Not bothering to soften the click of my heels, I approached the dark niche. The whimper grew louder and became an actual bawl by the time I got there.
“Are you okay?” I said to the girl cowering in the doorway. Her face was buried in her hands, but I could see her upswept auburn hair and her chocolate brown dress. Maybe the poor girl had gotten into a fight with her date.
The girl lowered her hands. At first, al I could see was the welt on her cheek from a hard slap and a long, bloody scratch on her arm, undoubtedly from a fingernail. Only then did I realize that the girl was Piper.
I almost left. Another thankless encounter with Piper wasn’t what I needed. And anyway, it was my special night with Michael. But then I smel ed a strong metal ic odor, and I realized that I couldn’t leave, even if I tried. The smel was Piper’s blood, wel ing up from the deep scratch on her arm. It mingled with the distinctive smel of someone else’s blood. Maybe the blood of the other person she’d fought with. How I could detect and discern the presence of two distinct blood scents was beyond me.
More than anything in the world, I wanted to touch and taste the blood, and not just because I sought information about her and Missy’s scheme.
My instinct compel ed me to do it. No matter the promise that Michael and I made about not tasting anyone else’s blood.
As I reached into my purse for a tissue, I asked her, “Who did this to you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said with a sob.
“Of course it matters, Piper.”
Tissue in hand, I leaned forward as if to dab her wound clean. As I did so, I touched some of the blood from her wound with my fingertip. Then I turned away slightly—ostensibly to reach for another tissue from my purse—and licked it.
The blood burned like liquor as it coursed down my throat and made me woozy immediately. Then two separate flashes struck. Their force nearly knocked me off my heels, and I reached for the wal to steady myself. Stronger than any flashes I’d received from anyone but Michael, they told me everything I wanted to know. And much, much more that I didn’t want to know.
Chapter Twenty-four
Without a word to Piper, I kicked off my shoes and carried them with me as I ran back down the hal . I didn’t have a spare second to make excuses to Piper, and she didn’t deserve them. I needed every moment to get to the gym and stop the figurative bloodshed.
The hal seemed to have doubled in size since I walked down it a few short minutes before, like some hazy, frustrating dream. I longed to fly down the hal , but had to rely on my gangly legs to propel me. The slower gait gave me al too much time to think about the malevolent images I’d cul ed from the blood. And it gave me too much time to think of Vanessa, Missy and Piper’s victim.
Why hadn’t we thought of Vanessa? This summer, she’d been on the outs with the group for trying to unseat Missy from her veritable throne.
Since then, Vanessa had been relegated to the “reject” lunch table, below Missy’s notice. Michael and I had believed that Missy had deemed the cafeteria demotion adequate punishment for whatever wrong Vanessa had inflected on Missy. Not so.
The first flash from Piper told me that, just before Vanessa would be crowned Fal Queen, every single Til inghast junior and senior would receive an email on their cel s inviting them to be Vanessa’s Facebook friend. The perfectly timed invitation would be irresistible to nearly everyone at the dance, who presumably would accept and be transferred immediately to Vanessa’s page. There, via a dummy account, Missy and Piper had posted not only a montage of horrific drunken photos of Vanessa but—worse—entries purportedly from Vanessa that revealed a litany of awful, humiliating secrets about many of Til inghast’s juniors and seniors. It wasn’t normal dirt in those entries, but terrible things like cheating and hidden pregnancies and familial meltdowns. The whole plan was designed to disgrace Vanessa and, through her supposed revelation of so many people’s closest-kept secrets, make her the object of everyone’s hatred. The only redeeming second of the flash was the disgust Piper felt for participating in it. Not that her distaste stopped her, mind you.
But it was the second flash that transmitted a sense of evil so palpable that I felt sick. The flash seemed to come from Missy, the source of the other blood. Through her eyes, I saw her in a tight embrace with some guy. Because she had her head nestled on his shoulder, I couldn’t see the guy’s face, just the fine black fabric of his suit jacket. But I could hear his voice. In the most enticing whisper imaginable, he told her that she was beautiful and deserved the Fal Queen crown more than anyone in the world. Though his words sounded like innocent flattery, somehow they had spurred Missy on to this plan and made her want to bathe Vanessa in metaphorical blood at the moment of her crowning. I saw—in her soul, it seemed—a desire for wickedness and destruction worse than my worst nightmares.
Final y, final y, I reached the gym door. I pul ed it open and ran over to Michael, who was stil leaning up against the same spot on the wal . I struggled to speak; it was amazing how running tired me out so quickly, when I could fly for hours with ease. “I know what Missy and Piper are going to do.”
Gaping at my disheveled state, he grabbed me by the shoulders. “Are you okay?”
I brushed aside his hands. “I’m fine. Michael, I don’t have much time. Have they announced the Fal Queen yet?”
“No, Vanessa and Keith are stil standing over there. I think the crowning ceremony is supposed to start in a few minutes.”
Stil panting, I said, “Good, I stil have time to stop it. Or defuse it, at least.”
“Defuse? As in a bomb?” From the terrified look on his face, I saw that he thought—by my unfortunate choice of the word “defuse”—I meant something much worse.
“Don’t worry. It’s not a literal bomb, but it’s stil real y awful.”
I wanted—no, needed—to save Vanessa and al the other kids from the virtual bloodbath about to rain down on them. And there was only one way to do it in the time I had available. To sacrifice myself by naming myself as the creator of the Facebook entries and deem them fiction. To point the finger at anyone else as the architect of this scheme left too much room for denial—and possible belief by the viewers in the horrific stories they’d see on the Facebook page. I couldn’t let that happen.