It is two-thirty a.m. on Friday morning. Pulling herself through the open window, Josie Ashton lands gracefully on her pink-carpeted bedroom floor. Looking around carefully, not expecting to find anyone around at this hour of the night, Josie surreptitiously slides the window down silently and locks it with a small click. Tiptoeing sneakily over to her princess bed, Josie pulls back the puffy comforter and hops into bed, her head spinning with the night she's just had. Her reddish brown hair lets out the unmistakable scent of boy as she rolls over and makes herself comfortable, closing her eyes.
She is unable to sleep, her head seems to be swimming, and whenever she closes her eyes she sees him.
Shivering because of the cold night air, Josie settles down into her nice warm bed, and finally allows sleep to take her over, swirls of candy cream and sparkles melting behind her eyelids.
Josie awakens much too soon, the shrill sound of an alarm clock invading her happy dreams. Moaning and rolling over, Josie closes her eyes for a few more moments of blessed sleep. At long last, she must rise, as she smells the sizzle of breakfast being prepared by her mother in the kitchen, a sure sign that she is already.
Rolling out of her warm bed, Josie stands and stretches and then, yawning hugely walks over to the large record player which stands next to the powder table. She sets the needle down and the silky voice of Elvis fills her room. Josie turns the dial to full volume, disregarding her parents' wishes for her music standards and heads for the closet, raking a hand through her hair and yawning again.
Flinging open the two white wooden doors of her wardrobe, Josie steps inside, the plush carpet soft beneath her red-toenailed feet. She pulls a random pair of blue jeans from a hanger, and then drags a sweater along with it. Josie sits on the edge of her unmade bed as she slips the jeans onto her body. They were slightly too big for her—the way that she liked her pants to fit, much to her mother's chagrin, and she had to roll the hems up at least three turns until they were at the cusp of her ankle bone. Satisfied, finally, Josie slipped off her t-shirt which she had fallen into bed wearing—his shirt—and jammed it under her comforter so that her mother would not find it and wonder where she'd gotten it.
She pulled the sweater over her head, a darkish pink color. Dragging on her dirty and worn Chuck Taylor's tennis shoes, Josie marched over to the powder table and examined her appearance. Looking closer at the looking glass, she studied the dark circles that had swollen up beneath her eyes. Reaching for her makeup brush, her hand grasped on the wooden handle, and she dabbed it into the pot of powder that sat next to it, applying this concealer to her face to attempt to hide the proof that she hadn't slept but a few hours the night before.
The serenading voice of Elvis still blasted through the speakers, so it was understandable that Josie did not hear the pounding on the door as she brushed through her treacherously tangled hair. The banging continued, unknown to Josie, as she finally successfully brushed her hair out into softly curling waves. Finally, the mysterious door-knocker gave up on politeness and burst into the room, striding confidently over to the record player and lifting the pin so that the record made a screeching halt.
"You'll scratch it!" Josie said to the intruder, laughing with her guest.
"Are you ready?" Sadie demanded, swishing her long brown hair with her hand and chewing her bubblegum loudly.
Sadie was Josie's best friend, and they ran with the same gang. They were next door neighbors and had been enemies from kindergarten all the way up until last year, when both of them joined The Dolls, their mutual friend Sloane's all-girl gang.
"Yeah, yeah," Josie sighed, standing up and inspecting her outfit once again in the full-length mirror on the inside of her closet door.
Sadie rolled her eyes and blew a huge bubble, which popped with a satisfying noise. Hand on her hip, Sadie said, "Come on, princess, Schuster doesn't care if you look pretty or not."
Josie fake-gagged at the thought of their homeroom teacher, Mr. Schuster, a man who was older than dirt, and who never let anyone off for being late.
Sadie laughed, and Josie swung her backpack over one shoulder and left the room with Sadie.
The two sauntered down the stairs and right past the kitchen, which
was swimming with the (nauseating) scent of frying eggs.
"Josie!" came the shrill cry of Josie's mother. "Won't you have something to eat, dear? And you too, Sadie?" Josie heard the distaste in her mother's voice; she wasn't very fond of Josie's gum-snapping, loogie-spitting, baseball-playing, tomboy of a best friend, but she had to be polite anyways.
"No, thanks, Mom," Josie said, turning to stick her head around the corner. Her mother was standing by the skillet with a lacy apron on and a spatula in her hand. "We're a little late."
"Fine, then," her mother said, a grimace on her made-up face. "Have a good day, dear."
"You too," Josie called over her shoulder as she slammed the front door of the house shut and sprinted down the front steps to find Sadie waiting on the sidewalk.
Josie's light backpack, not filled with books, flapped joyfully on her back and she hooked her thumbs into the straps.
"Sooo," Sadie said pointedly, looking at Josie as they took the familiar route down the road they lived on toward school; Castle Rock wasn't big enough to have a bus route, and most kids lived within walking distance anyway. Only the rich ones, like Audrey Byrner, who lived up on the View, had parents that drove them to school.
"What?" Josie asked, a glint in her tired eyes, knowing full well what Sadie wanted to know.
Sadie sighed heavily, and muttered, "Tell me about last night." She looked around furtively to make sure no one else was around.
Josie giggled, high-pitched and sniffed a lock of her hair, which the smell of his cologne still lingered on. "It was…great," she gushed. "He's so. Gorgeous." Josie sighed, smitten.
"Spare me," Sadie said. "Just tell me what happened."
Josie shrugged, her eyes far away, caught up in her fantasy. "I snuck out at about ten, after everyone in the house was asleep—"
"Everyone was asleep by ten?" Sadie interrupted.
"Yeah," Josie continued, not perturbed. "Wednesday night was potluck supper at church, and my parents were pretty tuckered out."
Sadie snorted.
"I know," Josie said, chuckling a little. "So anyways, I snuck out at ten, and he picked me up in his car around the corner. We went down to the lake."
"No way," Sadie replied enthusiastically, snapping her gum in excitement.
"Yep," Josie said, her chin held high in accomplished pride.
"That's fantastic," Sadie said, kicking a rock on the road absentmindedly with the toe of her beaten sneaker.
"Yep," Josie replied calmly, nothing to the jittery excitement that she felt bubbling in her chest. She playfully kicked the rock out of Sadie's foot's reach, her red hair swishing in her eyes. She brushed it back absentmindedly and Sadie shoved her, causing her to lose her balance and almost trip into the grass.
"Loser!" Josie called to Sadie, pushing her into the empty street.
Ambling up to the school at the same exact time as Sadie and Josie were two other members of their exclusive all-girl gang, Sloane and Katy, twins who pretty much ran the show. Sloane was their alpha, and Katy their beta. Sloane and Katy were best friends, but dramatically different. Looks wise, they were almost identical, but there were subtle differences: Katy wore her dark brown hair in curls whereas Sloane's was always meticulously straight. Sloane always applied eyeliner in cat's-eye style, and Katy wore simple and sweet makeup: pink cheeks and lips, subtle color on the eyes that complimented their sky-blue shade.
As four met, they kissed each other on the cheeks, a sisterhood greeting reserved only for the members of The Dolls to other members of The Dolls, a subtle reminder of their pact—what escapes the lips of a Doll never leaves the lips of another Doll without permission. Their lipstick covenant was their sacred rite.
Also approaching the school, though, were a group of girls that hardly added up to a "gang"—The Dolls secretly referred to them as The Tarts—the five girls who notoriously ran with The Cobras, who were The Dolls nemesis gang. Naturally, hating The Cobras, The Dolls also hated The Tarts—Carolyn, Judy, Sylvia, Diana and Carmen. They were the trampiest girls in Castle Rock Senior High—and in all of Castle Rock for that matter.
Everyone knew this: the parents, the teachers, the Junior High kids, and especially the Senior High boys. The Tarts were the semblance of women who were currently dating the members of The Cobras, and they wore copious amounts of black eye makeup, minimal clothing, and dangerously tepid high heels to school. They prided themselves on their not-so-subtle art of cutting class, which was something that they almost always got caught doing.
Honestly, The Tarts wished that they were like The Dolls. The Dolls' hard-earned status as bad girls with sweet, endearing sides, who hated The Cobras, was something that was highly envied by most girls at CRSH. Carolyn and Judy were the newest members of The Tarts, having just been "pinned" (in more ways than the traditional) by Vince and Fuzzy of The Cobras.
As The Dolls passed The Tarts on the brick stairway leading to the front doors of the school, The Tarts gave them searingly dirty looks which they gracefully ignored. Once inside the building, which smelled of chlorine, paper, and overused boys' cologne, The Dolls found its last three members—Alice, Joanie, and Aimee—leaning casually against the tan lockers outside homeroom.
Sauntering up ahead of the others, Sloane approached, and the circle was completed. Joanie, fearlessly, was smoking an unfiltered, which dangled nonchalantly from her slender fingers. Sloane, Katy, Josie, and Sadie kissed the other two on each cheek. Sadie then shimmied over to her locker and pulled it open. A paper bag-covered book fell down inside of her locker and she shoved it back, grabbing her baseball glove and ball. Alice looked down her nose at Sadie, only half-jokingly, and Sadie punched the worn leather in reply.
"Got a problem, Barbie?"
Alice grimaced and clawed her long fingernails playfully, growling a little.
"Psh," said Sadie, smacking her bubblegum. "Save that for the boys."
"As if." Alice rolled her eyes.
"Alright, break it up," Sloane said playfully.
Sadie brandished her fist at her too, and spit in her hand, stuck it out to Alice in an attempt at a truce. Alice shied away from her globby hand.
"No," she said pointedly, a glint of laughter in her eyes.
"Fine." Sadie smiled a pirate smile and wiped her hand on her ripped-knees jeans.
"C'mon," Katy suggested gently. "We'll be late."
Sure enough, the linoleum hallway was slowly clearing out, leaving only runaway notebook pages and mixed scents behind. The Dolls moved as one into their homeroom, 102, Schuster.
"Audrey Byrner," Schuster was calling monotonously as The Dolls crept quietly into the room, hoping that he was distracted by the football players sitting perched atop their wooden, wobbly-legged desks. "I hope you girls don't think that I cannot see you."
Busted. They flinched, but took their seats anyway. They weren't technically late; the bell hadn't even rung yet—it chimed just on time, as if punctuating their entrance.
One of the burly and muscle-bound football drones who was sitting atop a desk toward the front of the room, wearing only his Hanes shirt (it was commonplace for the boys to strip off their top layers of clothing early in the morning, claiming to be sweaty from working out, hoping to show off their toned muscle structure) turned around conspicuously and winked in The Dolls' general direction, smiling his pearly smile, and making the "call me" hand motion.
Rolling her eyes and chomping her gum, Joanie, who almost never showed up for class, curled her lip and flipped the guy off as The Dolls slunk into their seats in the back row of class. Defeated, the jock boy turned right back around to face the front.
Unconcerned, The Dolls began pulling from their bags compacts and mirrors, lipsticks and mascaras, nailpolishes and fashion magazines. Josie opened her tiny mirror and carefully applied Cherry Red #37 to her pout. Satisfied, she closed the mirror with a click, and slid it back into her bag, crossing her arms over her chest, bored already. Rolling her eyes back in her head, a memory fanned across her mind, of last night, and the dirty lake water licking her skin in delicious waves, the grains of dirt beneath her toes, and him…
Josie suddenly opened her eyes as a thought occurred to her, and she slanted her eyelids, looking discreetly to her left at Aimee. You see, the Lipstick Covenant that all of The Dolls partook in the summer before last took place when the humidity was slinking into their hair, and the ice cubes in their dainty glasses of lemonade melted as they sat around crosslegged on the floor of Sloane and Katy's room, linking pinkies. At the time, amid the lazy heat of summer mixed with excitement of their bad-girl-ness, all of them had intended to stick to the Covenant, just like their hair was sticking to their necks.
Aimee Merrill, who sat in the chair next to Josie, sat with one thin hand on her bony hip and the other propped up by the elbow on her desk as she examined her perfectly painted nails with a pouty look of girlishness. Aimee's eyes were untelling, so for now, Josie hadn't a clue—or a care—if she knew about Josie's backseat, lakeside adventures, and the broken Lipstick Covenant that lay in the secret parts of Josie's pretty little head.