Wrath

Harper rolled her eyes, almost thankful for the Minis’ presence; the familiar sense of disgust was helping her suppress all those less desirable emotions. Helplessness. Humiliation. Despair.

Focus on something more constructive, she warned herself. People can only hurt you if you let them. Don’t be a victim.

“See?” Mini-She chirped. “Like it says right here, ‘HG was so desperate for AM that she…’”

Harper tuned her out-after all, she already knew the story. It was more important to regain her focus and start working on damage control. But cool, calculating strategy was impossible when one unquestionable fact kept drilling into her brain.

Miranda had betrayed her. No one else knew what she knew.

She wouldn’t have done it on her own, Harper was certain ofthat. She didn’t have this kind of nastiness in her. She would have been goaded into it by someone else, someone so pure and innocent that no one would ever suspect her of spewing such poison.

“What are we going to do?” Mini-Me moaned. As if there were a “we.”

“Who needs to do something?” Harper asked, crumpling the flyer into a ball and tossing it over her shoulder like the trash it was. “You know what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

“You don’t even care?” Mini-She asked, eyes wide and adoring. From the expression on the Minis’ faces- impressed and totally devoid of pity-Harper grew certain that she’d be able to fix this.

These last few weeks had been the most lonely and miserable of Harper’s life-something like this could have been a fatal blow. And yet, she marveled, perhaps Beth had done her a favor. Because she suddenly felt invigorated. She felt offended and insulted, righteous and wronged, empowered and enraged.

She felt like herself again.

And it felt good.

Beth and Miranda met up in the second-floor girls’ bathroom after third period to compare notes. The school was buzzing about the already legendary flyer-half the student body had memorized it, and the other half had used it as a springboard to create and pass along wildly unlikely rumors of their own.

“I can’t believe we actually did it,” Miranda whispered, checking under the stalls to make sure they were really alone.

“You should have-” Beth quickly stopped talking as two babbling juniors burst through the door. Miranda turned on the faucet, pretending to wash her hands, while Beth peered into the streaked mirror, applying a new coat of transparent lip gloss.

“You think she, like, did it to herself?” the tall brunette asked, smoothing down her hair and using her pinkie to rub in some garish blue eye shadow. “But, like, why?” She dug through her overstuffed silver purse and pulled out a large gold hoop, wide enough to fit around her wrist, and clamped it onto her earlobe.

“Oh, puh-leeze,” the shorter, pudgier one said, locking herself inside an empty stall. Her bright yellow platform shoes tapped against the linoleum. “She’s mad crazy for attention, you know she’d do anything.”

“But we’re talking total humiliation hot zone-”

“Massive meltdown territory, but does she seem upset? Negative. You know she’s, like, loving every minute of it.”

“I don’t know,” the tall one said, now perched on the sink, fiddling with her nails, which were painted cotton candy pink and so long that they almost curled back toward her fingertips. “Maybe it was some nobody, like, you know, some bitter loser who wanted-”

“As if.” A laugh floated out of the stall. “How would some loser know all of that? No, it had to be-”

Finally, Miranda couldn’t help herself. “Did you ever think that maybe-”

“Uh, excuse me?” the brunette said, glaring. “Were we talking to you?”

The shorter girl burst out of the stall and quickly slathered on a layer of hot pink lipstick. She didn’t bother to look in Miranda’s direction-or make a move toward the sink. “Was she, like, eavesdropping on our conversation?”

“Whatever. Forget her.”

“Her who?” the other girl cackled as she pushed through the girls’ room door, the brunette following close behind.

Miranda and Beth stared at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter. “Were they for real?” Beth asked in wonderment.

“Oh, yeah, like, totally, I mean, you know, whatever,” Miranda said, giggling. “For reals, dude.”

“And that makes us the losers?” Beth asked, grinning.

“Apparently.” Miranda stuck out her hand to shake. “Nice to meet you, I’m nobody. And who are you?”

“Someone who would never walk out of this bathroom without washing her hands,” Beth joked.

“I think we’re missing the key point here,” Miranda said, trying to stop laughing. “Did you hear the way they were talking about ‘her’?”

“Harper,” Beth filled in.

“Right. Obviously. Like she was this pathetic nonentity, desperate for attention…”

“Humiliated,” Beth said, raising her eyebrows.

“Pitiful,” Miranda added, shaking her head.

“Defeated.”

Miranda grinned and slung an arm around Beth’s shoulders. “And all by a pair of bitter nobodies. Who would’ve thought?”

The curiosity-seekers had been swarming Kane all morning-and by lunchtime, it seemed half the school had surrounded him, desperate for insider information and some notoriety-by-association. Outwardly, he smiled, preening under the attention. But underneath, he was fuming. It was Beth. It had to be. No one else could know some of the things she’d printed, the few secrets he’d been foolish enough to share.

That was the worst of it: the realization that he’d brought this on himself. After swearing to protect himself, he’d left himself raw and exposed.

Not again-never again.

After spotting the flyer, Kane had quickly started his own campaign of disinformation; judging from Kaia’s and Harpers animated smiles and the naked curiosity of their eager disciples, it seemed the girls had chosen to do the same. They sat at separate tables, each the center of a small whirlpool of people, flowing past to catch a moment with the stars. The horde surrounding Kane was, of course, the largest.

“She begged me to take her back,” he confided to the second-string point guard. “It was getting pathetic. I mean, tears is one thing-you know girls. But when she started showing up at my house in the middle of the night? It’s not like I wanted to call the cops…”

“Let’s just say, I now have a pretty good idea of what it must feel like to kiss a cold, dead fish,” he confided to the sympathetic blonde from the cheerleading squad.

“And the smell… you know, she works at that diner, and all the onions, the grease, the sweat…” He shook his head, and the busty freshman patted him sweetly on the shoulder. “It was nauseating. I have a very delicate stomach, you know, and sometimes…”

“Sure, she couldn’t get enough of it,” he bragged to the gawky junior who managed the basketball team. “But what was I supposed to do? She was-well, let’s just say Adam’s pretty lucky he never made it to home base.”

He almost felt sorry for Beth. She was like a dolphin, playing at being a shark. Which was a dangerous game: You were likely to get eaten.

The note the teacher had handed her had been short and sweet: Report to my classroom. Now.

Okay, maybe not so sweet.

“Jack,” Kaia said simply, stepping into his empty classroom and closing the door behind her. “Bonjour.”

Powell was perched on the edge of his desk, fingering a red sheet of paper. Kaia recognized it immediately, with little surprise.

“You said you’d stopped seeing him,” Powell said coldly, placing the flyer carefully down on the desk. “I thought I’d made my position perfectly clear: I don’t like to share.”

Kaia strode toward him and took a seat at one of the desks in the front row, aware that his gaze was glued to