Kathryn:

The crowd gathers round me, the way they always do, but this time it's for an execution. I'm about to be crucified for their sins. Yes, theirs—Sebastian wrote about everybody in that journal not just me. I could laugh. Instead I find myself crying for no good reason. A single tear falls, but my face doesn't scrunch up, remains smooth and perfect, I've got that much control at least. Some guys in my past have found this combination attractive, some guys in the audience here might still find it attractive if they can manage to ignore what's in the journal. It doesn't matter. Mother comes up. She's boiling with rage inside, but her face is a mask. She's shocked at the revelation, and concerned about her lovely daughter. I get in the car with her. At home, she closes the door and stands in front of me and slaps my face again and again. "How dare you... My reputation..." I tune it out. Coke is all I'm thinking about, I can taste it on my tongue already, that lovely numbing sensation. Then one sharp word cuts through the mess: "Rehab."

"You can't be serious Mother. You and I both know that I'm not addicted. Even my liar of a stepbrother never made that claim. I'm a social user, as you are when the occasion demands it."

She slaps me even harder. "You will go to rehab. I will hear no arguments about it. I expect you to pack your things as you will be leaving tomorrow." She leaves, finally. I head to my room. The crucifix was taken but I still have a plentiful secret stash behind the top drawer. I look—it's not there. The bitch must have had my room searched while I was still up at Manchester. My fingers itch as I pace the room. Need coke. Please. I'd call up one of my college boy sex toys who doesn't give a damn what happens at Manchester, but I already know Mother has instructed the servants to not let anyone in or out. If I can just get through this night... I log on to the internet, porn and my fingers are the only escapes left. Like someone in trance, I find my way to the sex tape Sebastian made with what's-her-face, the shrink's daughter. I fuck myself frantically to their moans, and as I come, so do the tears, those stupid tears again, but then again no one is watching right now so who cares? And in a strange way, the tape is comforting. I'm getting off to the face body and cock of a dead man, as he's engaged in ruining someone's life. It's sick and wrong and depraved. It's me—the part of me the Manchester student body never saw before today and still won't ever understand, the part of me my mother would like to kill, hollow out of me until only the mask is left. You won't succeed. You can't change me. Rehab or no rehab, I will never be anything but myself.

I lie down on my bed and drift into sleep. "Pack your things," really. As if we didn't have maids for that.

The rehab facility's a Westchester-based outfit known for its complete discretion. They're done up in the most petty-bourgeois manner possible, on purpose; decent meals and decor are "enabling" according to their philosophy. The lack of beautiful surroundings drives me crazy almost as much as the coke withdrawal. I am agonizingly bored most of the time, but at least there is sex. I fuck a teen movie idol, perfectly chiseled body and bored superior expression fixed permanently onto his face. He's in there for heroin. Later I'll read a headline in People about his heroic battle with cancer—discretion, like I said. When he leaves, I switch to a Disney machine pop starlet. She's in for coke alcohol and Ecstasy, but her real problem is that she's in love with her best friend and can't tell anybody. Her gayness might fuck up that wholesome Disney image. I consider telling her: how about I pretend to be what's-her-face, and you pretend to be Seb? But it wouldn't work, she's far too innocent to pull it off. I get bored with her quickly and turn to the son of a discount-store magnate from the Midwest, meth addict, not that cute really, I don't usually go for the farm boy look, but what I like about him is, he's into violence. He likes choking me and twisting my nipples until they're bruised purple, banging my head against the floor and calling me his whore and his slave. He's my slave, of course, like all the others, as he finds out quickly enough when I stop having sex with him.

"You don't deny me."

"Watch me."

"You act high and mighty now, but when I get you alone..."

"You'll do nothing. Unless you want a very very public trial."

"Seriously, please, why are you doing this? I love you, Kathryn. You're the only one who really understands me." Well yes, morons are easy to understand. Your point?

My first day here, the director of the facility gave us all a pep talk. She said recovery was possible, but you had to really want to change. I didn't. But it wasn't hard to convince her that I did. Put on the sweet contrite look, regurgitate the Twelve Steps literature. The only thing that's getting me through this hell is the thought of that white powder, but why should you know about that? "Yes, I'm a little bit scared, but in my heart I really do think I'm ready. I can't wait to begin my new clean and sober life."

For my "new life", I'm shipped directly from rehab to a boarding school in Switzerland. For once Mother and I are in complete agreement. In fact, I'm actually grateful to her for sparing me a return visit to Manchester. Here, luxury at last. Coke, too, as much as I can snort. Philippe, who by some strange coincidence is even gayer than Blaine was, sees to that. The abundance of diplomat's offspring makes for some interesting sexual pickings. And I have my own room again, at least after poor little Violette is caught with a backpack full of hard drugs. Tsk, tsk. You really should know better Violette. Settled in, I begin my tedious climb up the school's social ladder. The "it" boyfriend over here is an overbearingly arrogant French boy named Marcel, whose intellectual-philosophical pretensions I find downright refreshing compared to the know-nothing jock attitudes of Court and his ilk. I seduce him. It's easy and boring, like everything else.

The scenery is different: skyscrapers have been replaced by mountains. Otherwise, everything is as it was.

I enter my room, alone or with Marcel or another bedmate, and the silence there makes me want to scream. I do a line instead. Or else I attack the boy next to me, kiss and bite him all over because conversation is impossible with these people. The idiot thinks my desire is for him. It will be, temporarily, if he knows how to lick my pussy right. Getting the school's resident Ms. Perfect replaced in mere weeks was a work of sheer artistry, but no one here has the vision to appreciate it—not even Marcel, who's really quite conventionally moral at bottom despite all his Nietzschean superman speeches.

And there's still the spectre of Annette. The bitch must pay, pure and simple. Even if I didn't despise her, she'd still have to be destroyed for security reasons.

And after that? College, meaning Harvard. Early decision season is coming up, I've been putting off doing the application even though I know my grades and community service record are perfect. The essay isn't a problem, either, I've got enough material, and if I decide I've had enough lying for one lifetime I can pay or blackmail someone else to do it. It's just that, more and more these days, I don't care. Oh, I'll apply, and get in. What's the alternative? I could just say fuck it, get deeper and deeper into the coke addiction, end up an overdose or a crack whore on the street.

I don't think I'd enjoy it very much.

But Mother would just die.