Mimi was popularity personified. She had the golden-girl good looks and tanned, Pilates-toned limbs that came with the Queen Bee position—but she transcended the stereotype while embodying the essence of it. She had a size twenty-two waist and a size ten shoe. She ate junk food every day and never gained an ounce. She went to bed with all her makeup on and woke up with a clear, unblemished complexion, just like her conscience.
Mimi came to Block 122 every night, and Friday was no exception. She and Bliss Llewellyn, a tall, rangy Texan who'd recently transferred to Duchesne, had spent the afternoon primping for the evening's festivities. Or rather, Bliss had spent the afternoon sitting by the side of the bed making complimentary noises while Mimi tried on everything in her wardrobe. They'd settled on a sexy-but-in-an-off-beat-bohemian-way-with-straps-just-falling-off-the-shoulder-just-so-Marni camisole, a tiny denim Earnest Sewn miniskirt, and a sparkly Rick Owens cashmere wrap. Mimi liked to travel with an entourage, and in Bliss she'd found a suitable companion. She'd befriended Bliss solely at her father's request, since Senator Llewellyn was an important colleague. At first Mimi had chafed at the directive, but she changed her mind when she realized Bliss's equine good looks complemented and emphasized her own ethereal beauty. Mimi loved nothing more than a suitable backdrop. Leaning against the stuffed cushions, she glanced at Bliss approvingly.
"Cheers," Bliss said, clinking her glass against Mimi's, as if she'd read her mind.
"To us." Mimi nodded, chugging the last of her luminescent purple cocktail. It was her fifth of the evening, and yet she felt as sober as when she'd ordered the first one. It was depressing how much longer it took to get drunk now. Almost as if alcohol didn't have any effect on her bloodstream. The Committee had told her it would happen—she just hadn't wanted to believe it back then. Especially since she wasn't supposed to avail herself of the other, more potent alternative as often as she'd have liked. The Committee had too many rules. At this point they were practically running her life. She impatiently signaled to the waitress to bring another round, snapping her fingers so hard it almost shattered the glass coffee table in front of her.
What was the point of going out in New York if you couldn't even get a little buzzed? She stretched out her legs and lay them languidly across the couch, her feet resting on her twin brother's lap. Her date, the nineteen-year-old heir to a pharmaceutical fortune and a current investor in the nightclub, pretended not to notice. Although it would be hard to say if he was even conscious, as he was currently leaning on Mimi's shoulder and drooling.
"Quit it," Benjamin Force snapped, brusquely pushing her off. The two of them shared the same pale, platinum blond hair, the same creamy, translucent skin, the same hooded green eyes, and the same long, slender limbs. But they couldn't have been more different in temperament. Mimi was loquacious and playful, while Benjamin—nicknamed Blackjack in childhood because of his tantrums, and shortened to Jack in adolescence—was taciturn and observant.
Mimi and Jack were the only children of Charles Force, the sixty-year-old, steely-haired media magnate who owned an upstart television network, a cable news channel, a popular newspaper tabloid, several radio stations, and a successful publishing empire that made profits from autobiographies of World Wrestling Federation stars. His wife, the former Trinity Burden, was a doyenne of the New York society circuit, and chaired the most prestigious charity committees. She was instrumental in the foundation of The Committee, of which Jack and Mimi were junior members. The Forces lived in one of the most sought-after addresses in the city, a luxurious, well-appointed townhouse that covered an entire block across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"Oh c'mon," Mimi pouted, immediately placing her feet back on her brother's lap. "I need to stretch my legs. They're so sore. Feel," she demanded, grabbing a sinewy calf and asking him to feel the muscle tense underneath. Strip Cardio was a bitch on the joints.
Jack frowned. "I said quit it," he murmured in his serious voice, and Mimi immediately retracted her tanned legs, tucking them beneath her butt and letting the undersoles of her four-inch Alaia heels scrape against the white suede couch, leaving dirty scratch marks on the immaculate cushion.
"What's wrong with you?" Mimi asked. Her brother had arrived in a foul mood just a minute ago. "Thirsty?" she taunted. Her brother was such a party pooper lately. He hardly ever went to Committee meetings anymore, something their parents would freak out about if they ever found out. He wasn't dating anyone; he looked weak and spent, and he was undeniably cranky. Mimi wondered when the last time was that he had had any.
Jack shrugged and stood up. "I'm going out to get some air."
"Good idea," Bliss added, rising in a hurry. "I need a smoke," she explained apologetically, waving a pack of cigarettes in front of Mimi's face.
"Me too," Aggie Carondolet, another girl from Duchesne said. She was part of Mimi's crowd, and looked just like their leader, down to the $500-dollar highlights and sullen expression.
"You don't need my permission," Mimi replied in a bored voice, although the opposite was true. One didn't simply leave Mimi's presence—one was dismissed.
Aggie smirked, and Bliss smiled nervously, following Jack toward the back of the club.
Mimi shrugged. She never bothered to follow the rules, and tended to light up wherever and whenever she felt like it—the gossip columns once gleefully published the five-figure tally of her smoking fines. She watched the three of them leave, disappearing into the crush of bodies throwing themselves around the dance floor to obscene rap lyrics.
"I'm bored," she whined, finally paying attention to the guy who had hardly left her side all evening. They had been dating for all of two weeks, an eternity on the Mimi time line. "Make something happen."
"What do you have in mind?" he murmured groggily, licking her ear.
"Mmmm," she giggled, putting a hand underneath his chin and feeling his veins throb. Tempting. But maybe later, not here, not in public at least. Especially since she'd just had her fill of him yesterday … and it was against the rules… Human familiars were not to be abused, blah, blah, blah. They needed at least a forty-eight-hour recovery time … But oh, he smelled wonderful … a hint of Armani …aftershave and underneath … meaty and vital… and if she could just get one little taste… one little… bite… but The Committee met downstairs, right beneath Block 122. There could be several Wardens here, right now … watching… She could be caught. But would she? It was dark in the VIP room… Who would even notice in this crowd of self-involved narcissists?
But they would find out. Someone would tell them. It was eerie how they knew so much about you—almost as if they were always there, watching, inside your head. So, maybe next time. She would let him recuperate from last night. She ruffled his hair. He was so cute—handsome and vulnerable, just the way she liked them. But for now, completely useless. "Excuse me for a second," she told him.
Mimi leaped from her seat so quickly that the cocktail waitress bringing a tray of lychee martinis to the table did a double take. The crew around the banquette blinked. They could have sworn she was sitting down just a second ago. Then in a flash, there she was: in the middle of the room, dancing with another boy—because for Mimi, there was always another boy, and then another and another, each one of them all too happy to dance with her—and it seemed like she danced for hours—her feet never even touching the ground—a dizzying; blond tornado in eight-hundred-dollar heels.
When she came back to the table, her face glowing with a transcendental light (or merely the effects of benefit high beam?), her beauty almost too painful to bear—she found her date sleeping, slumped over the edge of the table. A pity.
Mimi picked up her cell phone. She just realized that Bliss had never returned from that cigarette break.
CHAPTER 3
She didn't fit in anywhere. She didn't know why. Was there ever anything so ridiculous as a sociophobic cheerleader? Girls like her weren't supposed to have any problems. They were supposed to be perfect. But
Bliss Llewellyn didn't feel very perfect. She felt odd and out of place. She watched as her so-called best friend, Mimi Force, needled her brother and ignored her date. A fairly typical evening around the Force twins—the two of them bickering one minute or being spookily affectionate the next—especially when they did that thing where they just looked into each other's eyes and you could tell they were talking to each other without speaking. Bliss avoided Mimi's gaze and tried to distract herself by laughing at the jokes the actor on her right was telling her, but nothing about the evening—not even the fact that they'd been given the best table in the house or that the Calvin Klein model on her left had asked for her number—made her feel any less miserable.
She'd felt that way in Houston, too. That somehow she was not all there. But in Texas, she could hide it more easily. In Texas, she had big curly hair and the best backflip on the squad. Everyone had known her since she was a "wee chile," and she'd always been the prettiest girl in her class. But then Daddy, who'd grown up in New York, moved them back to the city to run for the empty Senate seat and had won the election easily. Before she could do a rebel yell, she was living on the Upper East Side and enrolled at the Duchesne School.
Of course, Manhattan was nothing like Houston, and Bliss's big curly hair and backflips didn't mean a thing to anyone at her new school, which didn't even have a football team, much less mini-skirted cheerleaders. But on the other hand, she didn't expect to be such a hick. After all, she knew her way around a Neiman Marcus! She owned the same True Religion jeans and James Perse T-shirts as anyone else. But somehow, she'd arrived for the first day wearing a pastel Ralph Lauren sweater with a plaid Anna Sui kilt (in an effort to look more like the girls featured in the school catalog), with a honking white leather Chanel purse on a gold chain slung over her shoulder, only to find her classmates dressed down in grotty fisherman sweaters and distressed corduroys. No one wore pastel in Manhattan or rocked white Chanel (in the fall at least). Even that weirdo goth girl—Schuyler Van Alen—displayed a chic that Bliss didn't know how to match.
Bliss knew about the Jimmy, the Manolo, the Stella. She'd made note of Mischa Barton's wardrobe. But there was something about the way the New York girls put it together that made her look like a fashion freak who'd never cracked open a magazine. Then there was the whole deal with her accent—no one could understand her at first, and when she said "y'all" or "laaahke," they imitated her, none too kindly either.
For a moment, it looked as if Bliss would be consigned to live the rest of her academic life as a borderline social pariah, a home-schooled reject when she should have been a Mean Girl. That is, until the clouds parted—lightning struck—and a miracle occurred: the fabulous Mimi Force took her personally in hand. Mimi was a junior, a year older. She and her brother Jack were like, the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt of Duchesne, a couple who were not supposed to be a couple, but a couple nonetheless—and the ruling one at that. Mimi was the Orientation leader for new students, and she'd taken one look at Bliss—the pastel cardigan, the shiny bluchers, the awkward Scottish kilt, the quilted Chanel bag, and had said, "Love that outfit. It's so wrong, it's right."
And that was it.
Bliss was suddenly in the In-Group, which, it turned out, was just the same as the one back in Houston—jocky guys (but starting lacrosse and crew instead of football), uniformly pretty girls (but they were on the debate team and headed for the Ivy League) with the same unwritten code to keep out newcomers. Bliss knew that it was only by Mimi's good graces that she'd managed to infiltrate the sacred stratum.
But it wasn't the social hierarchy of high school that was bothering Bliss. It wasn't even her blown-out-straight hair (which she would never let Mimi's stylist do to her again—she just didn't feel right without her curls), it was the fact that sometimes she didn't even feel like she knew who she was anymore. Ever since she had arrived in New York. She would walk by a building, or that old park by the river, and a feeling of déjà vu, but stronger—as if it were embedded in her own primal memory—would overwhelm her, and she would find herself shaking. When she walked into their apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street for the first time, she'd thought, "I'm home," and it wasn't because it was home … it was the feeling in her bones that she'd been there before, that she'd walked inside that same doorway before, that she'd danced across its marble floors in some not-so-distant past. "It used to have a fireplace," she thought, when she saw her room. Sure enough, when she mentioned it to the real estate agent, he'd told her it'd had a fireplace in 1819, but it had been boarded up for safety reasons. "Because someone died in there."
But the nightmares were the worst. Nightmares that left her screaming herself awake. Nightmares of running, nightmares of someone taking hold of her—as if she weren't in control—and she would wake up, shivering and cold, the sheets drenched with her sweat. Her parents assured her it was normal. Like it was a normal thing for a fifteen-year-old girl to wake up screaming so loudly her throat dried up and she choked on her own spit.
But now, at Block 122, Jack Force was standing up, and Bliss stood up too excusing herself from Mimi's attention. She'd stood up on impulse, just to be moving, just to be doing something other than just being a spectator to the Show That Was Mimi, but when she'd said she needed a smoke, she found she really did. Aggie Carondolet, one of the Mimi clones, was already snaking her way outside. Bliss lost Jack halfway through the crowd, and she flashed the stamp on her right wrist to the guard, who had to let people out and back inside due to the draconian smoking laws in New York City. Bliss found it ironic that New Yorkers considered themselves so cosmopolitan when in Houston, you could smoke anywhere, even inside a beauty salon, while you were under the dryer; but in Manhattan, smokers were consigned to the margins and left to deal with the elements.
She pushed open the back door and found herself in an alleyway, a small dark corner between two buildings. The alley between Block 122 and The Bank was a petri dish of warring cultural allegiances—on one side, preening hipsters in tight, expensive, European clothes, tossing their bleached hair over zebra-print jackets; and on the other, a scraggly group of lost children in their tattered and pierced clothing but an uneasy truce existed between the two parties, an invisible line that neither group ever crossed. After all, they were all smokers here. She saw Aggie leaning against the wall, hanging out with a couple of models.
Bliss rooted in her hooded Marc Jacobs car coat (borrowed from Mimi, part of the makeover) for her cigarettes and tapped one out. She brought it to her lips, fumbling for the matches.
A hand extended from the darkness, offering a small, lit flame. From the other side of the alley. The first time someone had braved the divide.
"Thanks," Bliss said, leaning forward and inhaling, the cigarette glowing red at its tip. She looked up, exhaled, and through the smoke recognized the guy who'd offered it. Dylan Ward. A transfer—just like her—to the sophomore class from somewhere out of town. One of the odd-ones-out at Stepford-like Duchesne, where everyone had known everyone since nursery school and ballroom dancing lessons. Dylan looked handsome and dangerous in his customary beat-up black leather motorcycle jacket over a dirty T-shirt and stained jeans. It was rumored he'd been expelled from a succession of prep schools. His eyes glittered in the darkness. He flicked his Zippo closed, and she noticed his shy smile. There was something about him—something sad and broken and appealing … He looked exactly the way she felt, and he walked over to her side.
"Hey," he said.
"I'm Bliss," she said.
"Of course you are." He nodded.
CHAPTER 4
The Duchesne School was housed in the former Flood mansion on Madison Avenue and Ninety-first Street, on prep-school row, across from Dalton and next to Sacred Heart. It was the former home of Rose Elizabeth Flood, widow of Captain Armstrong Flood, who had founded the Flood Oil Company. Rose's three daughters were educated by Marguerite Duchesne, a Belgian governess, and when all three were lost during the unfortunate sinking of
the SS Endeavor during an Atlantic crossing, a heartbroken Rose returned to the Midwest and bequeathed her home to Mademoiselle Duchesne to found her dream institution.
Little had been done to transform the home into a school: among the prerequisites of the behest was that all the original finishes and furniture were to be carefully maintained, which made entering the building akin to walking backward in time. A life-size John Singer Sargent portrait of the three Flood heiresses still hung above the marble staircase, welcoming visitors into the magnificent double-height entryway. A Baroque crystal chandelier hung in the glass-windowed ballroom that overlooked Central Park, and Chesterfield ottomans and antique reading desks were arranged in the foyer. The shiny brass sconces were now wired for electricity, and the creaky Pullman elevator still worked (although only faculty were allowed to use it). The attic, a charming garret room, was transformed into an art center, complete with a printing press and a lithograph machine, and the downstairs drawing rooms housed a fully equipped theater, gym, and cafeteria. Metal lockers now lined the fleur-de-lis wallpapered hallways, and the upper bedrooms housed the humanities classrooms. Generations of students swore that the ghost of Mrs. Duchesne haunted the third landing.
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