Free Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight Page A

endorsement. But then people seemed to decide that that was too stupid even to joke about.
    Finally, I hit some shade on the path, and I could make out the faces of the four other girls who were standing: Zadie, Bethany, Rachel, and Heather. Along with Dylan, the five of them looked like the ones who were in charge. It made sense. They were the main crew of popular senior girls, except for Dylan, who’d made the cut even though she was a junior. That was probably because she was Zadie’s best friend—a match that was almost as weird as Sylvia and me. Those five girls were the ones all the boys at Grace Hall wanted to sleep with and all the girls wanted to be. They were always together, too, even if it didn’t seem like they necessarily liked one another very much.
    I knew Rachel and Heather from the field hockey team. They were cocaptains. Heather was an old-school, upper-crust preppy with Mayflower looks and Rockefeller money. She spent summers in Nantucket and winter break at horse shows in West Palm Beach. The weirdest part about her was that she lived in Brooklyn and not on the Upper East Side. Rachel was from Paris and swore in French, which pretty much sealed her coolness. They both had thick, straight blond hair—Heather’s chin length, Rachel’s much longer—and could have passed for twins. Heather and Rachel were both really bitchy to all the other players on the field hockey team. So far, they’d mostly left me alone. It helped that, even as a freshman, I’d been twice the player they would ever be.
    I didn’t know Bethany personally, but I knew she was the group’s comic relief. She made sure everyone at school knew that. Ballsy and a little on the heavy side, she got suspended all the time for these big school pranks. She had a vicious sense of humor, too. She made kids cry all the time. That was probably part of how she got in with the Magpies: they were too afraid to keep her out. Rumor was that she was also willing to sleep with just about anyone, anywhere, too. In the Grace Hall world of emaciated skeletons, that could have helped make up for her extra poundage.
    And everyone knew Zadie. Dylan’s best friend and Grace Hall’s wildest child. Pale and wiry, Zadie had short, shaggy black hair that covered her bright blue eyes and a nose ring. She also had a big stripe of white hair on one side of her head, almost like a skunk. I wasn’t the only person who wondered if she’d put it there on purpose. I also wasn’t the only person way too afraid to ask. Zadie was always dressed in skinny jeans and a rumpled army jacket that was more couture than standard issue. She even had a little tattoo, on her forearm: CAVEAT EMPTOR . Word was that Zadie’s parents were totally lax—I mean, she was seventeen and had a tattoo—and that they even let her drink at home and went clubbing downtown with her sometimes. I was most surprised and most unpsyched to see Zadie there. I would have thought some dumb high-school club would have been way beneath her.
    When I stopped walking, I could finally see the faces of the two girls coming up the opposite hill: Charlie Kugler and Tempest Bain. They were sophomores, too, and looked as nervous as I felt. Neither of them was exactly mainstream popular either. Tempest, a ballet dancer, was new to school. She was a tall reed of muscle, with purplish streaks in her jet-black hair. Charlie was a teeny girl with cute, droopy eyes, baggy clothes, and, rumor had it, a $50 million trust fund, which included an original Warhol hanging in her bedroom.
    Charlie and Tempest and I looked at one another with the same confused, kind-of-spooked expression, shrugging as we met in front of the pack sunk in the trees. It seemed like the only thing the three of us could possibly have in common was that we’d all been curious enough—or dumb enough—to show up.
    “ Finally , for fuck’s sake,” Zadie said, clapping her hands together. She looked down at her big black watch. “You guys