From the Force twins, Bliss knew the basics—they'd found Aggie in "the Land of Nod" — the back room where the club hid druggies who'd passed out—a dirty little secret that Block 122 had successfully kept out of the tabloids, with hefty bribes to cops and gossip columnists alike. Most of the time patrons who passed out woke up hours later just a little worse for wear, with a great anecdote to tell their friends— "And I woke up in this closet, man! What a long strange trip, right?" and were sent home (mostly) intact.
But something had gone wrong on Friday night. They hadn't been able to revive Aggie. And when "the ambulance" (the owner's SUV) had deposited her at the St. Vincent's ER—Aggie was already dead. Drug overdose, everyone assumed. She'd been found in the closet, after all. What did you expect? Except Bliss knew that Aggie didn't touch drugs. Like Mimi's, her vices of choice were tanning salons and cigarettes. Drugs were looked down upon in Mimi's circle. "I don't need anything to get high. I'm high on life," Mimi liked to crow.
"She was … sweet," Bliss offered. "She really loved her little dog."
"I had a parrot once." A red-eyed sophomore nodded. She'd been the one who'd handed Mimi tissues in the hallway. "When she died, it was like losing a part of myself."
And just like that, Augusta «Aggie» Carondolet's death went from a tragedy to a mere springboard for an earnest discussion about how pets were people too, where to find pet cemeteries in the city, and whether cloning your pet was the right ethical choice.
Schuyler could barely disguise her contempt. She liked Mr. Orion, liked his shaggy-dog laid-back approach to life, but she was disgusted by the way he let her peers turn something real—the death of someone they knew, someone hardly sixteen years old—a girl they'd all seen sunbathing in the cortile, powering squash returns in the lower court gyms, or hoovering brownies at the bake sale (like all popular Duchesne girls, Aggie had a love affair with food that was out of proportion to her super-skinny appearance)—into a trivial matter, a stepping-stone to talk about everyone else's neuroses.
The door opened, and everyone looked up to see a red-faced Jack Force enter the room. He passed his late form to Mr. Orion, who waved it away. "Sit down, Jack."
Jack walked purposefully across the room to the only remaining empty seat in the classroom—next to Schuyler. He looked tired, and a little rumpled in his creased polo with the shirttails hanging out and baggy wool pants. A slight electric charge went through Schuyler's body, a prickly and not unpleasant sensation. What had changed? She'd sat next to him before, and he was always invisible to her, until now. He didn't meet her eye, and she was too frightened and self-conscious to look at him. It was odd to think they were both there that evening. So close to where Aggie had died.
But now another Mimi disciple was prattling about her hamster, who'd starved to death when they went on vacation. "I just loved Bobo so much," she sobbed into a handkerchief as the rest of the class voiced their sympathy. Tales of the demise of a similarly beloved lizard, canary, and rabbit were next on deck.
Schuyler rolled her eyes and doodled in the margins of her notebook. It was her way of zoning out from the world. When she couldn't take it anymore—her spoiled classmates' navel-gazing rants, endless math lectures, the yawn-inducing properties of single-cell division—she retreated into pen and paper. She'd always loved to draw. Anime girls and saucer-eyed boys. Dragons. Ghosts. Shoes. She was absentmindedly sketching Jack's profile when a hand reached out and scrawled a note on top of her page.
She looked up, startled, instinctively covering her drawing.
Jack Force nodded somberly at her, tapping on her notebook with a pencil, directing her gaze to the words he'd written.
Aggie didn't die of an overdose. Aggie was murdered.
CHAPTER 7
A gleaming Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow was waiting in front of the Duchesne gates when Bliss emerged. She felt slightly embarrassed, like she always did when she saw the car. She saw her half sister, Jordan, who was eleven and in the sixth grade, waiting for her. They had let the lower form out early too, even though they hardly knew Aggie.
The door to the Rolls opened, and a pair of long legs stepped out of the car. Bliss's stepmother, the former BobiAnne Shepherd, wearing a tight pink velour tracksuit with the zipper pulled down to reveal her ample bosom, and high-heeled Gucci clogs, began looking frantically around the clustered students.
Bliss wished, not for the first time, that her stepmother would let her take a cab or walk home like every other kid at Duchesne. The Rolls, the Juicy, the eleven-carat diamond, it was all so Texas. Bliss had learned, from her two months in Manhattan, that it was all about stealth wealth. The richest kids in class wore Old Navy and were on strict allowances. If they needed a car, their parents made sure it was a sleek and unobtrusive black Town Car. Even Mimi took cabs. Flashy displays of status and affluence were looked down upon. Of course, these were also the same kids who wore pre-stained jeans and unraveling sweaters from precious SoHo boutiques that charged in the five figures. It was all right to look poor, but actually being poor was completely inexcusable.
At first, everyone at school thought Bliss was a scholarship kid, with her fake-looking Chanel bag and her too-shiny shoes. But the appearance of the Silver Shadow Rolls every afternoon soon put an end to that rumor. The Llewellyns were loaded, all right, but in a vulgar, cartoonish, laughable fashion, which was almost as bad as having no money, but not quite.
"Darlings!" BobiAnne trilled, her voice carrying down the block. "I was so worried!" She gathered her daughter and her stepdaughter in her skinny arms, pressing her powdered cheek against theirs. She smelled like calcified perfume— sweet and chalky. Bliss's real mother had died when she was born, and her father never talked about her. Bliss had no memory of her mother. When she was three, her father had married BobiAnne, and they'd had Jordan soon after.
"Stop it, BobiAnne," Bliss complained. "We're fine. We're not the ones who were killed."
Killed. Now, why had she said that? Aggie's death was an accident. A drug overdose. But the word had come out naturally, without her even thinking about it. Why?
"I do wish you'd call me Mama, darlin'. I know, I know. I heard. The poor Carondolet girl. Her mother is in shock, the poor thing. Get in, get in."
Bliss followed her sister inside the car. Jordan was stoic as usual, taking her mother's histrionic ministrations with a studied indifference. Her sister couldn't have been more dissimilar to her. Whereas Bliss was tall and willowy, Jordan was short and stocky. Bliss was strikingly beautiful, but Jordan was so plain she was almost homely, a fact that BobiAnne never failed to point out. "As different as a swan from a water buffalo!" she lamented. BobiAnne was always trying to put Jordan on some kind of diet and admonishing her for her lack of interest in fashion or a "beauty regimen" while praising Bliss's looks to the heavens, which aggravated Bliss even more.
"You girls are not to go out anymore without a chaperone. You especially, Bliss, no more sneaking out with Mimi Force to god knows where. You're to be home every night by nine." BobiAnne said, nervously gnawing on her thumbnail. Bliss rolled her eyes. So now just because some girl died at a nightclub she had some kind of curfew? When did her stepmother even care about stuff like this? Bliss had been going to parties since seventh grade. She'd had her first taste of alcohol then, and had gotten stupid-drunk at the fairgrounds that year; her friend's older sister had had to come and pick her up after she'd vomited and passed out in the haystack behind the Ferris Wheel.