But the nightmares were the worst. Nightmares that left her screaming herself awake. Nightmares of running, nightmares of someone taking hold of her—as if she weren't in control—and she would wake up, shivering and cold, the sheets drenched with her sweat. Her parents assured her it was normal. Like it was a normal thing for a fifteen-year-old girl to wake up screaming so loudly her throat dried up and she choked on her own spit.
But now, at Block 122, Jack Force was standing up, and Bliss stood up too excusing herself from Mimi's attention. She'd stood up on impulse, just to be moving, just to be doing something other than just being a spectator to the Show That Was Mimi, but when she'd said she needed a smoke, she found she really did. Aggie Carondolet, one of the Mimi clones, was already snaking her way outside. Bliss lost Jack halfway through the crowd, and she flashed the stamp on her right wrist to the guard, who had to let people out and back inside due to the draconian smoking laws in New York City. Bliss found it ironic that New Yorkers considered themselves so cosmopolitan when in Houston, you could smoke anywhere, even inside a beauty salon, while you were under the dryer; but in Manhattan, smokers were consigned to the margins and left to deal with the elements.
She pushed open the back door and found herself in an alleyway, a small dark corner between two buildings. The alley between Block 122 and The Bank was a petri dish of warring cultural allegiances—on one side, preening hipsters in tight, expensive, European clothes, tossing their bleached hair over zebra-print jackets; and on the other, a scraggly group of lost children in their tattered and pierced clothing but an uneasy truce existed between the two parties, an invisible line that neither group ever crossed. After all, they were all smokers here. She saw Aggie leaning against the wall, hanging out with a couple of models.
Bliss rooted in her hooded Marc Jacobs car coat (borrowed from Mimi, part of the makeover) for her cigarettes and tapped one out. She brought it to her lips, fumbling for the matches.
A hand extended from the darkness, offering a small, lit flame. From the other side of the alley. The first time someone had braved the divide.
"Thanks," Bliss said, leaning forward and inhaling, the cigarette glowing red at its tip. She looked up, exhaled, and through the smoke recognized the guy who'd offered it. Dylan Ward. A transfer—just like her—to the sophomore class from somewhere out of town. One of the odd-ones-out at Stepford-like Duchesne, where everyone had known everyone since nursery school and ballroom dancing lessons. Dylan looked handsome and dangerous in his customary beat-up black leather motorcycle jacket over a dirty T-shirt and stained jeans. It was rumored he'd been expelled from a succession of prep schools. His eyes glittered in the darkness. He flicked his Zippo closed, and she noticed his shy smile. There was something about him—something sad and broken and appealing … He looked exactly the way she felt, and he walked over to her side.
"Hey," he said.
"I'm Bliss," she said.
"Of course you are." He nodded.
CHAPTER 4
The Duchesne School was housed in the former Flood mansion on Madison Avenue and Ninety-first Street, on prep-school row, across from Dalton and next to Sacred Heart. It was the former home of Rose Elizabeth Flood, widow of Captain Armstrong Flood, who had founded the Flood Oil Company. Rose's three daughters were educated by Marguerite Duchesne, a Belgian governess, and when all three were lost during the unfortunate sinking of the SS Endeavor during an Atlantic crossing, a heartbroken Rose returned to the Midwest and bequeathed her home to Mademoiselle Duchesne to found her dream institution.
Little had been done to transform the home into a school: among the prerequisites of the behest was that all the original finishes and furniture were to be carefully maintained, which made entering the building akin to walking backward in time. A life-size John Singer Sargent portrait of the three Flood heiresses still hung above the marble staircase, welcoming visitors into the magnificent double-height entryway. A Baroque crystal chandelier hung in the glass-windowed ballroom that overlooked Central Park, and Chesterfield ottomans and antique reading desks were arranged in the foyer. The shiny brass sconces were now wired for electricity, and the creaky Pullman elevator still worked (although only faculty were allowed to use it). The attic, a charming garret room, was transformed into an art center, complete with a printing press and a lithograph machine, and the downstairs drawing rooms housed a fully equipped theater, gym, and cafeteria. Metal lockers now lined the fleur-de-lis wallpapered hallways, and the upper bedrooms housed the humanities classrooms. Generations of students swore that the ghost of Mrs. Duchesne haunted the third landing.
Photographs of each graduating class lined the hallway to the library. Since The Duchesne School was formerly an all-girls institution, the first class of 1869 showed a group of six dour-faced maidens in white ball gowns, their names gracefully etched in calligraphy. As the years progressed, the daguerreotypes of nineteenth-century debutantes gave way to the black-and-white photographs of bouffant-haired swans of the 1950s, to the cheerful addition of long-haired gentlemen in the mid- 60s, when Duchesne finally went coed, leading to bright color photographs of winsome young women and handsome young men from the current crop.
Because, really, not much changed. The girls still graduated in white tea dresses from Saks and white gloves from Bergdorf's, and were presented with garlands of twined ivy on their heads as well as the requisite bouquet of red roses along with their diplomas, while the boys wore proper morning suits, complete with pearl-tipped pins on their gray ascots.
The gray tartan uniforms were long gone, but at Duchesne, bad news still arrived in the form of a canceled first-period class, followed by an announcement made over rustling static on the antiquated sound system: "Emergency chapel meeting. All students asked to report to the chapel at once."
Schuyler met Oliver in the hallway outside Music Hum. They hadn't seen each other since Friday night. Neither of them had broached the subject of encountering Jack Force outside The Bank, which was highly unusual, since the two of them dissected every social situation they experienced down to the minute detail. There was a studied coolness in Oliver's tone when he saw Schuyler that morning. But Schuyler was oblivious to his aloofness—she ran up to him immediately and linked her arm in his.
"What's going on?" she asked, tucking her head against his shoulder.
"Hell if I know." He shrugged.
"You always know," Schuyler pressed.
"All right—but don't say anything." Oliver melted, enjoying the feel of her hair against his neck. Schuyler was looking particularly pretty that day. She was wearing her long hair down for once, and she looked like a pixie in her oversized Navy peacoat, faded jeans, and broken-in black cowboy boots. He looked around nervously. "I think it has something to do with the crowd that was at Block 122 this weekend."
Schuyler raised her eyebrows. "Mimi and her people? Why? Are they getting expelled?"
"Maybe," Oliver said, savoring the thought.
Last year almost the entire crew team had been banished for illicit behavior on school grounds. To celebrate a win at the Head of the Charles, they had come back to school that evening and trashed the second-floor classrooms, leaving graffiti'd expletives on the walls and proof of their night— broken beer bottles, piles of cigarette stubs and several cocaine-laced dollar bills—to be found by the janitors the next morning. Parents petitioned the administration to change their decision (some thought expulsion too harsh, while others wanted nothing less than criminal charges filed). That the ringleader, a toothy Harvard-bound senior, was the Headmistress's nephew only added to the fire. (Harvard promptly recalled his admission, and the expelled coxswain was currently yelling himself hoarse at Duke.)