The Dolls(20)

Everyone is streaming by in a hurry, and nearly all of them are shooting me curious glances, but no one stops to help. I look down at the schedule again. It says on the top that I’ve been assigned to locker 445.

Yet I have no idea where locker 445 might be, or how I’ll find my first class. I look around, hoping I’ll spot Peregrine or Chloe or another one of the Dolls, because at least they’re not complete strangers.

That’s when I notice that the hallway is draped in black crepe ribbons. Signs that say We love you, Glory and We’ll miss you, Glory are taped on walls, and I spot a few photographs on a pin board nearby, framed in black. I step closer and see Glory Jones’s face smiling out at me.

“You look lost.” A voice comes from the right, startling me, and I turn to see a slender girl with a heart-shaped face, big brown eyes, and thick dark hair. She’s wearing a purple tissue-weight cardigan and faded purple Converse high-tops with her uniform, almost as if she’s trying to look anti-glamorous. I like her instantly.

“Yeah. It’s my first day, and I have no idea how to get to my locker,” I admit. “Or my first class. And I’m beginning to feel like an idiot.”

“It was super rude of Mrs. Perkins to send you off without telling you where to go. I’d blame it on all that tacky hair bleach going to her head, but around here, if you’re not one of the chosen ones, you can forget about anyone giving a crap about you.”

“The chosen ones?”

She laughs, although it sounds a bit like a snort. “You’ll see.” She squints at my schedule and says, “All right, let’s get you to your locker.” We begin walking, and she adds, “By the way, I’m Liv.”

“Eveny,” I reply.

She reads my schedule as we dodge other students in the hall. “Cool, we have physics together sixth period,” she says. “Other than that, our classes don’t match up. But I’ll show you where your first period is.”

We reach a row of lockers, and she points to one near the middle. “Here we are. Locker 445.”

I look at the slip of paper, which tells me the combination is 16-7-13. I turn the dials, and the door pops open, revealing a neat stack of books—and a name scratched into the inside panel: Glory Jones. I freeze.

“This was Glory Jones’s locker?” I ask.

Liv peers inside and sees the curvy letters too. “Can’t believe they’d reassign it so soon. Then again, Glory was one of the nice ones. She’d probably want you to have it.”

I grab my textbooks for English and trig, my first two classes. But what I’m thinking is that, nice or not, Glory would probably prefer to still be here, using her own locker.

The bell rings. “Here we go again,” Liv mutters. She points down the hall and says, “Your English class is that way. Fifth door on the right. Mrs. Shriver. You’ll be fine.”

I take a deep breath, clutch my books to my chest, and begin walking, relieved that I’ve now met at least one potential friend who’s not dead.


The second bell rings a millisecond before I walk into English, which makes me officially late.

I feel two dozen pairs of eyes on me as I hand Mrs. Shriver my schedule and mumble that I’m new here.

“Oh yes, Eveny Cheval,” she says. “We were expecting you. You can take that empty seat in the last row.”

“No.” I hear a languid voice from the back, and I turn to see Peregrine, decked out in thick eyeliner, dark lipstick, and a lacy black silk camisole under her standard-issue oxford shirt. The same stone necklace I noticed at the funeral dangles in her cleavage, and she’s wearing a close-fitting black quilted leather vest. “Eveny will sit right here.” She gestures daintily to an empty chair beside her.

I hesitate, wondering if she’s just being nice to me because her mother’s making her, but she snaps her fingers, gestures to the seat, and says, “We don’t have all day, Eveny. Chop chop.”

“Go on, take the seat, dear,” Mrs. Shriver says, seeming to recover a bit as I move down the aisle toward Peregrine.

“Nice shoes,” Peregrine says, raising an eyebrow at me after I sit. “Did you borrow them from a nursing home?”

“The dress code said we had to wear black loafers and knee socks,” I say, glancing down. She’s wearing strappy black platform stiletto sandals on her bare, perfectly pedicured feet. I feel ridiculous.

“Eveny, you’ll soon learn that we don’t have to do anything,” she says. She turns away without elaborating.

As Mrs. Shriver begins to talk about The Great Gatsby, which I read last year in my American Lit class, I spot Chloe sitting beside Peregrine, wearing a dark fur stole. She’s paired her oxford with a set of Chanel pearls featuring a diamond-encrusted, interlocking double C. Her high-heeled Mary Janes are studded with what look like diamonds, and her hair is artfully mussed.