee said to me. ‘I’m getting bored. I need more sugar.’

      It was a beautiful performance — I had to give that to her completely.

      ‘How irritating were they?’ Lanalee asked when we had turned the corner of the building. ‘I hate people who always have to ask if you know people. Who cares if I knew them?’

      ‘Well, they still sound cool,’ I said. ‘It sounds like those are people to know. There’s no one to know here. This school is not a magnet for the to-know people.’

      ‘Trust me, Bobbin’s just full of rich freaks. It’s not that exciting.’

      ‘Still,’ I said, ‘it’s kind of an accomplishment to get kicked out.’

      ‘I know,’ Lanalee said with a long smile. She had very thin lips, but they went on forever. ‘That’s why I made it up.’

      ‘You were lying?’

      ‘The part about my double Gs was true,’ she said. ‘They thought this place would be better for me. The school didn’t want me because I applied too late, but the GGs are buying the school a new driveway if I can stay.’

      We were standing in the driveway by this point. It did kind of look like testing ground for land mines. Lanalee looked out beyond the soccer fields and over to the golden brick mansion opposite us. It was like looking out to Oz. The grass was, quite literally, greener there — because they had grass in the places that we had asphalt. Some guys were stretched out on this grass. Other guys were lounging on the long marble steps that led up to the front door or were squatting on the veranda and the various urns and bits of statuary, bouncing soccer balls off each other’s heads and snorting.

      ‘That’s the guys’ school over there, right?’ she asked.

      ‘That’s St. Sebastian’s.’

      ‘It’s so much nicer than our school.’

      ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘I know. I’ve been talking about this for three years. It’s some old mansion that the church bought. It came with all of this ground, so they built our school over on this side.’

      ‘But why do the guys get that gorgeous place and we get this thing that looks like a bunker?’

      ‘Parking lot,’ I corrected her. ‘Our school was designed by a guy who was famous for making multi-story parking lots. He just made rooms where the parking spaces used to be and made staircases instead of ramps. I’m not kidding.’

      I wasn’t either. My dad knew the guy. He taught architecture at Brown, until they realized how awful all of his buildings were.

      ‘This place is just confused,’ she said. ‘They put guys in the nice building. Why? Guys ruin stuff. And then they separate us with this…’

      She lost her words and waved at the eight-foot cyclone fence that separated our soccer fields.

      ‘It gives the place that prison-camp feel,’ I said. ‘It’s nice. I heard they were actually going to put razor wire on top, but it was against some kind of law.’

      ‘I’m not going to be able to handle this,’ Lanalee said, her long face drooping.

      ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you went to bobbin, it might be hard to get used to. But it’s survivable.’

      She bit her lip for a moment.

      ‘Hey,’ she said, yanking a rose-stone school ring of her long, pale hand, ‘before I forget, can you give this to Allison? I haven’t been able to find her.’

      I put it on my thumb. For a moment, I wished this girl could have been my little. I wanted to steal her… but then I felt bad. No matter what, Ally had had a much worse day than I had. She deserved Lanalee.

      ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said. ‘That story on the Junior Judges page about Allison. Something about the prom. What was that all about?’

      ‘Ally just had a bad experience,’ I said,

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