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pretend to sing for the next two weeks and hope no one notices. I figure it can’t be too 36

    hard to lose yourself in a crowd.
    And it is a crowd. It’s eight in the morning and there are more people gathered in the assembly hall than I would have expected. Paradise doesn’t look like it could possess fifty reasonably musical offspring, let alone the roughly two hundred teenagers I see here, checking each other out brazenly. It’s like a meat market, and Carmen’s group is giving as good as it gets. The air is practically sizzling.
    ‘Are you having another mental attack?’ says Rat-face suspiciously when I don’t answer her right away.
    I dart a look at the cover of her score, which bears the name Tiffany Lazer in a cloud of hearts and flowers.
    It suits her. It’s fluffy and deadly, at the same time.
    ‘Nope,’ I reply casually. ‘Just scoping for, um …
    hotties, uh, Tiff.’
    It’s the right thing to say because Tiffany relaxes immediately. ‘Speaking of which, so how was it? I hear Ryan Daley looks all male-modelly super-gorgeous but is pretty much a psycho, nut-job disaster waiting to happen. I was soooo jealous at first when I found out who you’d got, but now I’m so glad it’s not me!
    You’re practically in the middle of an ongoing murder investigation — how twisted is that?’
    37

    Silently, I thank Carmen for her diary, which lays out the equal parts longing, equal parts hatred she feels for Tiffany Lazer and her snobby circle of friends. From what I can tell, everything between Carmen and Tiffany is some kind of weird contest for supremacy, though they seem to have nothing in common but the singing thing.
    I notice a few of the other St Joseph’s girls hanging off every word Tiffany says, giving me the once-over while they’re doing it. I feel a stab of pity for Carmen —
    why does she care so much about what the others think?
    And they say girls don’t like blood sports. My noncommittal, ‘Oh?’ is a little more antagonistic than I intended.
    But Tiffany only hears what she wants to hear, and it’s enough to prompt her to spill her guts about how Ryan Daley is this far away from being locked up in a mental institution for turning vigilante and stalking people he thinks might be responsible for his sister’s abduction.
    ‘She was taken right out of her bedroom,’ Tiffany says as Paradise High’s music director, a tired-looking little man with wild hair and eyeglasses called Mr Masson, taps the podium microphone with his stubby 38

    fingers. People wince at the vicious feedback he triggers but they keep right on talking. Two spots of hectic colour appear on his cheekbones.
    ‘No signs of forced entry or anything,’ Tiffany continues airily.
    Which would explain the invisible force-field that seemed to surround Mr Daley in the car park the other day. To most of the citizens of Paradise, it probably looks like an inside job. It also goes some way to explaining why Louisa Daley resembles a walking corpse and is on the brink of implosion, like a dying sun. Such a corrosive thing, doubt.
    ‘Lauren was a soprano, just like we are,’ Tiffany adds. ‘Blonde, incredibly bright, beautiful, too. The whole package.’ She looks me up and down as if to say, everything you’re not, baby .
    I wonder again why Carmen wants this bitch to like her so badly.
    ‘ Everyone at Paradise High gives Ryan a wide berth,’
    Tiffany says as Mr Masson tries and fails to get our attention once again. ‘He’s a weirdo loner with a hair-trigger temper and a gun . People have seen him pull one.
    They say there was blood everywhere .’
    The two statements are complete non sequiturs 39

    unless you draw an unsavoury line between them.
    Carmen wrinkles her brow, me doing it. ‘So people think Ryan might be in on it, too?’ I say. ‘The father did it? Maybe the son? Both involved. Some weird psycho-sexual thing? Maybe the mother knows something?’
    Tiffany nods enthusiastically. ‘Better watch your