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“Holy crap!” he cried as he grabbed her in a congratulatory headlock.

  Charlie leaned on Darwin for support—her legs had turned to Jell-O. Was this really happening? “Seriously?” she whisper-asked the black suits. “Is this a joke?”

  “No joke, Miss Deery. The Presidential Office of Technological Advancement has been paying close attention to your little TV show. Whatever you did impressed the hell out of them, and they want to offer you a job.”

  Charlie’s mouth lifted into a dazed smile of disbelief as her brown eyes drifted over the heads of the black suits and searched out the person that had made this all possible. Did Shira know about this? If not, Charlie couldn’t wait to tell her. Because in spite of all the mind games the glossy Aussie had subjected them to, Charlie now believed Shira really did want her girls to find success.

  Her eyes finally found Shira, and she was shocked to discover the mogul had raised her trademark black sunglasses a little and was aiming her ice-blue eyes directly at Charlie in a wide-eyed stare full of unspoken expectation, mixed—Charlie was sure of it—with a twinkle that could only be called pride. Charlie winked, then she mouthed two words that, until now, she’d never actually meant when it came to Shira. Thank you.

  But the Aussie just shrugged, as if to say “Don’t thank me, lolly, thank yourself,” before her jewel-encrusted hand lowered her black sunglasses back over her eyes.

  A shiver-inducing realization hit Charlie: Someday soon, I might be in a position to grant Shira Brazille a favor. She swallowed a laugh. How much things had changed since the day she begged Shira to let her join the Academy!

  Turning back to Darwin, Charlie pushed the thought to the back of her mind for now. “Okay, D. I think this officially means you don’t have to yell at your mom about the whole TV show thing.”

  “Hmm, I’ll think about that one,” Darwin answered.

  “Hate to break this up, Miss Deery, but we have a plane waiting,” Suit #1 interrupted.

  “But… what about him?” Charlie stammered, placing a proprietary hand on Darwin.

  “Just go,” Darwin said. “I’ll find you soon. I always do.”

  Charlie’s head spun. She had just reunited with Darwin, and now they were already being ripped apart? No way. If I’m really an Alpha now, then I get to call the shots.

  “No.” Charlie pulled her shoulders back and stood facing the black suits with her game face on, prepared to do some bargaining. “I’ll go on one condition. He comes with me.” She pointed her thumb at the airspace next to Darwin.

  The black suits looked at each other and then back at Charlie. They shrugged like two people who were in no position to argue.

  Charlie grinned. Shira was right after all—some things were better than winning.

  EPILOGUE

  KODAK THEATER

  BACKSTAGE AT THE ALPHA ACADEMY REUNION SHOW

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  4:58 P.M.

  “Looks like a full house,” Skye murmured to herself as she stared at the flat-screen monitors on each wall of the greenroom of the Kodak Theater. Any minute now the three winning Alphas would be reunited onstage with Shira Brazille for the Alpha Academy Reunion Special. At least a thousand people were seated in the audience, all of them waiting to see the Jackie O’s confrontation with their former principal. Leo Vanderbees, the host of such reality mega-hits as School Spirit Faceoff, She Stole My Boyfriend, Shopping with the Stars, and now the Alpha Academy spinoff hit Project Beta: Triple’s House of Pain, walked into the room trailing the scent of John Varvatos cologne and brandishing his ubiquitous uber-white smile.

  Skye jumped up from the white leather couch she was perched on. “Hi, Mr. Vanderbees,” she managed, trying not to act too starstruck. After all, as she’d come to understand over the past few months, she was a pretty huge star herself. She’d taken to wearing wigs and dark glasses on her commute from Westchester into midtown Manhattan, where the New York Ballet Academy was located, so that she could have some peace and anonymity on the train. She was tired of answering endless questions about how to get onto Alpha Academy 2 or whether Taz was a good kisser.

  “Skye, you look even more gorge in person. Please, call me Leo,” Vanderbees said, still smiling his ridiculously toothy smile. Skye wondered if his face ever relaxed, or if he’d had it injected to stay smiling even when he slept.

  “Thanks,” she said, twirling slightly in the sparkly white corset she’d paired with a pink silk tulip skirt. She’d completed the ensemble with a pair of fuchsia silk arm-sleeves, a look that had always been her trademark in the studio but that, thanks to the TV show, was now a mega-trend around the country.

  She had to agree, she was looking pretty “gorge.” Her favorite teacher at the New York Ballet Academy, Hungarian ballet legend Ilona Sandinski, had gone with her and her mother to find the outfit at Bergdorf’s, and all three of them thought it showed off her more-sculpted-than-ever shoulder and back muscles but still made her look elegant. She leaned over and snuck in a few shoulder stretches before showtime. Her muscles were sore from the long plane ride, or maybe it was the eight-hour day of ballet practice she had missed yesterday in order to get here.

  Vanderbees looked at his watch and shot his eyes toward the door just as it opened to reveal a distracted Charlie, furiously typing on her BlackBerry. Before Charlie was properly inside the room, Vanderbees jumped up and ran to shake her hand.

  “Charlie, Leo Vanderbees. Looking forward to interviewing you. But just a quick clarification, my notes tell me you’re not willing to say anything about what you’re doing now. True?” Vanderbees kept smiling, but his pale gray eyes flickered with concern.

  Charlie pushed a few final buttons on her BlackBerry, pursed her glossed lips and shook her head. “The project’s top secret. That’s all I can say at this time.” She turned to greet Skye and her big brown eyes lit up, still pure Charlie even if her exterior looked wildly different from the girl in cargo shorts and a sunburn Skye had said goodbye to at the Pavilion six months before.

  “Skye, that dress is incredible!” Charlie said by way of a greeting.

  “Thanks!” Skye squealed. “You look great, too. So professional.”

  Charlie wore a black Rag and Bone pantsuit with a crisp white button-down underneath. Her makeup was minimal, and her straight brown hair was wrapped up in a polished French twist. The diamond A pendant Allie had sent them both dangled at her collarbone, just like the one Skye wore around her neck. The pendant had arrived a month ago at Skye’s house with a note from an excited Allie about having landed her first big TV role.

  Charlie pulled Skye toward her for an excited hug. “Thank goodness you made it!” she squealed. “I was worried I’d have to face Shira alone. Now we just need Al.”

  As if on cue, the greenroom door opened again and there she was, dressed in strappy heels and a midnight blue one-shoulder minidress. Allie A. Abbott, better known to most by her starring role as Elinor Dashwood, from the hit CW show Jane Austen Junior High, stepped into the room and paused to stare happily at her best friends.

  Her hair was dyed a bit lighter than her usual honey-blond and her makeup was stage-perfect—she rocked some seriously smoky eyes and her cheeks glowed with iridescent blush—but otherwise Allie looked just the same. Except, Skye noted, happier and way more confident.

  Come to think of it, Skye realized as her teal eyes flicked from Allie to Charlie to the greenroom mirror, they all did.

  Allie’s perfect ski-slope nose wrinkled with joy. “Ohmuhgod!” she screamed.

  “Allie!” Charlie cried.

  “Group hug!” the three girls shouted simultaneously. Finally, Skye thought as she struggled for air while squeezing Allie and Charlie, we’re all together again.

  Just one more piece of the puzzle missing.

  “We all look ah-mazing,” Allie sighed, smiling at her besties when they finally broke free of their group hug. “Can you believe it’s already been six months?”

  “Kinda, yeah,” Charlie sa
id. “It feels like a lifetime ago already.”

  “I know,” Skye agreed, rotating her ankles to stay limber before they were called to the stage. “But I still have flashbacks sometimes.”

  “Me too,” Allie nodded. “At least once a week, I wake up thinking Shira’s about to bust me.”

  “Save it for the show!” Vanderbees boomed, interrupting their pre-reunion reunion. “This is solid gold TV. Let’s keep it fresh for the viewers. Allie, quick question for my notes—are you still with that boyfriend who tried to get you back after the show? What was his name?”

  “Fletcher,” all three girls answered.

  “And no, she’s totally not,” Charlie offered. “By the way, Darwin just texted me. He says hi.”

  “Hi, Darwin! Hang on, I used to know someone named Fletcher?” Allie asked, faux-innocently blinking her long black lashes.

  “I read in Us Weekly that you were dating your costar,” Skye said in a deep, mock-Vanderbees voice as she waved an imaginary mic under Allie’s pointy chin. “True or false?”

  “I’m dating around,” Allie announced, as if they didn’t speak every day. “Why tie myself down to just one hottie, right?”

  “Enough!” Leo interrupted again. “Wait until we roll camera.”

  “Okay, Leo,” Skye eye-rolled, and she was about to add If we know anything, it’s how to make great TV, when Shira walked into the room through a separate entrance Skye hadn’t noticed before.

  “G’day, lollies,” she said, whipping off a black trench coat and tossing an enormous Dior bag onto the greenroom couch as she stalked over to the mirror. “Glad you could make it.”

  “Turns out this was in our contract,” eye-rolled Allie, “so, like, we kind of had to make it.”

  “Indeed it was,” Shira nodded as she peered into the mirror and arranged her auburn curls, her dark sunglasses hiding her eyes. In the mirror’s reflection, her blood-red lips curled at the corners the way they did when she was about to drop a bombshell. “But this is the last Alpha Academy appearance you have to make until we start shooting Alpha Academy 2. And then, of course, we’ll need you to model Brazille Enterprises clothing and makeup for the ad campaign. We’ve already got a line of Allie A. hair products in production, as well as Charlie denim and Skye dancewear.”

  “She owns our images in perpetuity,” Charlie informed Skye and Allie, her voice weary as she typed on her BlackBerry. “Also in the contract.”

  Skye felt the same old half-sick, half-giddy fizzing in her stomach that being in a room with Shira always brought on. The phrase She owns our images in perpetuity echoed in her ears, but she tried to put it out of her mind. Tonight, she would hop a plane to England to play the part of the Black Swan in the London Ballet’s Swan Lake. She had made it; her hopes and dreams were coming true. All because of Shira.

  “Oh, Charlie, always so focused on the tiniest details!” Shira smirked, snapping a Chanel compact shut and whirling around to face the room. “We’ll talk about this later. Leo, I believe it’s time we took the stage. America is waiting!”

  “Right, Ms. Brazille.” Leo jumped up, instantly animated like a marionette for whom Shira held the strings. “Showtime, ladies.”

  “Let’s go out together,” Skye whispered to Allie and Charlie as they walked down the hall behind Shira’s clicking stilettos.

  The three girls grabbed hands at the edge of the stage, where an enormous A-shaped couch awaited the stars of Alpha Academy and their host.

  Skye sucked in her breath and smiled, her body tingling with pre-stage jitters. She looked to her right at Charlie, then at Allie on her left, remembering the last time they’d held hands like this—outside the Pavilion, when they were just three exhausted friends hoping to catch a break and beat a sneaky saboteur back home.

  “And one, two, three, walk!” Allie commanded, sounding confident and professional.

  “Don’t forget to smile,” Charlie whispered.

  Hand in hand with her besties, Skye pulled back her toned shoulders and shook her head, rearranging her platinum wavelets so they cascaded down her back. As they made their way toward the brightness of the stage lights, she knew she couldn’t possibly forget to smile—not with Charlie and Allie by her side.

  For once, Shira had spoken the truth. America was waiting.

  Contents

  Front Cover Image

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Clique novels by Lisi Harrison

  Copyright

  Clique novels by Lisi Harrison:

  THE CLIQUE

  BEST FRIENDS FOR NEVER

  REVENGE OF THE WANNABES

  INVASION OF THE BOY SNATCHERS

  THE PRETTY COMMITTEE STRIKES BACK

  DIAL L FOR LOSER

  IT’S NOT EASY BEING MEAN

  SEALED WITH A DISS

  BRATFEST AT TIFFANY’S

  THE CLIQUE SUMMER COLLECTION

  P.S. I LOATHE YOU

  BOYS R US

  CHARMED AND DANGEROUS

  THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR STALKING

  MY LITTLE PHONY

  A TALE OF TWO PRETTIES

  Alphas novels by Lisi Harrison:

  ALPHAS

  MOVERS & FAKERS

  BELLE OF THE BRAWL

  TOP OF THE FEUD CHAIN

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2011 by Alloy Entertainment

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  “Empire State of Mind” by Alicia Augello-Cook, Shawn Carter, Angela Ann Hunte, Bert Keyes, Sylvia Robinson, Janet Andrea Sewell, Alexander William Shuckburgh (Carter Boys Music, EMI April Music Inc., Gambi Music Inc., Global Talent Publishing, J Sewell Publishing, Lellow Productions Inc., Twenty Nine Black Music). All rights reserved.

  “We Are Family” by Bernard Edwards, Nile Gregory Rodgers (Bernard S. Other Music, Sony/ATV Songs LLC). All rights reserved.

  Poppy

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown.

  First eBook Edition: May 2011

  Poppy is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company

  The Poppy name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-12615-1