by Selena
“I don’t know…”
“You’re going,” she says. “Everyone goes. It’ll be fun. Besides, I know your brothers go. I saw them last week.”
“You did?”
“Of course,” she said. “I go to all the games. Everyone in school does.”
“Not everyone,” I mutter. From across the lawns between our houses, I hear the screen door of the Darling’s house slam. A minute later, the familiar slap of the football hitting something starts up. He’s early tonight. I usually don’t hear Devlin practicing until late in the night.
“Your brothers might be at the game as players pretty soon,” Dixie says. “I hear the Darlings might be off the team.”
I sit up straight, my heart stopping in my chest. “What?”
“Well, I don’t know about Preston and your brother,” she says quickly. “But there’s a video going around that clearly shows Devlin assaulting your brother, and then kicking him while he’s passed out on the ground. It looks pretty bad, Crystal.”
My head is spinning as it all falls into place. Baron wasn’t just getting video so he can get hits on his YouTube channel. He set this all up. They knew exactly how much Devlin loved his car. His stepmom even said so the other day. They knew he’d lose his shit when they hit it. And knowing Baron, he spliced the video to show exactly what he wanted it to show. He’s a wizard with video. He’d never admit it, but he’s a total geek at heart. He might use football to hide it so he can still get laid, but the guy is a tech genius.
“You really think Devlin will be off the team?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. I shiver at the thought of how pissed he’ll be, what he might do to retaliate if they take football away from him. I won’t be sleeping with my window open anymore, that’s for sure.
“I don’t know,” Dixie says. “His parents can probably get him back on. They can do anything in this town. But this time, it’s not just the school. The cops were involved.”
“The cops aren’t in their pockets?” I ask, thinking of how much influence my dad had back home. Surely if my dad could make a NYPD cop look the other way, the Darlings can get a small-town cop to do the same.
“Depends on the cop,” Dixie says. “Officer Gunn was one of the ones who arrested them, and he’s definitely a good cop, but he’s also friends with Mr. Darling.” She breaks off and giggles. “He’s cute, too. I’ll point him out at the game on Friday.”
I feel sick just thinking about the game. Yes, I want my brothers to have a chance with the coach, to be able to do the thing they do best. But I don’t want to think about what Devlin might do to sabotage them after this. They didn’t just wreck a car. They wrecked a priceless rebuilt classic that he worked on with his dad. They didn’t just get him arrested. They recorded it, spliced it to make him look especially bad, and quite possibly got him kicked off the team for the rest of his senior year. If he loves football even half as much as my brothers, things are about to get even uglier.
fourteen
I know I did the right thing. Dixie is no longer the Darling Dog. She doesn’t have to wear dog-ear headbands, and no one barks at her. If anyone’s going to do something, they’ll do it to me. And I can handle it. All I did was take away the bullies’ victim. So why can’t I rid myself of the little voice whispering in the back of my head that someone good, someone better, wouldn’t ruin anyone, even if they deserved ruination, to get what they want?
“I don’t know about this, Dixie,” I say as we pull up at a cemetery in a part of town I’m not at all familiar with. The houses here are boxy, brick affairs with narrow windows fitted with air conditioning units. It’s obvious they were ugly even when they were built, and that must have been decades ago, judging by the condition they’re in. There’s a reason I’ve never been to this side of town. People on my side of town like to pretend this side doesn’t exist.
“Just make it quick,” Royal says, shutting off the engine of his brand-new Range Rover.
“You know, you wouldn’t have to shuttle me around if you’d convince Daddy to let me drive.”
“When you get a license, you can drive,” Royal says with a smug smile.
“Which will never happen if you don’t let me practice.”
“You think I’m letting you practice on my new baby?” he asks with mock shock.
“I wouldn’t run it into any parked cars,” I shoot back. “So I’m already a better driver than you.”
“No license, no driving,” he says. “Go see your dead girl. I’ve got shit to do.”
I roll my eyes at Dixie, and she hops out and leads me across a small stretch of dead grass to a creaky iron gate. We enter the cemetery, which stretches back quite a way. The headstones are mostly small, with faded plastic flowers on many of them. An old white church sits beside it, the paint peeling along the bottom boards and stained with lichen and dust.
“This is depressing,” I mutter as we make our way back along a path worn through the grass. Three figures approach on the path, two men and a petite woman, backlit by the setting sun. We’re probably the last people to visit today, as I don’t see anyone else.
“It’s a cemetery,” Dixie says. “I think the point is to be depressing.”
A chill works its way through me, and I clutch the bouquet we bought on the way here to my chest. This could have been the end result last year. It almost was. A few more minutes in that pool, and it would have ended differently. If her mom had gotten home five minutes later, if she’d hit two more red lights, if she’d fed the dog first when she walked in the house, if she’d put away the groceries before looking for her daughter. I try to imagine how I’d feel if I had to visit that girl’s grave, and another shudder wracks my body, making me clutch the flowers even tighter.
The three figures step into the shadow of the church, revealing more than their silhouettes, and I lurch to a halt. One of them is Devlin Darling.
My heart stutters in my chest, and the world sways under me. He wasn’t at school today, so I haven’t seen him since the not-accident yesterday morning.
Beside him, a petite blonde girl clings to the arm of a tall, gorgeous guy with piercing blue eyes and tousled blond hair. The girl’s eyes are red and puffy, as if she’s been crying. The guy on her arm looks somber, as does Devlin. But when Devlin’s eyes sweep over us, they harden to flint.
“Dixie Powell?” says the blond guy with the somber face. His expression breaks into a big, friendly grin, the corners of his eyes crinkling and the sober surroundings apparently forgotten. He pulls his arm from the petite blonde and wraps Dixie in a big hug.
She looks like she’s about to faint, and I swear she swells to twice her usual size with the pride of being recognized by the hottie.
“I told Linds that Willow Heights must have poached you,” he says, pulling back and shooting Devlin a mock glare. “Bastards.”
“What are you doing here?” Devlin grinds out, glaring at Dixie as if he can’t bear to look at me. A handful of tiny white petals dot one shoulder of his navy jacket, and his hair is tousled by the wind. I tear my eyes away from him, looking at the couple beside him. I don’t recognize them from Willow Heights.
“Today’s the anniversary of her death, right?” Dixie says, shrinking back to her usual size beside me.
Anger flares inside me, but I keep my mouth shut and try to ignore Devlin as thoroughly as he’s ignoring me.
“You didn’t even know her,” Devlin says, yanking the flowers out of my arms. “Neither of you. Go home.”
By now, Dixie’s shrunken even smaller, down to the sniveling dog I met on my first day. “Do you own this cemetery?” I ask, swiping for the flowers.
Devlin holds them out of my reach. “Tell me her name,” he says, his eyes boring into mine.
“I don’t know her name,” I say flatly. “I’m here to support my friend. That’s it. Now, if you don’t own this cemetery, I suggest you get out of our way, because this has nothing to do with you.”
Devlin stares at
me incredulously. “Nothing to do with me?” he asks. “She died at my fucking house, Crystal. And people like you want to make a spectacle of it by parading by, shedding your fake tears and pretending to give a fuck when you can’t even bother to learn her name. It’s Destiny. And she’s not a sideshow.”
He drops the flowers on the ground and steps on them as he shoves past us and walks away.
The blonde girl is crying again, clinging to the friendly boy’s arm. He gives us an apologetic shrug and picks up the flowers, handing them back. They’re broken and dirty, but I take them just the same. Dixie seems frozen in place, all the color drained from her face.
“Sorry,” the blond guy mutters, and he puts an arm around his girl and leads her away, following Devlin.
“You okay?” I ask, turning to Dixie.
She nods, swallowing hard. “Thanks. I can’t believe you did that for me. You’re a good friend, Crystal.”
“Rules of friendship,” I say with a shrug.
“First rule,” she says with a weak smile. “Have each other’s backs.”
“You wanna just leave?” I ask, taking her arm. I knew this was a bad idea, though I had expected family to be there, not Devlin Darling.
Unless he is family. Shit.
I swallow the fist lodged in my throat and glance over my shoulder. The only car left in the lot is Royal’s.
“No,” Dixie says. “We brought her flowers. It’s not like we’re just here to gawk.”
That’s exactly what it’s like. Devlin’s words cut to the bone—because they’re true. Dixie didn’t go to Willow Heights last year, so she didn’t know the girl any better than I did. We came simply for the sensational gossip.
Did you hear…
Could it really be true?
Did a girl really die at a Darling party?
Turns out, it’s really fucking true. Now that I know it’s real, that a real person, a person our age, is under the ground in one of these plots, the last thing I want to do is go stand over her bones.
“Come on,” Dixie says, grabbing the tattered flowers from my arms and marching toward the back of the cemetery, her red hair flying. My standing up for her seems to have lit a fire under her ass, and she can’t wait to defy Devlin, too. I grudgingly admire her for it, even if I don’t really want to follow her. She’s never been here, but it doesn’t take a genius to find Destiny’s grave.
It’s piled with so many white flowers that it looks like a funeral shroud covers the grass in front of her headstone. I swallow hard and take a step in that direction, my knees threatening to buckle. All I can think about is the girl under there, a girl who wanted to jump into a pool, not to die but to be brave. To get applause, to get slaps on the back and screams of admiration. She didn’t sink to the bottom and inhale chlorine. Her mother didn’t find her floating, facedown, with her hair fanned out around her head.
Who called her parents? Who told them? Who pulled her out of the water? Who realized she wasn’t swimming, that she hadn’t come up?
I sink to my knees beside the bed of white flowers covering her like a down comforter. I imagine lying under there, under six feet of earth and the weight of a blanket of grief, how heavy it would be. How it would hold you down and trap you, so you could never rise again.
“I don’t think you should be friends with me,” I choke out, staring at the white petals around my knees.
“What?” Dixie asks. “Are you okay, Crystal? What’s wrong?”
“Devlin’s going to make my life hell,” I say. “You saw how much he hates me. I can’t involve you in that.”
“So far as I can tell, he hates everyone,” Dixie says. “And besides, I was already the Darling Dog. He can’t do much worse than that.”
“Remember when I asked you to be my friend?” I say. “I told you I’d done all the head cheerleader stuff, that I wasn’t a very good person.”
“Yeah…”
“I’m not good,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. “I’m not a good person.”
“But you said you were starting over,” Dixie says. “I mean, yeah, your brothers have done some pretty bad stuff, but you haven’t done anything bad since you got here. I think people should get a second chance even if they did something bad before.”
“What if what they did was unforgiveable?” I ask the ground in front of me, where a dead girl lies buried. “I was worse than Devlin. I didn’t just call someone a dog. I… I almost did this to her.”
“What?” Dixie asks, lowering herself to the ground beside me.
“The worst part is, I don’t even know why,” I whisper. “I didn’t even know the girl.”
“Who was she?” Dixie asked. “Someone in New York?”
“Yeah, she went our school. She was just… She was one of those girls who tries so hard it’s too hard, you know? Like, she’d insert herself into conversations she overheard that didn’t involve her. She was so desperate about wanting to be part of everything. And for some reason, my friend just got it in her head that she hated this girl. She couldn’t stand her.”
“And you went along with it because your best friend hated her.”
“Yes,” I admit, shame burning in my cheeks. “I didn’t at first. I told her to leave the girl alone, but she’d comment on her posts online and mock her at school when she was being desperate. And the girl, she didn’t do anything. She wouldn’t stand up for herself. It was infuriating. You just wanted to shake her and tell her to have some self-respect.”
“Like me,” Dixie says softly.
“No,” I say quickly. “Not like you.”
But maybe she’s right. Maybe that’s part of what drew me to Dixie. I never knew that girl, never knew what was going on in her head or why she was that way, and maybe in some subconscious way, I wanted to understand.
“Veronica was my co-captain on the cheer squad, and a year older than me,” I say. “Even when I felt like things were good, I always felt like I was walking on thin ice. I was only a sophomore, and I knew I’d gotten the co-captain spot partly because she had put in a good word for me. She knew how hard I worked, how many nights I stayed up practicing routines until four in the morning.”
“Then it sounds like you deserved it,” Dixie says, her freckled face so earnest I want to hug her. “You earned it.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “But it wasn’t just that. It’s all about who you know, who you impress, who’s on your side. I was popular, Dixie, but I was miserable. I was in therapy and taking medication, but I couldn’t stop feeling like the ground was going to drop out from under me at any moment. Like if I made wrong move, everything I’d built for myself would come crashing down.”
“Because of your friend?”
I laugh softly and tell her something I’ve never told anyone. “You know that lipstick I always wear? I called it my signature color.”
“It looks good on you,” Dixie says.
“The funny thing is, I don’t even like it that much,” I say. “I mean, it’s fine, but it’s no better than any other color. But it wore it one day in eighth grade, and Veronica said she liked it. After that, I felt like if I wore any other color, she might tell me it wasn’t flattering, or that I looked bad. So I wore that lipstick every single day for the next two years. And the thing is, she probably wouldn’t have said anything. It wasn’t even her. It was me. It was like this superstition, like when a guy wears the same undershirt for every game because he’s convinced if he wears something else, his team will lose. I was so miserably scared every second of every day even though I had what every girl wants.”
“Why didn’t you just quit?” Dixie asks, as if it’s that simple. Maybe it is.
“I guess I did,” I say. “But not then. Not until that girl. Veronica would pick on her, and I’d just stand there feeling sick. And I remember thinking, she’s so pathetic. Why doesn’t she leave Veronica alone? But she kept coming back, like a dog that wants to be kicked just so it can have some attention. I kept telling myself
, why should I stand up for her if she won’t stand up for herself?
“I remember the first day I said something to her, and it was just some little cutting comment, but I felt like dirt afterwards. It didn’t make me feel good or powerful. It made me feel even smaller. And the sick thing is, that didn’t stop me. It was like, some part of me liked that. I started getting meaner because I just wanted her to finally snap and push back against all of it. But she never did.”
“She died?” Dixie asks, her eyes widening.
“No,” I say. “She tried, though. That’s when everything changed. The school got involved, saw all the horrible things we’d said to her online. Mostly it was Veronica, but I did it, too. And not just when we were together, and she’d tell me to. It was like I saw weakness, and I hated it. I just wanted to stamp it out. And the sad part is, there was no reason for any of it. She didn’t steal anyone’s boyfriend or get someone kicked off the squad. That’s the part that really fucks with my head. There was no reason.”
“Maybe not a good one,” Dixie says. “Probably she just reminded you of yourself. How bad you wanted to impress your friend, and how you felt like you couldn’t stand up to her. So you wanted someone else to.”
I nod, waiting for the ache in my throat to dissolve. “I don’t want to take you down with me,” I say. “If Devlin wants revenge, and he saw us together today…”
“You haven’t done anything to him,” she points out. “Your brother wrecked his car. Not you. There’s no reason for him to hate you.”
“Does he need a reason?” I asked. “Did he have a reason for making you the Darling Dog?”
Dixie’s cheeks redden in the fading daylight. “I mean, some other people were picking on me first. And then he came along and claimed me for him and his brothers. No one else dares to say a word to me now. I’m not saying what you did wasn’t brave and good and everything, but…” She shakes her head.