The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (55 page)

“What doesn’t these days?” Natasha asked.

She had a point. Ever since Thomas had died, everything had felt weird. Laughing, eating, talking, studying. But partying, no matter how much we tried to justify it, felt even weirder than everything else.

“All we have to do is get through the next couple of hours,” Kiran said with a degree of grimness unfit for a party girl of her caliber. “Then, tomorrow night, we’ll all be outta here.”

“It will be nice to be home for a few days,” Ariana agreed, pausing outside the open double doors. Inside, our classmates
milled about, sipping punch and chatting. Some were even dancing. “Get away from all this insanity.”

I nodded my agreement, even though I neither a) agreed nor b) was actually going home. On day one, my father had arranged for me to spend Thanksgiving here at Easton with some of the other scholarship students and foreign kids who didn’t celebrate the holiday and were too far from home to travel. Getting home was too expensive and just not worth it. Thanksgiving had never been big in the Brennan household anyway—what with so little to give thanks for and a mother whose idea of a big home-cooked meal was ordering in from Boston Market and having it delivered instead of picking it up.

“Shut up, you guys. You’re depressing Reed,” Noelle said.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come home with me?” Natasha asked. She had floated this option earlier in the week, but I had declined. I knew she wanted to spend as much time as possible with Leanne while she was in New York and I didn’t want to be in the way. Plus, to be honest, I didn’t like Leanne all that much. Or at all. But to each her own.

“Really, I’ll be fine,” I said, feeling conspicuous. I shook my hair back and smiled, standing up straight. “I heard the apple pie is to die for,” I joked.

All the pretty faces around me fell. Everyone looked into the Great Room. My heart thumped. Wow. That had been a highly inappropriate thing to say.

“Let’s just go in,” I suggested.

“Good plan,” Noelle said.

She cleared her throat and led the way. Only a few steps off the plush carpet of the hallway and onto the hardwood floor inside, she stopped. Suddenly I felt as if the whole room was closing in on me.

Thomas was everywhere.

“He has
got
to be kidding me,” Noelle said.

Huge photos of Thomas clung to poster board on every available wall surface. Thomas standing in front of Grecian ruins. Thomas two-fisting tropical drinks with a straw hat on his head. Thomas and his brother, Blake, on skis. Thomas on a horse. Thomas with Dash and Gage on the back of some boat named
My Second Bride
. Thomas and Josh in suits and ties. Thomas and some random girl dressed for a formal. Thomas and three big-breasted waitresses. Thomas and an exotic beauty who was licking his face while he grinned.

Thomas. Thomas. Thomas.

And now I couldn’t breathe.

Noelle stormed across the room and unleashed that stored-up shit fit on Dash. I turned around to flee.

“Don’t.”

Ariana’s cold hand was on my arm. I felt like all the oxygen was being sucked directly out of my lungs.

“I can’t do this. I can’t stay here,” I said.

Everyone was watching me. Concerned faces. Amused faces. A camera bulb flashed. I felt as if there was a space heater inside my
body, emanating heat through my pores. Thomas was dead. Thomas was dead. Thomas was dead.

“Reed, we have to do this. We have to look at him and accept what we’ve lost,” Ariana said. She swallowed, took a breath, and looked around. “We have to accept that he’s gone.”

My mind felt like it was a whirling moth, trapped inside a lantern, frantically trying to beat its way out. “How can you say ‘we’?” I asked. “You don’t understand what it’s like.”

Ariana’s eyes were back on me like that. Her lips were thin and white.

“I understand that everyone is watching you,” she whispered. Her grip tightened like a claw. “Now, you can either be a weakling who turns and runs, or you can be strong and face this. Your choice.”

I knew which one she wanted me to be. Which one even I wanted me to be. The question was whether or not I was up to the challenge.

I turned around slowly and scanned the room. Most of the people who caught my eye quickly looked away. I forced myself to look at the pictures again. Thomas had led such a full life . . . and I had known nothing about it. I had never known he had traveled so much. Never realized that he and his friends were so close. Never known who his family was. Never known how many girls he had been with.

I caught a glimpse of Thomas and his face-licker and was overcome with jealousy and a severe sense of emptiness. Not a single
photo had ever been taken of me and Thomas. We hadn’t been together long enough, or I hadn’t been important enough, for us to be captured on film together.

The moment I thought this, I felt deeply ashamed. How could I stand here feeling sorry for myself? Thomas was dead. He would never have any of these experiences again. All because some psycho out there had felt the need to end his life. God, what I wouldn’t give to look that person in the eye and rip his heart out.

“Deep breath,” Ariana said. “You can do this.”

I inhaled slowly through my nose.
Let Ariana’s confidence cool me
. Across the room, Gage smirked in our direction. He and Dash both sported suits and loosened ties and looked very proud of themselves, even as Noelle ranted at them.

“Let’s get something to drink,” I suggested.

“Now you’re talking,” Kiran said.

This time, I led the way. When we got to the drink table, I dunked a cup directly into the punch bowl and sucked the fruity liquid down my dry throat. Kiran took a moment to slip out her flask under the table and spike her drink and Taylor’s.

“Nice work,” I said to Gage. “You guys should go into funeral planning.”

“It
is
the only business where you’re guaranteed a nonstop flow of customers,” Gage replied lightly.

This boy needed a good ass-kicking. Like yesterday. Maybe Noelle should have let them go after Thomas’s townie.

“You need to take down the pictures, Dash,” Noelle said,
apparently attempting to regain her composure. “It’s Tim Burton–level morbid.”

“What? I think it’s cool,” Dash said, admiring his handiwork. “We’re supposed to be celebrating Thomas’s life. Well, this was his life.”

“It’s creepy,” Kiran said, shuddering as she took a sip of her punch. “It’s like he’s staring at us.”

“From beyond the grave,” Taylor put in.

Gage scoffed. “And the Oscar for superfluous drama goes to—”

Dash laughed and the two boys slapped hands. “Nice!”

“This from the guys who were forming a lynch mob just days ago,” Noelle said, rolling her eyes.

“I don’t understand you, Noelle. Did I or did I not ask for your help planning this, and did you or did you not turn me down cold?” Dash asked, squaring his broad shoulders.

Noelle’s eyes narrowed. I felt a lovers’ spat coming on. “What’s your point?”

“My point is, you didn’t want to get involved, so now you don’t get to complain about it,” he said.

Noelle’s mouth fell open. Dash looked mighty proud of himself. No one, not even Dash McCafferty, rendered Noelle speechless very often. Could it be that the balance of power in this relationship was shifting? You could practically see the hope in his eyes.

“Why don’t you girls all down some of Kiran’s secret stash and unclench?” Gage said, with his usual subtlety. “Meanwhile, we’ll be
over here letting Dean Marcus congratulate us on a job well done.”

Gage slapped his hand down on Dash’s shoulder and tugged him away. Noelle fumed silently as she watched the guys lope casually across the room. She wasn’t big on making scenes, but I knew Dash was going to pay for that one later. Possibly, she was already plotting her revenge.

“I’m sorry about this, Reed,” she said. “I suppose etiquette and testosterone cancel each other out.”

I took a sip of my punch and set the glass down on the table. “You don’t have to apologize for them, Noelle,” I said. “It’s good, actually. Ariana’s right. I need to face this head-on. I need to stare right into the face of the guy who said he loved me and then lied to me and was then brutally murdered. In fact, I think it’ll make the whole mourning-process thing that much easier.”

“Reed—”

I was ranting. Billings Girls didn’t rant.

“I’m going to the bathroom now,” I told Ariana. “Or does that make me a weakling too?”

She opened her mouth to speak.

“Actually, forget it. I don’t care,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m going now, and when I get back, I’m going to dance.”

“I’ll be ready!” Kiran said, raising her glass.

My eyes were dry as sand as I wove my way back through the room. Reality was finally setting in on me. Thomas was gone. And even when he had been here, I had been just a blip to him, a nothing.

A nothing who seriously had to move on.

“Are you all right? You look like you’re evaporating,” Josh said, handing me a glass of iced punch.

I was taking a break from my cathartic dance ritual and my skin was beaded with sweat, but it felt good. It felt like I was getting something out of my system. I just hoped whatever it was didn’t smell.

I took a sip of the fruity punch and watched Noelle, Kiran, and Taylor, who apparently still had stuff to work out. They were all out there, hogging the center of the dance floor. I saw a few non-Billings girls shooting them snide looks behind their backs, but whenever one of my friends turned their eyes on the same girls, they were all smiles. Such power.

“I’m fine,” I said casually. “What do
you
think of the decorations?”

Josh looked around. “I’m gonna go with cool but eerie.”

I smirked. “Where’s that one from?” I asked, lifting my hand toward the shot of him and Thomas all dressed up. I tried to look
at Josh instead of Thomas. Pretend Thomas wasn’t there. Pretend I was just a-okay, hunky-dory, peachy-keen. All phrases my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Cornerstone, had used on a daily basis.

“That was Penny Halston’s wedding the week before school started,” Josh replied. “The guy she married has some stake in the Anheuser-Busch Companies, so they had bottled beer at the reception. Thomas snagged, like, a whole dolly full of cases and stayed up all night drinking, just to see how far he could get.”

I shook my head and looked at the floor. Were there any Thomas stories that didn’t include him being wasted?

“When we found him at dawn, he was lying on the eighteenth green, singing ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer’ and flinging the empties into a sand trap,” Gage said with a laugh, joining us.

“Almost killed one of the landscaping crew,” Josh added.

“Whatever. Like twenty stitches is such a big freaking deal.” Gage took a slug of his drink. “Kid did know how to party, though. But you knew that, didn’t you, Brennan?” he asked lasciviously.

He reached out as if to run his finger down my arm. Josh shoved Gage’s shoulder about two seconds before I would have grabbed Gage’s finger and twisted. “You have serious problems, you know that?” Josh spat.

“Look who’s talking, Hollis,” Gage shot back.

Josh glanced at me as if snagged.
Huh?

“Back off, asshole,” he said to Gage.

The last thing I needed right now was a scene. “Guys, come on—”

“Oooh. I’m so scared.” Gage set his drink down. “You think I’m scared of you, freak? Let’s go.”

“At least I’m not pathological,” Josh retorted.

“Well, maybe it just hasn’t been diagnosed!”

Another shove. Even trash-talking was more sophisticated at Easton. Bigger words, subtler insults.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dash walked over with his hands raised and lowered them onto Gage and Josh’s shoulders, with me in between. The man had a serious wingspan. “This is supposed to be a party. Everyone mellow out.”

“Mellow out? What have you been smoking?” Gage said, still belligerent.

“Nothing. I’m just saying, what’s there to fight about? All our friends are here, we’ve paid our tribute to Pearson, and day after tomorrow we’ll be home gorging on the best food of the year,” Dash said, leaning back against the wall next to Gage. “It’s all good.”

“Speak for yourself, dude,” Gage said. He took a step back from Josh. “Somehow I don’t think my mom’s new Venezuelan cook is going to know how to work a turkey.”

Subject officially changed. Josh’s shoulders uncoiled and Gage seemed to have already forgotten he was about to tear someone’s head off. Dash was
good
. Not for the first time, I appreciated his maturity and levelheadedness. He never stooped to join in with Gage’s random mockery and insults and was always able to defuse awkward situations. Plus, he’d managed to be in a solid relationship
with Noelle for three years—an achievement in and of itself. I saw politics in his future.

“Thank you,” I mouthed to Dash. The last thing I could handle just then was a pummeling between supposed friends. I’d already had enough drama for one semester. Dash nodded in response. I looked out at the dance floor and waited for my heartbeat to return to normal.

“Has your mother
ever
hired an American?” Dash asked Gage.

“Mara Coolidge? Champion of the should-never-be-employed? No,” Gage said.

“Well, I will be eating a nice home-cooked meal at my grandmother’s manse,” Dash said, glassy-eyed at the prospect. “Turkey, cranberries, stuffing, the whole nine.”

“Oh, you are so the all-American boy,” Gage said, reaching out to pinch Dash’s cheek. “What about you, new girl?” Gage asked. He walked over to the nearest table and sat, legs spread. We all followed, Dash and me sitting between Josh and Gage, just in case of a relapse. “What’s turkey day like in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania? Turkey roll and Bud from a can?”

Love this guy.
Love
him.

“Dude, back off,” Josh snapped.

“Josh,” I said. Like,
Calm down already.
I appreciated the effort, but I could take care of myself. “Actually, I’m not going home,” I told them. “I’m staying here.”