Copyright

First published in hardback in the USA by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

a division of Penguin Young Readers Group in 2006

First published in paperback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2012

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © 2006 by Maureen Johnson

Published by arrangement with Razorbill, a division of Penguin Young Reader’s Group, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Maureen Johnson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

Source ISBN: 9780007484515

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007479931

Version: 2017-02-01

Dedication

For J.W. Keeley, my little piece of hell on earth,

and my friend for all eternity. And Mr. Jones,

wherever he may be.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

two weeks earlier…

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Acknowledgments

Jack the Ripper returns…

Bedlam breaks free…

About the Publisher

So this was how it ended. The revelers had deserted, leaving plates of Spanish almonds and sushi and cupcake wrappers. Now there would be no more grand ballrooms with Assyrian kings and pampered dogs and English pop stars and the A3. No more midnight rides through the skies of Providence. No more Calculus II with Brother Frank. No more stolen moments with 116-year-old boys or staring at the golden brick mansion across the fields. It had come back to this mad room of antique perfume bottles and disagreements.

Only a handful of people would understand the real meaning of this event. The general public would be horror-struck. They would wonder how two best friends, two otherwise unassuming girls on the verge of adulthood, could have ended up like this. There would be new specials and magazine articles: ‘Teen Tragedy Stuns Providence,’ ‘Rhode Island Rampage.’ I would be cast as the brainy troublemaker — the angry little blond punk. Allison would be portrayed as my sweet, devoted friend — the one I had tricked and mislead and taken down this tragic path. The real villain would not appear in the stories at all.

Oh, I had no doubt that they’d blame the whole mess on me, probably just because I had spiky hair and a tendency to talk too much. That was the story of my life. And that life was over.

It doesn’t matter how old you are when you die, I’d been told. When you die, that’s the right time for you. I’d also been told my life was a small price to pay.

I was glad to pay it for Allison.

My hand fell away from the phone. The room grew dark and I felt myself slipping down the side of the sofa, down to the prized Oriental rug. This was my final move in the game, this graceless thud to the floor. There was only one question left in my mind…

Had I played it right?

two weeks earlier…

The reviews from the Junior Judges had gone up on the website in the middle of the night. This was how they described me:

JARVIS, JANE; CLASSROOM 2A: If you are trying to find Jane Jarvis, look down. Jane is the shortest person at St. Teresa’s, the littlest big. But that tiny body contains a huge brain. We must give this to her. Famously argumentative — we all remember fondly Jane’s impromptu speech during last year’s ‘Celebration of the Spirit of Womanhood’ assembly, when she openly debated with the visiting bishop about the rights of women in the church. We like a little less her brittle, bleach blond spikes. A retro no-no in our book. If you are the angry, brainy type, consider Jane. She can be your personal Yoda.

Nothing new there. I went right on to Allison’s. The first word struck me, and it was all downhill from there:

CONCORD, ALLISON; CLASSROOM 1A: Forehead first…Allison Concord has a showstopper. We have never seen anything quite like it. It’s kind of like an unused billboard or a makeshift landing strip at a small midwestern airport. Sexy. Comparable only to her gums, which are truly a sight to behold. The pinkest smile we’ve ever seen. She is best known for counting down every second to the junior prom — and then showing up without a date and looking very boo-hoo. Tragic. If you haven’t got anyone else for your big and no one else will take on a second…Well, we do what we must.

When there is blood on the water, the sharks will rise to the surface. And Big-Little Day, our yearly celebration of sisterhood, was one of the bloodiest days of the year.

Big-Little Day was a major school benchmark when seniors would officially ask a freshman or a new underclassman to be their ‘little.’ Enterprising freshmen would actively campaign the most popular seniors, leaving notes and tokens and generally sucking up in a really gross manner. It was a massively big deal to have a good little. Any self-respecting senior, it was understood, had to have at least three freshmen courting them. A few luminaries might have eight or ten offers. And selection was rapid. There was only one forty-five minute period at the start of the day to get it all done. By the end, we were expected to pull off our class rings and pass them to our chosen freshmen, who got to wear them for a day — making the whole thing a little creepily marriage-like as well.

The buildup to this event had been going on since school had started… clandestine meetings in the bathroom between classes, lunchtime congresses, a fury of note taking and illegal texting. But the really serious part was the evaluation by the Junior Judges, a group of self-nominated juniors who offered commentary on all the seniors on the day itself.

No one knew who the first Junior Judges were. The tradition was known to go back as far as the eighties. Back then, they got their message out using photocopied sheets that they stuck in all the freshman lockers. And every year since then, a group of juniors rose up and took on the task.

Even though they were self-chosen, the Junior Judges were hardly anonymous. This year’s group was a trio who called themselves the A3. The reason for this is so painfully pretentious that I can barely write it down, and if I really sit down and figure out how it is I even know this, something bad will happen to my head. So I won’t do that. I will simply explain that it comes from a size of paper in England called A3, which is really long paper. One of them went to England and discovered this, and they all started joking about how they liked ‘really long paper,’ as if that actually means something. Combine that with the fact that A generally means the best and the fact that there are three of them: Elsie Fast, Tracey Pils, and Lai Barden. It all comes together into one ready-made nickname. (Awful things like that tend to converge. Know that and you’ll be ahead of the game.)

These were the people digging up the past that I had worked all summer long to bury and cover in concrete. I had gone so far as to turn down a summer job helping to compile research data for my dad at his office at Brown, where he’s a professor. It had taken a lot for me to get that job in the first place — including a two-hour interview in which I had to prove that I knew enough math to handle it. And I gave it up. Instead, I made my money at the same summer job that Ally and I had always worked, scooping ice cream in a four-by-five foot fluorescent cell at Dibney’s. But this is what you do when your best friend needs you, even if it means chucking away an opportunity that could help you score a scholarship to college.

And the A3 may have just undone it all, simply by being their snarky, haggish selves.

My sister, Joan, was picking all of the green and orange pieces out of her bowl of Froot Loops when I came downstairs. Spread out in front of her were some books and papers. Joan never actually did her homework. I’m not sure Joan actually knew that she was supposed to do it — I think she may have been under the impression that she was just supposed to watch over it for the night and make sure nothing happened to it. Every morning, she took it out and checked to make sure that every page was as blank, every problem was as undone, and every answer was just as unwritten as when she’d first taken it under her wing.

‘What’s a parallelogram?’ she asked, peering at her textbook through two Loops she held up to her eyes.

My father was too busy poking at a Sudoku puzzle to answer. He couldn’t leave the house until he did one of the hard ones in under two minutes. My mother never joined our breakfast group because she was always asleep. She worked late managing a very fancy and very good restaurant in town called The Pink Peppercorn, providing us with the world’s best leftovers. Which is why I was having a bowl of cold sirloin tips for breakfast.

‘It’s a four-sided plane,’ I said. ‘The opposite sides are parallel.’

‘A four-sided plane?’ she repeated. ‘Okay, I am not falling for that one.’

Joan is two years younger than me. She didn’t get into St. Teresa’s Preparatory School for Girls. I’m completely used to her looking up at me with that lip-glossy stare of hers and asking questions like, ‘Is the Tour de France in Spain?’ or, ‘Do they make cotton out of plastic?’ This is a girl who I had convinced that Alaska used to be called Frigidaire. So sometimes she thought I lied to her.

My father smiled and shook his head. It never bothered him that Joan was like that. While she didn’t get my father’s savage intelligence or my mother’s dexterous common sense, she did get all the height, the muscle tone, and the strong and shiny brown hair. She was lovely and happy, even if she was as intelligent as a rubber band.

Whereas I, as the Junior Judges had so rightly pointed out, was four-foot ten and five-sixths inches (in school shoes) with blond hair, and I looked like an escaped street urchin from Oliver Twist. (The hair was dry and brittle because I dyed it with a home-brewed peroxide solution, which worked really well when I first started doing it as a freshman and couldn’t stop because if I used anything else on my hair, it turned a kind of moss-green color.)

Joan set her Froot Loops down and gazed at me evenly.

‘You have that look on your face,’ she said. ‘Are you thinking about Elton?’

My dad glanced up from his puzzle.

‘No.’ I gave her a silencing look, stiffening my jaw. She knew she wasn’t supposed to mention my ex in front of my dad because he would think I was still upset. It had been six months, three weeks, and two days since our breakup. I was over it.

‘It’s Allison, I said. ‘Today is Big-Little Day. I need to make sure she gets a little. This is the first big event since the prom. It means a lot to her. I can’t let anything bad happen.’

‘Allison will be fine,’ my dad chimed in. ‘Why would you need to worry about her?’

This was one thing Joan understood completely.

‘Ally needs to relax,’ Joan said. ‘Someone will definitely take her as long as she doesn’t get all… you know…spazzy.’

‘How do you keep someone from being spazzy?’ I asked, pushing aside some mushrooms that had attached themselves to the steaky goodness. ‘I know she’s great, but she’s going to be wound up today. She’s going to start breathing fast and get dizzy and scare away the freshmen.’

‘You can’t worry about something that hasn’t happened yet,’ my father said, turning back to his Sudoku. ‘You have to take life as it comes.’

This irritated me. When I worry about one thing, I frequently take it out on something or someone else. And the fact that my dad was offering stupid and totally untrue advice set me off.

‘Oh no?’ I said. ‘Isn’t worrying about things that haven’t happened yet the purpose of several major government agencies, like the army and FEMA? What about yearly checkups? Savings accounts? Tornado shelters? Earthquake-proofing?’

‘Moisturizer?’ Joan added.

‘You’re a math professor,’ I said. ‘What’s the study of probability? Figuring out what will probably happen. And then you dump all of that probability information into huge tables that insurance companies use. So they know who will probably crash their car, which places will probably get flooded, who might trip into the fireplace and set themselves on fire…’

‘I don’t think there’s a category for that, Jane.’

‘You see my point,’ I said archly. ‘Of course we know bad things do happen. And I know that Allison is probably going to spaz. She will probably start talking about her collection of Build-A-Bears or quoting entire episodes of Charmed, and while I think she’s cute, most people will think she’s insane and they will run.’

I was getting a little frenzied now. Joan was nodding away, like I was preaching and she had been infected by the spirit — but my dad was still back a few steps.

‘But she hasn’t done any of that yet,’ he said. ‘If you go into it with that attitude, there’s almost no point. Probability isn’t a guarantee. Give her some credit. You have to assume that she’ll do just fine.’

‘But she won’t.’

‘Well, then,’ my dad said, quietly folding his completed puzzle in half, ‘sounds like she had no chance in the first place. So I guess…’

He stood and flicked a lost Froot Loop over at Joan.

‘…you’ll just have to save her from herself.’

The sky was red that morning, which I think is supposed to be a sailor’s warning about something…storms, waves, sea monsters. It was a stupidly hot morning, too. October in Providence, Rhode Island, is not a hot time, normally. It’s New England — we like it cold and grim. We cultivate colds like some areas of the world nurture grapes and produce fine wines.

There was no homeroom for us. We were all instructed to go right to the gym, where folding tables had already been set up all along the walls. Where we, the seniors, were supposed to sit. The freshmen and new students would all stream in and approach us.

My fears turned out to be for nothing. Instead of the weepy Ally I was expecting, she walked in proudly examining a red velvet cupcake at arm’s length, displaying it to me.

‘I found it in my locker,’ she said with a grin. ‘With this.’

She held up a note that read: WILL YOU BE MY BIG?

‘Some freshman must be trying to suck up to you!’ I said with enthusiasm. ‘Would have helped if she’d left her name. But points for busting into your locker to leave you cake.’

She broke it in half and offered a piece to me, then immediately withdrew it and hid it behind her back.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Red chocolate. I wasn’t thinking.

I can’t eat red foods. They freak me out. No food should be the color of blood.

There was a warning squawk of the microphone, so Allison crammed the rest of the cupcake into her mouth, getting a little frosting on her cheek in the process. I felt bad about doubting her that morning. Allison was a big girl — she could handle herself.

‘Today’s your day,’ I said. ‘I can feel it. You’re doing a lot better than me. I got squat.’

‘Someone will come for you,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows you.’

Our vice principal, Sister Dominic, came up to the microphone to lead us through a Hail Mary; two specially written appeals to St. Teresa, begging her to help us all become better sisters; and one verse of ‘Join Us Together with a Rainbow of Love,’ a hymn written by a former student of questionable sanity. Then our student counsel president, Donna Skal, went to the microphone in the middle of the room.

‘Good morning, St. T.’s!’ she said, much, much too loudly. ‘A little warm in here today, huh? Must be all of that big-little energy!’

We were roasting in our polyester uniforms, yanking desperately at our collars, and twisting to find more air.

‘Sisterhood,’ Donna went on. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It usually means having a sister,’ I said to Ally in a low voice.

‘Would you shut up?’ she whispered. ‘They’ll kick us out, and then I won’t get a little.’

‘I can’t help it,’ I said. ‘I’m allergic to people who talk like spokesmodels.’

This wasn’t really fair. There was nothing particularly wrong with Donna, except for the fact that she was successful because she had that odd squeaky-cleanness that lots of teen pop stars exude, the kind that seems to have been manufactured in a laboratory. Her hair was genuinely golden, and her eyes were large, like a cartoon deer’s. She could sometimes be heard saying things like, ‘My sister told me I laugh in my sleep!’ (The best I’ve ever gotten from my sister was, ‘I thought there was something wrong with the dog, but it was just you snoring.’)

‘Sisterhood means loving each other no matter what we look like or how we dress outside of school,’ Donna explained. ‘Sisterhood means putting each other first. Sisterhood means believing in each other and going the extra mile.’

‘Or it means having a sister,’ I added quickly.

Ally giggled before she could stop herself and shoved her fist into her mouth, but she was a hair too late. Sister Dominic lifted herself up on her toes and scanned the seniors. She found us quickly. She held two fingers up in the air and then poked a finger first at me, then at Ally. I knew this gesture well. It translated into two demerits, each of you. Ally let out a low groan.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered.

One of the doors in the back opened. We all heard it, and everyone turned in unison.

‘There they are,’ Ally said, suddenly awed.

In a minute of shuffling and whispering, the freshmen were lined up like an advancing army, all with bright, crazy looks in their eyes. We quickly assumed our positions in the chairs. A jumpy, almost volatile vibe came into the room, and the temperature shot up about ten degrees.

‘And now,’ Donna said, ‘the big-little ceremony begins!’

The first flank of freshmen broke free and literally ran at us, targeting very specific people. They charged at Donna, who actually opened her arms to welcome them, like some kind of mother goddess.

‘I can’t watch,’ I said. But I did anyway.

A group with the easy stride of athletes made their way to Brooke Makepeace, the understated captain of the basketball team. There was a lot of giggling and near-skipping to Hillary Vorpel, school musical diva and former child star (of local theaters and supposedly ‘a very big show in New York’ that was never named). Within a minute, she was blinding four freshmen with her laser whites. We were sitting next to Kristin Durkin, who had no real portfolio except for being nice and kind of pretty, a good safety choice. Within a minute, she had two applicants.

‘Where is she?’ Allison asked, glaring at Kristin’s short line. ‘Why hasn’t she come up to me?’

‘Give it a minute,’ I said. ‘There’s still some in the back.’

The next wave was a slower, more considered group. They made their way to the next tier — not the superstars, but the perfectly acceptable people. The everyone elses. This was a slow, trickle-down kind of thing.

‘No one’s coming over here,’ Allison said. Her voice sounded odd. She was suddenly gruff, almost angry-sounding. I turned to find that she had gone a little bit gray. She was sweating, but then everyone else was, too. But she was also gripping the edge of her folding desk with an intensity that couldn’t be good.

‘Hey, Al,’ I said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said tersely.

The mysterious little didn’t come. Ten agonizing minutes went by. Allison watched the room and watched the clock. I watched Allison. She was naturally pretty pale, but now she was turning a color kind of like freezer-burned bread: not quite gray, not quite blue, not quite bread. Not a good shade to be. It started at her chin and zipped right up her head, right to her hairline — and that’s kind of a long way. I couldn’t take it anymore.

‘You’re not okay,’ I said. ‘You need to get some air. Just tell them you don’t feel good.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, clenching her teeth. ‘I’m just hot. I have to get a little.’

I became aware of a buzzing, which I at first thought was the undertow of all the conversations going on. I looked around, but all that was in front of me was a mob of schmooze. I don’t know why I looked up. I just did. That’s when I saw them… the flies. Hundreds of them were streaming in through the open windows. Most had gone right for the ceiling and were dripping down like icicles. I had never seen so many flies. There were entire constellations of them.

My hand automatically went out to tap Allison and point this out, but then I realized that this might not be good, not the way she was feeling. I looked around to see if anyone else saw this or if the heat had just driven me insane.

There was a loud scraping noise of a chair being pushed back. It echoed through the gym and caused many people to turn, including me. The sound came from directly next to me. It was Allison, leaping up from her seat. She was obviously trying to cut through the room and get to the door, but she ran straight into a freshman who was slowly and deliberately coming in the direction of Ally or me or Kristin.

Then Ally threw up.

Well, it was more than that, unfortunately. It was truly projectile, and it was accompanied by horrible coughing noises that almost sounded like barking. She got the poor freshman completely and totally, mostly in the hair.

For a second, there was no sound. Then there was a loud intake of breath and a sound of awe. A few higher-pitched squeaks. People backed up and moved away. The freshman let out a wail the likes of which I have never heard before. It was a real end-of-the-world scream. This stirred the room and sound increased — cries of sympathetic horror from all corners, as if Allison had just thrown up on everyone in the gym, everyone in the world. A few people rushed toward the freshman to help. No one was quite able to bring themselves to touch her — most pulled out tissues or anything they had on them and passed them to the girl.

No one reached out to help Ally except for me and one of the sisters who was standing nearby. Allison pulled away from us and ran for it. The crowd parted for her, and she was gone.

‘It’s not that bad,’ I lied.

I could see the soles of Allison’s saddle shoes poking out from under the pink stall door, toes to the ground. Classic puking position. But she wasn’t sick anymore — she was dead silent. I poked at the sole of one of her shoes with my foot. Nothing.

‘People will forget,’ I added. ‘They’re all too busy.’

Nothing.

‘And not everyone saw it.’ I was talking stupidly now, relentlessly, just to fill the air. Everyone saw it. Everyone would remember it for all time. It would be written into the fossil record.

I heard voices outside as people left the assembly and started to repopulate the halls. I heard cries of excitement. Just outside the bathroom door, freshmen were showing each other rings. Outside, there was joy. It was at that moment I realized I also hadn’t gotten a little. The shock and awe of what happened to Ally had stunned me briefly. But now, now I saw it — and it hit me harder than I imagined it would.

Help Ally, my good inner Jane told me. You didn’t really care that much about getting a little.

‘You want me to run down to the café and get you a ginger ale?’ I asked.

Finally, a reply.

‘I want you,’ she said, ‘to kill me.’

The bathroom door opened, and a very tall girl slipped inside. She was long. Easily six feet, one of which was all neck. The blue stripe on her blazer pocket told me she was a sophomore. The blazer looked very squeaky-new, and I’d never seen her before. She was the kind of person you would remember if you saw.

‘Hey,’ the girl said. She didn’t look like she’d come in for any real purpose — just one of those time-killer visits. She stood in front of the mirror and minutely adjusted the bands that held her two rust-red ponytails in place. Then she turned and looked at Ally’s shoe bottoms.

‘That was an interesting assembly,’ she said to the mirror. ‘I didn’t think anything cool would happen here, but that was pretty good.’

Together we looked down at Allison’s shoes. They did not reply, but the left heel did sink towards the ground a bit.

‘I’m new,’ the girl said. ‘That’s why I was there. I’m Lanalee. Lanalee Tremone.’

The warning bell rang. The shoes didn’t budge. I got down on my knees and peered under the door. Ally was resting with her head on the seat and a blank look on her face.

‘Shouldn’t she go home?’ Lanalee asked.

‘They don’t really let us go home here,’ I said, poking my hand under the door and stroking Ally’s ankle in a pathetic attempt to comfort her. ‘You pretty much have to be dead. And even then I think they’d just keep your body in the front office until the end of the day.’

The shoes shifted a little and drew themselves out of reach.

‘Do you think you can make it to English, Al?’ I asked. ‘We have to go or we’ll be late.’

One hoarse word of reply:

‘Go.’

‘I don’t want to go without you. Sister Charles will freak.’

‘Go.’

‘Can you come out?’

‘Go.’

I got to my feet. The girl leaned down and addressed the opening under the door gently.

‘Did you get a little?’ she asked.

I heard a slight shifting from inside the stall, but no answer was forthcoming. I shook my head.

‘Well, you can have me,’ she said brightly. ‘I didn’t get a big. There!’

This was an amazingly generous offer, considering. I’m not proud to say that it only highlighted the fact that I was still little-less.

‘I’ll stay with her,’ the girl offered. ‘I wasn’t planning on going to next period anyway.’

I didn’t really want to leave, but there wasn’t much I could do. Sister Charles had never actually killed anyone, but she did leave you with the feeling that she was capable of some deeply frightening behavior.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and tell her you’ll be late. Okay, Al?’

Nothing.

‘Go on,’ the girl said. ‘Really. Let me bond with my big.’

And so I left the bathroom, just as the second bell rang. I got a demerit from Sister Rose Marie for running in the hallway between classes for my trouble.

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