Excerpt from The Jills by Karen Parkman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

How many nights had I lain awake picturing the various ways in which my sister, Laura, might be attacked or murdered or kidnapped or run off the road or left in a ditch? I'd imagined each scenario in as much detail as possible, in a perverse attempt to protect her from these potential fates—surely they couldn't happen while I was thinking about them. But I never would have joked about these possibilities or put them in writing. That wasn't how the spell worked.

Obviously, I understood that the worst could and often did happen, whether you thought of it or not. Still, I erased the text, dropped my phone into the cup holder, and drove. I just didn't want to have sent it.

The smell of feet and hairspray nearly knocked me over, flooding my system with dopamine. It was four hours to kickoff, and the locker room at Ralph Wilson Stadium was crammed full of Jills.

I stood on the bench to scan the crowd for Jeanine. We got ready in the former referees' locker room, which featured three walls of lighted mirrors and a row of defunct urinals. Every inch of this tiny space we filled with the glorious mess of girls: tumbleweeds of hair, deflated ribbons of ripped pantyhose, sports bras browned at the armpits, athletic socks stained with blood from popped blisters, hair ties and bobby pins and spilled glitter littering the carpet, the air thick with aerosol. Girls sat at their assigned mirrors or cross-legged in groups on the floor, compacts propped up on the benches, squinting at their makeup—MAC products exclusively, which were provided at a discount from Edges Salon, one of our newest sponsors. They fought over outlets to plug in hair curlers and dryers. They practiced choreography and fussed over hair and eyebrows and emerging zits. One of the youngest girls on the squad, Maria, had brought some ridiculous little instrument, a recorder or a piccolo, on which she was loopily tootling out the notes to our opening number, Pitbull's "I Know You Want Me." The girls around her dissolved into fits of laughter and begged her to stop, wiping at their makeup. Beneath a muggy layer of jasmine and coconut, the locker room reeked—of dried BO and something deeper, the metallic scent of concealed fluids: blood, urine. The mess, the stink of it, made me dizzy with love and elation. It was the only proof we had of how hard we worked to appear shiny and perfect and effortless. I was so happy to be in this place, with these girls. My unease shrank to a dull twinge and retreated.

I clambered down from the bench and bumped into Lana from Line 2. "Help," she begged, fanning her face, the false eyelashes drooping from her left eye. "Did I smudge my eyeliner?"

Scattered around her feet was a pile of dropped cotton balls smeared with foundation and mascara. Our required makeup ran when we danced, but substituting other products was strictly verboten.

"Let me fix it," I said. She pointed her gaze to the floor while I patted her falsies back into place. "Have you seen Jeanine? She wasn't checked off the roster at the door."

"Uh-oh," said Lana. "Think she got held up on the beach with Robbie Richboy?"

"Bobby," I corrected, as she studied her lashes in her compact mirror. Her face smelled waxy and greasy, like a fresh crayon.

"If she's coked up at a resort while we're here in the chicken coop, I swear to God." Lana said this without judgment; Jeanine knew where to get drugs of all kinds—coke, Adderall, illegal diet pills—and Lana had purchased them off her many times. She snapped the mirror shut and glanced pointedly at the digital clock on the wall above our heads. "I'm sure she's sprinting across the parking lot as we speak. She's got exactly twenty minutes before Suzanna starts breathing fire."

We jumped as Sharrice kicked open the door behind us, brandishing a bag of ice above her head like a trophy. The room erupted in cheers. She emptied the bag into two urinals, forming twin mounds of ice, into which the girls shoved champagne, wine, cans of Diet Coke.

Excerpted from The Jills by Karen Parkman. Copyright © 2026 by Karen Parkman. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.