Their Vicious Games(6)

Then, isolation. I wasn’t invited to Esme’s second house upstate for spring break. I found out about it on the Monday after, when the other girls, including Toni, came in halfway through the day with handwritten notes from Mrs. Alderidge excusing them. I only forgave Toni for it after she explained that Esme had lied to her and told her that I was too sick to go and wouldn’t be responding to text messages—that explained her Get well, bestie before she’d gone radio silent.

Cruelty that had never been aimed at me suddenly dogged my every step in the most subtle ways. “Dropped” invitations, “forgotten” hangouts, the biting laughter that stopped whenever I entered the room. Eventually, Esme kept laughing even when I sat right there in front of her, back rigid as she asked pointed question after question about my college application, about my family, about my parents’ income, about fucking Suburbia.

“Toughen up, Adina,” she’d say when she saw my expression falter as she got a rise out of me. “The girls and boys of Yale will be far more inquisitive. They won’t be as nice as me. We have to find something.”

“Find what?” I’d asked.

“Something that makes you interesting enough to have gotten in… besides the obvious.”

The obvious.

Mistake two: I fought back.

“Don’t listen to her,” Toni said later that night, lying on her back on my bed, staring at me as I tore down every photo of our friend group, all except for the ones of just the two of us. “She’s just feeling insecure.”

“Insecure about what? She got into Dartmouth,” I snapped. “I earned my spot at Yale. Why should I have to hide that?” I was frantic, moving with a frenetic energy that was unlike me. Control was all I’d known.

And Toni. Sweet, well-meaning, slightly nosy Toni said, “I don’t think her parents are doing well. Financially, I mean. I heard her talking about it with Charles the other day, saying she’d have to hide her necklace before the Feds could find it. She played it off like she was joking, but also you know… was she? She has been nastier than usual.”

Knowledge is power and right then I wanted some, badly.

Rumors are easy, especially at a place like Edgewater, where everyone knows or wants to know one another’s business. I started with a “The Alderidges’ donation this year was low. Yeah, lower than it usually is. Getting cheap, aren’t they?” Dropped in the middle of a yearbook meeting, over a discussion with the layout editor. Then a whispered “I might’ve overheard in the main office that Esme’s parents were late on her little sister’s tuition payment for the semester. But… don’t blame me, I’m just the messenger” in the bathroom. And finally, the most damning—“I hear they’re going broke. Yeah, broke. And the Feds… yeah, the Feds. Heard there was something about embezzlement.”

I didn’t know for sure, of course, but “embezzlement” was a multimillion-dollar kind of word and one that terrified all the Edgewater kids, and none more than Esme Alderidge.

Mistake three: I miscalculated. Only three people had the potential to have heard Esme’s joke. One was Esme, the other she was sleeping with, and the third—Toni.

So Esme set her sights on a new target to torment. First, it started with jokes. About Toni’s hair, about her makeup, about her face, about her interests. She hadn’t wanted to go to an Ivy. Toni’d always wanted to go to Tisch. She knew who she was, but Esme knew how to weaponize someone’s joy against them with expertise. Suddenly, she had everyone buzzing that Toni only wanted Tisch because she hadn’t been able to get into an Ivy.

Then the girls—Hawthorne, who was always at her right hand, and the rest—wouldn’t talk to her. They even started inviting me to the table again, but Toni had made my days more than bearable when I’d been suffering Esme’s ire, and I knew I owed her. Plus, I was the reason this was happening to her. So we stuck together.

Being ignored together for a few more months would be fine. It could have been fine.

But it escalated again. Direct this time. Food staining our book bags. Shitty photos paired with shitty captions making fun of us, “leaked” from finstas. Enough so that no one would talk about Esme anymore. It partially worked; at first all anyone talked about were the jokes. All Esme would say was, “It’s a joke. Toni’s an actress, she likes jokes, doesn’t she?” But “embezzlement” was too big a word to drown out with jokes.

So it wasn’t a joke, being cornered in that bathroom, Esme’s voice running ragged as she screamed, “How dare you? What the fuck is wrong with you, spreading lies like that?” at Toni, even after Toni locked herself in the stall, sobbing, begging her, saying that it wasn’t her.

“Are you so bored with your little virginal life that you have to listen to my personal business with your brother?” Esme growled. “Are you that needy and nosy that you have to use my name to get anyone’s attention? That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Attention.”

Toni’s sobs echoed, and each hitch of breath felt like a punch in the chest, until I had to say something.

“Esme, that’s enough,” I warned, trying to cut the head off the beast, but three always rise from the Hydra’s neck. Mistake number four: Esme never liked being told there was a line she couldn’t cross.