Sara Shepard - Perfect

Spencer shrugged. “I don’t know.” She glanced at Melissa, who gave her a brief, indecipherable smile. Spencer hadn’t talked to Melissa since their hot-tub session last night, and she felt a little strange around her sister. Apprehensive, almost.

“I had a chance to read it yesterday,” Mr. Hastings continued, folding his hands. “I love how you updated the concept for modern times.”

“So who goes first?” Spencer asked shrilly. There was no way they were talking about the content of the essay. Not around Melissa.

“Didn’t 1996’s Golden Orchid winner win a Pulitzer last year?” Mrs. Hastings asked.

“No, it was a National Book Award,” Melissa said.

Please stop talking about the Golden Orchid, Spencer thought. Then, she realized: for once, they were talking about her —not Melissa.

Spencer looked at her tiles. She had I , A , S , J , L , R , and H . She rearranged the letters and almost choked on her tongue. LIAR SJH. SJH, as in Spencer Jill Hastings.

Outside, the sky was raven-colored. A dog howled. Spencer grabbed her champagne flute and drained its contents in three seconds flat. “Someone’s not driving for at least an hour,” her father mock-scolded.

Spencer tried to laugh, sitting on her hands so her dad wouldn’t see that they were shaking.

Mrs. Hastings spelled WORM with her tiles. “Your turn, Spence,” she said.

As Spencer picked up her L tile, Melissa’s slim Motorola lit up. A fake cello vibrated out of the cell’s speaker, playing the theme to Jaws. Duh-DUH. Duh-DUH. Spencer could see the screen from here: new text message.

Melissa flipped the screen open, angling it away from Spencer’s view. She frowned. “Huh?” she said aloud.

“What is it?” Mrs. Hastings asked, raising her eyes from her tiles.

Melissa scratched her head. “The great Scottish economist Adam Smith’s invisible-hand concept can be summed up very easily, whether it’s describing the markets of the nineteenth century or those of the twenty-first: you might think people are doing things to help you, but in reality, everyone is only out for himself. Weird! Why would someone send me part of an essay I wrote when I was in high school ?”

Spencer opened her mouth to speak, but only a dry exhalation came out.

Mr. Hastings put down his glass. “That’s Spencer’s Golden Orchid essay.”

Melissa examined the screen. “No, it’s not, it’s my…” She looked at Spencer. “No.”

Spencer shrank down in her chair. “Melissa, it was a mistake.”

Melissa’s mouth was open so wide, Spencer saw the silver fillings in her molars. “You bitch!”

“Things got out of hand!” Spencer cried. “The situation slipped away from me!”

Mr. Hastings frowned, confused. “What’s going on?”

Melissa’s face contorted, the corners of her eyes turning down and her lips curling up sinisterly. “First you steal my boyfriend. And then my paper ? Who do you think you are?”

“I said I was sorry!” Spencer cried at the same time.

“Wait. It’s…Melissa’s paper?” Mrs. Hastings said, growing pale.

“There must be some mistake,” Mr. Hastings insisted.

Melissa put her hands on her hips. “Should I tell them? Or would you like to?”

Spencer jumped up. “Tell on me like you always do.” She ran down the hall toward the stairs. “You’ve gotten so good at it by now.”

Melissa followed. “They need to know what a liar you are.”

“They need to know what a bitch you are,” Spencer shot back.

Melissa’s lips spread into a smile. “You’re so lame, Spencer. Everyone thinks so. Including Mom and Dad.”

Spencer scrambled up the stairs backwards. “They do not!”

“Yes, they do!” Melissa taunted. “And it’s the truth, isn’t it? You’re a boyfriend-stealing, plagiarizing, pathetic little bitch!”

“I’m so sick of you!” Spencer screamed. “Why don’t you just die ?”

“Girls!” Mr. Hastings cried.

But it was as if the sisters were in a force-field bubble all their own. Melissa didn’t break her stare from Spencer. And Spencer started shaking. It was true. She was pathetic. She was worthless.

“Rot in hell!” Spencer screamed. She took two stairs at a time.

Melissa was right behind her. “That’s right, little baby who means nothing, run away!”

“Shut up !”

“Little baby who steals my boyfriends! Who isn’t even smart enough to write her own papers! What were you going to say on TV if you won, Spencer? Yes, I wrote every word of it myself. I’m such a smart, smart girl! What, did you cheat on the PSATs, too?”

It felt like fingernails scraping against Spencer’s heart. “Stop it!” she rasped, nearly tripping over an empty J. Crew box her mother had left on the steps.

Melissa grabbed Spencer’s arm and swung her around. She put her face right up to Spencer’s. Her breath smelled like espresso. “Little baby wants everything of mine, but you know what? You can’t have what I have. You never will.”

All the anger that Spencer had held in for years broke free and flooded her body, making her feel hot, then wet, then shaky. Her insides were so bathed in fury they were starting to prune. She braced herself against the railing, grabbed Melissa by the shoulders and started to shake her as if she were a Magic Eight Ball. Then she shoved her. “I said, stop it!”

Melissa stumbled, grabbing the railing for support. A frightened look danced over her face.

A crack started to form in Spencer’s brain. But instead of Melissa she saw Ali. They both wore the same smug, I’m everything and you’re nothing expression. You try to steal everything away from me. But you can’t have this . Spencer smelled the dewy humidity and saw the lightning bugs and felt Ali’s breath close to her face. And then, a strange force invaded Spencer’s body. She let out an agonized grunt from somewhere deep inside her and shot forward. She saw herself reaching out and pushing Ali—or was it Melissa?—with all her strength. Both Melissa and Ali fell backward. Their heads both made skull-shattering cracks as they fell against something. Spencer’s vision cleared and she saw Melissa tumbling down, down, down the stairs, falling into a heap at the bottom.

“Melissa!” Mrs. Hastings cried.

And then, everything went black.

Hanna staggered to the planetarium gates a little after nine. It was the weirdest thing, but it was kind of hard to walk in the court dress. Or sit down. Or, well, breathe.

Okay, so the whole thing was too damn tight. It had taken Hanna forever to wriggle into the thing and then even longer to zip up the back. She had even considered borrowing her mom’s Spanx girdle, but that would have meant taking the dress off and going through the zipper torture again. The process had taken so long, in fact, she’d hardly had time to do anything else before coming here, like touch up her makeup, tally the calories she’d eaten today, or import her old phone numbers into her new BlackBerry.

Now the dress fabric seemed to have shrunk even more. It cut into her skin and clung so tightly to her hips that she had no idea how she would pull it up to pee. Every time she moved, she could hear tiny threads tearing. There were certain spots, too, like around the belly, the side of her boobs, and across her butt, that…bulged.

She had eaten a lot of Cheez-Its over the past few days…and she’d tried really hard not to throw any of them up. Could she have gained weight that fast? What if something was suddenly wrong with her metabolism? What if she had turned into one of those girls who gained weight by simply looking at food?