These Vengeful Hearts

by Katherine Laurin

  I had nodded eagerly, writing down what would become the promise that defined me. Gain access. Find the Queen of Hearts. Make her pay. Dismantle the court from within.

  By the time April confronted me about my obsession with the Red Court, it was too late. I had a promise that turned into a plan, and there was nothing my sister could say to deter me.

  I folded up my anger like a note and slipped it away as my mom and Gideon returned from the kitchen with individual slices of cake, each bearing a single candle. In the Williams household, everyone blew out a candle and made a wish, no matter whose birthday it was. My dad started it ages ago, but only to placate his two young daughters who demanded to blow out candles on his birthday. In the dozens of birthdays since, it’s come to mean so much more. It’s our way of sticking together. When one of us is celebrating, we all join in. And when one of us is hurting, we all feel it, too.

  I’d made a promise a long time ago, and I was finally, finally going to fulfill it. There wouldn’t be any wish for me this year. I was going to get what I wanted. I pictured the Queen of Hearts and blew out my candle. I was coming for her, and she’d better watch out.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY AT SCHOOL, I noticed a large display next to the cafeteria. There were names and pictures plastered all over the walls. It was the nominations for Homecoming Court. Each grade had its own representation for Lord and Lady, Duke and Duchess, Prince and Princess, and, finally, King and Queen.

  There, under Queen, was Maura Wright. Her bright, smiling yearbook photo seemed to shout at me in glossy relief next to the two other contenders. Didn’t anyone else notice that her photo seemed just a bit bigger than the others? Or that her picture looked cropped and zoomed in, like she appeared more prominently than the other girls?

  I was having a private “Tell-Tale Heart” moment, and any second I was going to start ripping my hair out and screaming like a madwoman.

  I skulked away before someone noticed my guilty look and pulled my journal out.

  October 9

  Is there such a thing as a victimless crime? Or are we creating victims that will never know they’ve been wronged?

  I heard a throat clear softly and I slammed my journal shut.

  “Is that a diary?” Chase asked with mild amusement.

  “No, it’s a journal. I don’t write long, rambling essays on unrequited love.”

  “Then what do you write?” He seemed genuinely interested and made a grab for my journal.

  I danced backward to keep it out of his reach. “Just how I’m feeling in a particular moment or what I’m thinking about a specific situation. It’s a short record more than a journal. I’m not about remembering specific details of my day-to-day, just how they make me feel.”

  After our conversation on the track, I wasn’t sure where we stood. Chase didn’t hate me and there was no point in lying to myself any longer about hating him. I didn’t hate him, but my feelings weren’t fully resolved into any one, categorizable emotion. I TBD’d him.

  “Don’t you need details for them to make sense later?”

  “No, because that’s not really the point. The point is that I feel a certain way at that exact moment in time. That something moved me enough to stir up some emotion or make me ask a question. I’m out in the world living my life, and this is my proof.”

  “That’s kind of badass.”

  I laughed. “Journaling is badass?”

  He shrugged. Chase was dressed in jeans and a thick gray sweater that I wanted to steal and envelop myself in. “Ok, maybe not badass. It’s cool that you record the pieces that matter this way.”

  I tried to quell the blush flooding my cheeks. I was unsuccessful.

  “I, uh, think someone over there is trying to get your attention,” Chase said, looking past me at some point over my shoulder.

  “Hmm?” I asked, a bit dazed. I shook my head to dislodge the dreamy fog that had taken up residence in my brain and turned to see Gideon looking conspicuously away from us.

  When Gideon saw he had drawn our attention, he gave up his ruse and came over to speak to us.

  “There’s something I want to show you.” His words were only directed at me.

  “I’m talking to Chase,” I said and motioned toward him.

  Gideon turned to look at him as if he had just remembered Chase existed and added, “You can come, too.”

  Gideon snatched up my hand and began to lead me to the math hallway with Chase trailing behind, looking so entertained I wanted to smack him.

  “Oh no. What’s going on?” I asked the question without needing to because it was obvious to everyone watching. I was witnessing another Red Court takedown.

  Taped all along the hall were photos. They were all different from the looks of it, but they all featured the same guy. A good-looking senior I recognized but couldn’t name. Though it was a series of unrelated candid shots, the narrative was pretty clear.

  A mixture of day and night images, close and faraway, showed that this guy had more than one girl in his life. In some shots, the more public ones, he was pictured holding hands with a petite blonde girl. In more of the night images, he was with a taller brunette.

  The photos themselves weren’t scandalous, but I could only guess that what they revealed would be the cause of death for this guy’s relationship.

  “Was this that group, then?” Chase asked. His face was one-part pity, two-parts disgust.

  Gideon’s expression mirrored my own feelings of distaste. He only pulled us farther down the hall. I felt sick to my stomach knowing what I’d find. Proof positive that this was a Red Court job. That it was perpetrated by members of an organization I belonged to.

  We stopped in front of an alcove and I made myself look up at what was in front of us.

  “‘You never stop owing us,’” Chase read the sign aloud. Taped to it was a simple playing card—a Joker.

  “The Red Court,” Gideon said. “Who else?”

  “What kind of person do you have to be to do this kind of thing?” Chase’s hardened voice caught me off guard, and shame washed through me.

  “I’m not sure.” Gideon kept his face turned toward Chase, but his eyes flicked to me.

  I wanted to grab him and shake him. Hard. I wasn’t like this; I wouldn’t do this kind of thing.

  Except I would. In some ways, I already had. This was the kind of person I was and seeing it from this angle revealed a harsh truth.

  Reeling, I turned from both of them and mumbled an excuse about the bathroom. I made my way back down the hall without looking up at the photos and ran smack into a petite frame.

  “Ouch!” I muttered. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  The girl I bumped into hadn’t moved a muscle. She just stood staring at the photos, tears sliding slowly down her cheeks. She was pretty and familiar, but no one I knew. I followed her gaze and saw that she was staring at a picture of the faithless guy wrapped up with a girl.

  Oh. It’s her. That’s why she looked familiar. She was the girl in the photos, the one he’d been cheating on.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. Though this time my apology was more like my condolences. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was the one who ended up in tears, humiliated in front of the whole school. It was so unfair. Why did she have to suffer for someone else’s mistakes? However, her boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend, I guessed—deserved all this and more.

  The girl yanked at a chain hanging around her neck hard enough to snap it. “Me, too,” she whispered and dropped the necklace on the ground before walking away.

  I stooped to examine the silver charm on the broken chain. It was a flat polished disk with a date engraved on one side from just over a year ago. An anniversary present? More like an unwanted token to remember a lie. I pulled away and kept walking down the hall,
leaving the necklace where it belonged.

  This was all so messed up, but I was in too deep, and there wasn’t anything to do about it. Out of habit, I reached for my journal again, and jotted down the first thing I thought of.

  October 9

  There’s no way out but through.

  I wasn’t in this thing to make friends. I shouldn’t care what Chase Merriman thought of me. I knew why I was doing this, and that was enough. My plan was sound. I just had to stick with it, but my unease grew with each takedown I witnessed. If I was caught, what would the Red Court do to a traitor? Whatever it was, I had no doubt it would make the hallway scene look like a fun trip down memory lane.

  No matter. It was time for the Red Court to pay. My job would be less difficult if I embraced the part of myself that enjoyed the work, just to make the next month or two or however long it took easier to bear. It was a dangerous line to walk. If I leaned too far into the parts of the Red Court that called to me, I risked not being able to pull back. But I could do it. I had to. There wasn’t any other way.

  Perhaps I could even minimize the damage to innocent people wherever possible. Having someone like me was only a good thing to the students caught in the line of fire. I wasn’t here for them; I was here for her.

  A glimpse of familiar curls flashed at the corner of my vision. Haley. I was glad there was nothing written on my face but determination.

  Though we didn’t acknowledge each other, waves of approval rolled off her. She must have seen me dodge Chase and the cold resolve that followed after my run-in with that girl. A normal person would probably have had some kind of reaction, and not the detachment I was allowing to swallow me. I quelled the rising sense of satisfaction at having pleased her. Being a perfectionist meant I wanted to do everything well, even when that meant impressing others with my heartlessness. Succeeding as part of the Red Court meant failing at being a decent human being. I’d have to sort through all that later.

  When I walked to the sink in the girls’ bathroom, I was surprised at who I saw staring back in the mirror—the girl I’d called up and embraced from some dark part of myself. It was a girl without a shred of empathy. It was an echo of Haley. It was a Red Court girl.

  CHAPTER 13

  “IT’S TIME FOR PART TWO,” Haley said as she plopped down next to me. It was another Saturday and another day of plotting back in the theater room at school. The carpet was dry, but the damp smell had intensified. Haley brought a Tupperware container with veggie lasagna for each of us. My high praise from dinner at her house must have won me an encore. I’d hit the track again that morning, but Chase was nowhere to be found. Maybe it was a small mercy, but I was still disappointed he wasn’t there. I hadn’t spoken to him since the day we saw the takedown photos.

  “I heard that guy from the photos had his car egged every day last week,” I ventured as I ate my lunch. Seeing the outcome of another team’s work firsthand had me wondering if there was someone in the Red Court as good at takedowns as Haley was at election rigging. I was desperate to find out who it was that ran that job. Maybe they had a hand in April’s accident, too.

  “Not surprising. When we run a takedown, that kind of thing is often the result.” Haley had already inhaled her meal and was popping her neck and rolling her shoulders out like a prizefighter preparing to enter the ring.

  “It was definitely us, then? The pictures?”

  She gave me a look that said I should stop asking questions. “We didn’t take them if that’s what you mean. We probably pulled a lot of strings to have that many photos taken. It was nice work. Very poetic.”

  I chewed and bobbed my head, thankful for a mouth full of lasagna to spare me from responding. A few fitful nights’ sleep didn’t help sharpen the focus on my mission. Reconciling my goal to take the Red Court down with the firm belief that some people get what’s coming to them was not going well.

  “The next phase is twofold, and it involves securing votes for our girl and dismantling any momentum the other two candidates have.”

  “Go over that first part,” I mumbled around another mouthful and waved my fork at her to continue.

  “You and I will focus on inflating support for Maura. It only takes a handful of well-placed rumors to make it seem like she’ll run away with the election. We each only need to plant three or four of these, and then we sit back and watch them spread like wildfire. Once those start to go, these elections tend to work like self-fulfilling prophecies. The expected winner typically comes out on top because people like to bet on a winning horse.”

  I tried to ignore the comparison of Maura to a horse. “Sounds easy enough. What’s after that?”

  “Next, we call in a handful of favors. We’re looking for people with a certain amount of influence to lobby against the other candidates.”

  “We just went through all that trouble last week filling out the ballots so what’s-his-face student council kid wouldn’t know who our nominee was.” I was indignant at wasting a Saturday. Time was my most valuable commodity. “Won’t these kids figure out what’s going on?”

  “Not necessarily.” Haley’s tone was patient; she did love to flaunt her evil genius. “We went cloak-and-dagger with Max because we can’t count on someone on the outside of the Red Court with his kind of involvement in the election not to ruin the whole thing in a fit of morality or accidentally spilling his guts. The people we pick for this part of the job will only focus on tearing down one candidate. Besides—”

  I cut in before she could finish. “I know. Mutually assured destruction and all that.”

  She nodded primly and pulled up the list of kids we could work with. We began reviewing each of them and identified which would be best suited for this job. All of the names on the list linked to separate documents that had descriptions of each of the assets’ strengths and weaknesses as well as a brief summary of the job we ran for them and all the other favors we had collected. It was an organized criminal’s dream.

  “Do we ever stop collecting favors at some point?” I asked.

  “No one is ever really free until they graduate. And sometimes even then...” She trailed off cryptically.

  “How do you collect once a student has left? What if they go to college across the country?”

  “Sometimes the ones who leave are the ones who need a clean slate the most. It’s easy to keep tabs on people when you know their pressure points.”

  The clinical calculation wasn’t easy to hear, but it all made sense. I reminded myself that each of the names on the list wanted something bad enough to make a deal. We weren’t leading lambs to the slaughter. If anything, they’d walked themselves over willingly.

  “Do you ever feel bad calling in debts and collecting from these people?”

  She made a dismissive noise. “No, and you shouldn’t, either. Everything has a price.”

  That kind of thinking made the bitter pill of Red Court work easier to swallow. Besides, I wasn’t there to help the people who’d made bargains. I was there to stop the Red Court from hurting innocent people like my sister. The rest could burn for all I cared.

  * * *

  I cleared my throat softly and held my phone, my actual phone, up to my ear.

  “I don’t know,” I declared loudly. “Jenny says that Maura Wright is going to run away with it this year.”

  Step one: site cryptic source with common name who has inside information.

  There was no place more crowded than the girls’ bathroom during a passing period, and this was my third passing-period bathroom trip today. I continued to recite my side of the fake conversation.

  “Well, I’m only telling you what Jenny told me. Of anyone, she’d be the one to know.”

  Step two: provide air of credibility to cryptic source.

  My face was strategically turned from the mirrors and stalls toward an alcove with a spartan bench. This
piece of information had to be attributed to my fictional friend Jenny, not me, so it was imperative that no one noticed who was relaying the information.

  This part of the plan relied on high schoolers’ propensity for gossip and providing fodder for the rumor mill that was too good for any eager ears to pass up. Whispers from behind me started speculating on the Jenny in question. Jenny the head cheerleader? Jenny the sophomore student council secretary? Jenny the lunch lady? All possibilities. Not that it mattered. The ball was rolling and Maura Wright was the Homecoming Queen front-runner.

  As I exited the bathroom on my way to World History, I texted Haley.

  Me: Done.

  Haley: good

  Haley: you need to deliver a note to mia gary

  Mia Gary was the Favored we had dismantling Maura’s biggest competition, Teagan Bradley. A tall order since Teagan had won a Homecoming crown all three years and was going for the sweep.

  Me: It won’t be a note congratulating her on a job well done, will it?

  Haley: no...she’s been too enthusiastic in her work

  Perfect. Haley directed the saboteurs to be subtle. There wasn’t such a thing as subtle enthusiasm.

  Me: And I’m delivering this note to her why?

  Haley: you’re my underling

  Me:

  Haley: relax her locker is 1124 two down from yours

  Haley: do you need a jack of spades

  Me: No, I have a deck.

  My gift from the QoH. It’s been in my locker, waiting for its chance.

  Haley: mia is saying that teagan is purging to fit into her homecoming dress

  Haley: if we don’t lock this down teagan will end up with pity votes

  Me: That’s awful.

  Haley: sometimes the favored go off script and take things too far

  Haley: we need to remind her that we are in charge

  Me: Consider it done.

  Mia deserved to have her cage rattled for spreading a nasty rumor like that. She was only supposed to talk about how unfair it would be if Teagan won again. This task certainly showed Mia’s true colors, and they weren’t flattering.