Glass Houses

probably hot tall leggy brainiac mutant girl-freaks.)

Didn’t matter. Mom and Dad had taken one look at the stack of enthusiastic thumbs-up replies from universities like MIT and Caltech and Yale, and clamped down hard. No way was their sixteen-year-old daughter (nearly seventeen, she kept insisting, although it wasn’t really true) going to run off three thousand miles to go to school. At least not at first. (Claire had tried, unsuccessfully, to get across the concept that if anything would kill her budding academic career worse than being a transfer student at one of those places, it was being a transfer student from Texas Prairie University. Otherwise known as TPEwwwwwww.)

So here she was, stuck on the crappy top floor of a crappy dorm in a crappy school where eighty percent of the students transferred after the first two years—or dropped out—and the Monickettes were stealing her wet laundry and dumping it down the trash chute, all because Monica couldn’t be bothered to know anything about one of the world wars big enough to rate a Roman numeral.

But it isn’t fair! something in her howled. I had a plan! An actual plan! Monica slept late, and Claire had gotten up early just to do laundry while all the party crowd was comatose and the studious crowd was off to classes. She’d thought she could leave it for a couple of minutes to grab her shower—another scary experience—and she’d never even thought about anybody doing something so incredibly low.

As she bit back her sobs, she noticed—again—how quiet it was up here. Creepy and deserted, with half the girls deep asleep and the other half gone. Even when it was crowded and buzzing, the dorm was creepy, though. Old, decrepit, full of shadows and corners and places mean girls could lurk. In fact, that summed up the whole town. Morganville was small and old and dusty, full of creepy little oddities. Like the fact that the streetlights worked only half the time, and they were too far apart when they did. Like the way the people in the local campus stores seemed too happy. Desperately happy. Like the fact that the whole town, despite the dust, was clean—no trash, no graffiti, nobody begging for spare change in alleyways.

Weird.

She could almost hear her mother saying, Honey, it’s just that you’re in a strange place. It’ll get better. You’ll just have to try harder.

Mom always said things like that, and Claire had always done her best to hide how hard it was to follow that advice.

Well. Nothing to do but try to get her stuff back.

Claire gulped a couple more times, wiped her eyes, and hauled the arm-twisting weight of her backpack up and over her shoulder. She stared for a few seconds at the wet pair of panties and one sock clutched in her right hand, then hastily unzipped the front pocket of the backpack and stuffed them in. Man, that would kill whatever cool she had left, if she walked around carrying those.

“Well,” said a low, satisfied voice from the open door opposite the stairs, “look who it is. The Dumpster diver.”

Claire stopped, one hand on the rusted iron railing. Something was telling her to run, but something always told her that: fight-or-flight—she’d read the textbooks. And she was tired of flighting. She turned around slowly, as Monica Morrell stepped out of the dorm room—not hers, so she’d busted Erica’s lock again. Monica’s running buddies Jennifer and Gina filed out and took up flanking positions. Soldiers in flip-flops and low-rise jeans and French manicures.

Monica struck a pose. It was something she was good at, Claire had to admit. Nearly six feet tall, Monica had flowing, shiny black hair, and big blue eyes accented with just the right amount of liner and mascara. Perfect skin. One of those model-shaped faces, all cheekbones and pouty lips. And if she had a model’s body, it was a Victoria’s Secret model, all curves, not angles.

She was rich, she was pretty, and as far as Claire could tell, it didn’t make her a bit happy. What did, though—what made those big blue eyes glow right now—was the idea of tormenting Claire just a little more.

“Shouldn’t you be in first period at the junior high by now?” Monica asked. “Or at least getting your first period?”

“Maybe she’s looking for the clothes she left lying around,” Gina piled on, and laughed. Jennifer laughed with her. Claire swore their eyes, their pretty jewel-colored eyes, just glowed with the joy of making her feel like shit. “Litterbug!”

“Clothes?” Monica folded her arms and pretended to think. “You mean, like those rags we threw away? The ones she left cluttering up the washer?”

“Yeah, those.”

“I wouldn’t wear those to sweat in.”

“I wouldn’t wear them to scrub out the boys’ toilet,” Jennifer blurted.

Monica, annoyed, turned and shoved her. “Yeah, you know all about the boys’ toilet, don’t you? Didn’t you do Steve Gillespie in ninth grade in there?” She made sucking sounds, and they all laughed again, though Jennifer looked uncomfortable. Claire felt her cheeks flare red, even though it wasn’t—for a change—a dis against her. “Jeez, Jen, Steve Gillespie? Keep your mouth shut if you can’t think of something that won’t embarrass yourself.”

Jennifer—of course—turned her anger on a safer target. Claire. She lunged forward and shoved Claire back a step, toward the stairs. “Go get your stupid clothes already! I’m sick of looking at you, with your pasty skin—”

“Yeah, Junior High, ever heard of sunshine?” Gina rolled her eyes.

“Watch it,” Monica snapped, which was odd, because all three of them had the best tans money could buy.

Claire scrambled to steady herself. The heavy backpack pulled her off-balance, and she grabbed on to the banister. Jen lunged at her again and slammed the heel of her hand painfully hard into Claire’s collarbone. “Don’t!” Claire yelped, and batted Jen’s hand away. Hard.

There was a second of breathless silence, and then Monica said, very quietly, “Did you just hit my friend, you stupid little bitch? Where do you think you get off, doing things like that around here?”

And she stepped forward and slapped Claire across the face, hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to make flares and comets streak across Claire’s vision, hard enough to make everything turn red and boiling hot.

Claire let go of the banister and slapped Monica right back, full across her pouty mouth, and for just a tight, white-hot second she actually felt good about it, but then Monica hissed like a scorched cat, and Claire had time to think, Oh crap, I really shouldn’t have done that.

She never saw the punch coming. Didn’t even really feel the impact, except as a blank sensation and confusion, but then the weight of her backpack on her shoulder was pulling her to one side and she staggered.

She almost caught herself, and then Gina, grinning spitefully, reached over and shoved her backward, down the stairs, and there was nothing but air behind her.

She hit the edge of every stair, all the way to the bottom. Her backpack broke open and spilled books as she tumbled, and at the top of the stairs Monica and the Monickettes laughed and hooted and high-fived, but she saw it only in disconnected little jerks of motion, freeze-frames.

It seemed to take forever before she skidded to a stop at the bottom, and then her head hit the wall with a nasty, meaty sound, and everything went black.

She later remembered only one more thing, in the darkness: Monica’s voice, a low and vicious whisper. “Tonight. You’ll get what’s coming to you, you freak. I’m going to make sure.”

It seemed like seconds, but when she woke up again there was somebody kneeling next to her, and it wasn’t Monica or her nail-polish mafia; it was Erica, who had the room at the top of the stairs, four doors down from Claire’s. Erica looked pale and strained and scared, and Claire tried to smile, because that was what you did when somebody was scared. She didn’t hurt until she moved, and then her head started to throb. There was a red-hot ache near the top, and when she reached up to touch it she felt a hard raised knot. No blood, though. It hurt worse when she probed the spot, but not in an oh-my-God-skull-fracture kind of way, or at least that was what she hoped.

“Are you okay?” Erica asked, waving her hands kind of helplessly in midair as Claire wiggled her way up to a sitting position against the wall. Claire risked a quick look past her up the stairs, then down. The coast looked Monica-clear. Nobody else had come out to see what was up, either—most of them were afraid of getting in trouble, and the rest just flat didn’t care.

“Yeah,” she said, and managed a shaky laugh. “Guess I tripped.”