Premeditated

The girl breathes heavily, her heart pounding, her hands shaking, her normally flawless makeup caked and discolored, mascara running tear tracks down her face.  She’s the typical prep-school stereotype-- perky, bouncy, blonde—and she’s holding a knife over her wrists.   An internal battle rages—she is good, she is evil, she is clean, she needs to be cleansed. In an instant filled with desperate fervor, she decides.  The cut isn’t deep—she has just begun this new practice of torture—but the shock of her deed causes her to slip on her white imported bathroom tile, hitting her head on a sink corner and later slipping into a coma the doctors say she may be able to climb out of.  Her name was Claire.  She was a freshman at Eleanor Lowry Preparatory Academy.  The incident was a week ago.  Her family is devastated, her friends shocked, her future shattered.  Many make up excuses—she did it for attention, she has a mental illness, she couldn’t think straight.  Claire’s cousin and best friend, Dinah Powell, is the only person who knows the truth.  She knows about the dark haired boy that stole her cousin’s heart and then proceeded to rip it in two.  She knows how he took her cousin and made her into a shell, a mere case of what she once was.  She knows how he made her life a living hell.  And now Dinah is out to make his life the same.  Armed with newly dyed blond hair, a designer uniform, and an uncharacteristic happy-go-lucky attitude, Dinah infiltrates the prep school scene intent on finding the man who was responsible for Claire’s decline.  She will make him pay.  Dearly.  He will wish he had never lived.  Claire’s fall was a week ago.  Today, his fall begins. 

“Revenge, on the other hand…….takes time and planning and patience. You have to smile when you want to scream.  You have to look your target in the eye and smile when you’d rather claw his eyes out.”