Vengeance (Private 14)

“I’m truly sorry to have to tell you this, Reed, but it looks like the ribbon-cutting ceremony you were expecting to have this weekend will have to be postponed,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. “Indefinitely.”

My heart dropped all the way through the floor, probably landing somewhere near Josh’s feet four stories below. No. No, no, no, no, no. Hundreds of alumnae were flying in for this event from all over the world. I had alerted the press. I had hired a caterer and ordered fifty bottles of seriously expensive champagne. I’d laid out all that cash for the cocktail party on Saturday night, for the hotel rooms, for the Sunday morning brunch. If I called it off now, I was going to look like a clueless little kid. And the new Billings would be pegged as a failure before the first stone was laid.

“Why?” was all I could manage to say.

“Unfortunately, it seems that the plans you submitted are not up to code,” the headmaster said, looking me in the eye. “There’s a new green initiative in the county, and unless the plans are changed significantly, the zoning board is going to kill the project entirely.”

My fingers curled around the leather armrests on my chair. “What? But the town approved the plans,” I said, my voice pitching itself up in a panic.

“I know, but now someone has submitted them to the county,” he said slowly, as if speaking to a chimpanzee.

“Who?” I said. “Why?”

I kind of sounded like a chimpanzee, actually. I cleared my throat and tried to get my thoughts in order, but none of this made sense and all I could think was that this wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair. At that moment my phone rang, and I felt like I was going to explode out of my skin. I reached into my bag and pressed down on the ignore button as hard as I could. Janice Winthrop wasn’t going to care much about which suite she was booked in when she found out there was no longer an event to attend.

“I don’t know,” the headmaster said. He tugged a piece of paper toward him and tilted it up to read. “But apparently the plans need to include the following: fifty percent sustainable materials; energy-efficient lighting, heating, and plumbing; and a solar panel to help ease the carbon footprint. Which, apparently, will at least get us a tax break from the state.”

“Oh my God.” I slumped back in my chair and my fingers automatically fluttered up to touch the locket. The current plans for the new Billings did include some green materials and plans for energy-efficient appliances and light fixtures, but I didn’t recall anything about heating and plumbing, and no one had ever mentioned a solar panel. “What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know, Miss Brennan,” he said. He tugged out another copy of the letter from the county and handed it to me. “But considering all the difficulties we’ve had on campus lately, I can’t go up against the county right now. So until you figure this out with your design team, the Billings project is officially shelved.”

THE NEW MISSY

“I don’t get it,” Constance Talbot said. Sun shone through the skylight at the center of the Easton dining hall, turning her red hair golden. “Who could have sent the plans to the county? We’re the only ones who have seen them.”

Around the table, my Billings friends wore varying expressions of concern, suspicion, and disappointment. Normally we took up two tables in the cafeteria, but for the moment, every last one of us was gathered around one table, and they were all leaning in over one another so they could hear my story. Even London Simmons and Shelby Wordsworth were there. After the insanity that had occurred on my birthday, we had all voted and decided to relax the rules that governed the Billings Literary Society—the secret club that I had started back in January. In fact, we’d kind of abandoned the thing entirely, giving up on the midnight meetings in the Billings Chapel and all

the crazy talk of witchcraft. It just hadn’t seemed right to go back there, after all the terror and misery the BLS and the book of spells had brought us. And although I knew that Kiki Rosen was still experimenting with some spells on her own, the rest of us hadn’t dabbled at all, content to try to get things back to normal. Which also meant that London, Shelby, and Constance had been hanging out with us again. Everyone was back together. Well, everyone except for Missy.

“Actually, that’s not exactly true,” I said, leaning back in my wooden chair at the head of the table and tucking my brown hair behind my ears. “My architect and contractors have them, of course—”

“But none of them would send them to the county if they knew it meant getting shut down,” Tiffany Goulborne pointed out. “They’d be out of a job.”

“True,” I conceded. “But I also sent them to some of the wealthier alumnae.”

“WTF? Why did you do that?” Portia Ahronian said, clutching the dozen gold necklaces around her neck. “You have enough money to build this thing ten times over.”

“I know, but I thought it would be nice to get other people involved,” I said. “The more they feel like part of the new Billings, the more they’ll be invested in its future.”

“She’s right, you guys. We need the alums,” Rose Sakowitz said, looking around at the others. She looked even tinier and more adorable than usual in a pink plaid sundress with her red curls held back by a tortoiseshell band. “Think of how many times they’ve supported us when things have gone . . .” She trailed off.

“I think ‘awry’ is the word you’re looking for,” Tiffany put in, shifting in her seat. “Like when Cheyenne . . . passed away and we had to elect a new president? They don’t usually have to come up with two presidential gifts in one year.”

I squirmed a bit, recalling the amount of cash and all the expensive presents that had been dropped in my lap after I’d been elected in the fall—not to mention the very thorough and useful files on the current Billings Girls and our alums that I’d been gifted.

“And how Suzel told us about the secret passage at Gwendolyn so we could get to the Legacy last semester?” London added, clicking a rhinestone-encrusted compact closed after checking her lipstick. “She’s, like, a total asset.”

“Seriously,” Shelby said, checking the end of her dark blond braid for split ends. “The alumnae have been keeping us afloat for years.”

“Yeah, but after everything that’s happened, can we really trust any of them?” Astrid Chou said as she reorganized her paintbrushes inside a funky, polka-dotted carrying case. “I mean, if this was three months ago, you probably would have sent the plans to Cheyenne’s batty mother.”

I swallowed hard, my eyes flicking to Noelle. She was the only one not participating in the conversation, choosing instead to sit at the far end of the table and page through Vogue. My phone beeped loudly.

“Is your phone possessed or what?” Amberly Carmichael asked, pressing the palms of her perfectly manicured hands into the edge of the table. “It hasn’t stopped since we got here.”

I groaned, pulling my phone out to silence it. “Sorry.”

Astrid did, of course, have a point. I always thought Cheyenne’s mom, Mrs. Martin, was a cool woman, someone who loved Billings and would have done anything for us. Until I found out she believed in this hundred-year-old curse and thought that five of my friends and I needed to die in order to break it.