Introduction

A CrimeReads Most Anticipated Book of the Summer

Heathers meets The Secret History in this thrilling coming-of-age novel set in a boarding school where the secrets are devastating—and deadly.

When Sarah Taylor arrives at the exclusive St. Ambrose School, she’s carrying more baggage than just what fits in her suitcase. She knows she’s not like the other girls—if the shabby, all-black, non-designer clothes don’t give that away, the bottle of lithium hidden in her desk drawer sure does.

St. Ambrose’s queen bee, Greta Stanhope, picks Sarah as a target from day one and the most popular, powerful, horrible girl at school is relentless in making sure Sarah knows what the pecking order is. Thankfully, Sarah makes an ally out of her roommate Ellen “Strots” Strotsberry, a cigarette-huffing, devil-may-care athlete who takes no bullshit. Also down the hall is Nick Hollis, the devastatingly handsome RA, and the object of more than one St. Ambrose student’s fantasies. Between Strots and Nick, Sarah hopes she can make it through the semester, dealing with not only her schoolwork and a recent bipolar diagnosis, but Greta’s increasingly malicious pranks.

Sarah is determined not to give Greta the satisfaction of breaking her. But when scandal unfolds, and someone ends up dead, her world threatens to unravel in ways she could never have imagined. The St. Ambrose School for Girls is a dangerous, delicious, twisty coming-of-age tale that will stay with you long after you turn the last page.

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Excerpt

Chapter One

The St. Ambrose School for Girls

Greensboro Falls, Massachusetts

1991

My first view of the St. Ambrose School for Girls is from the back seat of my mother’s nineteen eighty-one Mercury. The ten year old car is utterly unremarkable except for being reliable, and the reason I’m in the back is because I put the laundry basket full of my bedding in the front passenger seat. My mother is a smoker and I can’t stand the smell. I have a theory that I can put my head out the rear window and get better air because I’m farther away from her.

I’m wrong.

We pull through a pair of stone pillars that are united by a graceful arch of black iron filigree, a necklace overturned, the perfect welcome to a pearls and sweater set institution of learning. I’m being dropped off here for my sophomore year of high school. I’m a fifteen year old charity case on scholarship because I won a spot I was not aware of having competed for. My mother filled out the application, and put a piece of writing of mine into the pool of candidates. Those five thousand words, which I had no intention of anyone ever reading, coupled with my idiot savant grades, were the key to unlock this door I do not want to enter.

“Look at this lawn,” my mother remarks. She gestures around with her left hand, the lit cigarette between the fore—and middle fingers a laser pointer with an angry orange end. “This is a lawn. I’ll bet they mow it every morning.”

I am not as impressed with the lawn. I am not impressed with any of the brick buildings or the sidewalks that wind around the campus, either. All of this, from the acceptance to the packed sheets in that basket to the two-hour trip from where she and I live, has little to do with me, and everything to do with my mother’s need to upgrade something in her life. Our tiny two bedroom house is cluttered with issues of People, Star, US, the National Enquirer, the Globe. Each one of them is a pulpy, soft-spined vacation into another, better world for her, and after she’s done reading them, she keeps them like they’re diaries of a vacation she never wants to forget.

I wonder sometimes if she isn’t moving me out of her house so that she can use my bedroom for storage space. I know this isn’t true. The real story is that I’m the 99 cent houseplant she is shifting to a better, more sunny spot on the sill by the sink. I’m the pragmatism that I doubt she will admit to consciously, a recognition that her own life is a stagnation of going-nowhere, but damn it, she can figure out how to get her fucked up daughter into Ambrose.

“Look at this campus. I tell you, Sally.” She flicks her Virginia Slim out of her window, ashing onto the lawn and evidently missing the irony that she’s crapping up the very thing she’s admiring. “They know how to do things at this school.”

My mother puts a push into a lot of her words, as if her tongue is frantically shoving the syllables out of her lipstick-slicked mouth, like someone trying to bail out a boat. For her, an ocean of unspoken urgency surrounds the hull of her leaky skiff of nervous chatter, so there are always words for her, and rarely a pause for consideration of content. She speaks like the magazines she reads, everything headlined, drama manufactured out of her dull and endlessly reconstituted reality being a school lunch lady at Lincoln Elementary.

“Where are we going?” she asks. When I don’t answer her, she looks over her shoulder. “Sally, help me here. Where are we going?”

My name is Sarah, not Sally. I’m not sure how I got the nickname, but I hate it, and the first thing I’m going to do here is introduce myself as Bo. Bo is a cool name for a girl, unisex and unusual, just as I am fairly unisex and definitely unusual. Unlike the other girls I see walking around the campus—who look like they’ve stepped out of the rainbow pages of a United Colors of Benetton ad—I’m dressed in black and loose clothing. I’m also not wearing shoes, but lace up boots with steel soles. My hair is dyed jet black, although my mouse brown roots are starting to show already, a trail of mud at night.

My mother, whose name is Theresa, goes by Tera. Tera Taylor. Like a movie star. She said she named me Sarah so it rhymed, so we could be twins forever. She’s told me over and over again she wants me to have a little girl and name it Lara to keep the tradition going, even though, technically, Lara does not rhyme with Tera or Sarah. It would have to be Lera. The fact that my mother can only get sort-of-there with her own construct is the kind of thing that should go on her driver’s license.

I’m just hoping to make it to sixteen at this point.

“Sally, come on.”

It’s pointless to mention that I have not been on this campus before either, and there’s no map to consult.

“I think it’s over there,” I say, pointing in any direction.

This mollifies her and we find the correct dorm by luck. Tellmer Hall is right out of the brochure of any New England prep school: brick, three stories, two wings and one main entry with a limestone pediment bearing its name. Just below the slate roofline, there is a limestone frieze bearing the names and profiles of musical luminaries, Bach, Mozart, Mendelsohn. As I get out of the back of my mother’s Mercury, I stare up at the faces and start counting down for Thursday, June 4 when, according to this year’s school calendar, summer vacation starts.

“Look at this building. Just look at it.”

My mother slams the driver’s side door to add an exclamation point, and the sound of the hollow bang brings us attention from the other girls who are unpacking from their parents’ cars. As my mother smiles in the direction of a Volvo station wagon and then a Mercedes sedan, there’s expectation and relish in her still attractive features, like she’s prepared to be invited to dine with the Izod-wearing fathers and the Talbot’s-clad mothers. What she fails to notice, and maybe this is a blessing, is that their perusal of us is of short and disinterested duration, a cursory assessment of my black Goth-ness and my mother’s synthetic fiber, fake-von Furstenberg dress. They don’t even bother to reject us. We’re not significant enough for that. We’re something they look through, ghosts of the lower middle class.

“Go introduce yourself to the girls.”

When I don’t respond, my mother glares over at me, and then refocuses on the Mercedes as if she’s trying out the logistics of dragging me to it.

She’s going to need a fireman’s hold.

“We have to unpack the car,” I say.

The Mercury’s trunk has two suitcases in it. One a battered black, the other a winsome blue that has inexplicably fared better with age—black seems like it would be stronger, more durable. I take them out one by one. As I straighten, I see around the corner of the dorm. There is a plumbing truck. Albrecht & Sons. It is white with blue lettering, the telephone number starting with an area code I am not familiar with.

“You really need to introduce yourself,” my mother says.

“Why do the plumbers need to meet me?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She exhales over her shoulder, flicks the butt onto the lawn and lights another cigarette. She smokes when she’s frustrated with me, but she also smokes for a lot of other reasons.

I look over to the Mercedes that has commanded her attention. The car has a rich, creamy yellow body, and its hub caps are painted to match the sunny shade. The fact that, at this moment, there isn’t a fellow student of my own age to introduce myself to anywhere near it is irrelevant. My mother wants to go over and make acquaintances between adults, and as she stares at the mother and father, she gleams like lame. In her mind, she’s no doubt advancing way past dinner in the small town we went through about three miles down the road. She’s spending a late-season week at their summer house. Then they’re all skiing together wherever people like that ski together in Colorado during January break. Finally, three years from now, she sees them all sitting together at graduation, sharing in-jokes and reminiscing with a tear about how fast the young ones have grown up, and how lucky they are to have found each other.

Lifelong friends in a blink, the assumptions and the fantasy as real to her as my assessment that the last thing those two wealthy people want is for a pair of scrubs like us to do anything other than wash that pretty, buttercup-colored sedan of theirs.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she announces. “We’re going over there.”

My mother links her lower arm through my own, and I think of the old-fashioned Wizard of Oz movie, Dorothy lined up with her friends, skipping down the yellow brick road. It’s an apt image on one level, at least. We’re going to my mother’s version of the wizard, and out of the two of us, I’m the only one who cares what’s behind the curtain. My mother is not just content to be on the surface; staying superficial is necessary for her survival.

The parents of the Mercedes—and, presumably, a student who’s also in this dorm—look at us a second time as we approach. I’m embarrassed by everything about my mother, the dress, the lipstick stain on her cigarette, her peroxide yellow hair, this Hail Mary “introduction” that has taken us over a boundary line that to me is as obvious as a border wall. I’m also ashamed of my cheap black clothes, even though they are a persistent expression of my inner self, a signal to the world that I am different and apart from the crowd. Armor.

The good news about looking like a freak is no one tries to talk to you.

“Isn’t this a marvelous campus!” my mother says. “I’m Theresa—Tera Taylor. This is Sarah Taylor. She goes by Sally. How do you do.”

Ah. She’s switched into Rich Person Dialectic. I’ve heard her do this before. She picked it up while watching Robin Leach.

And so much for my going as Bo here.

The father’s eyes go to the V in the top of my mother’s dress. Then he looks at her mouth. My mother recognizes this perusal and shifts her body so that one hip moves out of place, the inquiry on his part answered with an affirmative on hers. Meanwhile, the wife notices no part of this currency exchange between her husband and what could arguably be called a tart. Her eyes land on me, and the pity in them makes me look at the pavement.

I don’t want any part of this. But this whole thing, from the clandestine application and shocking admission, to the excited way my mother talked all summer long about my coming “to St. Ambrose” to this “introduction,” is the same rabbit hole for Tera Taylor, a glossy magazine she is creating for herself. The defect in her reasoning, which is a blindness similar to the other mother failing to see her husband’s flirtation, is that no one else is going to buy this bullshit. I’m no more a St. Ambrose girl than Tera Taylor could be.

“Greta will be down in a minute, I’m sure,” the mother of the Mercedes is saying. “She was here last year as a freshman so she’s excited to see everyone.”

“Greta and Sarah!” My mother claps and ash falls on the back of her hand. She shakes it off with a grimace she almost hides. “The two of them will be the best of friends. It’s fate.”

“Here is Greta now.”

My eyes swing like the boom of a sailboat, an attempt to come about and salvage this poor tack I’m on. What I see emerging from the darkened interior of the dorm gives me no relief. It is blond. It is tall. It has limbs that would be described as willowy in a supermarket romance novel.

It has the eyes of a predator.

Even, if not especially, as it smiles.

“Greta’s” smile is shiny and white, a second sun. She has freckles dusting across a nose that is so straight and perfectly proportioned, you might assume she’d had it done—until you look at her father and realize that all that aquiline is the result of breeding, no donkey in this bloodline of thoroughbreds. She also has cheekbones with hollows under them—which makes me decide her baby fat was ordered to vacate the premises years ago—and her clothes are expensive and right out of Seventeen magazine, a boxy turquoise jacket, a coral crop top, a kicky skirt with contrast leggings, ballet flats.

She is a jewel.

“Greta,” her mother says, “this is your new best friend, Sally.”

There is no awkward pause because the girl puts her hand right out. “Welcome to Ambrose.”

My mother golf claps around her cigarette again, but doesn’t burn herself this time.

I glance at Greta again in case I was wrong, in case my insecurities have misconstrued what is actually going on. As our eyes meet, she somehow manages to smile wider and narrow her stare at the same time. It’s a cute trick.

If you’re Cujo.

My heart pounds sure as if I am already running in the opposite direction, throwing myself in the trunk of the Mercury and refusing to come out until I am released from this ruse.

My mother is wrong. Greta and I will never be friends.

And one of us is to be dead by the end of the semester. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. On page 9, Sarah’s mother drops her off at St. Ambrose: “Then she waves at me with her cigarette and I step back to watch the Mercury pull away.” Do you remember the moment your family dropped you off at school (whether high school or college)? What sights and sounds stand out most in your memory?

2. Sarah and Strots appear to be an unlikely duo upon their first meeting, with Sarah’s all-black ensemble a direct contrast to her roommate’s casual blue sportswear. How do you predict their relationship will evolve throughout the book?

3. On page 75, Sarah tells Strots about Greta’s bullying, and contrary to what she expected, Strots believes her wholeheartedly. Sarah is floored: “This is such a relief that I blink fast.” Think of a time when you have found solace in a friend’s comfort, or been able to provide comfort and support in a difficult time. Why are bonding moments like these so important, especially during teenage years?

4. How to the dynamics of the Mountain Day football game (starting on page 95) reflect the character dynamics of the book as a whole? For example, what does Sarah’s game-ending play reveal about her relationship with Greta and the rest of the characters?

5. Sarah lives with bipolar disorder, and her narration lays bare the thought patterns that wind through her darkest moments (example on page 117). What was your experience reading these pages and stepping into Sarah’s world?

6. The CVS employees have a tremendous effect on Sarah’s life, from Margie and Roni’s kindness with the clothing dye (page 54) to Phil’s intervention on a later trip (page 128). What does their influence suggest about the importance – and prevalence – of community?

7. Nick Hollis – an authority figure in the dorm – exhibits questionable behavior towards the girls on his floor, while providing Sarah with a trusted outlet after a dark moment. After reading chapter 14, take stock of your opinions on him. How does his character change as the book goes on, and how does Sarah’s view of him change as she questions the new information she learns?

8. Tera Taylor returns to St. Ambrose in chapter 15. How do her interactions with Sarah compare and contrast with her actions on drop-off day? What does this suggest about Tera’s character as a whole?

9. On page 208, Sarah encounters a horrible surprise. How does the author’s writing heighten the reader’s vicarious experience of the anxiety, shock, and terror Sarah feels?

10. There are a few characters in this book whose actions have harmful consequences. Who would you characterize as the book’s true villain, if there is one?

11. The book contains a surprising, whirlwind ending. As you neared the end of the book (especially around page 281), what were your predictions for what would happen?

12. After finishing the book, look back at your prediction. How close were you to discovering the truth?

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