Read Wrath - 4 for Free Online

patted Harper’s shoulder, and Harper squirmed away with a grimace. “We’l always be there for you, Harper, no matter what anyone else says.”
    “You’ve always got us,” Mini-Me agreed. “I mean, we don’t care if you wet your pants or slept with a mil ion guys or—”
    “Give me that,” Harper snarled, snatching the flyer out of Mini-Me’s hand. She unfolded it slowly, forcing her hands not to shake.
    The words leaped off the page.
    Al her darkest secrets, al her most embarrassing moments, her deepest fears, al laid out in black print, stretching across the page for anyone to see. It had been published anonymously—the cowards way—but Harper didn’t need a byline to know whom to blame. There was only one person who knew al her secrets—the one person she had trusted never to betray her.
    Harper smiled, though it felt more like a grimace of horror. Hopeful y the Minis would be too dim to tel the difference. Then she shrugged. “Is this al ?”
    “ All?” Mini-Me squealed. “Don’t you get it? ‘HG’—Harper Grace. That’s you .”
    Harper rol ed her eyes, almost thankful for the Minis’ presence; the familiar sense of disgust was helping her suppress al those less desirable emotions. Helplessness.
    Humiliation. Despair.
    Focus on something more constructive, she warned herself. People can only hurt you if you let them. Don’t be a victim .
    “See?” Mini-She chirped. “Like it says right here, ‘HG was so desperate for AM that she …’”
    Harper tuned her out—after al , she already knew the story. It was more important to regain her focus and start working on damage control. But cool, calculating strategy was impossible when one unquestionable fact kept dril ing into her brain.
    Miranda had betrayed her. No one else knew what she knew.
    She wouldn’t have done it on her own, Harper was certain ofthat. She didn’t have this kind of nastiness in her. She would have been goaded into it by someone else, someone so pure and innocent that no one would ever suspect her of spewing such poison.
    “What are we going to do?” Mini-Me moaned. As if there were a “we.”
    “Who needs to do something?” Harper asked, crumpling the flyer into a bal and tossing it over her shoulder like the trash it was. “You know what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
    “You don’t even care?” Mini-She asked, eyes wide and adoring. From the expression on the Minis’ faces—impressed and total y devoid of pity—Harper grew certain that she’d be able to fix this.
    These last few weeks had been the most lonely and miserable of Harper’s life—something like this could have been a fatal blow. And yet, she marveled, perhaps Beth had done her a favor. Because she suddenly felt invigorated. She felt offended and insulted, righteous and wronged, empowered and enraged.
    She felt like herself again.
    And it felt good.
    Beth and Miranda met up in the second-floor girls’ bathroom after third period to compare notes. The school was buzzing about the already legendary flyer—half the student body had memorized it, and the other half had used it as a springboard to create and pass along wildly unlikely rumors of their own.
    “I can’t believe we actual y did it,” Miranda whispered, checking under the stal s to make sure they were real y alone.
    “You should have—” Beth quickly stopped talking as two babbling juniors burst through the door. Miranda turned on the faucet, pretending to wash her hands, while Beth peered into the streaked mirror, applying a new coat of transparent lip gloss.
    “You think she, like, did it to herself?” the tal brunette asked, smoothing down her hair and using her pinkie to rub in some garish blue eye shadow. “But, like, why?” She dug through her overstuffed silver purse and pul ed out a large gold hoop, wide enough to fit around her wrist, and clamped it onto her earlobe.
    “Oh, puh-leeze,” the shorter, pudgier one said, locking herself inside