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am I to expect now?” she went on. “You’re not going to be a bore and preach or anything, are you? I really can’t have that.”
    “No,” I said. No fear of that. Or of speaking. Or of doing anything but ignoring each other.
    “Good. What
are
you staring at?” she demanded of Lissa.
    “Are those custom Balenciagas?” Lissa breathed, her gaze locked on the high-heeled sandals dangling from Mac’s fingers.
    “These?” She glanced at them. “I suppose they are. Good eye.”
    “My mother has a pair,” Lissa said with longing.
    “You can borrow them, if you like.”
    Lissa looked as though she’d died and gone to heaven. “Serious?”
    Mac shrugged. “They’re from the spring collection. When I get the fall ones, I won’t want them anymore.”
    Which sort of put a different spin on it. She’d be better off donating them to Career Closet. Lissa straightened. “Thanks, but we’re probably not the same size.”
    “Whatever.” She lifted an eyebrow at me. “I found your Ms. Tobin. About the room arrangements.”
    “Oh?”
Please, Lord. Let her have found another room
.
    “The only other empty bed, apparently, is with you.” She glanced at Shani. “So since I’m already here, I may as well make the best of it.”
    “Could you be any more unkind?” Gillian inquired. Her tone might have been polite, but her eyes sure weren’t. “Carly is the nicest person you could hope to meet. You don’t need to treat her like trash. Or the rest of us, for that matter.”
    Mac smiled. “I have the cleaning staff deal with trash. I thought I was treating you rather differently.”
    Gillian was up off the bed by now. “Different is right. I suggest an attitude adjustment.”
    “I suggest you toddle off to bed, little rice ball.”
    Gillian flew into her face. “You want to repeat that?”
    The smile had spread into a grin. Mac was enjoying this— deliberately antagonizing anyone within reach. “Are you deaf, too? I said—”
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “Which one?”
    “Why are you so mean?”
    Mac shrugged. “What difference does it make? You can always leave.”
    “And Carly gets to be stuck here with you? We’re better friends than that.”
    “Oh, are we all going to have a nice, cozy pajama party? Because if not, you’re going to have to get out sooner rather than later. Do us a favor and make it sooner, would you?”
    “Are you
looking
to make enemies?” Shani asked her. “Because let me tell you, this school isn’t the place to do that, if you can help it.”
    “Why is it so different from anywhere else?” The emotional temperature in the room was this close to redlining, and she looked as cool and amused as if she were at a garden party.
    “The people who go here make things happen,” Shani said. “If you make enemies out of everybody, what’s going to happen when you leave and want an internship or a summer job?”
    “I’ll blow dust in their faces, hopefully,” she replied. “You can’t possibly imagine that the opinions of anyone here matter to me.”
    Shani looked at me. “I’m so sorry, Carly, but I have to go. I can’t take any more of this.”
    “Me, too,” Gillian said. “Come on, Lissa.”
    As Lissa hugged me, she whispered, “The first thing the devil does is make you sorry you chose God. Don’t let Mac get to you.”
    Easier said than done,
I thought as I watched the door close behind them. I looked at the calendar on my desk.
    Thirty, sixty . . . only seventy-three days left to go.
    LISSA GRABBED ME the next day on our way to U.S. History. “Did you hear?”
    “Hear what?”
    Kids wove and split around us in the entry hall as Lissa dragged me off to the side under a big oil painting of Eleanor Spencer, the Countess of Carrick, who had founded the school when Edward VII was Prince of Wales. I’d never heard of her before I came here, but the gown she’d worn for her portrait had been designed by Worth in 1885, and I never missed an opportunity