Scandal Read Online Free PDF Page B

flutter at the beautifully rendered portraits of the girls in black, facing the girls in white. It looked almost exactly the way our initiations had looked. Some of this ritual had clearly trickled down to the current—well, former—Billings House.
    Suddenly, I felt like part of something big—bigger than I’d ever truly realized.
    These first few chapters of text had all been written in the same hand. I flipped to the original list of signatures to compare the handwriting and concluded that Elizabeth Williams had been the mastermind behind the Billings Literary Society. All the rituals and tasks had been written out in her tight script. I felt like she was reading over my shoulder, urging me on, encouraging me to keep reading. So I did.
    With each new page, my heart beat faster and faster. There was a secret handshake. A secret whistle. A whispered question and answer to recite before admission into secret meetings. There was even a list of excuses to recite should a faculty member happen to stumble upon one of said meetings. I raced ahead, speed-reading and skimming, my smile widening slowly.
    This was it.
    This was the key to bringing the Billings Girls back together—and maybe even getting Ivy the circle of friends she’d always wanted. A secret society. The Billings Literary Society, to be exact. We could reconstitute it. We could reclaim our history. We could be the sort of society the original Billings Girls wanted us to be. Forget adherence to fashion codes and backbiting gossip and snarky texts. We could be the fine, upstanding, intelligent, world-leading women of tomorrow.
    With a secret handshake and everything.
    I slammed the book closed and hopped off my bed. Noelle had to see this ASAP. If this book didn’t awaken her inner Billings Girl, nothing would.

ULTIMATE BILLINGS GIRL
    “They cover everything in here, Noelle.” I dropped down on the bed next to her, so hard we both bounced.
    Noelle’s Pemberly single was just two floors above mine and completely barren. She hadn’t hung up any of the framed photographs of her family and friends, or the black-and-white reproductions of classic Vogue covers that had lined the walls in her Billings room. Usually her desk and dresser were covered with crap—scarves, necklaces, iPods, books, ticket stubs, flyers, makeup, mementos—but she hadn’t unpacked a thing other than the clothes and makeup she’d worn that day.
    I hugged the book to my chest like it was the Holy Grail. “Initiation rites, mission statements, proper conduct when meeting with a sister in public. It’s a guidebook and a diary of everything these girls ever did. There are entries dating all the way up until the 1970s!”
    “It is an intriguing little piece of history,” Noelle said, giving a cursory glance over my shoulder. “Let me see that list of original members again.”
    I handed her the book, open to the second page. She quickly scanned the names. For a moment I saw her pause and her lips flicked into a smile, but then her eyes narrowed and the smile was gone.
    “What? Do you recognize a name?” I asked.
    Noelle slapped the book closed and handed it back to me. “Nope.”
    She got up and walked over to her trunk, unsnapping the lid and throwing it open. In big armfuls, she started to remove her clothes, most of them already on hangers, and shoved them into her teeny closet at random. Silk blouses shimmied to the floor. Designer dresses crowded and wrinkled. She tossed a stack of three-hundred-dollar jeans on the shelf above the hanging rod; four pairs tumbled back down onto her head. She groaned and flung them onto the floor.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “Nothing,” she told the pile of jeans.
    “Noelle—”
    “Why would someone give that to you?” Noelle blurted, throwing a hand out at me.
    “Because. Clearly they want us to restart this Billings Literary Society thing, and I—”
    Noelle closed her eyes, shook her head, and let out that condescending laugh