Furious - By Jill Wolfson

PROLOGUE

In times past, all dramas started with a prologue, the before before the beginning.

Enter the character to tell you what you need to know.

Enter me, Ambrosia.

Here is what you see. Someone tall and straight, dressed always in black, unruffled in every way down to the clean, classic lines of my designer clothing. I am not perfect by contemporary standards. My almond-shaped eyes—a legacy from my ancestors—sit a little too close together, giving me a penetrating gaze. My nose is too pointed and prominent to be considered an iconic profile in this culture of perky and pug-nosed Anglo-Saxons.

Yet mine is the face that all other female faces at Hunter High are unfavorably compared to. Beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. It exists beyond fashion and trend, and everyone feels drawn to it, to what’s deep and unshakable.

From this description, you think you know me, right? I’m the girl who has it all—the looks, the grades, the boobs, the family connections. But my face, this mask of self-assurance, covers a seething anger.

Because in truth, I have nothing worth having. When someone has wronged you and gotten away with it, when the guilty walk free, that miscarriage of justice makes your very soul writhe in agony.

Let bygones be bygones?

Come to peace with the past?

What rot!

Animals may forgive and forget, but not a human. I will never find relief, not until a certain someone pays for the crime and suffers as deeply as I have.

I’ve been waiting ages, and finally all the elements are coming together. What a rare alignment of sun and stars and flesh it is. It’s been up to me to find the talent, coax it, feed it, and slowly cultivate it into its full dangerous bloom.

I have two-thirds of what I need. I wait for the missing piece to reveal itself.

I can already taste the iron tinge in my mouth, blood calling out for blood.

It’s time for me to close the book on the prologue. But there’s one more crucial thing you must understand:

This story started long ago, when the wrong that haunts me was committed and left unpunished. When a spoiled and selfish young prince picked up a knife and decided that it was his gods-given right to plunge the blade deep into someone’s back.

That someone was me.

PROLOGUE, THE BOOK OF FURIOUS

1

When you’ve got an overbite and only one real friend and you’re what grown-ups euphemistically call “a late bloomer” (meaning I’m short and skinny where I shouldn’t be skinny and I just got my period), you pretty much accept that every day is bound to be a series of humiliations, large and small.

So given the sucky reality of being me, of being Meg, it’s really something to say that in my almost sixteen years of living, despite my many episodes of blowing it big-time, this particular day turns out to be the most humiliating one of my life.

More humiliating than when I was five and going to scary kindergarten for the first time and had to be pried loose from my foster mom. I was screaming and got a bloody nose from freaking out, and all the other kids were just sitting there—cross-legged and staring.

More humiliating than finding out too late that an eighth-grade girl should never stand at the school entrance and hand out valentines to all 167 members of her class. Especially when the cards are personally signed and individually addressed.

Even more humiliating than last week, when I must have had a brain drain that erased everything I ever learned from my previous humiliations. That’s the only explanation for how I could walk right up to this guy Brendon—this popular guy with adorable eye crinkles when he smiles—and blurt out that I had a two-for-one mini-golf coupon and maybe he might want to go with me sometime. I love mini-golf—I mean, who doesn’t? But Eye Crinkles only stared at me blankly, like he’d never seen me before, even though we’ve been in a ton of classes together for the past three years.

And now his friends make pretend golf swings whenever I walk by.

So probably you’re thinking, what could be more humiliating than that?

Hold on. It gets far worse.

A brief setting of the scene. Third period. 10th grade Western Civ, my favorite class this year, even though Ms. Pallas makes you work your butt off just for a B. All the usual characters are there. Our teacher is standing to the side of the room, arms crossed, listening to our first oral presentations of