The Cheerleaders(36)

“So, do you cheer?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I’m on dance team.” Carly must not remember that the cheerleading team was disbanded. She doesn’t look like she remembers what she did yesterday.

“Cool, cool.” She takes another drag from her vape, bored of me already. “What brings you out here? You’re not in college already, are you?”

“No.” I don’t know what else to say. I nod awkwardly to her vape: “How is that different from a cigarette?”

“There’s no tobacco or tar and shit.” Carly considers the device in her hand as if someone stuck it there without her noticing it. “Honestly, I don’t know why I bother. I’ve been smoking since I was fifteen.”

“It’s hard to quit,” I say. “It took my stepdad like twenty years.”

Carly eyes me as a white cloud billows around her lips. “So are you checking out the campus or something?”

The look on her face is clear: What the hell are you doing here?

“Yeah,” I lie. “I recognized you and figured I’d say hi. Were you friends with my sister?”

“I mean, we cheered together. But I was new that year, so I never got to know her or anything,” Carly says.

The cold nips at my fingers. I stick my hands in the pockets of my North Face jacket. “What about Juliana Ruiz?”

Carly eyes me. “We went to the same cheer camp that summer. We hung out a bit. Why?”

“I saw a picture of you two at a football game. Were you close?”

“I barely knew her. I mean, I hate to say it, but your sister’s friends were kinda conceited.”

She doesn’t sound like she hates to say it at all. In fact, it sounds as if she’s been dying to say it to someone. My annoyance is colored by an unpleasant thought—were my sister’s friends conceited? I try to remember a time when Susan and Juliana actually spoke to me beyond an obligatory hi.

Everyone likes to talk about how adored the dead girls were. I never stopped to consider the alternative—that Juliana and Susan and maybe even Jen herself had enemies.

“Do you remember Ethan McCready?” I ask Carly.

Carly turns and looks at me. “Who?”

“He made a hit list that year and got expelled. The cheerleaders were on it.”

“Oh.” Carly gives a small shudder. “Him.”

“So you know him?” I ask.

“Nuh-uh.” Carly brings her vape stick to her lips. “I never said one word to the kid, and then I find out he wants to kill me? Fuck that.”

I have to clamp my mouth shut to keep my jaw from dropping, because it seems totally lost on Carly that Ethan wanted to kill all the cheerleaders—and five of them actually wound up dead.

“Why would Ethan hate you if he never even talked to you?” I say.

“Kids like that always hate cheerleaders.” She moves her vape stick away from her lips, eyes on me. “Except one cheerleader.”

My stomach goes all slippery. “You mean my sister.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Carly’s still watching me, her spidery eyelashes unblinking. It’s deeply unsettling.

“A lot of guys liked Jen,” I say. “Ever since middle school, all the guys liked her.”

“Well. I don’t know if it was one-sided.” Carly’s razor-thin eyebrows arch up. “With Ethan, I mean.”

My heartbeat quickens. “What are you talking about?”

Carly’s eyes sparkle. I know something you don’t know. I decide right there that I hate her.

“She was the only one who wasn’t on his hit list,” Carly says. “You didn’t know that?”

“That doesn’t mean she liked him.”

“Well, they were friends as kids. He lived around the corner from her,” she says, as if she’s forgotten Jen and I were sisters and lived in the same house. “The two of them, like, went off into the woods together all the time.”

That’s impossible. My sister would have never hung out with someone like Ethan. I never even saw him on our street. “Who said that?”

Carly’s mouth pinches, as if she’s holding back a smug smile. “Let’s just say it came from a reputable source.”

I feel another fissure in my patience. “Who?”

“Susan Berry,” Carly says. “The same day she saw Ethan writing the hit list, she saw Jen slip something inside Ethan’s locker. When she told some senior on the cheer squad, they convinced her to tell Heinz.”

Bullshit. The word zips around my head like a pinball. “Susan thought Jen had something to do with the hit list?”

“I don’t know what she thought,” Carly says. “But she told Principal Heinz everything she saw.”

“Susan wouldn’t do that to Jen. She wouldn’t just make up some bullshit story about her helping Ethan write a hit list.”

“Well, maybe she didn’t make it up.” Carly holds my gaze and takes another pull from her vape. Lets the smoke out her nose. “You can’t believe everything you hear, though. Girls are always whittling little weapons to stab each other with.”

The last part is the only thing she’s said that makes sense. “Right.” I bite back the dozens of nasty words I have for this girl. This stupid, lying, awful girl who implied my sister had something to do with Ethan McCready’s hit list. “I have to go. Sorry I kept you from studying.”