PROLOGUE
IT’S A MIRACLE anyone gets out of high school alive. Everything is a risk or a well-placed trap. If you’re not done in by your own heart, so trampled and swollen, you might fall victim to a totally clichéd but equally tragic demise—a drunk-driving accident, a red light missed while texting, too many of the wrong kinds of pills. But that’s not how Shaila Arnold went.
Of course, technically, her cause of death was blunt force trauma at the hands of her boyfriend, Graham Calloway. With trace evidence of sea water in her lungs, drowning may have been the easiest assumption, but upon closer inspection, the bump on her head and the puddle of thick, sticky blood that matted her long honey-blonde hair was unmissable.
Blunt force trauma. That’s what her death certificate says. That’s what went down in the record books. But that’s not really how she died. It can’t be. I think she died from anger, from betrayal. From wanting too much all at once. From never feeling full. Her rage was all-consuming. I know this because mine is, too. Why did we have to suffer? Why were we chosen? How had we lost control?
It’s hard to remember what we were like before, when anger was just temporary. A passing feeling caused by a fight with Mom, or my little brother Jared’s insistence on eating the last piece of apple pie at Thanksgiving. Anger was easy then because it was fleeting. A rolling wave that crashed ashore before it settled down. Things always settled down.
Now it’s as if a monster lives inside me. She’ll be there forever, just waiting to crack open my chest and step forward into the light. I wonder if this is how Shaila felt in her last moments alive.
They say only the good die young, but that’s just a line in a stupid song we used to sing. It isn’t real. It isn’t true. I know that because Shaila Arnold was so many things—brilliant and funny, confident and wild. But honestly? She wasn’t all that good.
ONE
THE FIRST DAY of school always means the same thing: a tribute to Shaila. Today should be the first day of her senior year. Instead, she is, like she has been for the past three years, dead. And we are due for one more reminder.
“Ready?” Nikki asks as we pull into the parking lot. She throws her shiny black BMW, a back-to-school present from her parents, into park and takes an enormous slurp of iced coffee. “Because I’m not.” She flips down the mirror, swipes a coat of watermelon-pink lipstick over her mouth, and pinches her cheeks until they flush. “You’d think they could just give her a plaque or start a charity run or something. This is brutal.”
Nikki had been counting down to the first day of senior year since we left for summer break back in June. She called me this morning at 6:07 a.m., and when I rolled over and picked up in a hazy fog, she didn’t even wait for me to say hi. “Be ready in an hour or find another ride!” she yelled, a hairdryer blowing behind her into the speaker.
She didn’t even need to beep her horn when she showed up. I knew she was waiting out front thanks to the deafening notes of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know.” We both have a thing for eighties music. When I climbed into the front seat, Nikki looked as if she’d already had two Starbucks Ventis and a full glam squad appointment. Her dark eyes glimmered thanks to a swatch of sparkly eyeshadow and she had rolled the sleeves of her navy Gold Coast Prep blazer up to her elbows in an artful yet sloppy manner. Nikki’s one of the only people who can make our hideous uniforms actually look cool.
Thank God my nightmares stayed away last night and the near-constant bags under my eyes had disappeared. Didn’t hurt that I’d had a few extra minutes to apply a thick coat of mascara and deal with my brows.
When Nikki pulled out of my driveway, I was giddy with anticipation. Our time had come. We were finally at the top.
But now that we’re actually here, parked in the Gold Coast Prep senior lot for the first time, a shiver shoots down my spine. We still have to get through Shaila’s memorial and it hangs over us like a cloud, ready to rain all over the fun.
Shaila was the only student to ever die while attending Gold Coast Prep, so no one knew how to act or what to do. But somehow, it was decided. The school would start the year off with a fifteen-minute ceremony honoring Shaila. The tradition would last until we graduated. And as a thank-you, the Arnolds would donate a new English wing in Shaila’s name. Well played, Headmaster Weingarten.
But no one wanted to remember Graham Calloway. No one mentioned him at all.
Last year’s assembly wasn’t so bad. Weingarten stood up and said something about how much Shaila loved math—she didn’t—and how she would have been so thrilled to be starting AP Calc if she was still with us—she wasn’t. Mr. and Mrs. Arnold showed up, as they had the year before, and sat in the front row of the auditorium, dabbing their cheeks with cotton handkerchiefs, the old-fashioned kind that were so worn, they were almost translucent and probably held residual snot from decades before.
The six of us sat next to them, front and center, identifying ourselves as Shaila’s survivors. We were chosen as eight. But after that night we became six.
When Nikki weaves into the spot reserved for class president, Quentin is already waiting for us. “We’re seniors, bitches!” he says, and slaps a piece of notebook paper against my window, flashing a hastily drawn doodle of the three of us. In it, Nikki holds her senior class president gavel, I grasp on to a telescope twice my size, and Quentin’s covered in flaming-red paint to match his hair. Our little trio makes my heart melt.
I squeal at the sight of real Quentin and fling the car door open, throwing myself at his middle.
“You’re here!” I say, burying my face into his doughy chest.
“Aw, Jill,” he says with a laugh. “C’mere, Nikki.” She launches herself into our hug and I inhale the dewy scent of Quentin’s laundry. Nikki leaves a sticky kiss on my cheek. In seconds, the others appear. Robert, with his slicked-back hair, takes the last puff of a mint-flavored Juul and shoves it into the pocket of his leather jacket. He should get a handful of demerits for wearing it in favor of his blazer, but he never does. “I can’t believe we have to do this again,” he says.
“What? School or Shaila?” Henry comes up behind me and rests a hand on the top of my butt, nipping my ear with his teeth. He smells overwhelmingly male, like freshly cut grass mixed with expensive French deodorant. I blush, remembering this will be the first time we’re seen at school together as a we, and inch closer to him, tucking my shoulder into his armpit.
“What do you think?” Robert rolls his eyes.
“Shut up, you idiots,” Marla says, whipping her platinum-blonde braid over her muscled shoulder. Her face is tanned from a summer spent training at the best field hockey camp in New England. Her stick hangs low over her back in a tie-dyed canvas bag, its taped handle peeking out the top. The ultimate sign of varsity realness. She wears it well.