"Are you sure you want to do this?" Hadley chewed her bottom lip. Over the years of friendship, it had grown to be a habit of hers and she tended to do it out of boredom or nervousness and I'm not sure what it was this time. Though nervous was a good bet.

We were at the doctor's office, waiting for my appointment and waiting for the chance to finally transform.

"I'm positive," I told her, even though I could hear my heartbeat deep under my chest. The mirror next to the clock on the wall plastered with body-length posters of women's bodies and faces with slogans like sculpt your way to a new you or beauty is confidence. The last one struck me as rather odd to say in an aesthetic surgery clinic as confidence must be a department somebody was lacking if they came to seek beauty in plastic surgery. "It's what needs to be done."

I was never butt-ugly. Sure, I had some childhood hiccups but it wasn't as if I was Frankenstein's girl cousin. I always had bad skin but that could be amended with the right skincare routines and dermatologist appointments, my braces were already taken off and my eyesight had been recently restored the minute the osteopathic doctor recommended the LASIK surgery. Everything that was ever a flaw could've been fixed except for my nose.

Usually, I really didn't care about it. I thought it was cool to have a little bump on the bridge of my nose. People often said it gave character to my face. But popular girls don't do characters, they are usually caricatures of perfection.

The desire to change it had never struck me until recently when in order to assimilate into the ranks of the Elite and take them down, I needed to fix my nose. Since then, I became hyper-aware of the imperfect feature of the face- my nose. I was comparing it to perfect girls in magazines and social media, even though I knew they were retouched and photoshopped; those other tall, blonde, straight-nosed, full-chested girls who were perfect, no doubt of it, with their worries on anything but their nose.

It was now all I stressed about- my nose. The thing was that I was constantly worried about it, wondering if it was the first thing people noticed about my whole appearance- my nose; the bad and the ugly, the thorn that needs to be plucked off and replaced with a rose.

I stared back at the clock hanging on the wall above the receptionist's counter. The clock was like the rest of the clinic's interior- standard, white, clinical, boring, its glinting metal hands resting on two in the afternoon. I stared at the brochures, all written in Korean. They are all tacky and bright with beautiful, photoshopped Korean girls advertising some beauty product that doesn't really work. I stared at the other patients sitting beside me. They were reading magazines or scrolling down their feed, enslaved into the cage of their own networks, too busy for the real world, too engaged by the digital reality before them.

"Amory Scout?" The nurse in the white uniform pronounced my name in heavily accented English as she peered around the reception for anybody of the name. Hadley and I stood up, rising slowly, with caution as we drew some attention to ourselves.

"Here," I hoped it doesn't come off shaky. I didn't want the rest of the world to hear how anxious I was.

"Ready?"

No.

"Yes."

-

"I'm so pissed."

Luciana spits out venomously when we clamber into the bathroom in a messy tangled heap of high heels, alcohol, cigarettes, and tight dresses. We stagger over towards the sinks and mirrors; spread horizontally across the tiki

"She so doesn't have the right to do that." Parker grovels as Luciana shoves the cigarette back in her mouth, holding one exceptionally long inhale before removing it and breathing out a pillar of smoke into Carmen's face, who waves it away.

"Watch the carbon dioxide," Carmen cringes at the smell of smoke. Luciana mutters a brief sorry and moves her head to the side to blow out another column of smoke.

"You don't smoke?" I guess I shouldn't be surprised because Carmen is one of the top girls in her classes at the American School of Ballet, managing to score private lessons with their most renowned teachers and winning the main role of every major production the school put together for the last three years. Rumors have it that New York City Ballet is planning to scout her any time soon so she must be under a world of pressure and stress to ensure her body, weight and health are in top condition for the RAD exams and the incoming auditions for the next ballet production.

"I'm an athlete," she replies jauntily. "Athletes can't smoke."

"Dancers are not athletes," I laugh, thinking she's dramatizing this too much. A wave of heat floods Carmen's cheeks.

"Not when it comes to ballet," Parker produces a slim hand to tuck her long blonde hair behind her ear. "Of course, you wouldn't understand, Amory."

Luciana plunks her clutch onto the bathroom sink and billows out an irritated groan."Guys, it does not matter whether ballerinas should be considered athletes! I just got shown up by a fucking Conroy."

Carmen nods, the cold gust of the air conditioning sweeps by and whips at her skin, taking away the hot edge of her flush. Her Armenian features are more prominent than ever in the filtered, fake flames of the tiki torches; tainting her deep set massive almond eyes, angular-shaped face, and chiseled cheekbones in a red, amber vermillion haze of sunset with a cedar undertone, emphasizing her impeccable coffee beige skin even more. Her small, flat breasts are being pushed up, flooding out of her tight bustier top, which wraps her slim ballerina torso in its satin corset material and Carmen Calloway wears skinny jeans along with the top, ripped at the knees. They don't look like they're worth anything- probably some cheap knockoff by the Gap but I doubt it. Carmen Calloway does not do cheap.

"You're right, of course." A pop of a container, liquid lipstick hitting oxygen, and a careful stroke of motions across Carmen's cupid bow, then a nude pink coats over her lips. "Some people need to be taught a lesson."

"Who does she think she is? Honestly, she knew he was mine and she still went for it, right in front of my fucking face."

Luciana is referring to the scene she has stumbled upon with the other girls right after they spent an hour on the dance floor. Our feet were straining with the exhaustion of being caged in towering heels so we've decided to head back to the original table only to come back to an unsightly scene of Bailey and Orson all over each other, much to Luciana's dismay. Bailey's tongue was inside Orson's mouth and another girl had joined in where they found her I have no idea. Whatever it was, it was enough for Luciana to flush a deep puce color before stuttering some bullshit excuse about needing the bathroom, then dragging Carmen, Parker and me along with her.

Confusion mars Parker's face. "When did you ever say he was yours?"

"I told her in confidence last week."

"Carmen," Parker cooes with coy intention. The hungry light in her eyes resembles a hunter thumbing a knife over the prey's delicate neck, feeling it quiver as it positions the blade over the jugular vein. It's like she's passively savoring the fear when that momentous second descends upon the animal and it realizes it's going to die. "What are you thinking? Maybe a little cat-and-mouse?"

"You're so fucked in the head," Carmen snickers derisively. Unexpectedly, she looks at me. "What do you think, Amory?"

"I don't know. What are you thinking?"

I've witnessed pretty horrible things in my lifetime but nothing terrifies me more than Carmen Calloway's burning, inscrutable gaze and the glee in them. "Have you heard of a little ritual called Initiation?"

-

The next morning, I set an alarm to wake me up earlier than the other girls.

Luciana, Parker, and Carmen are sharing Luciana's bed while Madison, Nadine, and I are scattered across Luciana's attic bedroom on the wooden floor on comfortable, plush mattresses, completed with their own comforter, pillows and sheets. Perks of being an Upper Side princess.

I set the alarm by plugging earphones in as if to appear to be listening to music while sleeping when in actual fact nothing is playing. I do this so the other girls can't hear the alarm.

Luciana, Parker, and the other girls are still in their clothes from yesterday with the night before makeup caking their pores, stinking of booze, cigarettes, and vomit- courtesy of Luciana and Parker.

My mind flashes to yesterday at the thought of Luciana and Parker, who after the bathroom meeting swore me to secrecy and said don't breathe a word to the Conroys about this or we'll make sure you'll be so socially ruined you'll kill yourself. Then as if the conversations never happened, we waltzed back up to the table. Orson, Bailey, and the mystery girl have disappeared but the other boys remained and continued the party until five in the morning when Parker and Luciana officially died on us. Carmen, Nadine, Melissa, and I were relatively buzzed from the alcohol but we weren't as bad as Parker and Luciana. Parker had been rendered immobile after a stupid bet with Hanif to take eight Jager bombs in a row and Luciana, after almost six hours of subsequent drinking, felt the effects by puking at least six times all over Times Square. Thus we were stuck with babysitting duty.

Carmen huffed as we hauled Luciana's unconscious body into a cab, "I swear to God," she groaned as Luciana's vomit-covered hair almost brushed against her arm, "I'm always the fucking mom."

I had laughed and Carmen grinned at me, even though she just threatened to personally vindicate me if I exposed the fact that the Elite was not very happy with the Conroy sisters.

Speaking of Carmen, her space on the bed is cold with her absence. Panic seizes me. Where is she? Why wasn't she sleeping? If she's not sleeping, it might put a step back in my plan because if she walks in on me rummaging through Luciana's computer for dirt...

I try not to think about the consequences.

Treading softly on the floor, I sidestep to avoid accidentally stepping on any strands of hair on my way towards the door. As I languidly tap the door open, holding in a breath I didn't even know I'm holding, a creak sounds. As a gap widens, I scan the world outside of Luciana's room and spot Carmen outside.

I frown. Why is she out there?

Then I know. She's in shorts, a sports bra, and pretty pink pointe shoes, revealing her toned torso and long, muscular legs. She's skinny but you don't realize how skinny she is until she's stripped down like this where her hips jut out with only skin sewed on the bones and not an inch of fat makes itself prominent on her body. Her collarbones and her neck are so bony she resembles a crack addict. The only healthy-looking thing in her whole body is her muscular legs, so well sculpted with her calf and thigh muscles to support her weight when she lifts herself into a pointe position. She swings her leg back into a high arabesque with no problem, demonstrating the full height of her flexibility before she brings it back down and squats into a plie.

She doesn't seem to feel me watching as she's too engrossed and engaged in the passion of the dance, a world away as the sweet classical music plays through her earphones. You can hate her all you like but you can't admit that she's a great dancer. There's a silent, elegant grace to the way she fluidly arches her feet and extends her long neck or moves her arms. Even in old shorts and a plain black sports bra.

Then she stops and pushes the chair back into the dining table before she sits down and removes her ballet shoes. She sighs as she peels off the toe pad and she pops open a bottle, then her hand skims over her feet, seeming to be massaging them with some sort of menthol gel. I widen the gap of the door to access a better look. I had to stifle a gasp at the sight I received.

I've never seen her whole feet before. She always wears socks no matter the occasion. She slept with them on and at school, it's required to wear them. When we go out, she wears pumps or thick clogs that hide her toes. I never think of it now but this validates why she does it. Her feet are a galore of purple bruises, black ingrown nails, populating with blisters, bunions, and corns. Suddenly, ballet doesn't seem very pretty anymore. They look like they've been beaten repeatedly by a baseball bat and left there to fester out in the sun.

I tear myself from the scene as Carmen finish massaging her feet and apply her toe pad again, then she ties up the satin ribbons around her slim ankles before resuming another dance technique even though I have no idea how she could dance when her feet are swollen and on the verge of flaking apart. The motto pain is beauty, I suppose, is not only applicable to aesthetics.

My mind swirls with yesterday's events as I head to the bathroom to splash water onto my face to jar me into sharpness. After all, if I want to hack into Luciana's computer without any mishaps, I need to do it on full alert.

Luciana's laptop is a relatively standard Macbook Air- the highest grade, of course. The modems and securities are easy to crack through with the right app. The beauty with Apple laptops is that almost every one of them is the same- even their systems. Maybe one could hold more memory or one has a slightly more advanced hard drive but with the styles of the products, there's very little variation, meaning a program to hack one Apple laptop can be easily used for another. With a cable, I charged my phone and started her laptop, then let the app decode the password for me.

In five minutes, I'm able to breach through the security of her laptop and click on her trash, hoping I can play on the fact that she seems to be the sort of person who never empties their trash bins. I smile when it loads up. I was right. There were about twenty thousand files in her trash but I didn't care- the more, the merrier. I switch to another app on my phone and wait for my phone to download the files from her trash bin. As it does that, my eyes trail back to the bed and the floor where Melissa and Nadine are snoring peacefully in their mattresses, the loud sounds piercing through the veil of ease and silence that holds me aloft from reality.

I focus particularly on Melissa, whose smokey eyeshadow has rubbed all over the white sheets. I used to think I couldn't tell her and Bailey apart but now I realize how much difference there is because I start to associate Melissa's personality with her features. Melissa has a sharper, thinner chin to accompany her sharper mind and a taller nose, and a more slanted look to her eyes to show she's smarter and definitely more shrewd than her twin. Melissa's the wise one. Bailey has a rounder chin, a cuter, plumper effect to her features, and big doe-like Goldilock eyes. Bailey is the playful twin. Bailey is the one that boys like but Melissa's the one that boys love.

I think about what Melissa said to me. Such good advice. You have to know if it's worth it. I think about what I had to do for my Initiation and cringe, not at the game but at who I had to do it too. She didn't really deserve it. Not at all. Her words ring like a conundrum, becoming more of a demonic chant as it repeats in my head. Make sure the victim deserves it.

But did anyone really?

please vote + comment! will be updating more frequently since i'm now in self-isolation