“Wait,” Alice said. “I want to show you something, a photograph I just saw.”

“You can point out its artistic merits to me later.”

“No, it’s not its artistic merits I want to show you, it’s—”

Charlie cut her off: “Later. First we’re going to go introduce ourselves.”

“To who?”

Charlie looked over at Blonde Bombshell.

Alice followed the line of her sister’s gaze. The color drained out of her cheeks. “Wow,” she said. “You don’t believe in working your way up, do you?”

Charlie shrugged. “They say that if you’re the new kid on the playground, you should go up to the biggest bully, the alpha male, punch him right in the mouth.”

“Who’s they? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And besides, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not on a playground, and she’s no alpha male.”

“She’s a queen bee, though, the female equivalent. What’s the matter, Allie? Scared?”

“Yes, and if you had any sense, you would be, too.”

Charlie sighed. “Look, are you going to come on your own, or do I have to use force?”

When Alice didn’t respond, Charlie reached for an abandoned champagne glass on the table beside her, downed its contents in a single gulp. Then she grabbed her sister by the wrist and began dragging her across the room. As she got closer, within feet rather than yards, she saw that the blonde wasn’t as good-looking as she’d first thought. Her chin was a hair too long, giving her face a slightly horsey quality, and that gave Charlie a bump of confidence. Alice was wrong about Charlie. Charlie did get scared, and by the same things that scared Alice. The difference between them was, Charlie refused to give in to that fear. She did the opposite, in fact, went after the fear, took it head-on. Which is exactly what she was doing right now.

Charlie had to stand in front of the blonde for several seconds before the blonde deigned to notice her.

“Yes,” the blonde finally said, weirdly addressing Alice rather than Charlie. Her voice was everything Charlie expected it to be: cool, disdainful, faintly bored.

“Hi. I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Charlie Flaherty. This is my sister, Alice.”

“Cybill Buckley.”

Again, the girl—Cybill—addressed Alice rather than Charlie. Another humiliation tactic, Charlie supposed. A twist on the old pretending-the-other-person-didn’t-exist routine. She wanted to take Cybill’s face in her hand, physically turn it her way. “Nice to meet you, Cybill. We came with Richard Flood.”

Cybill furrowed her brow like she was searching her memory bank. “Oh, that’s right. You’re the substitutes. Mr. Flood got two daughters to take the place of one. Is that in case one of you doesn’t work out? He’ll have an extra on hand?”

One of the knockoff blondes flanking her tittered appreciatively.