Poor Little Dead Girls (3 page)

It was Sadie’s turn to sigh. She flipped to the last page on the clipboard, uncapped the pen with her teeth, and signed her name. There was no turning back now, anyway. And if they were truly horrible, maybe she could sleep on a cot in the broom closet. That’s probably where she belonged, anyway.

As soon as she lifted the pen off the paper, Ellen was all business. She grabbed the clipboard and clacked her way back across the floor in her impossibly high heels. She turned in the doorway, busily wiping the pen cap with a handkerchief she had produced from another pocket.

“My team will need another few minutes to sweep the room,” she said with another icy smile. “Perhaps you and your friend should take this opportunity to have supper? They should be finished upon your return.” With that, she turned and strode out of the room.

Sadie sat for a minute, a little stunned, as Ellen’s muffled footsteps moved away down the hall. Her roommates were going to be two famous girls — not famous, royal — and she had just legally signed away her gossiping rights. In the high school hierarchy, she was pretty sure that made her just a hair above completely worthless. The twin giants were starting to throw stern looks in her direction, so she stood up and headed off towards Jessica’s room. Contract or not, Sadie couldn’t wait to see what she had to say about this.

“Wow, and I thought Madison was bad,” Jessica said. “I’ve heard rumors about things like that, but it’s usually when the girl’s mom’s a senator or something. I guess being a Duke is kinda the same thing?”

“I guess,” Sadie grumbled, still miffed about being blindsided.

They had left Jessica’s room — a double just down the hall from Sadie’s — and joined the steady stream of girls heading down to the Ashby dining room. At the bottom of the curving staircase, they turned away from the front door and continued through an archway leading toward the back of the building.

After the dusty gloom of the dark lobby, the dining room was almost jarringly modern. It reminded Sadie of the kind of swanky bistros that lined Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, with shiny maple tabletops and walls painted in warm tones.

Jessica scanned the crowd until her eyes settled on one table in a far corner of the room. The girls were talking and laughing loudly, and most of them were wearing fitted, kelly-green tank tops that read “Keating LAX” in big, white letters.

Jessica waved and a couple of the green tank tops shrieked loudly in response. “Come on,” she said, linking one arm through Sadie’s and rolling her eyes. “Time to meet the girls.”

As they started across the dining hall, Sadie felt so many pairs of eyes on her that her cheeks started to flush. She pretended not to notice everyone at the lacrosse table was looking her way, but most of them weren’t smiling.

“Hey, ladies. You all remember Sadie Marlowe, right?” All the dead eyes at the table transformed into big, phony smiles, and a few manicured hands fluttered in waves of welcome.

A tall, willowy blonde with thin, tanned arms and thick, pouty lips stood up and extended a hand.

“I’m Thayer Wimberley, team captain. Welcome to Keating.” Her smile stretched wide over blindingly white teeth aligned in perfect rows. She tossed her head, making her long ponytail swish from side to side. “I hear you’re quite the hotshot on the West Coast.”

Sadie stretched her mouth into what she hoped was a less terrifying expression. “Thanks. I was all-state last year.” She hesitated. “But obviously the competition isn’t exactly the same as it is out here.”

“No,” Thayer said, cocking her head to the side. “It’s not.” She paused, just long enough for the other girls to start squirming uncomfortably. “But we’re all super, super excited to have you here.”

The whole table exhaled.

“Anyway, this is everyone.” She waved a hand around, listing each girl by name as Sadie and Jessica plopped down into two empty chairs. Seconds after they sat, a waitress in a white, full-length apron quickly set their places with silverware and a white napkin monogrammed with the Keating crest.

One of the other team members, a black-haired girl named Grace, smiled at Sadie. “We really are glad you came. We’ve been needing another middie so, so badly — ever since Anna … ” She trailed off, and Sadie saw Thayer’s head jerk in her direction.

“Ever since Anna’s been gone,” Grace finished, hunching back over her food and shrinking into herself like a scared puppy. Sadie swallowed and looked around the table. Something had shifted. The girls fidgeted in their seats, and Thayer was still glaring at the top of Grace’s head. Sadie noticed a few girls at neighboring tables had turned to stare, and the whole room felt quieter. The name “Anna” had dropped like a bomb on the cafeteria, one that spread silence and squirm instead of smoke and shrapnel.

“Anyway,” Thayer said finally, cracking another wide smile, “I heard Jess got stuck with Madison Plath. My money’s on her for the Keating Curse, so let me know if she starts, like, making voodoo dolls of everyone in the Harvard admissions department.”

“The Keating what?” Sadie asked.

Thayer tossed her head. “What, they didn’t put that in your scholarship pamphlet?” She smiled like it was a joke instead of an insult. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Girls at this school tend to … uh … lose it during college application season. The last whack-job threw herself in front of a car out on that road by the main gates, all because she didn’t get into Princeton. And some girl in the ’80s tried to drown herself and then ran away from school when that didn’t take. The Princeton one was like eight years ago, though, so we’re totally due.”

“But Anna — ” Grace spoke up again.

“Let it go, Grace,” Thayer snapped, her voice like ice. “That was different.”

Sadie looked at Jessica with wide eyes, but she just waved a hand. “It’s a stupid rumor,” she whispered. “I think the teachers keep it going just so they can scare people into finishing their applications early.”

“But those accidents — they really happened?”

Jessica nodded. “And if there really is a link, I am just fine not knowing what it is.” She shuddered and looked down as her phone vibrated on the table.

“Oh my god, Madison seriously just texted to tell me she’s thinking about painting the walls pink,” she murmured.

“You should listen to her, you know,” Thayer said softly from across the table. Sadie looked around, but all of the other girls were too wrapped up in their own conversations to hear.

“Why wouldn’t you want to know?” Sadie said. “I would.”

Thayer’s face was blank. “Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.”

Before Sadie could respond, Thayer smiled and clapped her hands. “So do you guys like the new practice jerseys? We tested them out this morning.”

Jessica punched a button and put down her phone. “You can’t seriously have practiced already.”

Thayer cocked her head to the side. “Oh, honey, all the local girls did a three-hour session as soon as we moved in.”

The girl on Sadie’s right, a pretty redhead with porcelain skin, nodded. “Coach is out for blood. She told Thayer we’re doing the running test early this year just so she can make sure no one sat on their ass all summer.”

Sadie felt a lump start to form in her stomach. Running test?

“When is it?” All the eyes at the table turned toward her. Thayer looked annoyed, like she had spoken out of turn.

“Monday.”

Sadie sat back heavily in her chair. The other girls chattered on all around her, and suddenly she felt like her bright red tank top was oddly appropriate among the sea of green ones. She might have been recruited to play lacrosse, but she wouldn’t be part of the team until she earned it — Thayer had made that much completely clear.

I am just as good as they are,
Sadie thought, her dad’s words sounding trite and ridiculous in her head. It was going to be a long week.

The hallway was empty outside her room, but as she neared the door, she heard voices. She paused. Yup — English accents. Her shoulders sagged as she pushed open the door.

Their backs were facing her, but she could already tell everything she needed to know. Each girl was tall, thin, and dressed in a boxy tweed suit, one pale lavender and one pink. Their black hair was drawn up into buns, each one topped with an identical, tiny, white hat. They looked like Easter Brunch Barbies. With really weird taste in headware.

They turned slowly — and, for some creepy reason, in perfect sync — and Sadie stood awkwardly while they looked her up and down, slowly taking in her jeans, tank, and rumpled, wavy hair. She tried not to think about the ketchup she had dripped onto her thigh at dinner, or the zit she knew was developing right above her lip, but she could feel her cheeks burning. She was toast.

The girls smiled identical ladylike smiles, and Ellen Bennett appeared between them.

“Hello again, Miss Marlowe.” She clicked her way across the room, nodding to Sadie over the top of her ever-present clipboard. “May I present The Lady Beatrix Everleigh.” She swept an arm toward the girl in lavender, who dropped into a small curtsy. Sadie’s eyes widened.

“And The Lady Gwendolyn Everleigh.” Ellen motioned toward the one in pink, who did the same.

This was just too much. All three of them were looking at her expectantly, and she wondered how one was supposed to respond to such an introduction. Salute them? Bow? Drop to her knees and kiss their feet?

She panicked and did the only thing she could think of, bending her knees and bowing her head in a crude imitation of what the twins had done. She saw Beatrix bite her lip to hold back a sneer, and she felt her cheeks flush even hotter. She couldn’t wait to tell her dad about this one.

Ellen looked annoyed and clapped her hands. “All right, I’ll leave you three to get acquainted. Ladies, you have my mobile number should you need anything.” She turned to Sadie and raised an eyebrow. “Miss Marlowe, please keep in mind everything we discussed.”

With that, she swept out of the room. The door swung shut and the three girls stood still, facing off across the room. Beatrix cocked her head to the side, listening. As the last clack died away down the hall, she looked at Sadie, her face blank.

“I thought that frosty bitch would never leave.”

In the next instant, the twins leapt into action, ripping off their gloves and blazers and shimmying out of their shapeless skirts. They were like little pastel Tasmanian devils — if Tasmanian devils had cleavage and wore ridiculously expensive-looking lingerie.

Sadie stood motionless, her jaw hanging open, and soon they had stripped down to matching sets of lacy underwear in pink and purple. They pulled out bobby pin after bobby pin, tossing each one on the floor in a pile with their tiny hats, then finally shook their heads until their hair cascaded wildly down their backs. At that point, the one in purple finally stopped moving and looked at Sadie, a toothy grin on her face.

“I’m Trix, and this here’s Gwen.” She jerked her head toward her sister, who had skipped over to a huge, full-length mirror in the corner of the room. Gwen was standing sideways on her tiptoes and staring intently at her reflection, one hand running across her flat stomach. She waved a hand distractedly, eyes never leaving the mirror.

“It’s Sadie, right? Don’t touch our shit, don’t snitch about anything we do to Ellen, and we’ll all get along fucking great,” Trix said. She smiled again, one side of her perfectly pink mouth curving slightly upward. Then she turned and sashayed back to one of the beds, flopped down on her stomach, and pulled out a cell phone. Sadie’s jaw dropped farther as her eyes zeroed in on a black orchid inked neatly on her lower back.

She forced her eyes up toward the ceiling as she tried to figure out what was weirder — the fact that her royal roommate had a tramp stamp or that she had just looked at that roommate’s butt. Then she realized she should really be focusing on what was important: What the hell just happened?

“Uh, hi,” she finally started, trying to sound about a thousand times more confident than she felt.
I belong here, right?
she told herself.
I hang out with royalty all the time, dahling — I just love
tiny hats!
The room stared back at her, and she felt like she was completely invisible. Trix was already deep in conversation, talking so fast Sadie could barely catch what she was saying. Gwen was still studying the mirror, this time facing it with one hip jutted out and her lips arranged in a sensual pout.

Sadie sighed, grabbed her toothbrush, and took off toward the bathroom. An hour later, she was deep into a book when the lights shut off. She glanced at the clock radio she had plugged in next to her bed and groaned. It was 10
P.M.
exactly. The twins had taken off minutes earlier, calling out something about going to the library. Sadie had just smiled and waved, but something about the amount of black spandex and bronzer they were wearing didn’t really say late-night studying in the stacks.

Sadie closed her eyes and imagined she was back in her old room in Portland, with its boxy IKEA furniture and ancient yellow eyelet bedspread. It was her mom’s favorite color, and she had never been able to bring herself to change it after she died. She saw her four walls against the insides of her eyelids — on one was a signed poster of the Northwestern Lacrosse team, and on another was a collage of photos and a cheesy Van Gogh reprint she couldn’t seem to get rid of. She gathered her blanket closer around her body, held the image in her head, and finally she slept.