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of hers that always got right under my skin. “No. No. Why would someone give it to you?”
    Oh. I got it. She wanted the book. She thought I didn’t deserve to have it and she did. I felt a flash of anger and clutched the book tighter. “What am I, not Billings Girl enough for you?”
    So maybe I had been voted out of the house before Christmas break, but that had been personal—because I’d hooked up with her ex (at the time) Dash McCafferty. And we’d since learned that both of us had been drugged to within an inch of our lives by Sabine, so it wasn’t entirely our fault. Not to mention the fact that Noelle had already gotten back together with Dash and asked me to move back into Billings, which I’d be doing right now if it wasn’t leveled.
    Noelle rolled her eyes. “No! It’s not that. It’s just—” She turned toward the closet again and brought her hand to her forehead. I’d never seen her this worked up. This was not the reaction I’d been expecting. “Forget it. It’s nothing.”
    “Maybe … I don’t know … maybe they left it for me because I was the last elected president of Billings,” I said with a shrug. “These pages seem to be all about following rules and codes and laws. … Maybe whoever left it for me takes that kind of thing seriously.”
    “Whatever,” Noelle said, bending to pick up the jeans. “I don’t care.”
    I smiled. “Good! Because I think we should get started right away. There are all these supplies to get and we’ll probably have to set up a secret email account for—”
    Noelle turned around to face me. “No. I mean, I don’t care,” she said firmly. “I’m not doing this.”
    I paused as I flipped through the pages, holding the edge of one thick sheet. “Not doing what?”
    “This secret society thing,” she said with a trace of a sneer. She yanked a few scarves from her trunk and tossed them onto the hooks in her closet.
    “You’re kidding,” I said as she jammed a bevy of belts onto the hooks over the scarves.
    “Do I look like I’m kidding?” she asked, overturning her makeup bag atop her dresser. Tubes of mascara and eyeliner rolled in all directions and she scrambled to grab them before they hit the floor. “Is this entire dorm crooked?” she snapped, jamming her things back into the bag.
    “Noelle. Come on,” I said. “This could be so cool. And it’s the perfect way to keep us all together. I mean, you were right this morning. It was crazy to think I could bring back Billings House, but maybe we can bring back the Billings Girls.”
    “Not interested,” Noelle replied. Like she was turning down the last blueberry muffin at breakfast, rather than rejecting me and all of our friends in two short words. My blood boiled and I slammed the book closed just to keep from exploding.
    “What do you mean, ‘not interested’?” I demanded. “Look, I know this could be a lot of work, but we need this, Noelle. We have to keep the Billings Girls together.”
    “Why?” Noelle asked, her arms wide as she turned to me again. “Why do I have to do anything anymore?”
    My face fell. This defeated, questioning, pleading person was not the Noelle I knew. I felt like I’d just been told all over again that there was no Santa Claus. That Elmo was just a puppet. That reality TV was not, in actuality, real.
    Noelle leaned back against the wall next to the closet and shook her head, staring off into space. For the first time I noticed that there were dark circles under her eyes—that her hair wasn’t perfectly parted and smooth, but unkempt and shoved haphazardly behind her ears. She slid down the wall slightly, so that her feet were pressed into the floor and her legs at a forty-five-degree angle—like she was trying to hold the wall up with her back. I’d never seen Noelle appear so spent.
    “I’m not even supposed to be here,” she said quietly. “I should be starting my second semester at Yale, not doing time in freaking