Little White Lies

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Did you just take the Lord’s name in vain?”

  “Really?” I said, raising my now-shapely eyebrows to incredible heights. “That’s what you’re going with? Not What’s a Sicilian bull?”

  “I would assume,” my cousin said primly, “that it is a bull conceived on the largest island in the Mediterranean.”

  I resisted the urge to tell her that the Sicilian bull was a medieval torture device used to slowly roast the victim alive.

  “You really do have excellent bone structure,” Sadie-Grace said tentatively. “If you would just let us—”

  I stood up. “I think I can take it from here.”

  Lily could not have looked more skeptical if I’d announced that I was the second coming of Cleopatra.

  “There’s a Lily-approved dress on the bed,” I pointed out. “Shoes next to the dress. I am ninety percent sure that I can put them on myself without ushering in the apocalypse.”

  “Our grandmother coerced—or possibly blackmailed—the ­Symphony Ball Committee into letting you be a Deb. The apocalypse is already here.” Lily took a deep and cleansing breath, but before she could continue to impress upon me the severity of the situation, a flying orange projectile bulleted past my head and hit her square between the eyes.

  She blinked.

  I turned toward the door, expecting to see John David. Instead, I saw Lily’s younger brother and her father. John David was holding a Nerf crossbow. J.D. was crouched behind his son, steadying the boy’s aim.

  “Truce!” the smaller of the guilty parties bellowed preemptively.

  Uncle J.D. made a show of looking at Lily—and the expression on her face. He took the crossbow from his son’s hand and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Run.”

  John David didn’t have to be told twice. Once he’d cleared out, Lily bent to pick up the dart and returned it to her father. “You shouldn’t encourage him.”

  “But I’m the encouraging parent.” J.D. pressed a kiss to the top of Lily’s head. “It’s what I do, and speaking of which, your mother is a bit stressed about tonight, so I just wanted to go on the record in advance by saying that you are absolutely and utterly perfect, just the way you are.” Uncle J.D. turned to offer me a grin nearly identical to the one he’d given his daughter. “You settling in, Sawyer?”

  “That’s one way to describe it.”

  Lily narrowed her eyes. “Do you mind?” she asked her father, plucking the toy crossbow from his hands before turning and aiming it squarely at me. “Put on the dress,” she ordered.

  I snorted.

  Behind her, Uncle J.D. began backing up slowly. “And with that, I take my leave. Sorry, Niece. I learned a long time ago never to involve myself in a fight between two or more Taft women.”

  Just like that, he was gone.

  “Your mom get ‘stressed’ a lot?” I asked Lily. So far, none of my relatives had been what I was expecting. Aunt Olivia hadn’t seemed cold or heartless or any of my mother’s other favorite descriptors for her older sister.

  “Mama just likes things to be perfect,” Lily said diplomatically. She lowered the crossbow. “For the record, I am not trying to be difficult here, Sawyer. I am trying to help you, because for better or worse, we are in this together.”

  From the tone in her voice, you would have thought we were in a life raft in the middle of piranha-filled waters. Then again, I was about to make my debut in high society.

  Maybe we were.

  Oddly touched at the way she’d thrown her lot in with mine, I decided to go easy on Lily. She hadn’t asked for this any more than I had—and she didn’t stand to gain half a million dollars in the process.

  As far as I knew.

  “Relax, Lily,” I said, wondering if our grandmother had bribed her to play happy hostess. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  think we can all agree this started at the auction.”

  “Campbell!”

  “I told you. She’s Lucifer!”

  “Auction.” Mackie had to raise his voice to be heard. “What auction?”

  All four girls turned to look at him in unison. They looked so… innocent. Sweet. As pure as the driven snow.

  “Officer,” Lucifer said demurely, “far be it from little old me to tell you how to do your job, but if I were you, I would circle back to that.” She offered him a subtle, conspiratorial smile. “If you want the good stuff, you should cut straight to asking about our accomplices.”

  etting dressed was more complicated than I had ­anticipated. The A-line number Lily had chosen was knee-length and made of a royal blue silk that had very little give. The color wasn’t a problem.

  The lack of straps was.

  August in Magnolia County had three and only three temperatures: hot, awful hot, and damn hot. And today?

  It was damn hot outside. I’d been in my grandmother’s massive backyard all of three minutes when I started sweating. And the moment I started sweating, the dress started slipping.

  And the moment it started slipping, I was surrounded.

  “You must be the scandalous Sawyer Taft.”

  I leveled a stare at the black-haired, blue-eyed good old boy who’d issued that statement. He was my age, or maybe a year or two older. The boy beside him was similarly aged, but appeared to be about 90 percent limbs and a good 10 percent hipster glasses.

  Hipster Glasses cleared his throat. “What my cousin means to say is that tales of your beauty precede you.” He paused and frowned. “Or proceed you.” He glanced at the other boy. “Precede? Proceed?”

  “Precede,” I said. “Tales of my beauty precede me.”

  That got a small, crooked grin out of the boy who’d spoken first, more genuine and far deadlier than the smile he’d worn a moment before. For a moment, Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Handsome looked almost human.

  “They will find you, you know,” he drawled, taking a sip of iced tea that I deeply suspected he’d enlivened with contraband. “No matter how far you run or where you hide, the debutantes of ­Magnolia County will find you.”

  I clamped my arms to my side, trapping my dress in my armpits and halting its rapid descent. “Yeah, well, I’m not hiding.”

  Neither of the boys seemed convinced. The fact that I was standing as far from the throe of things as I could manage probably didn’t help my case. There were easily a hundred people in my grandmother’s backyard. Slipping away from Lily’s watchful eye hadn’t been easy, but I needed to spend five seconds without anyone telling me how delightful it was to meet me. I needed to be able to hike my dress up without causing An Incident.

  Most importantly, I needed to be able to watch the adults at this soiree—particularly males in the running for mystery father—­without them realizing they were being watched.

  “I have good news for you, Sawyer Taft.” The blue-eyed boy drew my attention back from the crowd.

  You know which one of these fine gentlemen knocked up my mom?

  “In about five minutes, your fellow Debs are going to realize that my darling sister is conspicuously absent from these proceedings.” The boy angled his head toward the far side of the yard. “Shortly thereafter, their mothers are going to realize the same thing.”

  I followed his gaze to Aunt Olivia. She was in conversation with the senator’s tiny blond wife and three slightly less tiny, slightly less blond women who seemed to travel in her wake.

  “My father’s going to try to play it off like my sister’s feeling a little under the weather.” There was an edge in the boy’s voice as he continued. “My mother will say something along the lines of You know how girls this age can be and then maniacally one-up every single bid my aunt has made in the silent auction. Meanwhile, Campbell’s friends will text her. She won’t reply, the same way she hasn’t replied to any of my texts in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Campbell,” I repeated, remembering the look on Sadie-Grace’s face when she’d told me that the senator’s daughter was the devil incarnate. “Your sister
is…”

  “AWOL,” the boy replied.

  So this was Walker Ames. I could see his resemblance to the senator, now that I knew to look for it. The dark hair, the light eyes, the breadth of his shoulders.

  “It’s not like little sis to miss a chance to play Empress Supreme with her minions,” he commented. “But sticking it to my father is like her, and if I know Cam, there’s probably a guy involved.” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “So you see, Sawyer Taft, very soon you’ll be old news, no matter how scandalous you may be.”

  “Walker.”

  In unison, the senator’s son and I turned to look at the person who’d spoken his name.

  “Lily,” he returned.

  Something about the way my cousin was holding her head reminded me of the way she’d said that her mother liked things to be perfect. I was going to go out on a limb and guess that, in their days as a couple, Lily and Walker had been perfect.

  Right up until the point where they weren’t.

  “I see you’ve met my newly acquired cousin,” Lily commented.

  “We were just discussing the intrigue surrounding that very acquisition.” The edge I’d heard in Walker’s voice sharpened, but there was also something like longing buried deep in his tone.

  “Are you drunk?” Lily asked him flatly.

  He met her gaze. “Would it make you feel better if I was?”

  I knew when my presence in a conversation was no longer required. I made it all of two feet away before I was joined by ­Walker’s hipster-glasses-wearing cousin.

  “The Ballad of Lily Easterling and Walker Ames,” he said solemnly. “A tale for the ages, to be sure.” He lifted his right hand and offered me a little salute. “I’m Boone, Walker’s less explicitly handsome yet nonetheless debonair first cousin.”

  I gave him a look.

  He was undeterred. “Mine is a subtle charm.”

  Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I could feel the edge of my lips twitching upward. “Are they always like this?” I asked, glancing back at Walker and Lily.

  “They didn’t use to be.”

  Before I could read much into that statement, Boone’s phone buzzed. From the angle where I was standing, I could see that he’d received some kind of image.

  Of lingerie. An image of lingerie—and not on the hanger.

  Boone’s eyes went comically wide. He looked at me, then at his phone, then back at me. “I can see how, to the untrained eye, this might seem difficult to explain.”

  I shrugged. “Seems pretty straightforward to me—and firmly none of my business.”

  “It’s not like that,” Boone replied quickly. “I’m in it for the artistry.”

  The artistry of a close-up on a black lace bra?

  “Fine, you got me,” Boone admitted. “I’m in it for the gossip.”

  “The gossip,” I repeated.

  “I mean, yes, technically the site lets fans submit their own PG-rated art for each secret, and technically I could get my gossip there, but I’ll have you know that the fans call themselves Secrettes, which I frankly find exclusionary, and—”

  “Boone,” I said. “What are you talking about? What is… that?”

  He turned his phone around, allowing the picture to fill the screen. “It’s a photo blog,” he said. “And it is artistic.” I could make out the details of the photo now—specifically, the words that had been carefully scripted onto the girl’s skin.

  I said yes. He said no one can know.

  “Who said yes to what?” Boone intoned. “And who told whom not to tell what precisely?” He paused. “Did I use the word whom correctly?”

  “Secrets on My Skin.” I ignored his question and focused on the emblem at the bottom of the picture.

  “You’ve never heard of it?” Boone spoke about 70 percent faster when there were boobs involved. “It’s been all the rage here for months. People anonymously submit their secrets, and this girl writes them on her body. No one knows who she is. The Secrettes think it’s some girl who goes to Brighton, but I’m almost partially certain it’s someone at Ridgeway Hall.” He seemed to realize that flashing the picture around might not be prudent and quickly stuffed the phone back into his pocket.

  “Sawyer will be joining us at Ridgeway this year.” Lily slid effortlessly into the conversation, like whatever had just happened between her and Walker—who was nowhere to be seen—had been of no particular import.

  “Actually, I won’t be going to your school,” I countered as Boone turned the world’s biggest puppy-dog eyes on my cousin. “Or any school.”

  That was one requirement that I’d struck through with my little red pen.

  “Sawyer is taking a gap year between high school and college.” As if summoned by the mere thought of our contract, my grandmother inserted herself into the conversation just as easily as Lily had. “It’s really quite common in Europe.”

  I noticed that she didn’t mention my GED.

  “Perhaps you could talk to my parents about gap years and their benefits for young people such as myself?” Boone offered my grandmother what I’m sure he thought was very charming smile.

  “Boone Mason,” my grandmother replied, like saying his first and last names was some kind of incantation to make him stand up straighter and tack the word ma’am onto the end of every sentence. “I believe the Squire coordinator is looking for you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Boone scurried off—standing straighter all the while.

  “I take it Lily has told you about tonight’s auction?” In true ­Lillian Taft style, my grandmother—who, I realized then, was probably Lily’s namesake—didn’t pause for even a hair’s breadth before continuing. “It’s a tradition, you know, going back upward of fifty years.” She held up a flat, square box, six inches wide. “Pearls of Wisdom: each Deb wears a string of pearls, while each Squire carries a first edition. At the end of the night, the necklaces and antique books are auctioned off one by one. Half of the proceeds go to the symphony and the other half to a charity of the Debs’ choosing.”

  I glanced at Lily for some confirmation that I was not the only one who took issue with the girls being relegated to pearls over ­wisdom, but her eyes were locked on the box.

  Our grandmother opened it, and I heard Lily’s breath catch in her throat.

  “Mim,” she said reverently. “Your pearls.”

  It took me a moment to realize that “Mim” must have been what my cousins called our grandmother, and another few seconds after that for me to actually look at the necklace that had caught Lily’s attention so completely. I knew very little about jewelry, but even I could tell this piece was a thing to behold. Three strands of pearls were collected together with an emerald clasp edged in finely carved silver. All of the pearls were flawless—as were the trio of diamonds that hung down from the bottommost strand, each one preceded by a black pearl that reflected a dark rainbow of colors in the light.

  “Your grandfather bought this necklace for me many years ago, on a night just like this one.” The wave of nostalgia in my ­grandmother’s tone caught me off guard, and my thoughts went briefly to the grandfather I’d never known.

  “Mim.” Lily couldn’t tear her eyes away from the box. “You can’t auction off your pearls.”

  “Mim” smiled wryly. “Don’t look so horrified, Lily. This will be the third time I’ve auctioned off this necklace, and it’s never left the family yet. Your mothers each wore this necklace for their own Pearls of Wisdom. Your grandfather placed the winning bid both times.” She offered Lily a knowing look. “I suspect your father has his eye on them tonight. In the meantime…” She removed the necklace from the box. She unclasped it.

  And she turned to me.

  “Sawyer, would you do the honors?”

  Lily didn’t flinch. She smiled—harder, wider.

  I took a step back. “That’s not—”

  “A request?” My grandmother completed my sentence to her liking. “No, dear, it’s n
ot.” My cousin watched, unblinking, as our grandmother fastened her pearls around my neck.

  “What am…” Lily cleared her throat. “What am I wearing, Mim?”

  “The Deb coordinator has something for you,” our grandmother replied, straightening Lily’s hair, which 100 percent did not need to be straightened. “And whatever it is, I am sure you will do it credit.”

  Lily nodded. After a fraction of a second of silence, she excused herself, running her own hand over her hair as she went.

  Once she was out of earshot, I turned back to our grandmother. “Now that was just mean.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Sawyer.”

  “Lily could have worn your pearls,” I insisted. “I wouldn’t have cared.”

  “You should care, Sawyer Ann. There isn’t a person here tonight who won’t want a closer look at that particular piece of our family history.” She let that sink in. “Whatever you think of me, I’m not cruel—not needlessly, not to my own blood. As I told Lily, your uncle J.D. will undoubtedly bid on and win this piece. Until then…” She attempted to straighten my hair and found it significantly less pliable than Lily’s. “You and I have just ensured that every person here tonight has a very aboveboard excuse to approach you. Including people who remember your mother wearing that very necklace, particularly men who might not otherwise have much to say to a teenage girl.”

  My grandmother had just fixed it so that anyone and everyone could get a closer look at me under the guise of getting a closer look at her pearls.

  Including my biological father.

  “Just curious,” I said, more impressed by her machinations than I wanted to be. “Am I the bait or the hook?”

  ou’ve been a popular one tonight.” Aunt Olivia gave

  me a knowing look.

  I was fairly certain she didn’t know why I’d engaged with every single person who had approached. Why I’d memorized their names.

  Why I’d taken a mental picture of every man’s face.