“Look at you.” I gesture at his cleaned-up appearance, his books splayed out in the library before 10:00 A.M. “You’ve already achieved Good Boy status. You’ve done the thing. You’ve got basketball and Jenna and you look and smell like an actual human. But I still feel like … me.”

“Being you is not a bad thing, Skeevy,” Salem says, more seriously than I expect.

“Yeah, it is, trust me.” I can’t bring myself to tell him that he might not have been using me, but the girls I thought were my friends sure were, and so were the ones before that. I don’t want to be the girl people feel like they can do that to. I sure as hell don’t wanna be a girl who cares if and when it happens. And right now, I still care way, way too much.

He sighs and puts down his pen. “Okay, so what does a ‘Bad Girl Day’ entail?”

“You tell me.” I fold my arms on the table and rest my chin on them so I’m looking up at his pale face with its slashes of dark eyebrows, surrounded by equally dark hair that’s starting to curl at the ends with overgrowth. It makes him look the tiniest bit softer, which I’m sure he’d hate to hear. “What kinds of things have you gotten in trouble for in the past? I wanna do those. Well, other than smoking in the headmaster’s office; I’m not gonna do that. Or smoke at all, I don’t think. I don’t know. I’m still on the fence.”

“What would you even smoke?” he asks, amused. “You don’t have any weed.”

“I have yours.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. I stole that back like five days ago.” My jaw drops open, and he laughs. “Don’t worry; I didn’t smoke it. But I did give it to Jenna, so she and her friends have probably obliterated that by now.”

The mention of Jenna and her friends twists something in my stomach, but I push past it. “Well, then, that answers that. What else?”

“Lots of destruction of property. You wanna destroy some property?” His eyes take on a twinkle that says he knows I won’t, and if I hadn’t seen it, he’d be right; I absolutely hate the idea of trashing someone else’s hard work, especially if someone else has to clean it up. But that’s Good Girl mentality, and this day’s got a purpose.

“I wanna destroy some property,” I say firmly. “Where do we begin?”

Chapter Eleven

“WHAT AM I EVEN SUPPOSED to write?” I ask Salem as I stand poised in front of the statue of Martha Camden, wife of Camden Academy founder William Henry Camden, whose pedestal is covered with black-inked names. “Everything here is, like, initials in hearts. Is this a couples’ statue?”