Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles 1)

Open your eyes; they can’t get any worse. Or maybe they can.

She patted Lena on the shoulder.

Watch and learn.

She was staring at the Royal Court, sucking on her cherry lollipop. I hoped it was too dark for them to see her creepy cat eyes.

No! They’ll just blame me, Ridley. Don’t.

Gat-dung needs to learn a lesson. And I’m just the one to teach it to them.

Ridley strode toward the stage, her glitter heels clicking against the floor.

“Hey, babe, where ya goin’?” Link was right behind her.

Charlotte was walking up the stairs, in yards of shiny lavender taffeta two sizes too small, toward her sparkly, plastic silver crown and her usual place in fourth position of the Royal Court, behind Eden—Ice Handmaiden, I guess. Just as she was taking the last step, her gigantic lavender sweatshop creation caught the edge of the riser, and when she stepped up onto the last stair, the back of her dress tore right off, right at the feebly sewn seam. It took Charlotte a couple of seconds to realize it and by then, half the school was staring at her hot pink panties, the size of the state of Texas. Charlotte screamed a bloodcurdling, now-everyone-knows-how-fat-I-really-am scream.

Ridley grinned.

Oopsies!

Ridley, stop!

I’m just getting started.

Charlotte was screaming, while Emily, Eden, and Savannah tried to shield her from view with their teen wedding dresses. The sound of a record scratching ripped across the speakers, as the record that was playing abruptly changed to the Stones.

“Sympathy for the Devil.” It could’ve been Ridley’s theme song. She was introducing herself, in a big way.

The people on the dance floor just assumed it was another one of Dickey Wix’s screw-ups, on his way to becoming the most famous thirty-five-year-old DJ on the prom circuit. But the joke was on them. Forget light strands shorting out; within seconds all the bulbs above the stage and the track lighting along the dance floor began to blow, one by one, like dominoes.

Ridley led Link onto the dance floor, and he twirled her around as Jackson students screamed, pushing their way off the floor, under the spray of sparks. I’m sure they all thought they were in the middle of some kind of electrical wiring disaster that Red Sweet, Gatlin’s only electrician, would get blamed for. Ridley threw her head back, laughing and undulating around Link in that loincloth of a dress.

Ethan—we have to do something!

What?

It was too late to do anything. Lena turned and ran, and I was right behind her. Before either of us reached the doors to the gym, the sprinklers went off, all along the ceiling. Water poured into the gym. The audio equipment started to short out, sparking like an electrocution just waiting to happen. Wet snowflakes dropped to the floor like soaked pancakes, and soap-flake snow turned into a bubbling mess.

Everyone started to scream, and girls dripping mascara and hair product ran toward the door in their soggy taffeta skirts. In the mess, you couldn’t tell a Little Miss from a Southern Belle. They all looked like pastel-colored drowned rats.

As I reached the door, I heard a loud crash. I turned to the stage just as the giant glitter snowflake backdrop toppled. Emily flopped out of position, off her step on the slippery stage. Still wa

ving to the crowd, she tried to catch herself, but her feet slipped out from under her and she fell to the gym floor. She collapsed into a pile of peach and silver taffeta. Coach Cross went running.

I didn’t feel sorry for her, even though I did feel sorry for the people who would be blamed for this nightmare: the Student Council for their dangerously unstable backdrop, Dickey Wix for capitalizing on the misfortune of a fat teenage cheerleader in her underwear, and Red Sweet for his unprofessional and potentially life-threatening wiring of the lighting in the Jackson High gym.

See you later, Cuz. This was even better than a prom.

I pushed Lena out the door in front of me. “Go!”

She was so cold I could barely stand to touch her. By the time we got to the car, Boo Radley was already catching up to us.

Macon shouldn’t have worried about her curfew.

It wasn’t even half past nine.

Macon was infuriated, or maybe he was just worried. I couldn’t tell which, because every time he looked at me, I looked away. Even Boo didn’t dare look at him, lying at Lena’s feet, thumping his tail on the floor.