Then she turned and sailed out of the room, her nose in the air. I stared at myself in the mirror

above the sink, my eyes rimmed in red, my nose all puffed up. And just like that I felt another

wave of nausea. Because Ivy could not have pulled off this particular prank. She hadn't even been

here last year. There was no way she could have known about my first chore day. No way she

could have known what Cheyenne had done to me. I gripped the sides of the sink and stared into

my own terrified eyes.

All this time I had been so sure that it was Ivy. But the only people who knew about what had

happened that morning were Billings Girls.

157

* * *

After scrubbing the rug in the sink, remaking the bed, and cracking open my window to clear the

smell (which took all my strength and about twenty minutes of struggling against years of paint

buildup), I finally crawled into bed. Then I lay there wide awake, shivering against the cold

streaming through the screen, petrified to close my eyes.

If not Ivy, then who? If not Ivy, then who? Who would want to torture me like this? I had plenty of

enemies now, sure, but when all of this had started, there'd been no one. No one but Ivy, who

hated everyone

in Billings. Or Ariana, of course, but she was locked up somewhere. If it wasn't Ivy,

then I was at a loss. If it wasn't her, then it could be anyone.

If only I could talk to Noelle. She would know what to do. She would know exactly how to sniff out

my stalker, how to catch the person in the act or smoke them out or something. At the very least

she could

158

talk me down. Make me feel better about the situation. Make me feel above it all. Make me feel

safe.

But that was never going to happen. Noelle was never going to forgive me. I was on my own.

As I stared at the swirls in the crumbly stucco ceiling, a thousand thoughts whirled in my head, but

one kept squirming its way to the forefront.

I had to win Noelle back. She was the key to putting an end to all of this. She was the key to

winning back my life. I wished I had told her about the stalking from the beginning, but I had been

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