Dylan giggles. “Imagine the look on London’s face when she tracks him down in Duluth.”

Anastasia shakes her head sadly. “I take no joy in this, Dylan. London used to be my friend. But she needs to understand the consequences of her actions.” She finishes with her lipstick and snaps a quick selfie, for posterity. She considers texting it to London, along with a pertinent quote about karma from Deepak Chopra, or maybe Rihanna. But she decides against it. She is not a monster. She has her limits.

—

The thing she finds most strange about this whole situation is that London doesn’t understand why Anastasia does the things she does to her. The day London was arrested, she looked at her with such an expression of betrayal on her face as the cops dragged her out of the school in handcuffs that Anastasia almost laughed. There are a lot of things you could call Anastasia, but fake is not one of them. Duplicitous, maybe. Sneaky, conniving, unfeeling, certainly. But she will never pretend to be someone she isn’t. As one of her oldest friends, London had seen the things Anastasia had done to other people, and yet somehow she had expected to be exempt from all of that. She had expected Anastasia to care, and was shocked to discover that she didn’t.

In the months following her arrest, London kept begging Anastasia for an explanation: What had she done to make Anastasia hate her? But Anastasia didn’t hate her – not then, and not now. She actually thinks London is an interesting person, intelligent and sharp, although with an overinflated sense of moral superiority that often tends to flip over into righteous indignation, which Anastasia finds tedious. She believed London had potential until she saw the way she behaved after her arrest – claiming the drugs weren’t hers, that Anastasia had been the one selling them, that she had planted them on London because she knew that the police were about to come down on her. Anastasia had been floored. Like, talk about betrayal! She had obviously seen something in London that wasn’t there, a bond of loyalty that she assumed would never break, no matter what the circumstances.

Still, Anastasia forgave her. In fact, she feels she behaved quite magnanimously towards London after the whole debacle. It wasn’t her fault that London continued to blame her for what had happened, or that she decided to launch a campaign of hatred against Anastasia in the following months – badmouthing her to everyone at school, ratting her out to their teachers every time she cheated, trying to derail her bake sale – starting a war that she had not the slightest chance in hell of winning.