Blue Bloods (Blue Bloods 1)

"You don't need my permission," Mimi replied in a bored voice, although the opposite was true. One didn't simply leave Mimi's presence - one was dismissed.

Aggie smirked, and Bliss smiled nervously, following Jack toward the back of the club.

Mimi shrugged. She never bothered to follow the rules, and tended to light up wherever and whenever she felt like it - the gossip columns once gleefully published the five-figure tally of her smoking fines. She watched the three of them leave, disappearing into the crush of bodies throwing themselves around the dance floor to obscene rap lyrics.

"I'm bored," she whined, finally paying attention to the guy who had hardly left her side all evening. They had been dating for all of two weeks, an eternity on the Mimi time line. "Make something happen."

"What do you have in mind?" he murmured groggily, licking her ear.

"Mmmm," she giggled, putting a hand underneath his chin and feeling his veins throb. Tempting. But maybe later, not here, not in public at least. Especially since she'd just had her fill of him yesterday ... and it was against the rules... Human familiars were not to be abused, blah, blah, blah. They needed at least a forty-eight-hour recovery time ... But oh, he smelled wonderful ... a hint of Armani ...aftershave and underneath ... meaty and vital... and if she could just get one little taste... one little... bite... but The Committee met downstairs, right beneath Block 122. There could be several Wardens here, right now ... watching... She could be caught. But would she? It was dark in the VIP room... Who would even notice in this crowd of self-involved narcissists?

But they would find out. Someone would tell them. It was eerie how they knew so much about you - almost as if they were always there, watching, inside your head. So, maybe next time. She would let him recuperate from last night. She ruffled his hair. He was so cute - handsome and vulnerable, just the way she liked them. But for now, completely useless. "Excuse me for a second," she told him.

Mimi leaped from her seat so quickly that the cocktail waitress bringing a tray of lychee martinis to the table did a double take. The crew around the banquette blinked. They could have sworn she was sitting down just a second ago. Then in a flash, there she was: in the middle of the room, dancing with another boy - because for Mimi, there was always another boy, and then another and another, each one of them all too happy to dance with her - and it seemed like she danced for hours - her feet never even touching the ground - a dizzying; blond tornado in eight-hundred-dollar heels.

When she came back to the table, her face glowing with a transcendental light (or merely the effects of benefit high beam?), her beauty almost too painful to bear - she found her date sleeping, slumped over the edge of the table. A pity.

Mimi picked up her cell phone. She just realized that Bliss had never returned from that cigarette break.

CHAPTER 3

She didn't fit in anywhere. She didn't know why. Was there ever anything so ridiculous as a sociophobic cheerleader? Girls like her weren't supposed to have any problems. They were supposed to be perfect. But Bliss Llewellyn didn't feel very perfect. She felt odd and out of place. She watched as her so-called best friend, Mimi Force, needled her brother and ignored her date. A fairly typical evening around the Force twins - the two of them bickering one minute or being spookily affectionate the next - especially when they did that thing where they just looked into each other's eyes and you could tell they were talking to each other without speaking. Bliss avoided Mimi's gaze and tried to distract herself by laughing at the jokes the actor on her right was telling her, but nothing about the evening - not even the fact that they'd been given the best table in the house or that the Calvin Klein model on her left had asked for her number - made her feel any less miserable.

She'd felt that way in Houston, too. That somehow she was not all there. But in Texas, she could hide it more easily. In Texas, she had big curly hair and the best backflip on the squad. Everyone had known her since she was a "wee chile," and she'd always been the prettiest girl in her class. But then Daddy, who'd grown up in New York, moved them back to the city to run for the empty Senate seat and had won the election easily. Before she could do a rebel yell, she was living on the Upper East Side and enrolled at the Duchesne School.

Of course, Manhattan was nothing like Houston, and Bliss's big curly hair and backflips didn't mean a thing to anyone at her new school, which didn't even have a football team, much less mini-skirted cheerleaders. But on the other hand, she didn't expect to be such a hick. After all, she knew her way around a Neiman Marcus! She owned the same True Religion jeans and James Perse T-shirts as anyone else. But somehow, she'd arrived for the first day wearing a pastel Ralph Lauren sweater with a plaid Anna Sui kilt (in an effort to look more like the girls featured in the school catalog), with a honking white leather Chanel purse on a gold chain slung over her shoulder, only to find her classmates dressed down in grotty fisherman sweaters and distressed corduroys. No one wore pastel in Manhattan or rocked white Chanel (in the fall at least). Even that weirdo goth girl - Schuyler Van Alen - displayed a chic that Bliss didn't know how to match.

Bliss knew about the Jimmy, the Manolo, the Stella. She'd made note of Mischa Barton's wardrobe. But there was something about the way the New York girls put it together that made her look like a fashion freak who'd never cracked open a magazine. Then there was the whole deal with her accent - no one could understand her at first, and when she said "y'all" or "laaahke," they imitated her, none too kindly either.

For a moment, it looked as if Bliss would be consigned to live the rest of her academic life as a borderline social pariah, a home-schooled reject when she should have been a Mean Girl. That is, until the clouds parted - lightning struck - and a miracle occurred: the fabulous Mimi Force took her personally in hand. Mimi was a junior, a year older. She and her brother Jack were like, the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt of Duchesne, a couple who were not supposed to be a couple, but a couple nonetheless - and the ruling one at that. Mimi was the Orientation leader for new students, and she'd taken one look at Bliss - the pastel cardigan, the shiny bluchers, the awkward Scottish kilt, the quilted Chanel bag, and had said, "Love that outfit. It's so wrong, it's right."

And that was it.

Bliss was suddenly in the In-Group, which, it turned out, was just the same as the one back in Houston - jocky guys (but starting lacrosse and crew instead of football), uniformly pretty girls (but they were on the debate team and headed for the Ivy League) with the same unwritten code to keep out newcomers. Bliss knew that it was only by Mimi's good graces that she'd managed to infiltrate the sacred stratum.

But it wasn't the social hierarchy of high school that was bothering Bliss. It wasn't even her blown-out-straight hair (which she would never let Mimi's stylist do to her again - she just didn't feel right without her curls), it was the fact that sometimes she didn't even feel like she knew who she was anymore. Ever since she had arrived in New York. She would walk by a building, or that old park by the river, and a feeling of d��j�� vu, but stronger - as if it were embedded in her own primal memory - would overwhelm her, and she would find herself shaking. When she walked into their apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street for the first time, she'd thought, "I'm home," and it wasn't because it was home ... it was the feeling in her bones that she'd been there before, that she'd walked inside that same doorway before, that she'd danced across its marble floors in some not-so-distant past. "It used to have a fireplace," she thought, when she saw her room. Sure enough, when she mentioned it to the real estate agent, he'd told her it'd had a fireplace in 1819, but it had been boarded up for safety reasons. "Because someone died in there."

But the nightmares were the worst. Nightmares that left her screaming herself awake. Nightmares of running, nightmares of someone taking hold of her - as if she weren't in control - and she would wake up, shivering and cold, the sheets drenched with her sweat. Her parents assured her it was normal. Like it was a normal thing for a fifteen-year-old girl to wake up screaming so loudly her throat dried up and she choked on her own spit.

But now, at Block 122, Jack Force was standing up, and Bliss stood up too excusing herself from Mimi's attention. She'd stood up on impulse, just to be moving, just to be doing something other than just being a spectator to the Show That Was Mimi, but when she'd said she needed a smoke, she found she really did. Aggie Carondolet, one of the Mimi clones, was already snaking her way outside. Bliss lost Jack halfway through the crowd, and she flashed the stamp on her right wrist to the guard, who had to let people out and back inside due to the draconian smoking laws in New York City. Bliss found it ironic that New Yorkers considered themselves so cosmopolitan when in Houston, you could smoke anywhere, even inside a beauty salon, while you were under the dryer; but in Manhattan, smokers were consigned to the margins and left to deal with the elements.

She pushed open the back door and found herself in an alleyway, a small dark corner between two buildings. The alley between Block 122 and The Bank was a petri dish of warring cultural allegiances - on one side, preening hipsters in tight, expensive, European clothes, tossing their bleached hair over zebra-print jackets; and on the other, a scraggly group of lost children in their tattered and pierced clothing but an uneasy truce existed between the two parties, an invisible line that neither group ever crossed. After all, they were all smokers here. She saw Aggie leaning against the wall, hanging out with a couple of models.

Bliss rooted in her hooded Marc Jacobs car coat (borrowed from Mimi, part of the makeover) for her cigarettes and tapped one out. She brought it to her lips, fumbling for the matches.

A hand extended from the darkness, offering a small, lit flame. From the other side of the alley. The first time someone had braved the divide.

"Thanks," Bliss said, leaning forward and inhaling, the cigarette glowing red at its tip. She looked up, exhaled, and through the smoke recognized the guy who'd offered it. Dylan Ward. A transfer - just like her - to the sophomore class from somewhere out of town. One of the odd-ones-out at Stepford-like Duchesne, where everyone had known everyone since nursery school and ballroom dancing lessons. Dylan looked handsome and dangerous in his customary beat-up black leather motorcycle jacket over a dirty T-shirt and stained jeans. It was rumored he'd been expelled from a succession of prep schools. His eyes glittered in the darkness. He flicked his Zippo closed, and she noticed his shy smile. There was something about him - something sad and broken and appealing ... He looked exactly the way she felt, and he walked over to her side.

"Hey," he said.

"I'm Bliss," she said.

"Of course you are." He nodded.

CHAPTER 4