Lynn Weingarten: Bad Girls with Perfect Faces

First published in Great Britain in 2017

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

First published in the USA in 2017 by Simon Pulse,

an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

Text copyright © 2017 by Lynn Weingarten

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978 1 4052 7158 5

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1494 5

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties.

Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN First published in the USA in 2017 by Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division Text copyright © 2017 by Lynn Weingarten The moral rights of the author have been asserted First e-book edition 2017 ISBN 978 1 4052 7158 5 Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1494 5 www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

SASHA SASHA We were holding hands, palm against palm. I could feel his heart beating, his blood against my blood. When I looked up, his smile was wide and real. “Ready?” he said. I faked a smile back. I had gotten so good at faking things. I thought: You brought this on yourself, Sasha. You will never get to stop pretending. I thought: Protect those you love, no matter what the cost. He squeezed my hand. This is exactly what I always wanted. And nothing I ever wanted at all. And there is just no taking anything back. “Let’s go,” I said. “Road trip!” he said. He couldn’t begin to imagine what this actually was. He had no idea what I’d done. What any of us had. I turned the key. The engine started. We went.

PART 1 PART 1

SASHA: 3 WEEKS, 1 DAY EARLIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

PART 2

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

XAVIER

XAVIER

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

1 YEAR LATER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Back series promotional page

SASHA

We were holding hands, palm against palm. I could feel his heart beating, his blood against my blood.

When I looked up, his smile was wide and real. “Ready?” he said.

I faked a smile back. I had gotten so good at faking things.

I thought: You brought this on yourself, Sasha. You will never get to stop pretending.

I thought: Protect those you love, no matter what the cost.

He squeezed my hand. This is exactly what I always wanted. And nothing I ever wanted at all. And there is just no taking anything back.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Road trip!” he said.

He couldn’t begin to imagine what this actually was. He had no idea what I’d done. What any of us had.

I turned the key. The engine started. We went.

PART 1

SASHA

3 WEEKS, 1 DAY EARLIER

On the eve of Xavier’s seventeenth birthday, I decided I was finally going to tell him the truth.

We were in his bathroom with a folding chair pushed up against the sink and I was dyeing his hair as his birthday present.

“I want it to look like a very deep part of the ocean,” he’d said a few days earlier, when he’d asked me to do it. “Like something a whale would drink.”

I’d taken this as a good sign: him wanting something, expressing wanting something. He’d spent the last month in his room wanting nothing but quiet and to sleep, or maybe his ex-girlfriend back, though we mostly didn’t talk about that part.

“The ocean isn’t any color,” I’d said. “It’s just water.”

“Then like the bottom of the ocean if somebody dumped a whole bunch of blue food coloring in it.”

I bought the bleach and a bottle of dye that looked like ink. I also got a bag of Swedish Fish, because that was our favorite candy, and it worked with the whole ocean theme. We were both really into the ocean back then.

I put the bleach on his hair while he sat on the chair. I had to lean in to do it, and that made my heart pound, and then I felt guilty for its pounding, because it was messed up to feel that way about him and be that close without him knowing. But I’ll tell him soon , I promised myself. I will tell him, and it won’t be a secret anymore.

The bleach burned our eyes and our noses as it turned his hair from black to coppery gold, and then from coppery gold to almost white. We drank whisky and ate the candy and watched part six of the eight-part ocean documentary series we’d been working our way through on his laptop. This episode was about whales and how sometimes a whale will go years in between seeing any other whales. It just floats along down there in the dark, all alone. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Xavier said. But I knew he didn’t mean it.

After the bleach, I put on the dye. Xavier had already thrown away the plastic gloves, and so I got the blue all over my hands, and then it wouldn’t come off. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” he said when he saw what had happened. But he was laughing, which meant it was worth it.

We poured more whisky into our mugs and clinked them.

The buzzer on my phone went off, it was time to rinse. “I’ll get in the shower,” Xavier said. I got up and started to leave the bathroom, and he said, “No, just turn around.” But it felt very wrong to be in there while he was taking his clothes off, considering, even if I wasn’t looking.