Page 2 of House of Hearts

I slap on the smile I practiced in the mirror and bury my vendetta six feet deep.

I’ll unearth it later, but for now I need to look like any other perfectly adjusted, super-excited senior.

I could at least pretend to be happy, right?

I’m standing at the gates of the crème de la crème of boarding schools: a wealthy academy in Upstate New York where old-money families off-load their children each fall.

Anyone in my shoes would be ecstatic to be here—well, almost anyone.

My mother’s wearing an identical pair of sneakers, and all she’s doing is sniffling into a tissue.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she says, crying.

She’s been doing that all morning. It started after her tenth snoozed alarm, and it continued the entire three-hour drive in the car—Google Maps couldn’t get a word in without my mother blubbering into the steering wheel.

I hand her the last Kleenex in the pack. We’ve gone through several. “I’ll call every night.”

She accepts my offering with a final blow of her nose. “You better! Oh, Violet, I’m so worried about you. You packed your pepper spray, right?” she whispers entirely too loudly. “You know I don’t trust rich kids—their parents have good lawyers. They could get away with anything.”

God, don’t I know it.

I stretch that fake smile further for my mother’s sake. It’s starting to chafe. “Yes, Mom. It’s in the front pocket of my duffel bag.”

“And your little whistle?” she presses.

“Yes, Mom. It’s on my key chain.”

“What about—?”

“Mom, trust me, I’ve got it all. Do I have to show you my laminated checklist?

” I swivel around to pull it out once again.

My packing list (however small) has been highlighted and checked off several times over.

If it were up to Mom, she would’ve packed a mismatched pair of socks, an old blanket I had when I was five, and then nothing else because she would’ve been too busy bawling.

“Oh, Violet, when did you get so grown up?”

Probably at age eight when Mom’s deadbeat ex smashed a beer bottle against the wall and I spent the rest of the night in my room staging our elaborate escape. “I’m pretty sure I was born this way.”

She harrumphs but doesn’t argue with me there.

“Quit worrying so much. C’mon, isn’t it breathtaking? It looks just like the website.”

This time I’m not lying. It is breathtaking, but I’m also completely and utterly out of my element.

Our trailer-park home is a far cry from the Gothic gray stone library; our Ford Fiesta sticks out like a sore thumb against the lot of sleek armored cars.

“Did you know this school was featured in Architectural Digest ?”

I gesture to the building beside us. The Great Hall lies in the quadrangle like a sleeping beast, its enormous body embellished with sandstone and its oriel eye focused on the courtyard ahead.

Students mill through its arched ribs, their bags slung across their backs and their phones poised at the ready.

I don’t blame them; every inch of this place is begging to be immortalized on canvas.

It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s the site of an open murder investigation. Or at least it should be.

“C’mon!” I urge, tugging Mom deeper into the crime scene.

It hardly looks like one anymore. Instead of police tape and chalk lines, we’ve got cotton candy and balloon animals, Welcome Back, Students! strung high from dogwood trees. It’s a lesson in extravagance, a nightmare of confetti and rose topiaries and Golden Goose sneakers.

Nothing about it screams “a girl died here a year ago”—no funeral attire or memorial imagery scattered among the fairgrounds. My best friend’s death has been scrubbed away in time for orientation. Headmistress Lockwell and her family saw to that.

“Ooh, can we see that?” Mom’s voice rips me back to the present.

She cuts off an exhausted custodian before he can toss a crumpled map into the trash.

Smoothing out the wrinkled folds, she jabs at the center.

“God, Vi, all right, I’ll give you one thing: This place is fancy.

There’s a regulation tennis court and an Olympic-size swimming pool and—”

I cut her off gently. “We don’t have time to look at the pool, Ma. We need to get to the new-student orientation. We’re all the way over here, and we have five minutes to get there.”

“Here” is sandwiched between the Great Hall and Fitzpatrick-Wallace Library. “There” shines like a beacon in the distance, a journey beyond a sprawling family of green hills.

She huffs like a lectured child but doesn’t press the issue.

Instead, she follows my lead as I push our way through the crowd.

What we lack in money, I more than make up for in false confidence.

My power walk is honed from years of customer service—shoulders back, chin up, arms crossed.

It’s all about making the world believe you’re stronger than you really are so they don’t chew you up and spit you out.

Though, to be perfectly honest, I do feel like a used wad of bubble gum right now. But that’s less confidence-based and more due to the fact that the sun is stuck on the broiler setting.

Mom pauses to wipe a bead of sweat from her brow.

Above our heads, a trellis reads The Little Garden .

The space around us is a bleeding canvas of color: bright yellow marigolds, stalks of purple-bellied aconite and pink valerian, patches of poppies and beds of wormwood.

All of which are tucked away inside carefully placed shrubbery.

“Aww, Violet, let’s stop for a second. I want a cute photo of you in front of the violets,” she says, like it’s an ingenious, novel idea and not something we’ve been doing since the day I was born. “Here, take this, I have to look for my phone.”

She passes me the wrinkled trash-pamphlet, and I squint through the creases as she looks.

“?‘Funded by an alumnus’s generous donation, the Little Garden is a curated collection of Shakespearean variety. A campus favorite, it is not uncommon to find students and staff alike basking in the beauty of—’?”

I stop reading as red splatters the page.

…Blood?

The very thought has my lungs seizing and my mind hurtling sixty miles per hour back to the gruesome past. Back when my friend’s body was found broken at the bottom of the school clock tower, a dark puddle beneath her soaking deep into the roots.

Her body wasn’t even cold when the press statement was released.

Headmistress Lockwell issued what can only be described as a tragedy Mad Libs, with “Emoree Hale” slotted conveniently into the blanks.

I learned that day that anyone can rewrite history for the right price.

A “tragic fall” became an “intentional jump,” and one by one, everyone came to the consensus that Em had meant to die that day.

Everyone but me. Because I know she didn’t jump. She was pushed. And as for the murderer? It was none other than the headmistress’s eldest son, Percy Lockwell.

I growl at the memory and drag a sticky finger up the page. Just as I think I might pass out, I catch a whiff of cherry filling. Not blood but dripping jam.

“My bad!” Some girl squeezes past us with a half-assed apology, a jelly-filled donut poorly balanced in her hands.

The stranger is as disorienting as this world around her—her outfit an eclectic hodgepodge of fabrics that pulls me out of my haze.

I can’t help but tally the cost—it’s the type of mismatched attire that you can only pull off with an ungodly amount of self-assurance and money.

The floral pattern of her mesh top has no relation to her striped skirt; the skirt has no link to the random tie slung loosely on her throat.

Then there’s the studded glasses and the knifepoint of her earrings.

None of it blends, and yet, on her, it’s seamless.

She gives me a once-over, and I’m suddenly conscious of the stain on my sleeve. Maybe I can pretend it’s avant-garde.

“Oh my God! Wait, are you Violet Harper?” she asks, mid-bite.

Mom looks between us in a not-so-subtle attempt to suss out a connection.

Meanwhile, Donut Girl is fumbling around with her belongings.

Her messenger bag lifts open to reveal a camera that’s worth more than several of my vital organs, but she pushes it aside to grab at her equally expensive phone.

With a series of clicks, she’s pulling up the student portal and flashing my photo.

I’ve got that “sun-starved Victorian factory child” thing going on in my picture.

The perfect casting call for a horror-movie extra: wispy, bone-pale hair, twiggy limbs, and dark shadows. A true ghost of a girl.

“We’re roommates this year. I’m Birdie, remember? Birdie Pennington.”

I swallow my nerves and take her manicured hand in mine.

Nothing about my roommate assignment was random.

No one asked me if I was a morning bird or a night owl.

Messy or organized. If I liked long walks on the beach or late nights hunched over my computer screen reading over the obituary of my best friend, wondering how everything broke apart in a single, horrifying instant—

No. Birdie was matched with me because the last roommate she had hit the pavement and broke every bone in her body. Now I’m here to fill a vacancy.

I chew the insides of my cheek, and my molars trace over the familiar scarred skin.

Don’t think about that , and most importantly, don’t cry.

Crying doesn’t bring the dead back, and it certainly won’t help me get my revenge.

I don’t know yet what that revenge will look like, but I do know one thing:

I’m going to haunt the Lockwells until the bitter end.

“Are you on your way to the new-student orientation?” Birdie asks, unaware that her new roommate is plotting out someone’s demise in her head.

“Yeah, it’s part of crashing in here my senior year. I’ve got to play freshman today.”