Girls in spendy clothes—my fellow members of the Sneak decorating committee—sat in groups on the shiny parquet floor of the St. Sophia’s gym, sticking beady eyes onto cutout ravens and draping faux spider web around everything that sat still long enough to be draped. There were also foam gravestones everywhere, all painted black and coated with chunky black glitter.
Sneak was the fall formal of our junior class, and the St. Sophia’s girls in charge—the brat pack—had decided “graveyard glam” was our decorating theme. (The Sneak committee guys at Montclare, our brother school that Jason and Michael both attended, got to do all the audiovisual and electronic stuff.) The idea wasn’t exactly original, but since I was a fan of dark clothes and good eyeliner, I didn’t mind so much. Besides, St. Sophia’s alumnae had rented out the Field Museum, Chicago’s natural history museum, for the party, which was this Friday. I hadn’t been there yet, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but with all that money and all these decorations, there was no way it wasn’t going to look sweet when we were done.
I was pretty excited about the dance. The brat pack, on the other hand, I could do without. Veronica—an every-hair-in-place type of blonde—was their leader. She was currently using a pencil to point other members of the junior class toward their glittery assignments.
I didn’t like her, but I had been paying more attention to her lately. A few weeks ago, Veronica had walked right into the middle of a civil war between two vampire covens that lived in the Pedway—a bunch of passageways that connected buildings in downtown Chicago. Marlena was the reigning coven queen, and she hadn’t been happy that Nicu, a vamp she’d made, had started his own clan. Nicu helped us save Veronica, and something seemed to pass between them. She’d been spelled to lock down her memories of the fight and the meeting, but I couldn’t shake the feeling she was a magical time bomb waiting to go off.
Number two in the brat pack was Amie. She had a bright pink room in my suite but a quiet attitude, and she was currently painting the ravens I’d been assigned to glitter.
Mary Katherine, the third brat packer, whose dark hair was now streaked with yellow spiral curls and tiny rows of rhinestones, was painting her nails a deep shade of blue. At least, I assumed they were rhinestones. Who really knew?
Lesley Barnaby, another suitemate, walked toward me, a bundle of flat, black birds in her hand. She’d been given the task of carting the birds between the brat pack and me. Since their primary goals were being top of the St. Sophia’s food chain and driving me crazy, I was more than happy to let Lesley play middleman.
“More ravens,” she said, setting them down on the floor.
She sat cross-legged beside the stack, a pair of bright rainbow socks reaching up to her knees. She also wore a T-shirt with a rainbow on it and a small pair of fuzzy black cat ears tucked into her blond hair. Lesley had a very unique sense of style.
I liked clothes, and I definitely had an artistic streak. I hated the matchy-match plaid of our school uniforms. But that stuff just made me a teenager. Lesley was an altogether different type of girl. She acted less like a teenager than like a high-fashion model transplanted from some future world, complete with strange clothes and fuzzy expression. The stuff she wore might be really cool in twenty years, but right now it just seemed odd.
“Thanks,” I said, and glanced over at the girls. The brat pack was possibly increasing from three to four. A new recruit, Lisbeth Cannon, had been hanging out with the crew.
“How’s the brat pack?” I asked.
Lesley shrugged. “See for yourself. Veronica’s handing out orders. Amie’s following them. M.K.’s working on her nails.”
“What about Lisbeth?”
“She’s learning how to be like the rest of them.”
I glanced back. As much as I found them repellant, I could admit that I was also kind of intrigued. There was a lot of fighting. They were always pairing off together, leaving one girl out until the other two got mad at each other and decided it was time to switch partners again. Some days I’d find Veronica on the couch in our suite, complaining to Amie about Mary Katherine’s dramatics. M.K. usually complained to Amie that Veronica always had to have her way.
Both complaints seemed right to me.
I was glad to have a steady BFF in Scout, but in an odd way I was a little jealous about the dramatics. What if deciding between BFFs were the only problem I had to face? No magic. No Reapers. No slimy nasties in the tunnels? Just deciding which friend I wanted to wear on any given day.
“You ever wonder what it’s like to be them?”
Lesley looked back at me. “You mean instead of having magic?”
Lesley was one of the few people without magic who was allowed to know about Adepts and Reapers. I wasn’t sure if she knew the entire story, but there was an advantage to not knowing too much—having all the details about the world of underground magic apparently put a Reaper target on your back. Lesley might have been a little odd, but she’d been a friend to us when we needed it, so I certainly didn’t wish that on her.
“I mean to be popular, and for how you look to be the most important thing on your mind.”
Lesley painted lines of glue onto the raven’s feathers. “I play the cello,” she said. “Sometimes I help you and Scout. I speak four languages, I’m super good at physics, and I will probably get into whatever college I want.” She looked up at me, and it was clear she wasn’t bragging. She was just giving me the facts. “So why would I want to spend my time worrying about whether everyone else thinks my shirt is cool enough?”
Like they were following a script, raised voices carried from the brat pack corner of the room.
“I’m trying to do it right,” Lisbeth said. She was attempting to carve a piece of foam into the shape of . . . Well, I’m not really sure what it was supposed to be. A gargoyle, maybe?
Veronica, who’d made her way over to the group, wasn’t buying it. “It certainly doesn’t look like it. You’ve been working on that thing for, like, an hour now.”
“Seriously,” M.K. said. “It looks like an angry terrier, and that’s really off-theme.”
I doubted M.K. cared whether the decoration was right or not. She probably just liked having someone to terrorize. And Lisbeth definitely looked terrorized. She burst into tears and ran from the room, leaving the brat pack rolling their eyes behind her.