Sisters of Misery (6 page)

“Oh, sweet Jesus, it’s the Stepford wives in training,” Cordelia said under her breath. “Do they all share the same hair dye or what?”

Maddie glowered at her cousin for a moment. She wanted this to go as smoothly as possible. But then she realized that they
were
all wearing the same uniform of pastel Polo shirts, khaki skirts or shorts, headbands, and Kate Spade purses. They were a J. Crew catalog sprung to life. Maddie wondered why she had never noticed that before, but realized as she looked down at her own clothes that she unknowingly had chosen the same unofficial Hawthorne Academy “uniform.”

“Hey girls, this is my cousin, Cordelia LeClaire. She just moved here a few weeks ago from California,” Maddie said. None of them smiled. “Cordelia, this is Kate Endicott, Hannah Sanders, Darcy Willett, and Bridget Monroe.”

“Oh, the infamous Cordelia. We wondered who had taken our little Maddie captive. It’s like you fell off the planet, Maddie,” said Kate curtly. “We could have used you in field hockey camp. Most of those fat asses couldn’t even do the drills without passing out.”

Kate then turned her attention to Cordelia. “California, huh?” Kate sniffed. “Are you an
actress
or something?” The girls laughed in unison.

Cordelia smiled, unaffected by Kate’s remark. “Not really.”

“Nice skirt,” Bridget said, not making it clear if it was a compliment or not. Maddie shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. This wasn’t going to be as easy as she had hoped.

“Thanks,” Cordelia said tentatively. “I bought it in a village market in the French countryside.”

“A
flea
market?” Kate asked. A few of them giggled.

Maddie could feel her face flushing as she looked at the girls.
Why are they being so rude?
Cordelia’s expression hadn’t changed, which seemed to egg them on even more.

“Come on.” Maddie protectively grabbed her arm. “We should get you registered.” Maddie pulled her away from the girls before they could say anything else.

“Nice meeting you, Cordelia,” Kate called after them.

Cordelia wrangled out of her grasp and turned back to face the group of girls. “No, really, the pleasure was all mine. I hope
everyone
here is as friendly as you.” She then whipped around and marched ahead of Maddie up the stairs to the administration building. Maddie quickened pace to keep up, the muffled laughter fading behind them.

“Nice friends,” Cordelia said flatly. “Real charmers.”

“I honestly don’t know what’s gotten into them,” Maddie said, even though she wasn’t completely surprised by the chilly reception her cousin had received.

“Maybe you just can’t see it because you’re one of them,” snapped Cordelia. She raced into the registration office, letting the heavy door slam behind her.

Maddie’s heart sank. The bond that had grown between them over the past few weeks was on the verge of being broken.

“What’s with you and the hippie chick?” Kate taunted Maddie at her locker at the end of the school day.

Maddie swung around and glared at Kate’s perfectly featured face; her heart-shaped face, tiny nose, and freckled cheeks made her the poster child for the all-American girl. Her silken hair fell down her back, sleek and polished as always, and her expression was absent of tolerance.

“I can’t believe how rude you guys were,” Maddie reprimanded her.

“Well,
I
can’t believe that you blew us off for, what, like the entire summer for that—that freak!” Kate laughed. Bridget, Hannah, and Darcy came up behind Kate, nodding their heads in agreement. “Did you forget about us, your friends? Your Sisters!”

“She’s not like us, Maddie,” Darcy offered. “You know that. She’s like, I don’t know…weird.”

“Yeah, she was in my European History class today, and she told Mr. Wilson that his description of one of the cathedrals or something was wrong. She said that she had been there and that she could describe it better,” Bridget added. “I mean, who does she think she is?”

“Just give her a chance. She’s really very cool.” Maddie said halfheartedly, not really wanting to get into it with the girls.

“Madeline, you need to drop the welcome wagon act already. She’ll never be one of us, you know that,” Kate insisted with a smile. Then the smile faded, a stain of shock spreading over her face as she stared at something behind Maddie.

Maddie turned to see Trevor Campbell and Cordelia strolling down the hallway together, talking and laughing. His eyes were glued to her face, like a lost puppy hungry for whatever Cordelia had to offer him.

As they walked past the girls, neither of them acknowledged the stares from the group. An odd, raspy sound escaped from Kate’s mouth as she overheard Trevor offering to give Cordelia an ocean-guided tour of Hawthorne from his new Whaler, the latest gift from his parents. Cordelia flung her hair over her shoulder and agreed halfheartedly, as if her mind was somewhere else entirely.

Kate spun angrily. “Who does that bitch think she is? You’d better tell her to keep her hands off of my Trevor! Do you understand, Madeline?”

Darcy snickered. “
Your
Trevor? Are you sure he knows that?”

Kate turned to Darcy, “Why don’t you shut up, you little bitch? You’ve always wanted him, and I saw you throwing yourself at him the other night. It’s pathetic.”

Darcy looked uneasy for a moment but wasn’t about to let herself become the focus of Kate’s wrath. “Pathetic is what I’d call Maddie’s cousin. Throwing herself at a guy she barely knows. Jesus, Maddie. She’s only been in school for what, a few hours? And she’s already gunning for someone else’s boyfriend.”

Maddie slammed the locker shut. “Listen, I don’t know what’s gotten into everyone. She
just
moved here. Her dad
just
died. And she doesn’t know
anyone
. I don’t see why you have to make it so brutal for her!”

“I’m sorry, Maddie dear. I don’t do charity work,” Kate snapped. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t hang with the help unless you want to be treated like them.”

With that, she stormed off angrily after Trevor and Cordelia, leaving the others to smirk and roll their eyes.

Darcy looked concerned for a moment and then ran after Kate, obviously trying to make amends.

“Try to get yourself off her shit list, Maddie,” Hannah offered, leaning closer to Maddie. Her narrowly set hazel eyes opened wide in warning. “If you don’t control your cousin, Kate will make life a living hell—for both of you.”

After years of bending to Kate’s every wish, Maddie knew that wasn’t an exaggeration.

FIRE

“S
o what’s up with you and Trevor?” Maddie asked her cousin that evening while they sat at the kitchen table, doing homework. The late afternoon sun slanted through the trees and created a barcode of shadows along the wooden table.

“Who?” Cordelia asked earnestly.

Tess was humming a foreign tune in the other room.

“Trevor Campbell. I saw you walking down the hall with him after school.”

“Oh yeah, blond hair, blue eyes, kinda cute. Was his name Trevor? Hmm…fits his type, I guess. What about him?” Cordelia asked, more interested in their reading assignment—short stories by Edgar Allan Poe—than boy talk.

“Well, he’s sort of been dating Kate, like, forever.”

“Poor guy.”

“Yeah, really,” Maddie laughed. “Seriously though, he’s cute and all, but I just wouldn’t get involved with him. He’s bad news.”

Cordelia laughed hysterically. “Get involved with him? Oh, please. I’d never get involved with a guy my own age. I mean, he’s okay, I guess, but…”

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry. I just thought that…”

“Where is this coming from, Maddie?” interrupted Cordelia. “I can take care of myself. Always have.”

“Of course. It just looked like—”

“Looked like what? Like I was flirting with him? So what if I was?” Cordelia stopped reading suddenly. A smile spread across her face. “Oh, I see. This is about Kate, right? She freaked when she saw her pretty boy following me down the hall like a puppy dog today, didn’t she? And you’re her messenger girl, is that how it is?”

“No, I’m not her messenger,” Maddie snapped. “But I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to piss off Kate. I mean, you just started here, and you don’t want to be on her bad side.”

“You mean there’s a good side to her? Funny, didn’t strike me that there was one,” Cordelia said, almost to herself. “Like I said before, Maddie, I’m not the one you should be worrying about. I can take care of myself. Always have. You, on the other hand, have to stop worrying so much about what other people think and say.”

“I don’t!”

“Whatever,” Cordelia smiled. “Besides, Trevor Campbell isn’t even my type. I need a man with a little more maturity, you know? Now, his older brother, Mr. Campbell, well, he’s another story altogether. He’s more my type, for sure. I think I could be—how does that Van Halen song go—“Hot for Teacher”? But now that I know that there’s a controversy brewing…” Her blue eyes flashed wickedly, and she bit her ruddy bottom lip. “This could be kinda fun.”

Reed Campbell had forever been known as “the hot teacher,” due to the fact that he was barely out of college and his looks hadn’t changed much since he was voted Most Popular, Best Looking, and Most Likely to Succeed back when he was a student at Hawthorne Academy. All the girls harbored secret crushes on him, even Maddie. But Cordelia was the only girl who seemed capable of attracting his attention. Maddie wasn’t sure if it was her maturity, her picture-perfect looks, or her passion for literature that made Cordelia the quintessential “teacher’s pet.”

“Did any of you know that we have King Lear’s favorite daughter right here in this classroom? And since she’s here, I think she should tell us a little bit about herself,” Mr. Campbell said one afternoon. He sat on his desk and looked at Cordelia. Maddie could have sworn that she saw a blush creep onto Cordelia’s face, something that seemed totally out of character.

Kate whined, “What are you talking about, Reed?”

The smile dropped from Mr. Campbell’s face, and he walked over to Kate’s desk. He leaned over her and said quietly, but not so quiet that Maddie couldn’t hear, “I know that you and my brother are together, but while we are in school, please treat me with a little respect. I am your teacher during the school year, got it?”

“God, I’ve got it Ree—er, Mr. Campbell, you don’t have to smother me.” Kate laughed her throaty laugh. “You’re going to make people start talking.”

He turned when he got back to his desk at the front of the classroom. “I’m going to have the headmaster talking…to
you
if you don’t cut the crap, Kate.”

Hannah and Darcy giggled. Kate turned and gave them the death glare.

“Now, as I was saying…King Lear’s favorite daughter, for those of you who are not familiar with the words of good, old Will Shakespeare, was the beautiful Cordelia.”

He raised his hand to Cordelia and directed her to the front of the classroom.

She smiled, blushing still, and said, “‘O thou good Kent! how shall I live and work To match thy goodness? My life will be too short, And every measure fail me…These weeds are memories of those worser hours: I prithee, put them off.’”

Mr. Campbell laughed while the rest of the class looked at each other, dumbfounded. “I see that they do a good job of teaching Shakespeare in the California school system.” He turned and explained to the class. “She was just quoting something that Cordelia said in
King Lear
.” And then he shook his head, looking down at his syllabus, almost at a loss for words. “Very impressive, Ms. LeClaire. Very impressive. How about you tell us about yourself?”

Cordelia flushed at the compliment and then took her place at the front of the class.

“Well, there’s not much to say. My mom is from Hawthorne. I was born in California. My dad passed away about six months ago, and now I’m living with my cousin, my aunt, and my grandmother. That’s pretty much it.” She laughed and held her hands up awkwardly. “Am I done?”

Maddie smiled. Even her cousin’s awkward little speech came off as charming and utterly cool. All the guys in the room—including Mr. Campbell—stared at her as she fiddled with the pale pink bra strap that peeked out from her peasant blouse. Kate seethed when she noticed Trevor staring intensely at Cordelia. Maddie observed it all from her seat in the back of the class, knowing that nothing good could come of any of this.

A couple of weeks into the semester, Kate and the girls had made it quite clear that they were not going to give up on making Cordelia’s life miserable. Maddie couldn’t understand why her cousin had become the brunt of all of Kate’s anger, but she assumed it had something to do with the fact that Cordelia was probably the only person in the history of Hawthorne Academy who wasn’t completely terrified by Kate Endicott. She wasn’t impressed by her money, her family’s influence, or her obvious wrath.

During French class one afternoon, Kate kicked a cheat sheet under Cordelia’s desk. When Maddie tried to signal to Cordelia, Madame Rousseau noticed the interaction and demanded to know whose cheat sheet it was. Kate giggled, eagerly anticipating Cordelia’s punishment.

But Cordelia stood up and said in a loud, clear voice, “Je ne sais pas qui a écrit la note, Madame Rousseau. Peut-être elle appartient à quelqu’un dans la classe qui n’a jamais habité en France ou ne peut pas parler la langue couramment, comme j’évidemment bidon.”

Kate turned and looked with great surprise at Darcy, who shrugged her shoulders. Madame Rousseau smiled and said, “Ms. LeClaire has informed me that she doesn’t know who wrote the note, but perhaps, it was someone in the class who has never lived in France and cannot speak the language fluently, as she obviously can.”

She turned to Cordelia and said, “Two things are obvious, Cordelia. One is that someone is trying to get you into trouble”—she narrowed her eyes at Kate before continuing—“and two, you belong in a higher level of French.”

“Merci, Madame,” Cordelia said gratefully. “Je suis d’accord complètement avec vous.”

After class, Maddie slammed her lunch tray down on the table, exhausted from having to divide her allegiance between the Sisters of Misery and Cordelia. Luckily, Cordelia had been spending her lunch hours with Mr. Campbell. She was excelling in his English class, so he was giving her training to do some tutoring work on the side. As much as she wished she could have lunch with her cousin, it worked out perfectly because Maddie knew that she’d never be accepted at their lunch table.

“Nice job in French class today, Kate. Real nice,” Maddie said angrily.

“Je ne comprends pas,” Kate said innocently. “I was just trying to help your cousin out. Who knew she was freakin’ Celine Dion?”

“Celine Dion isn’t from France, you moron; she’s from Canada,” Darcy said.

“French Canadian! Close enough.” Kate retorted. Bridget took her place at the table, and Kate smirked when she saw that Bridget’s tray held nothing but wilted lettuce and a fruit cup. Bridget, who used to be a normal, healthy weight, had wasted away to nothing over the summer after Kate had gotten the rest of the girls to call her Bridget Bubble Butt or Triple B. She begged her mother to put her on Weight Watchers and supplemented her diet with a daily cocktail of assorted diet pills. Some were smuggled out of her mother’s medicine cabinet, and others—illegal in the U.S.—she bought off the Internet. Her rapid weight loss didn’t seem to send up any red flags for her teachers or her parents. So she continued to waste away, the skin around her eyes sunken and hollow, her clavicle too prominent, and her head too large for her slender body. Maddie finally understood why girls who lost weight that dramatically were called The Lollipop Girls.

When Maddie mentioned to Kate how concerned she was about Bridget’s health, Kate took great pleasure in singing or humming the “Lollipop” song or simply doing the
plop
sound whenever Bridget walked by. And then, whenever Bridget started looking healthy again or was seen eating normally, Kate was always at the ready; whether it was “innocently” blowing bubbles with bubble soap or bubble gum, anything that reminded Bridget of Kate’s taunts from the previous year would send her spiraling back into picking at lettuce or gnawing on carrots, while wistfully looking away from their full lunch trays.

“You’re going to need more than that to eat if you’re going to be any help to us today in our match against Cross Prep,” Kate complained. Bridget pretended that she didn’t hear her and pushed food around her plate. “Or maybe you’d like to save your energy to try to hook up with Trevor again. I bet he’d
love
that.”

Kate controlled all of the dynamics within the Sisters of Misery, and when she was in a bad mood, she typically took it out on the rest of them. Once, when Trevor and Kate were broken up, he’d hooked up with Bridget after having too much to drink at a party. This had infuriated Kate to no end. If Bridget hadn’t been part of the Sisterhood, her life would have been mercilessly destroyed by Kate. Once they got back together, Kate and Trevor started calling Bridget “Fish Sticks,” saying that Trevor only did it to see how far she would go with him, but that he stopped when he realized she smelled like fish and her body felt like a bag of sticks. When that scandal faded, they made up another rumor about catching Bridget hooking up with another girl.

But today, Bridget was desperate to deflect Kate’s wrath onto someone else. “Where’s your cousin, Maddie? Isn’t she the one who’s been hitting on Trevor these days? Or is she too busy being Mr. Campbell’s teacher’s pet?”

“I already told you,” Maddie sighed, “she’s not into Trevor. I don’t think she’s into any of the guys at Hawthorne,” Maddie said, conveniently ignoring the comment about Mr. Campbell. Even though Cordelia stressed that their relationship was purely platonic, strictly student-teacher, she didn’t want to give Kate more ammunition.

“Well then, there are plenty of girls for her to choose from,” Kate laughed. “Just tell her to stay away from me.” She paused and looked over at Bridget. “Hey B, you want a shot at Maddie’s cousin?”

Bridget shot Kate a fierce look and then gave her the finger.

Kate laughed louder. “Rrrreowr! She’s a tiger. I think Triple B may be too intense for your skanky cousin.”

Kate twirled a strand of honey-blond hair around her fingers, staring Bridget down and smiling. “Hey, I know, Maddie, since our game against Cross isn’t until later tonight, why don’t we check out your aunt’s store after school today? I mean, it must be a pretty cool place if you’d rather spend your time there than hang out with us, right? Do they have cauldrons and eye of newt and bat wings and all that jazz?”

Maddie gave Kate a sour look. The last thing she wanted was to have Kate and the rest of the girls there poking fun at Rebecca and Cordelia. She could handle it at school, but she didn’t want to deal with it anywhere else. “I don’t think it would interest you, Kate. If you want a witch store, go to Salem.”

Undeterred, Kate turned to Bridget. “Maybe they have some sort of potion for losing weight. Whaddya think, Bridge?”

“How about a potion to make people stop being such bitches,” Bridget cried as she shoved her tray in Kate’s direction and took off in tears.

“Why did you do that?” Maddie asked Kate. Hannah and Darcy were giggling like crazy, excited that they had managed to escape Kate’s wrath—at least for today.

“Because I can, dear,” Kate snapped. “Because I can.”