Sweet Like Revenge

46 - Fill the Crown

Sienna had been gone for two weeks.

It had been two weeks since her red bottoms paraded up and down the school halls, since the rumor mill relayed every aspect of her day, since I had to watch in silence as she pretended to date the boy I knew she secretly loved.

But unlike the last time the queen was away, there was no battle of the bitches for the crown. The people had voted. They'd elected their interim. What they didn't know, though, was that she was there to stay.

As I sauntered down the school hall on my second Thursday as queen—Chontelle on my right, Kat on my left—I couldn't help but notice how similar being an Elite felt to being an outcast. People still whispered my name, still glanced in my direction but were quick to look away. And there was often a hint of bitterness in those glances, too, just as there had been back when I was Ana. But while that bitterness had derived from judgment, manifesting in the form of cruel sniggering and hushed insults, this resentment very clearly stemmed from something else. If I didn't know any better, I'd put it down to jealousy.

"You'll never guess who Willa Scott caught slinking around school yesterday."

I swung my eyes in Kat's direction. "Oh?"

"Astor," she muttered, cupping her hand around her mouth but making very little effort to lower her voice. "Picking up homework."

"His dad's back in town," Chontelle mumbled into my other ear. "For mediation. It only took a sexual assault allegation for him to take an interest in his child—"

"No surprises there." Kat scoffed. "Like father, like son."

I smiled to myself. To think, I once had to sneak around in the shadows for even a third of that information. Now? It was handed to me.

I blew the girls a kiss as we came to a fork in the hall. "Catch you at lunch."

They mirrored my affection before continuing along without me. With their backs turned, my painted smile fell.

There was a time when I'd kept Kat and Chontelle safe. When I'd steered my mission around them and tried to protect them from the fallout. Because they were nice to me.

No. Nice to Elle.

But Elle didn't exist.

Elle was a puppet. A Trojan horse. She didn't have feelings, or history, or something as humanlike as friends. She lived to serve Ana, to do her bidding. And Ana had very clearly stipulated that she wanted revenge on every bitch who ever wronged her.

Kat and Chontelle included.

"Elle?"

My eyes refocused just in time for me to see that I was two steps short of colliding into a flock of girls who were hovering directly in my path. Donning a pastel pink color scheme, matching plaid skirts, and ornate drop earrings, each looked more like a love child of Regina George and Cher Horowitz than the last. A petite blonde carrying a bubble-gum pink binder broke their ranks, stepping toward me with a nervous smile that read more as an angsty grimace.

I scooted around the group, heading toward my locker and motioning for Binder Girl to follow. "Hi..."

"Hazel," she informed me.

"Hi, Hazel." I peeled my eyes from my destination to cast them over her once more. She was short, relatively cute, with a tiny button nose and wide brown eyes. Her hair was cut at the same length as mine, and I noticed that a pretty pink headband was framing her face. A headband. The exact shade and size as the one I'd worn two days before.

"I noticed you weren't in English yesterday," she explained. "How did your root canal go?"

My eyes widened the slightest bit. Since when was my dental work a source of school gossip?