Little White Lies

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Hollow,” I said out loud.

  Lily popped up from behind a trio of wardrobe boxes several feet away. “Did you find something?”

  I held up the portrait. “One daughter, banished to the attic in disgrace.”

  Lily stared at the portrait for almost as long as I had. I wondered if she was thinking about Secrets and how close she’d come to disgrace of her own.

  “Well, don’t just stand there like a bump on a log,” she ordered, recovering. “Get started on those boxes.”

  There were easily two dozen boxes behind the portrait, stacked in columns of three, all the way back to the wall. Each one had been marked in the upper right corner in thick black marker: E.T.

  Eleanor Taft.

  The contents of the boxes were meticulously organized: elementary school projects and dolls that my mother had outgrown, photograph albums of two little girls at a lake, year after year. I found an entire series of boxes dedicated to my mother’s old dance costumes.

  I hadn’t even known she’d taken ballet.

  Near the back, I finally hit pay dirt: three boxes marked E.T.—S.B.

  As in: Symphony Ball.

  I wondered briefly at the fact that Aunt Olivia had only one box at her house dedicated to Debutante keepsakes, but that my grandmother had somehow kept every party favor, every invitation, every notecard of my mother’s. There was a decorative pillow hand-stitched with the words Symphony Deb; a program from my mother’s Pearls of Wisdom listing the items in the silent auction. There were a pair of white slippers and a pair of white heels and a small ring box—empty. What looked to be a vintage purse contained only two items: the stub of a movie ticket and a small, braided bit of ribbon.

  I held the ribbon in my hand for a moment. Three strands of white, woven together. After a moment, I returned the contents to the purse and set it aside.

  The last item in the last box sucked me in like a black hole. The memory book had obviously been put together by the Symphony Ball Committee to mark the season. The cover was made of a matte black fabric, crinkled and ridged in a way that made me think of a formal dress. There was a small square cut out of the middle of the cover, and inside, there was a picture of a single red rose.

  Lily slid in beside me. The two of us sat cross-legged with our knees touching as I paged through the book, sheet by sheet. I’d never been the slumber-party, confiding-in-other-girls type. Having Lily here with me should have felt invasive, but it didn’t.

  Unlike Aunt Olivia’s album, the one between us on the floor didn’t include loose pictures. Instead, the photographs had been scanned and printed, like a yearbook—if that yearbook was printed on paper thick enough that each page could have practically stood on its own.

  The book was divided up by events. Pearls of Wisdom. The pool party. The scavenger hunt. The Halloween masquerade… Lily was right. Everything we’d done, my mother had done, too. I wasn’t even halfway through the book when I started turning back, scanning each individual picture in detail, looking for my mom.

  There she was at the masquerade, dressed, the caption informed me, as Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. Her mask was a deep rose pink, accented in golden thread and beads. She wasn’t alone in the picture—there was a boy beside her. It took me a moment to recognize him, beneath the mask.

  Lucas Ames.

  I paged back further, to the scavenger hunt, and was rewarded with a whole page of pictures of each team. My mom’s had consisted of two boys and three girls. I recognized Lucas again, but barely registered his presence or that of the other boy, because almost all of the photographs were of the three girls.

  Three girls, with their arms thrown around each other.

  Three girls, posing ridiculously for the camera.

  Three girls, pressing exaggerated kisses to each other’s cheeks.

  They’d done their hair in matching styles: French braids, tied to one side. Woven through each of their braids, there was a white ribbon. It stood out, stark against my mother’s dark hair. One of the other girls was blond, and the third—the third, I recognized.

  Her hair was red.

  “That’s Sadie-Grace’s stepmother,” Lily realized. “It looks like she and your mother were—”

  “Not just passing acquaintances?” I suggested. I checked the box for video footage of the hunt and came up empty, so I flipped back further in the book and found more shots of the three girls, almost always together, always a unit, always wearing a white ribbon somewhere on their bodies. There they were at the pool party, legs dangling into the water. At Pearls of Wisdom, they stood side by side behind the stage, proudly displaying their pearls and waiting to go forth.

  I flipped forward, past the masquerade. I only found one more picture of the three girls, taken at Christmastime, in front of a two-story-tall tree. They were wearing white scarves and white hats.

  They weren’t laughing.

  I looked down at the caption—Ellie, Greer, Ana. I flipped past Christmas, to New Year’s, Casino Night, a spa day, something called a “glove luncheon,” the Symphony Ball itself.

  There were no more pictures of my mother.

  No more pictures of Ana.

  Greer was suddenly surrounded by other girls. Other boys. I paused near the end of the memory book on a photograph of Greer being escorted down an elevated platform. Her father—or a man I assumed was her father—was waiting for her at the end, his arm outheld. Greer had a bouquet of white roses in one arm and the other was tucked through the arm of her escort.

  Greer Richards, daughter of Edmond and Sarah Richards, I read the caption, escorted by Lucas Ames.

  “Sawyer.” Lily’s voice snapped me back to the present. I looked up from the photographs.

  “What?” I said. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why my mother had disappeared from the pictures. At some point between Christmas and New Year’s, she’d told her family that she was pregnant.

  She’d been on the street by New Year’s Day.

  “Sawyer,” Lily said again. “Your phone.”

  It was ringing. I pushed aside the question on the surface of my mind—What happened to the other girl? To Ana?—and looked down at the screen. Suddenly my mom’s Debutante year didn’t seem quite so pressing.

  The name on caller ID, programmed in during the month I’d spent at her beck and call, was Campbell.

  ackie was fairly certain that it wasn’t protocol to allow perps in the holding area to have visitors, but it also wasn’t protocol to have no idea whatsoever why you were holding said perps or what they had been arrested for doing, nor was it protocol for Rodriguez and O’Connell to have abandoned him to their mercies.

  “Girls.” Mackie kept his voice low and even. Best not to show fear. “You have a visitor.”

  “Is it perhaps a lawyer?” the prim and proper one asked.

  “We’ve been thinking of lawyering up,” the drop-dead gorgeous one added, tugging nervously at the tips of her white gloves.

  Mackie thought about the kind of lawyer that these girls would have and shuddered. He aimed his next words to the lock picker. To the granddaughter of Lillian Taft.

  “I thought you said that if anyone found out you were arrested, you’d be out five hundred thousand dollars.” That was a pretty good shot, if Mackie did say so himself.

  Before Miss Taft could reply to the zinger, however, her visitor stepped around the corner.

  “I told you to wait,” Mackie said, shooting the boy an aggrieved look.

  The boy ignored him. “Half a million?” he said, his voice dry and barbed. “Is that the going rate for selling your soul these days?”

  For the first time since Mackie had met the girls, all four of them fell silent. The boy didn’t seem any more inclined to speak. He just stared at them, his expression impossible for Mackie to read.

  I am not sure, Mackie thought suddenly, that he is their friend.

  The flirt—the troublemaker, the one that Mackie just knew had to be the senator’s daughter—
recovered her voice first. It came out in a whisper. “Nick.”

  tand up straight, Sawyer.” Aunt Olivia wasn’t even looking at me. She was looking at the sketch in her hand: a detailed drawing of the design the committee had, after much length, selected for this year’s Symphony Deb gown.

  As I’d been led to understand, the selection process had gotten downright near bloody. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Aunt Olivia had come out on top. I could make out the soft, satisfied curve of her lips as she studied the design.

  “Face forward.” This time, the order came from the tailor, who squeezed my chin between delicate fingers and forcibly moved my skull to the correct angle. I stared at myself in the mirror. I was wearing nothing but my underwear and bra. The seamstress looped her measuring tape around my boobs. The sound she made as she wrote down the number was unmistakably a sound of judgment. “We’ll build in cups,” she offered delicately.

  “I should think so,” Aunt Olivia replied.

  “You have such a tiny waist,” Lily told me soothingly.

  There was nothing like starting the day off with a three-way conversation about the size of my boobs where no one actually mentioned my chest, but it was strongly implied that one needed a microscope to see it. It could have been worse—Lily’s fitting had included some murmurings about where the dress could be let out and taken in, to create the desired silhouette.

  And, it was strongly implied, to camouflage Lily’s butt.

  This is hell, I thought. I have died, I am in Dante’s inferno, and I deserve to be here. This time, as I caught my reflection in the mirror, I acknowledged how hard it was to recognize the girl who stood there. Months of using conditioner that cost more per ounce than most gourmet chocolates had given my hair the kind of body and softness that could only be bought. My natural highlights weren’t natural anymore, and somehow, my skin looked like I was wearing makeup, even though I decidedly was not.

  That was just the tip of the iceberg.

  The Sawyer Taft I’d been four months ago wouldn’t have left Nick’s fate in the hands of the girl who’d gotten him arrested.

  “Sawyer?” Aunt Olivia prodded.

  I snapped back to the present. “Yeah?”

  My aunt winced at the fact that after lo, these many months, I still couldn’t manage a yes, let alone a yes, ma’am. “Perhaps,” Aunt Olivia suggested diplomatically, “you could put on some clothes.”

  Apparently, the tailor had finished getting the measurements she needed.

  Apparently, that wasn’t a particularly recent development.

  Apparently, I’d been standing there in my undergarments for a while.

  Only about a third as embarrassed as I should have been, I ducked back into the dressing room. As I closed the door and picked up my jeans, I found myself doing something I’d done a thousand times or more in the past month: I replayed the phone conversation I’d had with Campbell the night of the masquerade.

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  That had been all the greeting she’d given me; the Campbell Ames version of hello.

  “What happened tonight?” I had asked.

  There had been silence on the end of the phone. I could still remember meeting Lily’s eyes as I’d pressed further.

  “Campbell, tell me that Nick getting arrested had nothing to do with those stupid pearls.”

  Campbell decidedly had not told me that. “They can only hold him for the theft for forty-eight hours without charging him,” she’d said instead. “And I can guarantee you that no one is going to charge Nick with anything. They needed to arrest him. That’s all.”

  “They needed to arrest him,” I had repeated, “or you needed him arrested to ensure that none of this blows back on you?”

  “Does it matter? Either way, there won’t be any charges.”

  “They’re not going to charge him,” I’d confirmed through gritted teeth, “because I’m going to the police in the morning. I’m going to tell them the truth.”

  “The truth?” The tone in her voice had been maddening and arch.

  “I’ll tell them that you’re the one who stole the pearls,” I’d threatened.

  “I hope you have some evidence to back that up.”

  “I can revoke your alibi.”

  “After a month? One during which no one even asked me for my alibi, because I’ve never been a suspect?”

  “The key,” I’d said abruptly. “The one we found in your locker.”

  “The one you stole, you mean? I suppose if you didn’t want to admit to a crime, you could always tell the police that you just saw me with a key at some point. But how exactly is that incriminating?”

  “You stole those pearls.”

  “Why?” Campbell had asked mildly. “What’s my motive? I don’t need the money, and they’re not my family’s heirlooms.”

  They were mine.

  “Nick will be out by Monday, Sawyer. I’ll make sure of it. And until then, I need you to do something for me.”

  “What?” I’d asked sharply.

  I’d practically been able to hear Campbell smiling on the other end of the line. “Nothing.”

  Campbell Ames had asked me to sit back and do nothing, to let this play out, and for some godforsaken reason, I’d done what she’d asked. I deserved a dozen fittings like this one—worse than this one. I deserved to be waxed and plucked and manicured to perfection. I deserved the worst that high society had to offer.

  True to Campbell’s word, Nick had been released within forty-eight hours of his arrest. Charges were never pressed. I’d been told—multiple times—that I should be happy.

  Nick had been fired from the club. He’d lost his job, but I should have been relieved. All was well that ended well.

  Like hell.

  A knock on the dressing room door jarred me back to the present and filled me with the awareness that I was still standing around in my underwear.

  “Sawyer,” Lily called through the door, “if you don’t hurry, we’ll be late to meet Campbell.”

  ny activity involving Campbell Ames ranked just above root canal and just below bikini wax on my list of preferred pastimes, but the November Symphony Ball event was being organized by the mothers of the Ridgeway Hall Debs. Since Sadie-Grace’s stepmother was chairing the whole ball, that left two power players to battle it out for subcommittee supremacy: Aunt Olivia and Charlotte Ames.

  Not coincidentally, my aunt and the senator’s wife had also been the leaders of the two opposing camps on what I’d termed ­Dressgate. When Aunt Olivia had won that battle, Campbell’s mother had simply insisted that my aunt let her take on the brunt of the work for the November event.

  Aunt Olivia, of course, had insisted on helping.

  Lily and I had been conscripted against our will.

  “Food, Coats, Comfort, and Company.” Campbell greeted us at the door to Costco with a shopping cart and a sardonic expression on her face. “It doesn’t quite have the ring of Pearls of Wisdom, but charity is as charity does.”

  This was the first time Lily and I had been alone with Campbell since Nick’s arrest—and release. The senator’s daughter clearly intended to pretend that none of it had ever happened. The only reason I obliged her was that the three of us weren’t alone for long.

  “Pack mule, reporting for duty.” Walker’s hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed, and the gray hue of his normally suntanned skin made me think that he needed to invest in a better hangover cure.

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” Lily said, her voice dangerously neutral. I watched for a hair tuck, and she didn’t disappoint.

  “Neither did I,” Walker replied. He glanced at Campbell. “Mom’s on the warpath. If she asks, you called me in a tizzy about the prospect of lifting moderately heavy objects on your own, and I had no choice but to vacate the house and come to the rescue.”

  “You know I don’t do tizzies.” Campbell arched an eyebrow at him. “I’m so much better at conniptions.”


  “Shall we divide up the list?” Lily interjected. She wouldn’t come right out and say that she hadn’t signed up for this, but I knew that she preferred all encounters with Walker Ames to be of the anticipated variety.

  “Divide away,” Campbell said with a wave of her hand. “Who wants canned food, who wants coats, and who wants comfort?”

  At this point, I had to ask. “I thought Symphony Ball was hosting a canned food drive for Thanksgiving?”

  Lily blinked several times. “We are.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Campbell explained with exaggerated patience. “To buy the canned food.”

  I considered explaining that drives like this one usually involved donating your extra food, but decided it wasn’t worth it. “Let me guess, we’re also buying the coats?”

  Lily must have decided that was a rhetorical question, because she got down to business. “I’ll do food.”

  “That will get heavy quickly,” Walker commented. “I can—”

  “I’m sure I’ll be just fine.” Lily cut him off. “Don’t you worry a thing about it.”

  Walker looked like he was on the verge of objecting, but Campbell spoke up first. “Given Sawyer’s unique fashion sense, I’ll do coats. Walker, why don’t you help Sawyer with comfort?”

  There were worse ways to spend an afternoon than buying books, blankets, stuffed animals, lotions, bubble bath, and chocolate on another person’s dime. The only guideline we’d been given wasn’t a monetary one: five carts of food, five of coats, two of comfort.

  Walker and I jammed as much into our two carts as we could fit.

  He tried, no fewer than three times, to help Lily load up and maneuver carts of canned food, but she rebuffed his offers and recruited multiple stock boys in his stead.

  “That has to hurt,” I commented after he’d been shot down a third time. If there was one thing I’d picked up during months’ worth of envelope stuffing, it was that Walker wasn’t over Lily. I had no idea why he’d broken up with her in the first place.