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You’re a cheater and a liar. You look pretty sometimes, but I’ve seen your real face. You’re nothing but
an old chickenshit whore.”
“You . . . you . . .” But she could say no more. Her rage was so great it felt like it was strangling
her. Some of it was shock at finding herself—Rose the Hat—dressed down by a kid whose idea of
transportation was a bicycle and whose major concern before these last weeks had probably been when
she might get breasts bigger than mosquito bumps.
“But maybe I’ll give you a chance,” the bitchgirl said. Her confidence and breezy temerity were
unbelievable. “Of course, if you take me up on it, I’ll wipe the floor with you. I won’t bother with the
others, they’re dying already.” She actually laughed. “Choking on the baseball boy, and good for him.”
“If you come, I’ll kill you,” Rose said. One hand found her throat, closed on it, and began to
squeeze rhythmically. Later there would be bruises. “If you run, I’ll find you. And when I do, you’ll
scream for hours before you die.”
“I won’t run,” the girl said. “And we’ll see who does the screaming.”
“How many will you have to back you up? Dear?”
“I’ll be alone.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Read my mind,” the girl said. “Or are you afraid to do that, too?”
Rose said nothing.
“Sure you are. You remember what happened last time you tried it. I gave you a taste of your own
medicine, and you didn’t like it, did you? Hyena. Child-killer. Coward.”
“Stop . . . calling . . . me that.”
“There’s a place up the hill from where you are. A lookout. It’s called Roof O’ the World. I found it
on the internet. Be there at five o’clock Monday afternoon. Be there alone. If you’re not, if the rest of
your pack of hyenas doesn’t stay in that meeting-hall place while we do our business, I’ll know. And
I’ll go away.”
“I’d find you,” Rose repeated.
“You think?” Actually jeering at her.
Rose shut her eyes and saw the girl. She saw her writhing on the ground, her mouth stuffed with
stinging hornets and hot sticks jutting out of her eyes. No one talks to me like this. Not ever.
“I suppose you might find me. But by the time you did, how many of your stinking True Knot
would be left to back you up? A dozen? Ten? Maybe only three or four?”
This idea had already occurred to Rose. For a child she’d never even seen face-to-face to reach the
same conclusion was, in many ways, the most infuriating thing of all.
“The Crow knew Shakespeare,” the bitchgirl said. “He quoted some to me not too long before I
killed him. I know a little, too, because we had a Shakespeare unit in school. We only read one play,
Romeo and Juliet, but Ms. Franklin gave us a printout with a whole list of famous lines from his other
plays. Things like ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘It was Greek to me.’ Did you know those were from
Shakespeare? I didn’t. Don’t you think it’s interesting?”
Rose said nothing.
“You’re not thinking about Shakespeare at all,” the bitchgirl said. “You’re thinking about how
much you’d like to kill me. I don’t have to read your mind to know that.”
“If I were you, I’d run,” Rose said thoughtfully. “As fast and as far as your baby legs can carry you.
It wouldn’t do you any good, but you’d live a little longer.”
The bitchgirl was not to be turned. “There was another saying. I can’t remember it exactly, but it
was something like ‘Hoisted on your own petard.’ Ms. Franklin said a petard was a bomb on a stick. I
think that’s sort of what’s happening to your tribe of cowards. You sucked the wrong kind of steam,