OHMIGOD. Sorry for that god awful delay. I feel like such a bitch for making you guys wait so long. Anyway, I'm really happy with the direction in this chapter. I love, love love, you guys' input in the story. Who thinks they know what happens next? Who thinks Olivia Ryan will make an appearance? Who thinks Demspey is a good guy? Who thinks Cam better be in the next chapter?
It took a lot of digging.
More digging than Claire was comfortable to be honest.
There was no way to bring it up casually with Alicia, or any of the other girls. In retrospect she probably could have asked Cam for information, but he'd been avoiding her lately. Something told Claire she'd lost her favorite confidant, but she wasn't sure why. In the end, she got her first clue from Landon one afternoon after school when her parents weren't home and she'd let him suck a hickey the size of a quarter on her collarbone.
"Olivia Ryan? She's old news baby, a nobody. Dropped out first semester of last year."
"For what? What happened to her?"
"What happens to everyone around here? She just couldn't hack it." Then he bit back down on one of her earlobes and Claire lost her train of thought.
That was all she had to go on for a full week, until she got paired up with Kori Gedman in gym. Kori was a social climber of the worst kind, and all too happy to spill her limited knowledge over sit-ups and burpees.
"I heard it was drugs, but she was selling not snorting. Ritalin, Oxycotin, Molly. All the fun stuff. She got busted right before the winter formal and hauled off to some reform school upstate." Kori shrugged and smirked "She wouldn't be the first."
Meena Hill, a sour faced sophomore in her A.P. Spanish class was next after Claire agreed to do her translations for a week.
"No, she definitely sampled her own product. And she definitely didn't work alone. She didn't get caught. They never get caught. She probably slipped up and someone had to take her out. It was only a matter of time."
"It wasn't just the drugs though." Lisette Aberman told her during photo lab, as they developed pictures in the dark room. "No one gets sent away over just that. Someone wanted her gone for something bigger. A Pretty Committee girl is like royalty around here, she'd had to have pissed off someone high up. Probably deserved it."
That was the general consensus anyway. Olivia Ryan, whoever she was, must have been guilty of something, and she had probably gotten what had been coming to her all along. When Claire googled her, the facebook account of a stunningly beautiful blonde had popped up immediately. Bright cerulean eyes gazed framed by thick mascara covered lashes, long honey blonde waves that spilled over her shoulders, clear porcelain skin and a perfect pert little nose. She beamed happily from the tiny box in the corner, mouth upturned in a never-ending grin.
Olivia had four thousand friends and hadn't updated anything since December of last year. She had recently turned sixteen, her relationship status was "its complicated", and her last post had been a lament –Can someone, ech ehm puh-lease bring me a latte?! The library is freezing I hate midterms.
Her photo album was all the Pretty Committee. She and Kristen fake yawning from their box seats at a Dodgers game, making duck faces with Dylan and Orlando Bloom on the set of the Daily Grind, lounging on a yacht in Bermuda in the skimpiest bikini with Alicia. She and Massie, arms wrapped around each other as the grinned ecstatically on a ski lift in Aspen. All five of the girls laughing and blowing kisses at the camera, captioned simply my family .
Then there was one of Olivia, smiling around a red cup and looking blurry eyed at the camera, a box was next to her, arm tossed casually around her shoulder face buried in her blonde hair. She let the mouse hover over picture for a second, the little black tag popped up.
Dempsey Soloman.
Claire's heart stopped and sputtered at that, and she felt a hot flush crawl up her neck to settle in her cheeks, but she didn't stop scrolling
Claire flipped through more pictures. Olivia and Dempsey riding go carts at Boomers, at a Kanye West concert with Josh and Alicia, sipping champagne on a ritzy looking roof top in New York City. In the most recent ones Olivia was still pink cheeked and grinning, but dark purple bags hung under her pretty, tired eyes and her tan, peach skin was pale. She looked incredibly weary in the most recent one: a candid of just she and Massie snuggled together on a couch heads tilted computationally, with serious looks on their pretty faces.
Massie had commented miss you in February of this year.
Dempsey had liked it.