Devilish

devilish

Also by Maureen Johnson

13 Little Blue Envelopes
The Bermudez Triangle
The Key to the Golden Firebird

devilish

by
maureen johnson

Devilish

RAZORBILL

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
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Copyright 2006 © Maureen Johnson
All rights reserved

EISBN: 9781101578711

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Prologue

Two Weeks Earlier …

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Acknowledgments

So this was how it ended. The revelers had deserted, leaving plates of Spanish almonds and sushi and cupcake wrappers. Now there would be no more grand ballrooms with Assyrian kings and pampered dogs and English pop stars and the A3. No more midnight rides through the skies of Providence. No more Calculus II with Brother Frank. No more stolen moments with 116-year-old boys or staring at the golden brick mansion across the fields. It had come back to this mad room of antique perfume bottles and disagreements
.

Only a handful of people would understand the real meaning of this event. The general public would be horror-struck. They would wonder how two best friends, two otherwise unassuming girls on the verge of adulthood, could have ended up like this. There would be news specials and magazine articles: “Teen Tragedy Stuns Providence,” “Rhode Island Rampage.” I would be cast as the brainy troublemaker—the angry little blond punk. Allison would be portrayed as my sweet, devoted friend—the one I had tricked and mislead
and taken down this tragic path. The real villain would not appear in the stories at all
.

Oh, I had no doubt that they’d blame the whole mess on me, probably just because I had spiky hair and a tendency to talk too much. That was the story of my life. And that life was over
.

It doesn’t matter how old you are when you die, I’d been told. When you die, that’s the right time for you. I’d also been told my life was a small price to pay
.

I was glad to pay it for Allison
.

My hand fell away from the phone. The room grew dark and I felt myself slipping down the side of the sofa, down to the prized Oriental rug. This was my final move in the game, this graceless thud to the floor. There was only one question left in my mind
…

Had I played it right
?

The reviews from the Junior Judges had gone up on the web site in the middle of the night. This was how they described me:

Nothing new there. I went right on to Allison’s. The first word struck me, and it was all downhill from there:

When there is blood in the water, the sharks will rise to the surface. And Big-Little Day, our yearly celebration of sisterhood, was one of the bloodiest days of the year.

Big-Little Day was a major school benchmark when seniors would officially ask a freshman or new underclassman to be their “little.” Enterprising freshmen would actively campaign the most popular seniors, leaving notes and tokens and generally sucking up in a really gross manner. It was a massively big deal to have a good little. Any self-respecting senior, it was understood, had to have at least three freshmen courting them. A few luminaries
might have eight or ten offers. And selection was rapid. There was only one forty-five-minute period at the start of the day to get it all done. By the end, we were expected to pull off our class rings and pass them to our chosen freshmen, who got to wear them for one day—making the whole thing a little creepily marriage-like as well.

The buildup to this event had been going on since school had started … clandestine meetings in the bathroom between classes, lunchtime congresses, a fury of note taking and illegal texting. But the really serious part was the evaluation by the Junior Judges, a group of self-nominated juniors who offered commentary on all the seniors on the day itself.

No one knew who the first Junior Judges were. The tradition was known to go back as far as the eighties. Back then, they got their message out using photocopied sheets that they stuck in all the freshman lockers. And every year since then, a group of juniors rose up and took on the task.

Even though they were self-chosen, the Junior Judges were hardly anonymous. This year’s group was a trio who called themselves the A3. The reason for this is so painfully pretentious that I can barely write it down, and if I really sit down and figure out how it is I even know this, something bad will happen to my head. So I won’t do that. I will simply explain that it comes from a size of paper in England called A3, which is really long paper. One of them went to England and discovered this, and they all started
joking about how they liked “really long paper,” as if that actually means something. Combine that with the fact that
A
generally means the best and the fact that there are three of them: Elsie Fast, Tracey Pils, and Lai Barden. It all comes together into one ready-made nickname. (Awful things like that tend to converge. Know that and you’ll be ahead of the game.)

These were the people digging up the past that I had worked all summer long to bury and cover in concrete. I had gone so far as to turn down a summer job helping to compile research data for my dad at his office at Brown, where he’s a professor. It had taken a lot for me to get that job in the first place—including a two-hour interview in which I had to prove that I knew enough math to handle it. And I gave it up. Instead, I made my money at the same summer job that Ally and I had always worked, scooping ice cream in a four-by-five foot fluorescent cell at Dibney’s. But this is what you do when your best friend needs you, even if it means chucking away an opportunity that could help you score a scholarship to college.

And the A3 may have just undone it all, simply by being their snarky, haggish selves.

My sister, Joan, was picking all of the green and orange pieces out of her bowl of Froot Loops when I came downstairs. Spread out in front of her were some books and papers. Joan never actually did her homework. I’m not sure Joan actually
knew
that she was supposed to do it—I
think she may have been under the impression that she was just supposed to watch over it for the night and make sure nothing happened to it. Every morning, she took it out and checked to make sure that every page was as blank, every problem was as undone, and every answer was just as unwritten as when she’d first taken it under her wing.

“What’s a parallelogram?” she asked, peering at her textbook through two Loops she held up to her eyes.

My father was too busy poking at a Sudoku puzzle to answer. He couldn’t leave the house until he did one of the hard ones in under two minutes. My mother never joined our breakfast group because she was always asleep. She worked late managing a very fancy and very good restaurant in town called The Pink Peppercorn, providing us with the world’s best leftovers. Which is why I was having a bowl of cold sirloin tips for breakfast.