by Hannah Capin
Contents
THAT NIGHT
AFTER
THE COVEN
CONFESSION
CLINICAL
RUN
BACKSTAGE
INTRODUCTIONS
NEW GIRL
REUNION
VARSITY
THE BATTLE
PROPHECY
THE FIRST KILL
LOYALTIES
EULOGY
IN MEMORIAM
COURTING
NIGHTFALL
SWORN
WATER
CHAPEL
REVELATIONS
LAIR
GHOSTS
HIT LIST
TANGLED
THE FORTRESS
TRUTH OR DARE
OATH
DEFENSELESS
MORTAL THOUGHTS
REGICIDE
CLEAN
MORNING
AFTERMATH
SUNSET
HUNGER
REFLECTION
SUCCESSION
MARKED
RIFT
FLIGHT
THREATS
TETHERED
ADRIFT
SINKING
UNITED
WAKING
BEHIND THE GATES
THE HAUNTING
CAUGHT
LIARS
TOIL AND TROUBLE
TYRANNY
GUILT
RUIN
ESCAPE
HOME
FIRE
BLOOD
MOURNING
OUR NIGHT
THE SET
THE KING
THE KNIGHTS
THE QUEEN
WHITE
RED
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
Hannah Capin finished her first ‘novel’ when she was eleven, about a girl detective and a brilliant villain looking for revenge. Thousands of pages later, she’s still writing about smart girls and vengeance. Hannah’s debut novel The Dead Queens Club was released in January 2019, and Foul Is Fair will be released in January 2020.
For every girl who wants revenge.
That Night
Sweet sixteen is when the claws come out.
We’re all flash tonight. Jenny and Summer and Mads and me. Vodka and heels we could never quite walk in before, but tonight we can. Short skirts—the shortest. Glitter and highlight. Matte and shine. Long hair and whitest-white teeth.
I’ve never been blond before but tonight my hair is platinum. Mads bleached it too fast but I don’t care because tonight’s the only night that matters. And my eyes are jade-green tonight instead of brown, and Summer swears the contacts Jenny bought are going to melt into my eyes and I’ll never see again, but I don’t care about that, either.
Tonight I’m sixteen.
Tonight Jenny and Summer and Mads and me, we’re four sirens, like the ones in those stories. The ones who sing and make men die.
Tonight we’re walking up the driveway to our best party ever. Not the parties like we always go to, with the dull-duller-dullest Hancock Park girls we’ve always known and the dull-duller-dullest wine coolers we always drink and the same bad choice in boys.
Tonight we’re going to a St Andrew’s Prep party.
Crashing it, technically.
But nobody turns away girls like us.
We smile at the door. They let us in. Our teeth flash. Our claws glimmer. Mads laughs so shrill-bright it’s almost a scream. Everyone looks. We all grab hands and laugh together and then everyone, every charmed St Andrew’s Prepper is cheering for us and I know they see it—
for just a second—
—our fangs and our claws.
After
The first thing I do is cut my hair.
But it isn’t like in the movies, those crying girls with mascara streaks and kindergarten safety scissors, pink and dull, looking into toothpaste specks on medicine cabinet mirrors.
I’m not crying. I don’t fucking cry.
I wash my makeup off first. I use the remover I stole from Summer, oily Clinique in a clear bottle with a green cap. Three minutes later I’m fresh-faced, wholesome, girl-next-door, and you’d almost never know my lips are still poison when I look the way a good girl is supposed to look instead of like that little whore with the jade-green eyes.
The contact lenses go straight into the trash.
Then I take the knife, the good long knife from the wedding silver my sister hid in the attic so she wouldn’t have to think about the stupid man who never deserved her anyway. The marriage was a joke but the knife is perfectly, wickedly beautiful: silver from handle to blade and so sharp you bleed a little just looking at it. No one had ever touched it until I did, and when I opened the box and lifted the knife off the dark red velvet, I could see one slice of my reflection looking back from the blade, and I smiled.
I pull my hair tight, the long hair that’s been mine since those endless backyard days with Jenny and Summer and Mads. Always black, until Mads bleached it too fast, but splintering platinum blond for the St Andrew’s party on my sweet sixteen. Ghost-bright hair from Mads and jade-green eyes from Jenny and contour from Summer, almost magic, sculpting me into a brand-new girl for a brand-new year.
My hair is thick, but I’ve never been one to flinch.
I stare myself straight in the eyes and slash once—
Hard.
And that’s it. Short hair.
I dye it back to black, darker than before, with the cheap box dye I made Jenny steal from the drugstore. Mads revved her Mustang, crooked across two parking spots at three in the morning, and I said:
Get me a color that knows what the fuck it’s doing.
Jenny ran back out barefoot in her baby-pink baby-doll dress and flung herself into the back seat across Summer’s lap, and Mads was out of the lot and onto the road, singing through six red lights, and everything was still slow and foggy and almost like a dream, but when Jenny threw the box onto my knees I could see it diamond-clear. Hard black Cleopatra bangs on the front and the label, spelled out plain: #010112 REVENGE. So I said it out loud:
REVENGE
And Mads gunned the engine harder and Summer and Jenny shrieked war-cries from the back seat and they grabbed my hand, all three of them, and we clung together so tight I could feel blood under my broken claws.
REVENGE, they said back to me. REVENGE, REVENGE, REVENGE.
So in the bathroom, an hour later and alone, I dye my hair revenge-black, and I feel dark wings growing out of my back, and I smile into the mirror at the girl with ink-stained fingers and a silver sword.
Then I cut my broken nails to the quick.
Then I go to bed.
In the morning I put on my darkest lipstick before it’s even breakfast time, and I go to Nailed It with a coffee so hot it burns my throat. The beautiful old lady with the crooked smile gives me new nails as long as the ones they broke off last night, and stronger.
She looks at the bruises on my neck and the scratches across my face, but she doesn’t say anything.
So I point at my hair, and I say, This color. Know what it’s called?
She shakes her head: No.
I say, REVENGE.
She says, Good girl. Kill him.
The Coven
“What are you going to do to them?” Mads asks me.
They’re in my bedroom, her and Summer and Jenny, when I get back. Summer and Jenny sit on the bed, one knee touching, and Mads stands lookout-sharp against the wall.
“Your hair,” says Jenny. “It’s short.”
I sit down and Jenny reaches out and strokes one hand over the paintbrush ends. Little Jenny Kim from two houses over, still in last night’s dress. Her cat-eyes are smudged to smoke
but her lips are fresh pink, a tiny perfect heart on her perfect little face. She wears a rose-gold chain with one white pearl nestled under her throat.
She is so sweet it could kill you.
“I’m ready for war,” I say.
“So are we,” says Summer, next to Jenny. Summer, supermodel blond and supermodel tan and supermodel gorgeous, sunny and irresistible, enough garage-band songs about her to fill ten albums, the hottest virgin in California. Last year a football boy drove whiskey-fast up Pacific Coast Highway just to make her want him. Plunged his Maserati off the saw-blade cliffs. Summer went to his hospital room and left a lipstick kiss on the window so it was the very first thing he saw when he woke up. She never talked to him again.
He lived, but everyone knows he wishes he hadn’t.
“Tell us what you want,” says Mads. “We’ll do it, Elle.”
My parents named me Elizabeth Jade Khanjara. Everyone calls me Elle: they always have. Last night, I told the St Andrew’s Prep boy with the dazzle smile and the just-for-me drink, I’m Elle, and he said, Elle. Pretty name, but not as pretty as you.
“I’m not Elle,” I tell them.
Mads waits. She doesn’t blink.
“I’m Jade,” I say.
“Good,” says Mads.
If I were the kind of girl who cries I’d cry right now for Mads, my favorite. Mads, my very best friend in all the world, since we were four years old together and she moved into the house on the other side of the fourteenth green. When her parents still called her by her deadname and the only time she could wear girl-clothes was when she was with me. Mads, who last night was the only one I could think about once I could finally stand without falling, and when I found her out back by the pool, tall and regal and lit up like a goddamn queen, that was when I could breathe again. Mads, who knew what happened without me saying anything, and found a pair of lacrosse sticks in the pool house and together we broke all the windows we could find, and the glass shattered and caught in the nets and our hands bled bright and furious.
Mads, my Mads, who once upon a time when we were eight and taping knockout-pink Barbie Band-Aids over skinned knees, looked at me and told me the name she wasn’t and said, I’m Madalena, and I said, Good.
“Jade,” says Jenny—
“Jade,” says Summer—
“Jade,” says Mads—
—and it’s magic, dark magic. A spell from my three witch-sisters.
“Find them,” I say, and I close my eyes because I can still feel it, almost, the poison the dazzle-smiled boy put in my drink last night so the world turned flashbulb bright but slow, so slow, until I couldn’t fight anymore, and when I tried to scream they smashed their hands over my mouth and I bit and bit and my fangs drew blood and they said, God damn, she’s feisty.
I open my eyes—now, this morning, here in my coven with Jenny and Summer and Mads—and they’ve done magic again. There on the screen Summer’s holding, I see the boys we’re going to ruin.
Summer prints it in color on the purring sleek printer my parents bought me to make sure I get into Stanford. They want me to be a doctor. I want to be the queen.
The paper looks like those WANTED lists in the post office, but instead at the top it says St Andrew’s Preparatory School Varsity Boys’ Lacrosse. One smug smile after another. Secrets you can feel even on paper.
Mads finds a scarlet lip liner in her purse. I point at pictures and she paints bold circles onto the page:
Duncan.
Duffy.
Connor.
Banks.
Four boys from the room with the white sheets and the spinning lights, and four red circles in front of us now.
“We can kill them,” says Mads, quiet, and she means it.
I look at Jenny in her baby-pink lace; Summer in her silky black shirt with the deadly plunging neckline; Mads with gold rings in her ears and fists ready to fight.
They are mine and I am theirs.
My nails are long and silver. Ten little daggers, sharp enough to tear throats open.
“Killing hurts worse if somebody you love is holding the knife,” I say.
“So make one of them do it?” Summer asks. She’s looking at the boys, the ones we haven’t circled yet. She’s hungry.
I nod.
Jenny smiles her pink-heart smile and says:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
—another spell.
Mads hands me her lip liner. I look at every boy, one by one. Remember them from the party at Duncan’s house, locking girls against the wall in the living room and pouring shots in the kitchen and smirking sidelong while I drank poison.
Today I choose who dies and I choose who kills.
There’s one boy who wasn’t at the party. Right in the middle of the page. Earnest eyes that trust too much. Innocent, he thinks, and he thinks he isn’t one of them. He thinks he isn’t lying when he says his prayers at night.
I carve a bloodred X across his face:
Mack.
Confession
Summer says I have to tell my parents.
“No,” I say, frostbite-cold.
“I’m not saying don’t do the rest.” Her eyes flick down to the paper in her hands. “But what if you want to do something about them, later, and you need proof—”
And Jenny says, “Killing them isn’t enough for you? Damn, Summer.”
And I say, “Thank you.”
Summer looks at Jenny the way she always does. The way everybody except Jenny can see. “I’m not saying cops. Or lawyers. Not yet.”
And Jenny narrows her eyes and says, in her cotton-candy bubblegum voice, “Not ever,” because Jenny’s father is the sort of slick-haired lawyer who smiles at boys like Duncan and Duffy and Connor and Banks and tells them he doesn’t want to know if they did it, he just wants to know who can stand up and put one hand on the Bible and swear that he’s a fine young man, and then he takes their fathers’ checks and those boys walk out of court free, grinning guilt all over their faces.
“I’m just saying, the hospital,” Summer says.
I say it again: “No. Hell no.”
So Summer says, “But what if—”
And I say, “Are you really going to tell me I can’t say no?”
The words hang in the air and Jenny’s eyes flicker bigger.
Then Mads says, “Jade.”
She’s still standing by the window, light slivering past the curtains and sparking off her earrings and her shimmering dark skin. Immovable.
“We’re going to kill them,” says Mads. “We’re going to do exactly what you tell us, until it’s done.”
And Jenny says, singsong, “Until the battle’s lost and won.”
And Mads says, “But this is insurance. You never know what you’ll need later.”
And Summer takes my hand in hers and looks into my eyes and says, “Please, Jade, for us.” It’s so perfectly, perfectly Summer—her pool-blue gaze and her beach hair and that voice people would murder their mothers for—that I laugh, because if anyone knows exactly how to do what I need to do, it’s her.
“I’ll tell,” I say. “But you have to do the rest.” I nod at the boys in Summer’s hands. “Find out everything. I need to know everything.”
“Done,” she says, with her megawatt smile. “Before sunset.”
They watch me. Sisters, by something more than blood.
And Mads says, “Good.”
They leave, because in the end this is all mine, and I put Summer’s list under my pillow and brush my hair. Stare into the mirror until all that’s left is the cold hard glint in my eyes. Dangerous eyes for a dangerous girl.
Then I go downstairs.
And here I am, standing in front of the fireplace we never use. Standing with my hands folded together in front of me, facing my parents.
“I’m going to tell you something,” I say.
They wait. The silence hums loud in my ears.
“Don’t be upset,” I tell them.
“What is it?” my father asks. I can read it on his face: poor grades, he’s thinking, cheating on a test. He’s in his golf clothes, because plastic surgeons aren’t the kind of doctors who work Saturdays. She won’t get into Stanford, he’s thinking. She’s ruined her chances.
“I’ll handle everything,” I tell them.
“What is it?” my mother asks. She’s in a brunch dress; perfect hair; fresh Botox. She’s thinking a boy, but not in the way that’s true. Thinking heartbreak, thinking about the boy she loved back when she was my age, the one her parents decided wasn’t good enough for her. She loves my father. They’re exactly right together: the goddamn American dream. But she still has a picture of the boy, the one who stayed out too late and called when she was studying. The one she left behind in Torrance when she packed her things for college, the way her parents said she should.
I hold my shoulders square. They see the little baby version of me: eyes too big for my face, tiny gold earrings, too much laughing. As soon as I speak they’ll never see that same girl anymore, and knowing that makes my fingernails bite into my skin because I want it so hard, to rip those boys’ faces open. Tear their hearts out and hold them, still beating, in my hands.
I’m not their little baby girl. I’m a cruel bitch and everyone knows it. Every teenage girl thinks she and her friends are the mean girls, the ice queens, the wicked witches, but Jenny and Summer and Mads and me—we’re what they wish they were.
Savage.
And after all, little baby Jade waited patient at the top of the preschool playground castle the day Tristan Wilder pushed Summer on the sidewalk and made her spit blood. Waited for Tristan to climb grubby-handed up the ladder and teeter too close to the edge. Waited until the teacher wasn’t looking.
Tristan Wilder went to the hospital the day he made Summer spit blood. And when the ambulance pulled away, Summer’s eyes met mine and her face split into a smile and her teeth glowed red.
I’ve never been anyone’s little baby girl.
“Yesterday,” I say. “Last night.”
I tell them.
But mostly lies. Because the real story is mine, and I already know what I need to do.
