“Honestly, she won’t even know it’s gone. I’ll have it back to her long before she’s ready to use it. She’s not even home right now. She uses her vacation time to play around in Tijuana and seduce men half her age or younger. She won’t miss it, promise.” Julianne’s attention wandered as she spoke, her eyes subtly taking in all the people around us.
“Looking for anybody in particular?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Cataloguing,” she said. “Next year is important. A lot of these people will be taking their gap years in Europe, some of them already have positions ready at their parents’ companies, and some of them are going straight to the Ivy League. I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, so I’ve collected a little of everything.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Collected, huh? You have got to work on not sounding like a comic book villain when you’re talking about people.”
She grinned. “Oh, it’s just you,” she said in a way that didn’t make me feel any better. “Connections is what I’m collecting, not men. I’m not Joan’s mom.”
“You aren’t?” Joan said in mock-surprise as she came up behind Julianne with a tray.
I could have warned Julianne that Joan was coming, but how was I supposed to know that she was about to be a bitch?
Julianne narrowed her eyes at me.
I busied myself with my breakfast. It tasted like cardboard even though it smelled fantastic, which annoyed me. If I was going to ingest the calories, it made sense that I enjoyed them.
Julianne sniffed. “Well, it’s true,” she said defensively. “How many boyfriends does your mom have?”
“Currently none,” Joan said. Her voice was firm, but her eyes were uncertain. “She hasn’t had spare boyfriends since she married David.”
“Uh-huh,” Julianne chuckled, clearly not believing her. “But I bet she never pays to get her car fixed. Or her lawn mowed. Or her pool cleaned. Or her pipes—”
I stabbed a sticky gob of waffle off of Julianne’s plate with my fork and shoved it into her open mouth.
“Eat your forbidden calories,” I said blandly. “Or should we talk about your mother?”
Julianne glared briefly, but was mollified by the sugar and real butter.
Joan shot me a grateful look, then dug into her own breakfast.
I knew I would pay for that later, but Julianne’s petty vengeance wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. She mostly claimed me as hers, so whatever she would do to get back at me wouldn’t be too bad.
Besides, dealing with Julianne was kind of like dealing with a feral dog. Once in a while you had to prove you were just as mean as she was, or she’d eat you alive.
“Oh my God, I thought I would never get through that line,” Macy said, flopping down beside me.
She had yogurt and fruit on her tray and none of the sugariness that sat atop just about every other plate. She raised an eyebrow at our loaded trays but didn’t say anything.
Julianne’s pale skin flushed slightly around her jaw.
I could have pointed out to Julianne the spot of syrup clinging to Macy’s collar, a clear indication that she’d done her indulging on the other side of the room before coming over here to flaunt her apparent self-control in Julianne’s face—but I sort of felt like Julianne deserved to be shamed after what she’d said about Joan’s mom.
Besides, the only ones who cared about Macy and Julianne’s calorie counts were the two of them. They’d been dieting competitively for as long as I’d known them, and probably for a lot longer. It showed, I guess—they were both fashionably thin and looked Instagram-worthy in bikinis—but their eating habits had almost nothing to do with health or beauty, and everything to do with out-doing the other.
Joan interrupted the silent censure by reaching across the table to grab the syrup pot which sat between the two blondes.
“More for me,” she said with a dismissive look at Macy’s tray. “There’s no better way to say good-bye to summer than a sugar rush and four hours of carsickness.”
I caught her eye across the table and we shared a secret smile.
I liked Joan more than I liked Macy or Julianne, though Julianne had been the first person to talk to me when I moved to Starline at the beginning of my Sophomore year.
Julianne and Macy liked to play power games that exhausted me to watch. Joan played them too, but mostly in a supporting role. She knew there were worse things in the world than being at the bottom of the social ladder—and better things in the world than being at the top of it.
It was good to see her smile, even if it was at Macy’s expense. Her half-brother’s abortive birth and her mother’s subsequent moodiness had left Joan surly for months. Camp was exactly what she’d needed, and I hoped her lightened mood would carry over even after we were back home.
“So, speaking of the end of summer. It’s time to switch up the wardrobes, don’t ya think?” Julianne’s comment broke the tension around the table and the conversation moved away from food and onto fashion.
Julianne wanted to do a mall run with all four of us before school started on Monday. It was a conversation I didn’t have to think much about.
I would go, we all would, because Julianne was the one organizing it. You didn’t get to be in Julianne’s circle if you weren’t inclined to move as a pack.
Without the conversation to distract me, though, my mind wandered back to the guilt which was still weighing heavily on my chest.
I started picking at it without really meaning to, still wondering where it was coming from. Some word in the conversation the girls were having made that guilt spike again, and I tuned back in.
“—and you know we won’t have to worry about running into anyone disreputable there,” Julianne was saying, wrinkling her nose.
“I thought one of the Seymores worked at the mall?” Joan asked.
There it was. Guilt rose to fevered levels, making bile rise in my throat. I washed it down with a tumbler full of apple juice.
Why the hell was I feeling guilty about the Seymores?
“No,” Julianne said. “Benjamin Seymore used to work at Spencer’s, but he got fired for shoplifting or assaulting a customer or something.”
I raised my eyebrows, battling a surge of nausea.
“That’s a big difference,” I said. “You’re talking petty theft versus felony.”
She shrugged dismissively. “Does it matter? Point is, he won’t be at the mall, and that’s all that really matters.”
I frowned at my bacon, which was drowning listlessly in a sticky brown pool.
The flippant way she said that rang a bell in the back of my head, a little voice saying, this is why.
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and picked at my breakfast, chopping my food into smaller and smaller bits.
It didn’t make sense for me to feel guilty about listening to rumors about the Seymores.
Even if they hadn’t done exactly what Julianne said they did, they’d more than earned my ire anyway.
That thought pushed the guilt back a little bit, so I rolled with it.
I remembered the second week of school two years ago, after Julianne had brought me into her group and one of the Seymores—the smaller of the skinny blonde ones—had flipped my tray, getting spaghetti all over my new clothes and in my hair.