Dead Little Mean Girl. Eva Darrows

didn’t miss any more practices, but she did spend her weekend days exchanging bodily fluids with her mysterious dude and, in turn, collecting valuable prizes. A necklace. New lingerie. An iPad. She tried to give me the sordid details 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.