Kenzie Montgomery

Quick Facts

A junior at Caseham High, class president, and head cheerleader, Kenzie dominates the school’s social scene. First seen on the very first day, she immediately asserts control over space and people. Key relationships include a bitter rivalry-turned-alliance with Addie, a secret and damaging entanglement with Nate, and a performative “romance” with Hudson that signals her status more than her heart.

Who They Are

At first glance, Kenzie Montgomery is the immaculate queen bee: stylish, confident, and feared. She is the antagonist who makes Addie’s life miserable, but the novel peels back her shine to reveal a survivor trapped inside her own performance. Her outward perfection—golden-blond hair, a lithe, impeccably dressed figure—stands in stark contrast to the chaos she’s trying to hide. Kenzie becomes a living case study in Appearance vs. Reality: a girl who weaponizes image because it’s the one thing she can control.

Personality & Traits

Kenzie’s personality is a mask with seams. She performs cruelty to maintain power, but the performance is born from fear and shame. Her bullying is scripted dominance; her vulnerability, when it surfaces, is raw, unpolished, and brave. As the truth emerges—her home life overshadowed by her brother’s illness, her grooming by Nate Bennett—her actions read less as gratuitous meanness and more as the survival strategies of someone who learned that control looks like hurting others before they can hurt you.

• Calculated cruelty as armor: Blocks Addie on the steps, engineers the locker-room humiliation (stolen clothes), and fills Addie’s locker with shaving cream—ritualized acts meant to isolate and script the social order in her favor.
• Social architect: As class president and head cheerleader, she doesn’t just have influence; she choreographs it, surrounded by a posse that amplifies her choices.
• Vulnerability under pressure: Confesses that her family’s focus on her brother’s cancer left her invisible—making Nate’s “soulmate” narrative feel like rescue rather than entrapment.
• Moral courage: Once she recognizes Nate’s recycled poem, she owns her past, apologizes to Addie, and goes to the police—choosing accountability over image.

Character Journey

Kenzie’s arc is a slow unmasking. Introduced as a flat “mean girl,” she functions as the embodiment of Addie’s social nightmare. The cafeteria poem is the rupture: realizing Nate fed Addie the same lines he once fed her forces Kenzie to see her past not as a teenage romance but as systematic manipulation. From there, her choices pivot—she seeks Addie out, apologizes, and offers proof of Nate’s pattern. The queen bee persona cracks, and in the fracture Kenzie becomes an ally, then a friend, committed to a shared pursuit of Revenge and Justice. By the end, the power she once used to terrorize becomes the power she uses to testify.

Key Relationships

• Addie Severson: Kenzie begins as Addie’s tormentor, using social spectacle to isolate her. After recognizing Nate’s recycled tactics, Kenzie reframes Addie not as a rival but as the next target in a chain—and she acts. Their alliance is built on mutual vulnerability, turning public enemies into private confidantes and, ultimately, co-witnesses.

• Nate Bennett: Nate is not a boyfriend but an abuser who groomed Kenzie when she was fourteen, selling intimacy as destiny. Their secret history illustrates the novel’s exploration of Abuse of Power and Predatory Behavior: Kenzie’s “choices” were shaped by isolation and manipulation, which explains—without excusing—her earlier cruelty.

• Hudson Jankowski: Publicly, Hudson is Kenzie’s boyfriend; privately, he’s only a friend. Her proximity to Hudson Jankowski, Addie’s former best friend, compounds Addie’s pain and signals Kenzie’s command of the school’s social optics—she understands how relationships function as currency.

Defining Moments

Kenzie’s story is punctuated by performances that become confessions. Each moment reassigns meaning: what once looked like confidence reads as deflection; what looked like meanness reveals the wound beneath it.

• First-day blockade on the steps
  • Why it matters: Kenzie choreographs public space to declare hierarchy; it’s the pilot episode of her reign.
• Locker-room humiliation and locker sabotage
  • Why it matters: Systematic targeting escalates from inconvenience to spectacle, proving her cruelty is deliberate, not impulsive.
• The cafeteria poem
  • Why it matters: She recognizes Nate’s “original” poem as a copy-and-paste con, exposing a pattern of Deception and Manipulation and catalyzing her moral pivot.
• The confession at Addie’s house (with screenshots)
  • Why it matters: Kenzie trades secrecy for truth, staking her reputation to validate Addie’s experience and her own.
• Going to the police with Addie
  • Why it matters: She converts private knowledge into public action, redefining power as accountability.

Essential Quotes

“This is my seat.” This curt territorial claim encapsulates Kenzie’s early rule: ownership through intimidation. It’s less about a chair and more about who gets to exist comfortably in public. The sentence’s clipped finality mirrors how she polices status boundaries.

“Woe is me, my clothes were let free, and now everyone will see my hairy knee.” Her sing-song mockery turns Addie’s humiliation into performance art. The rhyme trivializes harm, converting cruelty into entertainment so the crowd will collude. It’s a masterclass in how Kenzie leverages humor to sanitize dominance.

“Because Nate and I have been sleeping together since my freshman year.” The bluntness shocks because it strips away euphemism. By naming the timeline, Kenzie reframes what others might call scandal as evidence of grooming. The line is both confession and indictment.

“He told me I was his soulmate. I completely believed it. I was so stupidly in love with him. I would’ve done absolutely anything for him.” Here Kenzie narrates her own manipulation, exposing how romantic rhetoric can become a tool of control. The self-reproach (“stupidly”) shows internalized blame, even as the detail (“soulmate”) reveals the script Nate used to secure compliance.

“Please, Addie. Please come with me. I don’t want to be the only one.” This plea marks Kenzie’s transformation from isolator to someone terrified of isolation. She seeks solidarity not as strategy but as survival, inviting Addie to stand beside her in truth—and in court.