Dead Little Mean Girl. Eva Darrows

once, showing me the rug burn she got from Old Boyfriend’s car upholstery, but I declined story time, telling her there weren’t enough therapists to fix my tender brain meats if she continued talking.

      She laughed and called me childish. I was okay with that.

      Sadly for Quinn, the Bella and Edward of donuts were not to be. Quinn came home on a Thursday night slinging curses that would have made a sailor blush. I was playing video games at the time with my noise-canceling headphones on, but somehow, Quinn’s banshee wails trumped soundproofing technology.

      I went downstairs to check on her only to see her chuck the Bouncing Bear hat across the kitchen.

      “I hate him! I hate him! I am... I hate him so much!”

      “Are you okay?”

      “Leave me alone!”

      “Good talk! Leaving you alone.” I returned to my virtual playground where, unlike my kitchen, demolitions were an acceptable form of problem solving. Ten minutes later, a wet, bathrobe-clad Quinn haunted my threshold.

      “I hate him so much.” She threw herself at my bed, muffling her shriek of rage in my Domo-kun pillow. I paused the game and waited. She’d stop leaking her psycho all over my stuff eventually, and I was guessing she’d want to talk at that point.

      It took her a few minutes to collect herself. She lifted her head, looked at the fuzzy brown monster with fangs who’d been her tissue, and flung it across the room. Poor Domo-kun. Reduced to a snot rag and discarded.

      “S-so he says he can’t leave his wife. That they’ve been together too long. I thought he loved me,” she warbled. It was clear by the jut of her chin she was on the verge of sobbing.

      Raw emotion from a goodness vacuum such as Quinn Littleton was not an eventuality I was prepared for.

      “Aren’t you going to say something?” she demanded.

      “I... Yeah. I’m sorry you’re hurt.” I didn’t know how to navigate these waters. I could handle Quinn when she was in typical mean girl mode because that’s what I knew. That was her modus operandi. This vulnerable, softer-side-of-Sears Quinn threw me off guard. She looked so fragile and human.

      I sucked in a breath. “He didn’t deserve you. Plus, when he’s sixty you’ll be thirty. There’s not enough Viagra in the world to cover that.”

      I didn’t expect her to appreciate what I’d said, but she smiled, rolling onto her back to look at my ceiling. “He said he loved me.”

      “Of course he did. He wanted to do you. It’s the oldest cliché in the book.” Her expression turned far less friendly. I hadn’t meant to criticize her, only I guess I had by suggesting she’d let herself be taken advantage of. I winced. “You know what else is an old cliché? A woman scorned. You’ll do better now. Better than him.”

      “A woman scorned,” she repeated.

      She lifted her butt off my bed to pull her phone from the pocket of her robe. Her thumbs flew. I glanced over to her screen only to see a picture of Quinn with a silver-tipped head jammed between her ample boobies while she grinned at the camera. Then there was another picture that...okay, that was a nipple. I didn’t need to see that, so I looked away. I hadn’t signed on for sisterly areolas.

      Quinn kept typing.

      “He wants to dump me? Whatever. You’re right. I will do better. But while I’m doing better, I’m going to make sure he has the worst day of his life.”

      “What are you doing?” I asked.

      Quinn paused to smirk at me, one brow lifted, her eyes full of flint. “Texting his wife. She really ought to know what he’s doing behind her back. A woman scorned, right?”

      “Oh,” I said. Because what else could I say? I’d fed fire to the fire god. The inferno was a foregone conclusion.

       Chapter Six

      It never occurred to me that Quinn shouldn’t have the cell number of her ex-dude’s wife. The house phone would have made sense, but she said she was texting Mrs. Cheated On. Unless the married couple shared a cell...

      Naaaaah. It was much more convoluted than that.

      I went over Nikki’s house to hang out with her, Laney and Tommy for Shitty Movie Night. It was a thing we did the first Friday of every month wherein we found the dumbest movie on Netflix, ordered pizza, drank gallons of soda and mercilessly mocked the film. We were buzzards on a fresh corpse. It was great.

      It is great. We still do it.

      We were at the “waiting for the pizza guy to show up” portion of the night, laying siege to Nikki’s downstairs family room with the surround sound, big-screen TV and comfortable leather theater seating, when Quinn came up in conversation, albeit in a roundabout way.

      “Big goings-on at the Bear,” Laney said, sprawled across Tommy’s lap, her heels perched on the armrest of the couch. Her black lips, pale powdered skin and straight black hair made her look especially Morticia, which was a compliment by Laney’s standards.

      “What’s up?” Nikki was painting her toenails rainbow colors, a weird pink foamy thing separating her toes so she didn’t smudge. Her glittery lacquer matched her neon skull leggings. Looking between her and Laney, I felt like the only girl present who couldn’t be in a rock band. I was relegated to nerdy groupie or maybe, if I was lucky, band manager.

      I was still doing better than Tommy, though. He’d be the sound guy.

      “The big boss got caught dipping into the employee tip jar if you know what I mean. That’s six people now, I think? Mrs. Winters is still around the shop, crabbier than usual, but Mr. Winters is nowhere to be found. I think she’s going to take him up the river.”

      I said nothing because why didn’t that occur to me before?

      Josh’s dad, Quinn? Holy crap!

      “He messed around with Theresa what’s-her-name.” Nikki capped off her polish, fanning her toes with the menu from the pizza place. “How do you think she got that car? She told her parents she won it in a contest from the chain. Mr. Winters is as nasty as Josh.”

      “I can’t even,” I managed. “Gross. So, so, so gross.”

      Tommy connected the dots first, and his expression—lip curled up on one side in horror, nose crinkled—mirrored my own.

      “Oh, crap. Quinn?”

      I nodded. “Yeah. She said she loved him. I... Man. I didn’t even think about it at the time.”

      I felt sick. I didn’t exactly like Quinn, but for her to fall prey to a serial teen-banger was bad business. She’d told his wife, but it should have gone way beyond that, especially considering Mr. Winters was indiscreet enough in his doings that everyone knew about them.

      Well, except for Mrs. Winters.

      Until recently.

      “Maybe I can convince her to press charges. It is statutory,” I said.

      “She should. Damn. Poor Josh.” Tommy flinched. “Poor girls for being used, but that sucks for him, too.”

      “Especially since he got Quinn the job,” Laney added. “Can you imagine if he finds out who outed his father?”

      I could, despite not wanting to.

      The room grew silent. No one was supposed to ever feel sorry for Quinn Littleton and yet none of us could help it. If she’d known, she would have lost her mind; pity wasn’t Quinn’s thing. Owning every situation, pretending she was always in charge—that was her deal. Which meant no matter what I said to her about how wrong Mr. Winters had been, she wouldn’t press charges. She’d have to tell strangers intimate things that would