**Officially published as Clique Bait with HarperTeen!**
Payment is usually a part of a basic transaction. You give and then you take. But, at Arlington Preparatory, people take at their leisure. They take their entertainment in the form of humiliat...
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There was something my grief counselor had said to me before my father had whisked me away on a holiday in an effort to help me forget about my dead best friend. It wasn't particularly useful or reassuring, but it stuck in my head because it was true.
You can't keep pretending she's still here, Chloe. She made bad decisions. She didn't mean to hurt you.
The footage wasn't much, but the few flitting scenes of her bright red hair and the wide grin on her small mouth had brought with them a heavy lump in my throat.
Eight people had entered that hidden bathroom. I'd seen a split recording of Mike walking through the room, and its unedited footage showed them entering in clusters. Monica and Maddy. Lola and Sophie. Max and Li and Zach, followed by Piers.
Then they left, in the reverse order to as they'd come. Only Monica never did. She never left that room again.
But Lola and Sophie had returned. I didn't know what happened, or what they did or what they didn't do. But it didn't matter, it was their fault. If they'd never messed with Monica, she'd never have become reckless or mean.
Or dead.
I shut the laptop. I'd watched the footage at least a hundred times. I'd seen snippets of the party, of the elaborate nightclub stuffed with people. A brief encounter with Francis outside. The red and blue flashing lights reflecting throughout the crystalline decor inside as paramedics stormed towards the exclusive bathroom where my best friend lay dying.
My hands were trembling, and I couldn't stop them as they reached forward and opened my top drawer, almost pulling it to the floor with the force. I grabbed the stack of letters inside, covered in scribbles of ink on pretty paper with tear drop stains.
I hated them. I hated that they weren't real. I hated myself for not letting her go, and I hated myself for losing her. With one motion, I tossed them into the paper bin where they joined the crumbled lists. My failed attempts at connecting with her. Of pretending she was still here.
Our last conversation was an argument. She was supposed to be my best friend, but the last thing I ever said to her was that she was turning into a monster. That she was losing control. That she'd gone insane.
And I'd never be able to take it back, not any of it. I couldn't save her from them. They destroyed her.
Which was why I needed to destroy all of them.
I screwed my eyes shut, pressing my palm into the space between my eyebrows. I was losing it. I was feeling nothing and everything at once. Watching the footage had loosened the lid on the jar I kept hidden deeply in my mind, the one full of voices constantly screaming at me that my best friend was dead. It felt better not to think about it, to pretend she was still here somewhere, if not by my side like she should have been.
