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  © 2008 Alloy Entertainment

  P R I VAT E

  A N O V E L B Y

  K A T E B R I A N

  SIMON PULSE

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WHERE BEAUTY LIVES

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2006 by Alloy Entertainment and Kieran Viola

  Where I come from everything is gray. The bland, square strip

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  malls. The water in the lake at the center of town. Even the sunlight in whole or in part in any form.

  has a murky quality. We barely get spring and we never get autumn.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of

  The leaves fall off the sickly trees early each September before they Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  even have a chance to change, tumbling down on the shingled roofs Produced by Alloy Entertainment

  of the standard-issue houses, each one exactly the same as the last.

  151 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

  If you want to see beauty in Croton, Pennsylvania, you’ve got to Cover design by Julian Peploe

  sit in your ten-by-ten bedroom in your boring split-level house Book design by Amy Trombat

  and close your eyes. You have to use your imagination. Some girls The text of this book was set in Filosofia.

  see themselves walking red carpets with movie-star boyfriends

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  while flashbulbs pop. Others, I’m sure, go the princess route, con-First Simon Pulse edition July 2006

  juring up diamonds and tiaras and knights on white horses. All I 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  imagined my entire ninth grade year was this:

  Easton Academy.

  Library of Congress Control Number 2006922004

  How I found myself there, in the place of my daydreams, while

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-1873-8

  the rest of my classmates were entering the dank dreariness of

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-1873-6

  Croton High, I still am not totally sure. Something to do with my

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  soccer and lacrosse skills, my grades, the stellar recommendation low branch of a birch tree, as if to convey that if you belong here, of outgoing Easton senior Felicia Reynolds (my brother Scott’s

  you know where you are going, and if you do not, they aren’t going older, cooler ex), and I think a little bit of begging on my father’s to great lengths to help you find your way.

  part. But at this point, I didn’t care. I was there, and this place was My father turned the car under the iron and brick archway and I everything I had dreamed it would be.

  was sucked in. Hard. Here were buildings of brick and stone,

  As my dad drove our dented Subaru through the sunny streets of

  topped by shingled roofs and spires, tradition and pride oozing Easton, Connecticut, it was all I could do to keep from pressing my from every dated cornerstone. Here were ancient, weathered,

  nose to the dog-slobbered window. The shops here had colorful

  arched doorways, thick wooden doors on iron hinges, cobblestone cloth awnings and windows that gleamed. The streetlamps were the walks lined by neat beds of flowers. Here were pristine playing old-fashioned kind that were electric now, but had once been lit by fields of bright green grass and gleaming white lines. Everything I a guy on a horse toting a pole and a flame. Potted plants hung from saw was perfect. Nothing reminded me of home.

  these lamps, bursting with bright red flowers, still dripping from a

  “Reed, you’re the navigator. Where do I go?” my father asked.

  recent dousing with a garden hose.

  Easton’s orientation map had become a sweaty, crumpled ball in

  Even the sidewalks were pretty: neat and lined with brick,

  my hand. I flattened it over my thigh as if I hadn’t memorized it ten topped by towering oak trees. Beneath the shade of these trees, a times over. “Make a right by the fountain,” I told him, trying to pair of girls my age chatted their way out of a boutique called Sweet sound much calmer than I felt. “The sophomore girls’ dorm is the Nothings, swinging clear bags stacked with neatly folded sweaters last one on the circle.”

  and skirts. As out of place as I felt in my worn Lee jeans and my blue We drove by a matching set of convertible Mercedes. A girl with T-shirt, I had never wanted to live anywhere more than I wanted to live blond hair stood idly by while a man—her father? her butler?—

  here, in Easton. I couldn’t believe that very soon I actually would. I unloaded a huge set of Louis Vuitton luggage onto the curb. My dad felt something warm inside my chest. Something I had felt less and whistled.

  less over the last few years since my mother’s accident. I recognized

  “These people sure know how to live,” he said, and I was

  it dimly as hope.

  instantly irritated by his awe, even though I felt it myself. He Easton Academy is accessible by a small two-lane road, which

  ducked his head so he could see up to the top of the clock tower, winds up from town into the hills above. A small wooden sign on a which I knew from my many hours of paging through the Easton

  short stone base marks the entrance to the school. EASTON ACADEMY

  catalog marked the ancient library.

  ESTABLISHED 1858 it reads in faded letters. The sign is obscured by the What I wanted to say was “Da-a-ad!” What I said was “I know.”

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  He would be gone soon, and if I snapped at him I would regret it a senior boyfriend driving her to school on the first day, would be later when I was alone in this strange, picture-book place. Besides, just another thing that would mystify the girls in my grade.

  I had a feeling that girls like the one we had just seen never said Of course, they were easily mystified.

  things like “Da-a-ad!”

  I hoped it would be different here. I knew it would be. Look at it.

  Outside the three imposing dorms that stood around the circle

  How could it not be?

  at the midpoint of the hill, families kissed and hugged and checked My dad brought the car to a stop at the curb between a gold Land that everyone had everything they needed. Boys in khakis and white Rover and a black limousine. I stared up at the ivy-covered walls of shirts kicked arround a soccer ball, their blazers tossed aside, their Bradwell, the sophomore dorm that would be my home for the next cheeks blotched and ruddy. A pair of stern-looking teachers stood year. Some of the windows were already open, raining down music near the dry stone fountain, nodding as they spoke toward each

  on the students and parents. Pink curtains hung in one room and other’s ears. Girls with shimmering hair compared schedules,

  inside a girl with jet-black curls moved back and forth, placing laughing and pointing and whispering behind their hands.

  things, making it hers.

  I stared at the girls, wondering if
by tomorrow I would know

  “Well, here we are,” my dad said. There was a pause. “You sure

  them. Wondering if any of them would be my friends. I had never about this, kiddo?”

  had many girlfriends. Or any, actually. I was a loner by necessity—

  Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. In all the months that my parents keeping people away from my house and my mother and therefore

  had argued about my coming to Easton, my father was the only per-myself. Plus there was the fact that I wasn’t interested in the things son in my entire family who had never expressed a moment of

  most girls seemed to be interested in—clothes and gossip and Us doubt. Even Scott, whose idea it had been for me to follow Felicia Weekly.

  here in the first place—she had come for her junior and senior

  Back home I was always more comfortable around guys. Guys

  years, finishing up last spring before heading off to Dartmouth and, didn’t feel the need to ask questions, to check out your room and undoubtedly, glory—had balked when he saw the tremendous

  your house and know all the intimate details of your life. So I mostly tuition. But my dad had been on board fully from day one. He had hung out with Scott and his friends, especially Adam Robinson,

  sent in my lacrosse and soccer tapes. He had spent hours on the whom I had dated all summer and who would be a senior at Croton phone with the financial aid department. And all the while he had High this year. I guess the fact that I had broken up with him and constantly reassured me that I was going to “knock ’em dead.”

  come here, thereby not being the first sophomore girl ever to have I looked into my dad’s eyes, exactly the same blue as my own,

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  and I knew he didn’t doubt whether I could make it here. He doubted whether he could make it back home. Images of pill vials flashed in my mind. Little white and blue tablets spilled across a water ring stained night table. A bin full of empty liquor bottles and crumpled INTIMIDATION

  tissues. My mother, wiry and pale, grousing about her pain, about how everything bad happened to her and none of us cared, tearing me down, tearing Scott down, telling us all we were worthless just to make us feel as miserable as she did. Scott had already made his escape—he had packed up and gone off to Penn State last week. Now it would be just Dad and my mother in that tiny little house. The

  “Easton Academy is one of the top-ranked schools in the country.

  thought depressed me.

  Which is, I assume, the reason you sought out a place here. But

  “I don’t have to go here,” I said, even though the very idea that many students who matriculate in from public schools find it to be he might agree with me made me physically ill. To see this place, a . . . difficult adjustment. I trust, of course, that you will not be feel what it was all about, and then have it all taken away within the one of those students, am I right, Miss Brennan?”

  span of five minutes would be painful enough to kill me, I was sure.

  My advisor, Ms. Naylor, had gray hair and jowls. Actual jowls.

  “We can go home right now. Just say the word.”

  They shook when she spoke, and when she spoke it was mostly

  My dad’s face softened into a smile. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Like about how I never should have applied to Easton in the first place as I would really do that. But I appreciate the offer.”

  I was completely out of my league and teetering on the brink of fail-I grinned sadly. “No problem.”

  ure before I had even entered my first class.

  “I love you, kiddo,” he said. I already knew that. Getting me into At least that was what she implied.

  this school and out of that hellhole was about the most obvious dis-

  “Right,” I echoed, going for a confident smile. Ms. Naylor made play of love any parent could have produced. He was pretty much an equally feeble attempt in return. I got the idea that she didn’t my hero.

  smile much as a rule.

  “Love you too, Dad.”

  Her basement office was dark, the walls made of stone and lined And then he hugged me and I cried and before I knew it, we were by shelves full of dusty leather-bound books. It was lit only by two saying good-bye.

  windows set high in the wall. Her round body wedged so perfectly

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  between the arms of her chair that it seemed she was permanently sounded more like a threat. There was a pause. I had the feeling I bound there. If the musky/oniony smell in the air was any indica-was supposed to say something. So I said, “Okay.”

  tion, it was quite possible that she never actually left the room.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Your schedule.”

  And that whatever she last ate within its four walls was seriously She whipped out a thin sheet of paper and held it out over the

  rank.

  little bronze nameplate on the edge of her desk, advertising her

  “The academic programs at Easton are extremely advanced.

  position as guidance director. As far as I could tell, all she was try-Most of the students in your year are taking courses that would be ing to do was guide me, crying in submission, to the nearest airport.

  considered senior level by your old high school’s curriculum stan-I took the paper and scanned it, taking in words like “Art

  dards,” Ms. Naylor continued, looking down her nose at what I

  History,” “Bonus Lab,” and “French 3.” How in God’s name had I

  assumed were my Croton High records. “You’ll need to do a lot of placed into French 3?

  extra work to keep up. Are you up to the task?”

  “Thank you,” I said. I was pleased to hear that my voice was not

  “Yeah. I hope so,” I said.

  trembling in concert with my insides.

  She looked at me like she was confused. What did she expect me

  “And, the honor code.”

  to say? “No”?

  She handed me another piece of paper, this one thicker, more

  “I see you’re here on partial scholarship. That’s good,” Ms.

  substantial, than the first. At the top corner was the Easton crest Naylor says. “Most of our scholarship students have a certain fire in and the words “Easton Academy Code of Honor for Students.”

  their bellies that seems to inspire them to attain their goals.”

  Beneath that, “Tradition, Honor, Excellence.”

  Ms. Naylor closed her folder and leaned toward me across her

  “Read it over and sign it,” Ms. Naylor said.

  desk. A shaft of light from one of the windows illuminated the dis-I did as I was told. The honor code basically stated that I would tinct line between the makeup on her face and the fleshy rolls of her not cheat and that I would report any classmate if I suspected him neck.

  or her of cheating. If I failed to meet these standards, I would be

  “We expect great things out of each and every one of our stu-

  instantly expelled. No second chances at Easton Academy. But

  dents here at Easton,” she said. “I hold my own advisees to partic-since I had never had to cheat in my life, and couldn’t fathom that ularly high standards, so I will be keeping a close eye on you, Miss anyone else who had been accepted to this school would have to, Brennan. Don’t let me down.”

  I signed it quickly and handed it back. Ms. Naylor inspected my Maybe I was just being paranoid, but somehow this demand

  signature.

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  “You should get going,” she said. “House meetings begin in fif-

  teen minutes. You don’t want to make a bad impression with your house mother on your first day.”

  “Thank you,” I said again, and stood.

  INTRIGUE

  “Oh, and Miss Brennan?” sh
e said. When I looked at her again,

  she had twisted her face into a smile. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof. “Good luck,” she said.

  The “you’ll need it” was implied.

  Feeling nostalgic for the hopefulness I had felt back in my dad’s car, I grasped the cold, brass doorknob and walked out.

  My tendency to walk with my head down has had both benefits and drawbacks in the past. The major drawback was the fact that I had walked into my share of people. The benefit was that I was always finding things. Tons of coins, fallen necklaces and bracelets, secret love notes people thought they’d secured in their binders. Once I even found a wallet full of cash and when I turned it in I got a fifty-dollar reward. But I should have known that walking that way

  around Easton would be bad. I was halfway across the quad that

  backed the dorms when I heard someone shout, “Heads up!”

  Which, of course, made me look when it was supposed to make

  me duck.

  I dropped my schedule and grabbed the football out of the air

  about a tenth of a second before it would have sent me to the infirmary with a broken nose. My heart was in my throat.

  “Nice reflexes.”

  There was a guy sitting directly in my path. Had the ball not

  almost rearranged my face, I would have tripped right over him

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  with my next step. He slipped the sleek cell he’d been texting on

  “I’ll take that back now,” I said, reaching for it.

  into his pocket, unfolded his long legs, and stood up, picking up my He turned away from my grasp, holding the schedule up with

  schedule along the way. His dark hair fell over his forehead in a both hands. I racked my brain trying to recall if there was anything messy yet somehow totally deliberate way, one lock landing right embarrassing or overly personal on there. Did it say I was on

  over one of his strikingly deep blue eyes. He wore a gray heather scholarship? Did it say where I was from?

  T-shirt that hugged a perfectly lithe frame. His features were angu-

  “Hmmmm. . . tough schedule. We have a smarty on our hands.”

  lar, his lightly tanned skin flaw-free.

  The way he said it, I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad

  “New girl,” he said, looking me up and down.