4. April

4

APRIL

DECEMBER 29, 9:30 P.M.

I press my forehead against the cool glass of the car window, watching the streets of Uptown pass in a green-and-golden blur. There's a dull throbbing behind my skull, but I try to ignore it, focusing on the fact that we'll be home in ten minutes. Then I'll get to peel this dress off and try to wipe the past two hours from my memory.

"How's the air?" Dad asks from the passenger seat. "Too hot? Too cold?"

"I think we're just right, Goldilocks." Mom reaches across the driver's side to squeeze his shoulder with a warm smile.

They're annoyingly cute for a couple who've been married almost twenty-five years. Sometimes, it feels like a slight from the universe that I, April Whitman, cynic extraordinaire, somehow ended up with two college-sweetheart parents who manage to run a real-estate business without becoming any less in love with each other. It defies the logic of both physics and America's divorce statistics.

I'm mostly kidding. I'm glad my parents have such a good relationship. Really, it's just that the least-perfect thing about them seems to be me.

"How ya doing back there?" Dad asks me. "You've been awfully quiet."

"Just practicing my wistful gaze out the window," I say. "You know, for when I'm a debutante child bride and my husband goes off to war."

Dad laughs. "Well, you look beautiful."

"Good. They'll never know I'm hoping he dies in battle so I can inherit our massive country estate."

"There's the feminist, mildly sociopathic debutante I raised," Mom teases, but she glances at Dad in that way of hers, a telepathic temperature check. Instantly, I feel guilty, remembering Dad's beaming face as Milford dragged me around the ballroom. Dark humor has been my number-one defense mechanism through all this, but I'm worried it might actually be hurting Dad's feelings.

"I'm glad I did it, though," I say as convincingly as possible. Which is to say, not at all. I edit the statement, making it true. "I mean, before everything happened at the presentation, I'm glad we all got to hang out as a family, and stuff."

"Me, too." Dad smiles, but there's a twinge of sadness in it. "Look, April, I know you only did this for your old man, and I'm so sorry it turned out to be such a mess." He pauses, and I know he's doing his own temperature check on me, wondering if he should change the subject. "Did you have some fun before, at least? I saw you chatting with Vivian Atkins up there. Are y'all getting to be friends?"

"Chatting" is a generous description, considering I could barely produce a single syllable. I feel a twinge deep in my gut, the same mix of guilt, shame, and frustration I get whenever my parents try to save me from my own hermitlike behavior. It's no secret that I have no friends, which is due to a combination of social anxiety and, as I've told my parents hundreds of times, personal choice. The people at school aren't exactly my type, with their rich-kid conformism and total lack of interest in anything outside of the Beaumont bubble. And sure, maybe Vivian seems a little more down-to-earth than some of the other popular kids, but she's still one of Lily's minions. To them, I'm just the weird, quiet girl with the camera, if I'm anything at all—and that's the way I like it.

Because I've tried the alternative, and it was infinitely worse.

Still, I can't handle the barely disguised hope in Dad's voice.

"Yeah," I lie. "A little."

"That's great!" He grins at me in the mirror, but it's too put-on, fading as quickly as a camera flash. Already, I know what's coming next. "I just can't believe someone would pull a stunt like that. Those videos, like some kind of joke…"

The silence stretches, pressing against the windows like a palm print in the condensation.

Dad sighs. "I'm just really sorry it happened."

"Yeah," I say through a tightening throat. "Me, too."

I close my eyes again, but this time, I can't block out the images. The blood on Lily's dress. The red light. Margot. It's like my corset is getting tighter and tighter, so fast that I want to scream just to remind myself I still can.

Like she can sense it, Mom straightens. "Y'all want to take one last spin down St. Charles before they take all the lights down?"

I may be a cynic who wants nothing more than to get home right now, but I am a sucker for some good ol' capitalistic holiday cheer. Plus, I could really use the distraction.

"Hell yeah," I say. "Aux me?"

Dad hands me the cord, and I hit SHUFFLE on a playlist of Whitman Family Favorites—all the big holiday hits except for "The Christmas Shoes," because Dad can't listen to it without openly weeping—and shift around in my giant skirt until I have a good view.

I drive down this street every day on the way to school, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't still take my breath away. St. Charles Avenue is like something out of another world, old sepia-toned photographs come to life in full color. The long two-way street is split by the neutral ground—or the median, for the uninitiated—and the streetcar track, all of it shaded by a parade of gnarled old oaks, bending to each other as if in mutual adoration. Both sides of the street are lined with some of the grandest houses I've ever seen: old Victorians and colonials with wraparound porches, dangling lanterns, and big yards behind tiny iron fences that are hardly more than decorative, like the mansions themselves are imposing enough to ward off intruders.

Most are still decked out for the holidays, white lights wrapped around tree branches, ornaments dripping like red and gold dew drops. The St. Charles families always go all out, spending tens of thousands to hire decorators, like it's some kind of competition. Which I guess it is. Tourists flock to this street, snapping pictures from the sidewalk and the streetcars, dreaming about which fairy-tale home they'd choose.

And shining above them all is Lily LeBlanc's mansion.

I can't help looking as we pass it, some compulsion to capture it all. The house is a bright, flawless white, three stories trimmed with columns and cornices that make it look more like a wedding cake than a home, too perfect to cut into.

On instinct, my eyes track up to the window I know is Lily's bedroom. I haven't been there since last year, but it still lives in my head like an old photo, the contours clear if I focus hard enough. Her queen bed with its gauzy canopy, the covers and pillows as white as her ball gown. Bare, tidy walls, except for a single picture hanging there: Margot and Lily sitting in profile, the levee stretching behind them. Margot has her signature claw-clipped bun and smudge of black eyeliner, playfully giving the camera the finger. And Lily looks over her bony shoulder, head tilted like she's forgotten that I'm behind the lens. Like she's forgotten that I was Margot's friend first.

I can remember that night so clearly. Or maybe it's just that I remember the photo, which, sometimes, I think is the same thing. It was a few weeks before the start of our junior year, mine and Lily's—Margot was about to be a senior—and for the past month, we'd been something like a trio. Against my will, obviously, but I had no choice.

Margot and I had been friends since that January, even though hardly anyone knew about it, not even my parents. We never really hung out at school. She had her crowd, and I had my camera. But it wasn't that she wanted to keep me a secret. At least, I didn't think so. Because I felt that way, too—like she was this special hidden place I'd found, or a new favorite song by an underground band, something that would be ruined once everyone knew about it.

But then, that summer, Margot spent a few weeks at her family's beach house in Mississippi, which just so happened to be right next to the LeBlancs' new vacation home. When they got back, Margot and Lily were attached at the hip, and suddenly, whenever we hung out, she was there, too, whether I liked it or not.

I didn't, for the record. And neither did Lily. To her, I was just an unfortunate consequence of befriending Margot, the crawfish shell and spindly legs you have to deal with before sucking the good stuff straight from its head.

The night I took that photo, we were sitting in Margot's favorite spot on the levee, right along where St. Charles turns into River Road. We'd go all the time that summer, walking about ten minutes from Margot's house, crossing the train tracks, and then climbing up the grassy hill to the bike path on top of the levee, where we'd sit facing the other side: a concrete slope down to a tangle of grass, trees, and beyond that, the Mississippi River and a skyline marred by bridges, barges, and industrial plants. It wasn't much to look at. If St. Charles Avenue was a kingdom full of castles, then this was the drawbridge and moat, the last thing standing between us and destruction.

Maybe that's what Margot liked about it: it felt like the edge of the world.

"Y'all ever think about how the river could just kill you?" she'd asked that night, absent-mindedly rolling the spark wheel of her lighter, the fancy silver one engraved with a sad clown face. I never knew where she'd found it, but she always carried it around, more for the aesthetic than any actual smoking habit.

Lily laughed, genuine and bubbling.

"Thank you, Morbid Landry," she teased, taking a sip of her hard seltzer. "Please elaborate?"

"Like, the current is so strong it'd pull you under in seconds. It's filled with toxic sludge and definitely alligators and it could also flood us at any time, but we still built a city around it. That's pretty badass."

"Or a death wish," I added.

Margot's face lit up as she turned to me. " Exactly. "

I couldn't help smiling back.

"We're literally sinking into the ocean," I added. "It's kind of ridiculous that people still buy property here."

Lily glanced at me. "Well, you'll be out of here soon enough, right?"

Her tone was casual, but the question sent uneasy pinpricks down my spine.

"I mean, like, with college," she added, off my silence. "Didn't you say you're not applying anywhere in the South?"

I shrugged, deflecting. "It's still a whole year away."

But Lily was right. Seventeen years in the South felt like plenty, and I was already itching to get somewhere with seasons and a general public who wouldn't balk when I held a girl's hand, if I could ever get over my crippling anxiety enough to start dating one.

"Well, sinking or not, I'm sure as hell staying," Margot said. "Like, there has to be something spiritually wrong with you if you have the chance to go to a school with Mardi Gras break and don't take it." She looked at me again. "I love you, April, but you are disturbed."

She smiled, but there was something sad simmering beneath it—something I felt a sudden urge to capture, if only so I could examine it later.

"I never said I wasn't." I lifted my camera. "Smile."

Now I turn away from Lily's house, focusing intently on the trees bending above us until we get home. Before the engine's even off, I'm pulling off my clunky heels and climbing out of the car, desperate to unhook this dress and take my first gulp of unrestricted air in hours.

"Careful with your skirt!" Dad calls behind me. "The ground is dirty."

Shooting him a thumbs-up, I bundle the giant puff of fabric as I walk up our front steps, the brick chilly on my bare feet. As much as I can't wait to move out, our house is pretty cool. Like a lot of the homes in our neighborhood, it's at least a century old. It's a renovated double shotgun—a New Orleans classic, named because of their long, straight design, where you could stand in the entrance and, theoretically, shoot a bullet clean through the back door. It's got that famously colorful Uptown style: canary-yellow clapboard with a porch framed by bright white columns, an iron gas lantern hanging above the front door, which is painted the same robin's-egg blue as the window shutters. The colors don't match, but no one in New Orleans gives a shit. They match because we say they do.

I glance through the front window to see Mouse curled up on the piano bench, licking her mittened paws. I bend down and tap on the glass.

"Hey, gremlin. How about you, me, and a Doctor Who binge?"

Her tail flicks—as close as this cat will ever get to showing approval—and I smile. Just as I'm about to get back up, my phone buzzes. When I see the name on the screen, my dress feels even tighter.

Lily.

Meet me at the Deus Den tomorrow at noon , it says. We need to talk about Margot.