Instead, she felt like she couldn't get full. They were about to try to open a portal to hell she should be too nervous to eat. They ate breakfast late in the dining hall, and Alex piled her plate high as she always did. As promised, she was nothing but polite then she curled up in bed and went back to sleep until Mercy woke her. Saturday morning, she slipped out while Mercy was still asleep and called over to Scroll and Key. She'd told herself she was going to get through the year clean, but the year was being a dick, so she'd do what she had to. She'd dosed herself with a little basso belladonna. She liked standing with a red Solo cup in her hand, flanked by her friends, pretending to be buzzed. Alex drank water the whole night and was bored out of her skull, but she didn't mind. Elmo's sad slump of an apartment, its hopeful weather vanes spinning slowly on the roof. The party was at a house on Lynwood, not far from St. Were Eitan's people still watching Mira? Or had he decided to leave her mother alone now that Alex was doing what she was told? California seemed less like another coast than another age, a hazy time before that Alex wanted to keep blurry, the details too painful to draw into focus. Mercy on her right - hair in a shiny black bob, big vintage earrings in the shape of daisies, caution in her eyes. Lauren on her left - thick honey-blond hair and teeth so white they looked like a flashlight beam. They paused by the swing to take pictures and Alex chose one to send to her mom, the one where she looked happiest, the one where she looked all right.

Mercy and Lauren wore strappy sandals, but Alex didn't have any and she stuck to her battered black boots. Alex felt like they were a tiny army, three sleepwalkers in dainty nightgowns. Alex even put on a dress, short and black, held up by cobweb straps, identical in all but color to Mercy's and Lauren's. She'd created a kind of makeshift canopy over her bed in blue tulle that made the whole place feel glamorous.īut Mercy and Lauren wanted to go out, so they went out.

Mercy's side was already elaborately turned out in art prints and strips of poetry in Chinese characters collaged with fashion illustrations. She wanted to stay in that night, catch up on rest, finish hanging posters in her room.

Hell bent leigh