Blue Bloods (Blue Bloods 1)

"Friday. At The Bank."

"Aggie Carondolet was at The Bank?" Schuyler asked skeptically. That made as much sense as Mimi Force being spotted shopping at J.C. Penney. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I mean, she wasn't technically at The Bank, but outside, you know, where everyone smokes downstairs, in the alley next to Block 122," Dylan explained.

"What happened to you?" Schuyler said. "We never saw you again after midnight."

"I, uh, met somebody," Dylan admitted, with a sheepish grin. "It's no big deal."

Schuyler nodded and didn't pry.

They walked out of the chapel, past Mimi Force, who was standing in the middle of a sympathetic circle of friends. "She'd just gone out for a smoke ..." they overheard Mimi say, dabbing at her eyes. "Then she disappeared... We still don't know how it happened."

"What are you looking at?" Mimi spat, noticing Schuyler staring at her.

"Nothing - I..."

Mimi flicked her hair over her shoulder and snorted in annoyance. Then she deliberately turned her back on the three of them and went back to reliving Friday night.

"Hey," Dylan said, passing the tall Texan girl in their class, who was part of the huddle. "Sorry about your friend." He put a light hand on her arm.

But Bliss didn't even acknowledge that she'd heard him. Schuyler thought that was odd. How did Dylan know Bliss Llewellyn? The Texan girl was practically Mimi's best friend. And Mimi despised Dylan Ward. Schuyler had heard her calling him a ?vagrant? and a ?wastoid? to his face when he refused to give up his seat in the cafeteria. She and Oliver had warned him when he'd sat down, but he wouldn't listen. "But this is our table," Mimi had hissed, holding a tray that contained a paper plate of dry lettuce leaves surrounding an undercooked hamburger. Schuyler and Oliver had immediately grabbed their trays, but Dylan had refused to budge, which had instantly endeared him to them.

"It was a drug overdose," Dylan whispered, walking between Schuyler and Oliver.

"How do you know?" Oliver asked.

"It's the only thing that makes sense. She passed out at Block 122. What else could it be?"

Schuyler thought: aneurysm, heart attack, diabetic seizure. There were so many things that could cause a person's untimely demise. She'd read about them. She knew. She'd lost her father in her infancy, and her mother was stuck in a coma. Life was more fragile than anyone ever realized.

One minute, you could be getting a smoke in the alley on the Lower East Side with your friends, having drinks and dancing on tables in a popular night club. And the next minute, you could be dead.

;

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.