by Hannah Capin
I tell them it was a Hillview party. I tell them I went alone; the girls weren’t there; nobody knows but me. I tell them it was a Hillview boy. I tell them I’m not sure who.
I tell them I blacked out before it happened.
When I’m done the silence doesn’t buzz anymore. It sits, vulture-quiet, on the mantel behind me.
My father stands up and walks out.
I can’t look at my mother, so I stare at the painting on the wall and think of the very last act of this goddamn Greek tragedy. Four boys dead on the ground and me, standing over them with a crown in my hands.
Something shatters from the kitchen.
I see it where I’m not looking: my mother’s face shattering, too. She says, Elle, I love you, I love you and then she’s stumbling after my father, unsteady for the first time in her life. A broom brushes against the kitchen floor and crystal scrapes on marble. My parents speak too fast, two languages melting together, hushed and desperate: it can’t be, how could he, how can we, why did, who was—
no.
My mother’s voice gets so quiet I can’t understand it even in the bone-crushing silence.
Then my father’s voice spikes out, clear and loud:
kill the boy
—and I’ve never been prouder to be his daughter. My father, who spends his days slicing scalpels across cheeks and chests. My father with his expensive watch and his once-a-week haircut, who breaks people apart and sews them back together, better.
If I told him the truth, he’d take his scalpel and slice those St Andrew’s boys’ throats himself.
But this is all mine.
When they come back my father’s hands are fists and my mother’s eyes shine.
“Tell us what you need from us,” they say.
And I say, “Let me handle it myself. I need to. I will.”
They look stronger when I say that. Like they know it’s true.
Behind me, the vulture on the mantel spreads its wings, black and huge.
I say, “I want to transfer to St Andrew’s.”
Clinical
My mother goes with me to the hospital. I want to go alone, I told her and my father, but she took my hand in hers and said, You’re my daughter, and that was the end of it. We drive my father’s favorite car, the slut-red BMW convertible, three miles from our house to Cedars-Sinai. The sky is blue enough to drown in.
The nurses give me pills and ask too much. I swallow and lie. The doctor is tired and grave with eyes that dig too deep, and I float away from her white-gloved hands and wait like the vulture from the mantel.
They look at me like I’m something to be fixed.
When they say do you want to talk to anyone I tell them no, and they tell me to wait for a counselor anyway. Out in the hall my mother’s voice edges sharper each time the doctor murmurs to her about police and reports and all the other things I don’t want. My mother says, She’s my daughter. My mother says, No.
I sit on the end of a white-sheets hospital cot in the black dress Summer let me borrow a month ago, for Valentine’s Day, when all four of us crashed hotel bars downtown and smiled daggers at greased-up businessmen and collected martinis and waited for when the men got too close, and then we threw the drinks in their faces and ran back out into the night, stilettos clipping out gunfire, elbows locking us together. Summer’s black dress and my silver heels. Holding my phone in both hands and texting Jenny, texting Summer, texting Mads. Dividing and conquering the St Andrew’s boys. Piecing their whole lives together from their pictures and tags and reckless Connor’s comments about girls who won’t remember.
The woman they want me to talk to comes in so mouse-quiet I don’t even know she’s there until she says, “Elizabeth, right?”
I look up from my phone. My lips twist.
I say, “Wrong.”
She flips a page on her clipboard and her eyebrows furrow. “Elizabeth Jade Khanjara?”
My phone buzzes. It’s Summer: You’re gone. Full ghost, because I asked her to do it: erase every last trace of me so the boys won’t find anything if they decide to dig where they don’t belong.
My eyes meet the mouse’s, and she’s even more like prey when I bother looking her over. “It’s Jade,” I say.
“Jade, then,” she says, and she offers up a careful smile, like if she shows too many teeth she’ll shatter my poor fragile self.
I grin at her, glittering and wide.
She takes a step back and blinks three times, right in a row.
I text the coven, They’ve sent an actual mouse to fix me. If I were broken, I’d be fucked.
“First of all, Jade, I am so, so sorry,” says the mouse.
Terrify her, says Jenny on my screen.
Almost too easy, I text back. Almost not worth it.
“So am I,” I say with a lilt that should tell the mouse what I really mean, and the little twitch she does says she notices, but then she blinks again and decides I didn’t mean it.
She has no idea.
“Jade,” she says, sitting down in the ugly chair across from me, “what you need to know, before anything else, is that there’s no wrong way to be a victim.”
I look up for that. Straight into her mud-and-pity eyes. I flash my teeth again; let the light gleam off them. “I’m not a victim,” I say.
She bows her head. “Survivor,” she says, and that word is worse somehow, with its painted-false bravery.
Survivor, I text. Fuck her. Is that the best she can do?
“Not that, either,” I say. There’s more she wants to tell me, and the words cling to her like dust and rot: who I was and who I am and who I should be. I’m supposed to listen. I’m supposed to believe her.
“I—well, then,” the mouse falters. “Well, what would you prefer?”
Tell her queen, says Summer.
Tell her killer, says Jenny.
Tell her justice, says Mads.
I won’t let her read me her lines.
Fate, I tell the coven.
“Why do you need a word for it?” I ask, all mocking uncertainty.
“I don’t—I don’t know.” She’s grasping and too nervous. “What do you mean?”
My smile is lethal. “I mean those boys didn’t turn me into anything I wasn’t before.”
She opens her mouse-mouth and closes it again.
I stand. Summer’s dress blacks out the white sheets behind me. My heels are so high my arches curl into talons. I’m the huntress and she’s the kill and she knows it now, too late to do anything.
I hold out one hand, palm up, and she places her mouse-hand into it like it’s automatic.
“But I would prefer—” I say, and I lift her hand and kiss it. My eyes are still locked on hers. Her pupils shrink to tiny panicked pinpricks—
“Avenger,” I say.
I drop her hand and walk out.
I am exactly the wrong way to be a victim.
Run
I hate running. I always have.
Losers run, sweaty and red-faced. Glowing in neon or slumming in T-shirts. Flailing and obedient.
I hate running, but I run anyway, because my coven and me, we’re the very best girls at Hillview. Running carves us hard as marble, and it means we can dance all night and fly fast away from the men who want their drink-money back when they don’t get what we never promised.
So I run on Sunday, at dead noon. Alone, on the smoothed-glass sand where the waves wash everything away. In black on black with the ghost of my long hair shadowing me. The ghost of my hair and the ghosts from Duncan’s party—
the things I remember, jabbing at my skin—
the things I don’t, bubbling under it—
—matching my pace no matter how fast I run.
It’s supposed to be two miles out and two miles back to my father’s red car. But I don’t turn even when I’m past the boardwalk, all the way to where the waves crash almost against the rocks. When the sand runs out I climb up and run on the road, straight up the co
ast and straight toward the traffic, until I can’t feel my feet at all—
until it’s only my black wings carrying me, reaching so wide the cars swerve into the other lane to make room—
until the hills stretch higher and closer, bare dark rock pressing in behind the houses—
—until my feet stop all on their own and I’m crashed against the pavement and a truck roars past with its horn screaming in my ears.
Across the road a silver Lexus pulls over. The window comes down. Another car flies past, so close I can taste the exhaust. The traffic splits the car that pulled over into cut-up frames: a woman yelling something, sunglasses coming off, a door opening.
My wings are gone and my hair is gone and the sun blazes down too bright.
The woman is next to me, all of a sudden: “Sweetie, wake up—are you okay—”
She crouches down too close.
“Sweetie, can you hear me?”
Hey, slut, said Connor on Friday night, can you hear me? Wake up—
She touches my shoulder—
—and I push her so hard she falls almost into the traffic. She lets out a little cry and scrambles back on all fours, grinding freeway dirt into her white jeans.
I’m on my feet again. My shadow covers all of her. She cowers, wide-eyed and scared, and it breathes life back into me, and my hands find my phone and hold it straight out like a gun.
I leave her there, oil-streaked and trembling.
Mads finds me, twenty minutes later, straight down the cliff on a blade-thin crescent of sand the waves can’t reach. She sits so close our arms seal together. The wide gold band halfway between her shoulder and her elbow is cold against my skin.
She doesn’t say one single thing. She stares hard at the ocean. Gold-rimmed sunglasses and scarlet-orange lipstick.
She’s the most beautiful girl in the world. I love her more than anything.
The waves rush in. Washing everything away, again and again, to clear blue nothing. The sun sinks just enough to shine straight into our eyes. White-hot and blinding.
I stand up and walk into the ocean. The waves are stronger than they look and cold enough to crack bone. I should fall, but I don’t. I won’t. I keep walking, steady, until my feet barely touch the sand and I float closer to the sun with every wave. Keeping my head above the water—
daring every fucking wave to try to drown me—
daring the sharks to find me—
daring the St Andrew’s boys to come back—
—until my feet can’t touch the sand at all and the waves are breaking all around me and the water washes out the sun. All I see is the biggest wave yet, blue and gleaming, closing in, and nothing else is real.
It breaks.
The blue goes black. I spin hard away from the light and skid through sand. My lungs burn and then they burst and the water rushes in.
I can’t find the sky.
And then strong hands grab my arm and pull hard against the tide, and the sun comes shouting back.
We wash up on the sand. Mads and me, snarled together. I cough out water and blood. The sky is even brighter than before.
Finally Mads says, “You can’t swim for shit.”
We laugh, not like our siren call on Friday night, but raw and ripping open.
“Swimming fucking sucks,” I say.
“Swimming is for flyover bitches on vacation,” Mads says.
I cough again. There’s water in my lungs; salt beating through my heart. “Swimming is for jock bitches who get up at five A.M. for practice.”
“Swimming is for reality-show bitches who jump into pools in their bridesmaid dresses just to keep the attention on them.”
I slither closer to Mads so my head is against her shoulder. Our hair blooms water into the sand. We laugh again, but there’s something in it that isn’t a laugh at all—
—something like a scream instead, hollow and full.
It dies but the echo doesn’t.
I stare at the sun. “Did you see them?”
Mads’s jaw shifts. “They were by that big window that looks out at the pool—”
“The one we broke?”
“The one we fucking smashed,” she says. “They were together when we went out looking for Summer’s boy.”
It seeps in like the water in my lungs. The lights spinning through Duncan’s house. Everything white, every room with corners hidden away, spotlights beaming down into secret alcoves with plaster-white statues of dead Roman kings—
—just enough space for a glowing girl and a dazzle-smiled boy to hide away right there with everyone watching.
“You and Jenny and Summer,” I say.
“Me and Jenny and Summer,” says Mads.
The silence hangs so heavy it drowns out the waves.
“We couldn’t find you,” she says. Her voice makes every inch of me sting.
We were together at first, Jenny and Summer and Mads and me, dancing and drinking and shining so bright the St Andrew’s Preppers needed sunglasses to look at us. Then Summer found a boy, and she chased after him and pulled Jenny with her, just their fingertips touching. We danced and we drank and we danced. The St Andrew’s Preppers were everywhere, blond and tan and laced together with white powder and pills, and then Jenny was calling for Mads and me and a new song came on, loud enough to see it in the air, the best song all night. And everything was silver, and I spun away from Mads and into the middle of the biggest room. A sunken floor and a soaring ceiling with more lights beating down.
I danced. Alone. A whirl of platinum and white, too fast to catch, cutting the air and sending gold sparks flying.
And then when the song was over and I spun out to one of the niches with the dead-king statues—
I’ve never seen you, I’ve never seen anyone like you—
The dazzle-smiled boy, the only one who could watch me without going blind.
Mads grabs my hand. Pulls me back to her, to here, to now.
“I don’t remember,” I say. It feels like a scream, but it sounds like a whisper.
Her hand locks tighter on mine.
“The boy who gave me the drink—” I say—
I see white. Only white. The statues and the marble floor. The music. The spotlights. What’s your name? he asked, faceless, and I said, I’m Elle. And he said, Elle. Pretty name, but not as pretty as you—
“I don’t remember,” I say, louder. I sit up, sword-straight, and so does Mads. The sun burns our skin so hot that the last drops of water boil to steam. “Did you see him?” I ask.
She knows who I mean. She shakes her head.
I take my hand back. It wants to shake but I don’t let it. I count, one finger scarring the sand: “Duncan. Duffy. Connor. Banks.”
The salt water in my lungs drips into my veins.
“The boy who mixed the drinks—Malcolm,” I say. “The boy who guarded the door—Porter.”
The salt water in my veins blisters through my skin.
“The boy who gave me the drink—”
Someone shrieks so piercing cold it takes my breath away.
“I have to remember,” I gasp. “I have to know—”
Your eyes—he said, and then white, and the hallway, with my talons scraping the floor and the walls bending in, and Connor’s iron grip—
The shriek tears the air open again.
“Jade,” says Mads. “Jade, Jade, Jade—”
The shriek rips sharper. Cruel and ruinous.
“Jade,” says Mads, again and again, until my shriek is a dagger that blots out the sun—
Jade, says Mads.
I stand up. My wings and my scream swallow up the sky.
Backstage
My father, the surgeon celebrities trust with their whole dead hearts, has connections.
My father, the immigrants’ son who buried his father’s accent so deep into the ground that political blind-callers read him the college-educated white male version of their script, knows how to be anyone he needs to be.
My father, the man who said kill the boy, will do anything to make sure his daughters get the very best lives money and sweat can buy.
I don’t quite know how he does it, but when I get home Sunday afternoon there’s a St Andrew’s Prep uniform laid out on my bed.
I wake up so early on Monday that it still feels like night. And I text the coven even though they’re sleeping, and I say, Today St Andrew’s meets its new queen.
Mads texts back before I even set the phone down: Take what’s yours.
The uniform is a white shirt, a blue-plaid skirt, and a blue-plaid tie. White knee socks and a navy blazer. I add my patent leather Mary Janes: Girl Scout buckles and round toes from the front, but deadly sharp heels from every other side. And I do the kind of makeup that makes boys look at you and think, damn, and girls look at you and think, bitch. Old Hollywood instead of the contoured Insta-goddess I was on Friday night. A villainess, not a heroine.
The scratches disappear with the kind of magic those lacrosse boys won’t even suspect.
My lipstick is femme fatale red.
In the mirror I’m something from a two A.M. movie about Catholic schoolgirl vampires. Revenge-black hair, short and sharp; a face that says she’ll pull you to the dark side and you’ll love every second of it.
Summer texts me, Ruin them.
I pose and shoot until the girl on the screen has exactly the look she needs: a smile they’ll read as inviting today, but tomorrow—whichever tomorrow finds them clutching at their throats and choking on blood—they’ll look back and see the vengeance in it, and they’ll wonder how the hell they ever missed it—
—and then they won’t think another damn thing.
I post the picture to my fresh account, brand-new in person and online: St Andrew’s, you’ve met your match. And I tag it just right, the same way those boys and their clinging groupie girlfriends tag everything, so they’ll be talking about me before I even walk in the door.
Bold as hell.
I don’t eat breakfast, but my mother gives me tea in a white cup threaded with gold, and she sits with me and lets me stay silent. When it’s time to go, she hands me a heavy card. My father’s handwriting loops across it under his letterhead: Take the red car.
