Deadly Little Scandals

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I was used to them putting us through our paces. But this? The current White Gloves giving us something in return for what was being asked?

  That was new.

  “I’ll go first,” Victoria said. She paused, for a second, if that. “I’m not in my father’s will.” She looked down at her card after she said the words, as if to check that she’d said them correctly. “That’s all I wrote. Next?”

  Hope held her card in both hands. “The cancer came back.” She didn’t say whose cancer.

  No one asked.

  Nessa stared at Hope for a moment, shaken, and then read her own secret aloud. “I’m a replacement.”

  For what? Or who? Again, there was no explanation, no clarification.

  A fourth girl whose name I couldn’t remember offered only three words: “I said no.”

  One by one, the other White Gloves read their secrets. Most of them had kept things brief. Some of the secrets were hard to understand without context. Some were pretty damn clear.

  You’re not here because you’re powerful, we’d been told. You’re here because you know what it’s like to feel powerless.

  Once they finished, it was our turn. The first Candidate followed their example. She read her card—no context, no explanation. One by one, the others did the same. I barely registered what they were saying, because I was waiting for my turn—and my friends’.

  The four of us went last.

  “I have a half-sibling I’ve never met.” Campbell had a way of tossing out words like they didn’t matter and including just enough of a challenge in her tone to dare anyone to tell her that they did. After a second’s silence, she broke the mold the others had set and elaborated. “Though to be fair, I suppose it’s entirely possible that I have met this person and just didn’t know we were related.”

  That was an angle I hadn’t considered—though maybe I should have, given that I’d gotten the distinct impression from Campbell’s grandfather that he’d had a plan for the baby, once upon a time.

  “My turn?” Sadie-Grace had a habit of turning statements into questions. “I…ummm…” She was seated, but I would have bet big money that her feet were going crazy. “Okay? Here it goes?” She took a deep breath. “My mama was pregnant when she died.”

  I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me. I wasn’t sure if that meant that Lily hadn’t known what Sadie-Grace had just told everyone, or if she was taken aback to hear her best friend actually say the words.

  Suddenly, Sadie-Grace’s reluctance to tell her father the truth about Greer’s “baby” made so much more sense. When Sadie-Grace had discovered the pregnancy was fake, she’d been so sad. I couldn’t remember everything she’d said when she’d gotten drunk at our casino-themed Debutante party, but I was pretty sure the words No sisters for Sadie-Grace had been included.

  I’d known that Sadie-Grace’s father had lost his first wife when Sadie-Grace was young. I hadn’t realized he’d also lost a child. Knowing that and knowing what Greer was doing to him now made my stomach turn.

  No wonder Sadie-Grace can’t bring herself to tell him the baby isn’t real.

  I was next in line to read my secret, but before I could, Lily jumped in to take the attention off of Sadie-Grace. “My turn.” She waited a moment, then spoke, enunciating every word. “I don’t know what I want anymore.”

  If I hadn’t known Lily, that wouldn’t have sounded like much of a secret, but she was, next to Aunt Olivia, the most type A person I’d ever met. Lily always had a plan. She had her whole life mapped out. Even when Walker had broken up with her, even when she’d been dealing with so much suppressed emotion that she’d taken to displaying other people’s hidden thoughts and darkest secrets on her own skin, she’d still wanted the same things.

  To be the daughter Aunt Olivia wanted. To be the kind of granddaughter Lillian could take pride in. To be a credit to her family name.

  Walker.

  “That’s not good enough.” Victoria had remained silent through all of the other secrets. I couldn’t help wondering why she was speaking up now.

  “Victoria,” Nessa murmured. We’d been told up front that they weren’t going to demand our deepest and darkest. They were supposed to accept our secrets and move on.

  “Fine,” Lily said. I pictured her punching the walls of that ruined house, but when she spoke again, her voice was calm and clear.

  Too calm. Too clear.

  “I don’t know what I want anymore,” she repeated. “Or who.”

  harlotte adjusted the straps on her bathing suit. She knew she looked good. She told herself that she looked good.

  “You’re perfect,” Liv told her. “Now hand me a damn pair of sunglasses before my skull actually splits in half.”

  Charlotte had to go back to the car to find the sunglasses, but she did as she was bid. This was my idea, she told herself. My plan.

  The boys were meeting them at Falling Springs.

  Charlotte had jumped off the lower ledges before but never the highest one. She was not fool enough to believe that Liv would accept anything less today.

  “Having second thoughts?” Julia asked from the back when Charlotte stuck her head into the car.

  “Of course not,” Charlotte replied, judiciously avoiding looking at Julia, who was changing into her suit.

  “No peeking,” Julia needled. “Then again, I’m not the Ames you want to see naked.”

  Charlotte could feel herself blushing. She grabbed Liv’s sunglasses and shut the car door—she shut, not slammed it, because one did not let Julia know when she’d hit the mark.

  It’s not about seeing Sterling—or touching him or having him touch me. Charlotte could feel a blush rising in her cheeks just thinking the words, and she thanked the Lord that she was fair enough that she could blame any pink tint to her skin on the punishing August sun.

  “Thinking dirty thoughts?” Liv was every bit as perceptive as Julia, but most days, she was also twice as loyal and only half as mean. She plucked the sunglasses from Charlotte’s hand. “I’m just kidding, Char. You look fabulous. You are fabulous. Sterling won’t know what hit him. Drink?”

  Charlotte was not sure if that was a question, an order, a suggestion, or a request. She went to grab the liquor, but stopped when she saw the boat pulling into the cove below. On a weekend day, Falling Springs was busy, but during the week?

  They were the only ones here.

  Charlotte’s eyes searched the boat. Sterling was driving, which only made sense, because it was his family’s boat.

  He wasn’t the type to abdicate the wheel.

  Charlotte smiled when he looked up at her—not too much, not too little. Just right.

  Liv was right. She was perfect. And so was he.

  “Who the hell is that?” Liv asked suddenly.

  Belatedly, Charlotte finished assessing the occupants of the boat. J.D. was there, of course, and there was a third boy whom Charlotte assumed was the rough-around-the-edges Thomas Mason, who Julia had talked her brother into bringing along.

  And sitting between them was a girl.

  he Ballad of Lily Easterling and Walker Ames was supposed to be a love story for the ages. Or at least, that was what I’d been told.

  That was what Lily had always seemed to believe.

  “Sawyer.” Victoria turned to me, implicitly accepting Lily’s second offering as sufficient. “You’re up.”

  The secret I’d written down on my card was only two words long. I CARE. I’d spent a lot of my life in self-protection mode. I’d learned early on that it was better not to expect too much of people. I liked to think of myself as someone who didn’t have tender feelings for other people to hurt.

  If nothing mattered that much, it was hard for anything to penetrate your armor.

  But the truth was that I cared. I’d always cared—about the way my mom was the best friend a girl could ask for one moment and off chasing daydreams the next. About the way a subset of people had talked to me and about me
in the town where I’d grown up.

  About not having a father.

  Now I had other people to care about, too. People who could leave me. People who could decide, if they were so inclined, that I was more trouble than I was worth.

  “Sawyer,” Victoria prompted again.

  I glanced at Lily, who’d just admitted that, for the first time in her life, she had no idea who or what she wanted.

  “I wrote down ‘I care,’” I said, still looking at Lily. “But since I suspect that won’t be enough”—I shifted my gaze to Victoria, who might not have chosen to press me the way she’d pressed Lily—“I’ll throw in another secret for good measure.”

  There wasn’t much I could have said that would have stood a chance of distracting Campbell from Lily’s admission—and everything it implied about Lily’s relationship with Campbell’s brother. So I went for something just as personal, a corollary to caring—and being well aware of the dangers of caring too much.

  “I do know what I want,” I said. “And I know what I don’t want.” I’d never actually said this out loud before, but the words came out easily. “I never want to fall in love.”

  That night, when Lily and I snuck back into the family’s lake house and to the turret room, our grandmother was the one who caught us on the stairs.

  “Your mama isn’t happy you girls pulled a disappearing act,” she warned Lily mildly.

  “Mama’s never happy,” Lily said. “Or she always is. Honestly, it’s getting hard to tell.”

  Lillian’s expression softened—or at least shifted—as she processed the truth in Lily’s words. Without any additional commentary, she turned to me. “Sawyer, your mama might have a bit of a headache in the morning.” My grandmother was far too discreet to say the word drunk, but she did elaborate. “I believe there were Long Island iced teas involved.”

  The fact that my mom had been drinking in their presence was enough to get an eyebrow raise out of me. They were lucky she hadn’t gotten weepy and started reminiscing about my conception.

  Assuming she didn’t.

  “Come on,” I told Lily, nodding toward the turret room. “Ellie Taft sleeps like the dead when there are Long Island iced teas involved.”

  Since my mom was passed out in one of the twin beds in the turret room, Lily and I both squeezed into the other. It was a tight fit, but we were both spent, and I don’t think either one of us wanted to be alone. Her hair ended up spread across our pillow. Mine was bunched up beneath me.

  I didn’t say a word to her about Walker, and she didn’t say a thing to me about love.

  orning came early—and by morning, I meant John David. I awoke to him cannonballing onto the bed Lily and I were sharing. I ended up with what I was fairly certain would turn into a pretty impressive bruise, and Lily ended up on the floor.

  John David, on all fours on the bed, made no apologies. “Golf cart,” he declared emphatically. “Parade.”

  Due to what he’d termed a “sparkler deficit,” John David had opted for themed decorations. The theme he’d decided on was “Star Wars Spangled Banner.”

  “Does the cart look enough like the Death Star?” John David asked, eyeing his work critically. “Except also like the American flag?”

  I thought there was some questionable and assuredly unintentional symbolism at play there for a holiday that was supposed to be patriotic, but who was I to argue with genius?

  “It looks exactly like the Death Star,” I told him. “And also the American flag.”

  “Good.” John David narrowed his eyes at Lily and me. “Listen up, soldiers. We only have ninety minutes to finish these lightsabers and droids.”

  It turned out that when it came to arts and crafts, John David was an even stricter taskmaster than his mother. With five minutes to go on our ninety-minute deadline and all three of us sopping wet from sweat, he stepped back to appraise our work.

  “Perfect,” he declared. “Now all we need is to get William Faulkner into her costume.”

  Putting pants on a dog was not what one would call “easy.” Putting pants on a purebred, hundred-pound Bernese mountain dog who was fairly certain she did not want to wear pants could have substituted for one of the twelve labors of Hercules.

  But with enough cajoling and the right bribes, we did it.

  “Bless William Faulkner’s little doggy heart,” Lily said as John David proudly drove past us in the Death Star, dressed like a Jedi, with a canine companion costumed as Uncle Sam.

  Including the hat.

  There were easily fifteen or twenty carts in the parade, plus bicycles, strollers, and at least a half-dozen other costumed dogs.

  “How much do you think he understands?” I asked Lily as John David’s cart disappeared from sight, and the two of us melted back into the crowd. “About everything that’s happened?”

  Lily’s blond hair caught in the wind. For once, she didn’t try to tame it. “More than he lets on.”

  Thanks to being drafted as John David’s assistants, the two of us had managed to avoid Aunt Olivia this morning. My mom, as far as I knew, was still asleep.

  “About last night,” I said, but before I could say more or Lily could interject, her phone buzzed—three times. I was close enough to see her screen.

  The first text was a rose. The second was a snake. And the third started with the words YOUR CHALLENGE, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT…

  “Why,” Lily said for the fifth time, “do they want me to enter the pie-eating contest?”

  “Not enter,” I clarified helpfully, taking a bite of the snow cone I’d just acquired. “Win.”

  Lily didn’t respond to the teasing tone in my voice the way she might have, pre-Ana. She didn’t respond at all. The thumb on her left hand prodded the bruised and battered knuckles on her right.

  I thought about her second secret. Sometimes, my body feels like it belongs to someone else.

  “Lily?” I said.

  She blinked. “Headache.” Before she could return to the topic of the pie-eating contest—or why she cared about meeting the White Gloves’ challenge—her posture changed abruptly. She grabbed the snow cone out of my hand.

  “Wouldn’t advise eating that if you want room for pie.” I realized a second later that she had no intention of eating anything. She just wanted something to look at. Something to hold. An excuse to pretend she didn’t see Walker and Campbell Ames across the way.

  “Do you think she told him?” I asked so Lily wouldn’t have to. On the other side of the sprawling lawn, where a group of men was just starting to set up a half-dozen grills, Campbell and Walker were approached by Victoria.

  And her father.

  “Maybe Walker should date Victoria,” Lily said, tightening her death grip on the snow cone. “Dance with her. Talk to her. Kiss her and tell her she’s the one.”

  I had the distinct feeling that Lily saying that was no different than her pressing on bruised knuckles to see if it hurt.

  “Before you have your boyfriend and Victoria hypothetically married off and having babies,” I interjected, “I’d like to remind you that you’re the one who’s not sure, and they only danced together once.”

  “I’m the one with doubts now,” Lily replied. “Walker was the one who wasn’t sure before.” She shifted the snow cone to her left hand, and the bruised fingers on her right curled and uncurled at her side. “Walker likes to be needed. He likes to ride in on a white horse and save the day, and he spent the last year thinking he’d never get to be that kind of guy again.”

  “And you don’t want that kind of guy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what I want,” Lily reiterated as Walker and Campbell spotted us through the crowd. “I thought my mama and daddy had the perfect marriage. I thought they were the perfect couple. I was wrong. I wanted what they had. What does that say about me?”

  Walker started making his way toward us, Campbell two steps behind.

  “Are you hoping she didn’t tell him?” I a
sked Lily. “Or that she did?”

  No reply.

  “Happy Fourth of July.” Walker greeted her with a quick kiss to the lips. “Care for a stroll?”

  He held out an arm, and she took it.

  Once they were out of earshot, Campbell turned to me. “I didn’t tell him. Obviously.”

  That was unusually altruistic of her. “What did Victoria and her father want?” I asked.

  “To say hello,” Campbell replied. “Supposedly.” She didn’t dwell on that—or allow me to. “Get any texts this morning?”

  “No,” I said. “But Lily did.” Maybe that meant I’d been cut. As fond as I was of patriarchy smashing, that was an outcome I could live with.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what my challenge is?” Campbell prompted.

  I obliged.

  “That’s for me to know,” came the reply, “and you to provide an alibi for me in regards to later.”

  “That almost makes me nostalgic,” I said.

  “Must be in the air,” Campbell replied. “Mama informed me this morning that she’s been feeling nostalgic, too.”

  I scanned the sprawling lawn and caught sight of Charlotte Ames, on the far side of the basketball and tennis courts—and right next to Aunt Olivia.

  She’s probably enjoying the fact that someone else is the scandal du jour. No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than I saw my mother standing underneath a large blue tent, all of three feet away from Greer Waters.

  Depending on where my mom fell on the scale from hungover to really hungover, this had the potential to get ugly.

  “I have to go,” I told Campbell.

  She caught my arm as I walked past. “If anyone asks tonight after the fireworks, I was with you all morning and afternoon.” She smiled. “And, Sawyer? You’ll know my challenge when you see it.”