The Screaming Season by Nancy Holder

Miles had crashed on purpose? Would he deliberately risk getting hurt like that? If he wanted to help his sister scare you to death, then yes, given how crazy he is, I told myself. Scare you, or . . .
    . . . kill you.
    I shuddered even harder.
    “How do you know all this?” I asked, and my voice cracked.
    Claire raised her hand. “I was in the bathroom. I saw the light go on in her room. Lara was in there and Mandy was going just crazy, throwing things.”
    “No way,” Julie said. “What about their housemother?”
    Claire snorted. Our housemothers were legendary for doing as little as possible, especially if it came to getting in the way of rich girl self-expression.
    “So I crawled out the bathroom window and snuck over there. I had made it to the hedge when they came outside. I hid and listened. And I heard everything .”
    “Go, Claire,” Elvis said appreciatively.
    “Mandy was completely freaking out. She said she was going to go kill someone.”
    “No,” I whispered. By then I had stripped out of my wet clothes and pulled on my fleece bathrobe.
    “Your name was not mentioned,” Claire assured me. “I figured she was going to kill Troy.”
    “But we like Troy,” Marica argued. “Now he can be Lindsay’s novio .”
    “Well, we’d rather have her kill him instead of Lindsay,” Claire said, and Marica nodded. “Anyway, then she split. I wasn’t about to follow her in my pajamas and flip-flops.”
    Elvis huffed. “I don’t know why not. I mean, we’re all dying to know what she did next.”
    “No, we’re not,” Julie said firmly, returning with a roll of gauze, a box of bandages, some tape, and a pair of scissors. “I don’t care at all what happens to her.”
    Julie did care. She had moved into Mandy’s charmed circle for a time, then been tossed back out. Despite her loyalty to me, she had enjoyed her moment in the sun. But in the bipolar ways of mean queen bees, Mandy had abruptly yanked away the privileges she had bestowed on Julie. She ditched her to go skiing with Miles during winter break, and then she drove back to Marlwood without her, even though Julie—and her parents—had been counting on the ride.
    As for me, I was grateful down to my soul that Mandy had dissed Julie. Because Julie had been full-on possessed, and now that she was free of Mandy, she was free of the possession. Hurt and embarrassed because of it, but Julie nonetheless.
    “I wonder why Lara didn’t go with her,” Ida said. She stood up to help as Julie began to wrap gauze around my head. I wasn’t sure what they were hoping to accomplish.
    “Maybe she doesn’t want to go to juvenile hall?” Julie asked, sniffing.
    “Oh, please, as if any of them would ever get busted for anything they did,” Claire said. “Look at Kiyoko.” Everyone fell silent. I had looked at Kiyoko. I was the only person in the room who had seen her dead body. Her eyes had been shiny and silvery, like fish scales, a sure sign that she had drowned. But by the time she washed up onshore, she was frozen. Her hair was so brittle it broke off when they laid her in the body bag, zipped it up, and Life Flighted her away.
    “ Chicas, we are taking away from Lindsay’s joy,” Marica declared. She beamed at me. “Troy did it!”
    “Yes.” I finally let myself smile. Several of my layers of individuality were more thrilled about Troy’s manning up than they were terrified about what happened earlier in the evening. Handsome, wealthy, funny, warm Troy, who had tried much harder than Riley ever had to be honest in his dealings with the fairer sex. Troy, who had whispered, “I love you,” when he thought I was asleep. To me . After I had hit him with a hammer. That Troy.
    “He’s trying to talk his parents into spring break in San Diego,” I told the others. A couple of them cheered softly, Ida and Julie doing the grinning-teasing-eyelash-fluttering thing girls did when one of their own moved from unrequited crush to victorious