Very Bad Things by Susan McBride Read Free Book Online

shrink for weekly sessions. It had taken months of therapy and snapping rubber bands against her wrists before she’d kicked the habit.
So much for that
. She sighed and started gnawing on her thumbnail.
    “I have to give him credit for one thing, at least,” Tessa went on. “When you ran out, he went back to the hockey jocks’ table and slammed Getty in the face. I think he might have knocked out a few teeth.”
    “What?” Katie stared at Tessa. “Mark hit Steve?”
    “Yeah, and Steve was spitting blood. Hmm, I wonder if he had any teeth left to lose.”
    Katie wasn’t sorry that Mark had gone after Getty. Maybe the whole thing
was
Steve’s fault. Why else would Mark be convinced enough to beat him up in front of everyone in the dining hall?
    Mrs. Gabbert appeared. “Here you are, hon,” she chirped. “But be careful. The box is wet from the rain, and it’s got a strange smell to it, like perishables that have already perished.”
    Katie stood up and took the box. The cardboard had beensoaked through so that a faded label marked TWO DOZEN BRILLO PADS could barely be read. It was held together by twine, not tape. Weird.
    “Mrs. G.’s right,” Tessa said, wrinkling her nose. “It smells like bologna gone bad. Who sent it?”
    “I don’t know.” The rain had smeared the ink, making a mess of Katie’s name. There was no address, not even her dorm name. There was nothing in the left-hand corner where the return address should have been, so she had no idea where it came from. “Do you think it’s from Mark?”
    “Would he give you rotten meat?” Tessa looked at her like she was crazy. “If he did, he’s really lost it.”
    Katie set the package on the floor and pried off the twine. There was no note, just something rolled up in yellowed paper, something that smelled rank enough to make her hold her breath as she began to unwrap it. Toward the end, the paper unrolled all by itself and dumped the contents between her feet.
Plop
.
    “Oh, my God,” she whispered when she saw what it was. The few bites of lunch she’d eaten backed up in her throat.
    It was a severed human hand, bone protruding from where the wrist used to be. The skin had turned a mottled shade of grayish purple, and the fingers curled like claws, with badly chipped nails once painted hot pink. On the back of the hand was a bloodred rose.
    “Lord have mercy!” Mrs. Gabbert gasped.
    “That can’t be real, can it?” Even tough-as-nails Tessa sounded freaked out. “It’s rubber, right?”
    But it didn’t look rubber to Katie. It didn’t smell like it either. She stared at the object unraveled from the stained paper, her stomach churning. She could hardly breathe.
    “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” she murmured over and over, turning away, unable to look a second longer.
    Had someone cut off the party girl’s rose-tattooed hand and delivered it to her?
    “I’m calling security!” Mrs. Gabbert said in a shaky voice as she backed out of the foyer.
    “I’m gonna be sick,” Katie murmured, wobbling as she took a few steps away from the box. As Tessa held her arm to steady her, Katie turned her head and puked all over Tessa’s shoes.

M ark swiped at his bloody nose with the sleeve of his blazer as he walked down the marble-tiled hallway. Just outside the closed doors to his father’s office, he caught his reflection in a mirror and frowned. A purple bruise had begun forming along his jaw and drying blood clung to his nostrils. He let out a slow breath, telling himself that Steve had asked for it, that the beating was long overdue.
    If Whitney Prep’s head of security hadn’t shown up so fast, Mark would have killed the guy. But Wharton’s crew had quickly broken things up and disbanded the crowd that had gathered. One uniform had taken Getty to the school’s infirmary—with Steve giving Mark a hint of a bloody smile on his way out, like he’d won the fight, not lost it—while Wharton himself had dragged Mark to the