37. Lily

37

LILY

JANUARY 3, 12:05 A.M.

Once upon a time, there was a queen trapped in a castle. It was full of riches and guarded by two dragons with fire on their breath and venom on their tongues, and even though the queen had been in this castle all her life, no one in the kingdom could find her. But that was okay with her. They never could have saved her, anyway, and if they'd tried, she would have warned them: the riches are all made of plastic, but the dragons are real.

And if you're not careful, they can start to feel like home.

Vivian stares at me in horror, like she doesn't recognize her best friend, and maybe she shouldn't. Because I'm not the same.

Or maybe this is who I always was.

"Lily," she says softly, like maybe if she keeps saying my name, I'll be who she thinks I am. "What happened?"

"I got my hands dirty," I tell her. I mean it as a joke, but it doesn't come out like one, and it doesn't change the awful pitying look on her face.

"Coach…" She glances at the door. "Did he hurt you?"

I almost laugh at that. Honestly. But she's looking at me so confused and desperate for an answer that I decide to give her what she wants.

"No, don't worry. Besides the kidnapping part, he's been a perfect gentleman." I turn toward the locked door. "Even if the accommodations suck !"

I raise my voice on that last part, which makes Vivian tense up, like she might need to fight or run.

"Relax," I tell her. "They won't hear us. These walls are basically soundproof."

Vivian watches me for a second. "They?"

"Everyone's favorite father-son duo." I roll my eyes, but when I look at Vivian again, I realize she doesn't know. "Coach and Marty?"

"Marty's his dad ?" she asks.

Weirdly, I'm a little disappointed. I know, now, that the plan was doomed before it even started, but still, I thought my Maids would at least put some of the pieces together.

"Lily, what happened?"

"You really don't know?"

Vivian blinks at me. "We know that someone at the Pierrot killed Margot and they've been covering it up. Coach and Marty brought you here because you knew, right?"

Now we're getting somewhere. "And?"

She hesitates, like she doesn't want to say it. "And Coach and Margot were having an affair."

And now I actually laugh. I feel bad, but it's just that Vivian has always been like this, straightforward and single-minded—which is great when it comes to things like soccer, but not so much with seeing what's in front of her.

"That would make more sense, wouldn't it?" I tell her. "Well, you're almost there, but not quite."

I've pushed her too far.

"Oh my god, can you cut it out with this unbothered bullshit?" Vivian explodes, and finally, there's the fire I recognize, the one she tries to tamp down everywhere but the field. "What is your problem ? We've spent the past week looking for you and risking our lives and it's like you don't even give a shit." She pauses, like she's just really heard herself. "Sorry. Shit. I'm so fucking glad you're okay, Lil. But I'm trying to figure out what's going on, and you're not helping."

"No, you're right. I guess I wasn't much help, was I?"

I sigh. What does it matter, anyway? She's here, and I'm starting to think that none of it matters, not really, so what's the harm in her knowing the truth?

"Marty and Coach were at the Mississippi house that summer," I tell her. "When I started being friends with Margot. Back then, though, I just knew Coach as Reed, 'cause he hadn't started at Beaumont yet. They'd rented their own house for a week. You know, father-son bonding."

Vivian frowns. "How did we not know that Marty was Coach's dad?"

" You didn't," I correct her. I shrug. "But I guess it's not that obvious. Coach's mom remarried when he was little, and he took the stepdad's last name and moved to Houston. Marty wasn't superinvolved in Coach's life, but they'd reconnected ever since Marty helped him get the Beaumont job. Turns out Coach was in a bit of a bind. He'd just gotten fired from his last coaching job when they found out he'd been dealing to students on the side. But Beaumont was willing to overlook that little hiccup, since our lovely Head of School happens to be in the Krewe."

"Mr. Pierce is in the Pierrot, too?"

"Oh, they're everywhere. Like termites. Or ravens circling a carcass, in his case." I roll my eyes, thinking of Mr. Pierce in his ridiculous raven mask, showing off that Tulane student like a new luxury timepiece. "Anyway, one day that summer, Marty offered to take us all out on his boat. Me, Margot, our parents, and Coach. So we went. Watched the grown-ups get wine-drunk and reminisce about the good old days, or whatever. It was all pretty typical stuff, but even then, I could tell. The way he looked at her…"

"Coach?" Vivian asks.

"No," I say. "Marty."

I watch it hit her, the same skin-prickling feeling I had when I first saw it happen. We were sitting together, Margot and me, on the white seat cushions of the boat, spray in our faces and sun baking our shoulders, when Marty's eyes caught Margot's over the rim of his glass. Dipped down to her halter-neck bikini top. Flashed, for a moment, with bare and unashamed hunger, before focusing again on his conversation with our dads.

Margot didn't miss it, either.

You see that? she whispered to me.

Gross, I whispered back. Totally shameless.

Margot shifted slightly. I don't know. He's kind of cute, for an older guy.

She sounded like she was joking. She always had that bold sense of humor, a fuck-you sort of confidence that I'd always been jealous of, even when it bordered on vulgar. Maybe that's why I was jealous—because she could be vulgar. Because, despite growing up with the same suffocating pressure and expectations that I did, Margot had a unique power: she didn't give a shit what people thought.

But even then, on the boat that day, I think I had a sense of what was about to happen—something tipping toward a cliff's edge, momentum unstoppable.

"I found them one night," I say. "I'd gone down to the dock to look for Margot, because she'd disappeared, and there they were on his boat together. Alone. Drinking wine, Marty's hand on her thigh. And then…"

When he kissed her, I wanted to turn and run, or say something so they knew I was there, but I couldn't do anything except watch, frozen, from the dock. Some part of me needed to see it happen. Needed to know how much of a mess they were about to make.

"I didn't tell anyone," I say. "I just went back to the house and tried to pretend I didn't see anything. For the rest of the trip, it mostly worked. But then, when we got home, they started texting. Margot never said anything, but she was always on her phone, all secretive, smiling. It was so obvious."

Disgusting, too, though I still can't admit it out loud. Not only because of the age gap, the wrongness of it, but because of how stupid she was being. That summer, I'd gotten to know her as this strong badass girl, everything I wished I could be, but here she was, doing something completely reckless—and not in a fun way anymore. It was bad enough that I had to fight April Whitman for Margot's attention when we got home, but now…

"I kept thinking she'd get over it, get bored, but it went on for months. By Thanksgiving, I couldn't take it anymore. I confronted her about it, told her I'd seen them in Mississippi, and she admitted it. Said he was going to leave his wife for her." I laugh, bitterness burning in my throat. "The thing is, I don't think she even liked him that much. I think she just wanted to see if he'd really do it. Blow up his whole life."

I can still see it so clearly, that gleam in her eyes as she told me. It wasn't love. It was power, and she was drunk on it. And I was so angry at her because I understood it, somewhere in the deepest, darkest part of me. Not that I'd ever fantasized about screwing an old guy—ew—but I knew what it was like to daydream about all of the men who thought they owned me bowing down at my feet. Not just some fake debutante-ball version, but real.

That's what we were both starving for, I think. Control. Only we dealt with it in different ways: I focused on me, sharpening my self-control like a weapon, and Margot threw hers into the fire, watching it burn.

It's why, I thought, we needed each other. But I guess I was wrong.

"Anyway," I say, forcing down the memories, "Margot basically told me I wasn't her friend if I was going to judge her."

"What did you do?" Vivian asks, her voice hollow.

"What was I supposed to do?" I shoot back. "Tattle to her parents? Mine? They wouldn't have believed me, and Marty would have denied it. He texted her from a burner, like a creep, so there wasn't even real evidence that it was him."

"I know," Vivian says. "We found the burner. It was in an envelope on my car."

Her car? No, that's not right.

"I left the burner for y'all in the darkroom," I say.

"Coach and Marty got to it first." Vivian looks down, guilty. "We told Marty about the email you sent us. That's how he knew where the phone was, I'm guessing."

I grit my teeth. The email—my one backup plan in case anything went wrong—and they failed me.

"I have no idea why he would have left the burner on my car, though," Vivian adds. "And I never would have told him about the email if I'd known. I swear, we thought he could help us."

Another bitter laugh works through me.

"Yeah, well. Rookie mistake."

For a moment, Vivian is quiet.

"He killed her, didn't he?" she asks. "Marty?"

A sad smile twitches on my lips. She really doesn't know. I watch her for a moment, waiting to see if she'll put together the last twist in this Southern Gothic fairy tale.

And she should. Because we both know by now that none of my stories have tidy endings.