Page 107 of Good Girls Lie

I think it’s time for the two of us to have a conversation.

63

THE HEADLINE

I hurry out of the Dean’s office and slink toward the library, fighting the urge to run and hide myself in a carrel and never come out.

Sister. Sister. Sister.

And then,nightmare.

Becca steps out of the trolley that attaches Main to Old East Hall and blocks my path. She is carrying a green file folder in two hands and oozing menace. What is she doing? Why is she following me? What sort of humiliation does she have waiting for me? The Mistress is cunning and sadistic. But now is not the time for games.

“What are you doing, Swallow?”

“Going to study, Mistress.”

“In the middle of the day?”

“I’m getting behind on my work, Mistress.”

Please, please let me go. I need to scream, I need to cry. I need to plan.

“Ash. Part of my duties to this school as head girl is to see to the well-being of our younger students. I’ve become worried about you.”

Someone is watching. There’s no way she’d talk to me like this, so stilted and foreign, so bloody affected, if we were actually alone. Must be an Honor Court thing. She wants witnesses. I do feel eyes on me, but I don’t want to turn around.

“I appreciate your concern.”

“I wanted to be here for you when you saw this. It’s going to be difficult, Ash.”

She actually sounds legitimately worried now. Worried, but also gleeful. She takes a piece of paper from the folder.

The headline is lurid, pulled from one of our most sensational rags, the one that finds alien babies in Buckingham Palace and exposes cross-dressing politicians.

Bombshell Report: Hidden Will Splits Carr Estate

With Unnamed Heir

Becca watches me, waiting to see how I will respond. If I hadn’t just spent half an hour with the solicitor from my father’s estate, I would have reacted, but now, I’m numb.

I crumple the paper into a ball and throw it on the ground. “I’m aware. I appreciate your concern, Becca, I do.”

A flash of stormy green. “Mistress.”

“I appreciate your concern. Mistress.”

“That’s better.” She picks up the printout, smooths the wrinkles, puts it back in the folder. Smiles and hangs an arm around my shoulder. Whispers in my ear, fire in her hissing, fingers digging into my bones: “Don’t think this changes anything, Swallow. Your little melodrama means nothing to me. Now go get my mail and have it back to my room within five minutes or you’ll regret you were ever born and never get to meet the other Carr baby.”

She saunters off. So silly of me to think she actually cares. Becca is cruelty personified. She is the paper’s edge that slices open unsuspecting fingers, the pin buried in a shirt’s collar, the tiny triangle of glass you step on crossing the kitchen floor.

Cruel. Bloodthirsty. But an annoyance.

I have bigger issues.

* * *

The mail room is actually a place I like. It’s in the basement of Old East, and there’s a small, private courtyard outside the glass doors with a bronze sundial in the middle of a circular garden. It’s a pleasant spot. Many of the girls read their mail there, complain about the grades they’ve received. The teachers also put their graded papers and homework in the slots, folded lengthwise so they’ll fit the narrow berths. They have no locks on the front—this school runs on the honor system, there’s no reason to try to keep the mail under lock and key.