Читать книгу As I Descended - Robin Talley - Страница 8
Оглавление“Ten!” Delilah whispered.
“Nine!” The dozen seniors squeezed into the tiny dorm room joined in. “Eight!”
Maria took another gulp as her friends cheered in hushed voices. She was the only girl who’d ever join the guys’ absurd beer-chugging contest.
“Seven!” everyone chorused. Maria coughed. Lily resisted the urge to snatch the beer can out of her hand.
“Six! Five! Four!”
Maria fist-pumped. The movement made her tank top ride up. Just a fraction of an inch, but enough to get appreciative looks from the boys sitting at her feet. Lily wanted to kick them.
“Three!” Emily, leading the chant, took a dainty sip from her drink. Lily could’ve sworn she was intentionally slowing the countdown to trip Maria up. “Two! . . . One!”
Lily gazed from face to face. Every single person in this room—except Maria, of course—was useless.
Lily hated Acheron to the depths of her soul. She longed to tell all these losers to shut up and get out of her room before she shoved them out the door herself. She bit her lip and took another sip of seltzer instead.
“Zero!” the group chorused. Maria lowered her empty beer can and wiped her mouth. She laughed as Ryan took the can from her and crushed it in that way guys did when they were being stupid.
The grin on Maria’s face almost looked real. She collapsed onto the bed next to Lily, fanning herself dramatically even though it was freezing in their room.
Lily raised her eyebrows at Maria—their usual look, the one that meant People are watching us, so you can’t sit that close—and Maria slid down onto the floor next to Austin, still giggling.
“Congrats, Ree.” Austin tipped his drink to Maria’s beer can in a toast. A trickle of rum rolled down the sleeve of his black mesh shirt. Austin was the school’s resident dealer, and for some reason he liked to pretend he was goth. “I can’t believe they let you off with a warning. That chandelier’s been up there since the Stone Age. You’ve got the magic touch, Princess.”
Delilah, slumped on the floor next to him, giggled and held up her drink, the liquid glistening in the candlelight that shined across the room. Her own top was so tiny it wouldn’t have had room to ride up. She was on her third Diet Coke of the night, and she was high on oxy. The combination of caffeine, fake sugar, and prescription painkillers had her at maximum intolerability.
“It was crazy,” Maria told Austin. Lily could see her hiding her smile. “Anyway, they told our parents too.”
“As long as they don’t stop you from going to homecoming,” Caitlin said. She’d climbed onto Maria’s bed and wrapped herself around Ryan. Tamika, who’d been dating Ryan up until yesterday, glared at them from the other side of the room. “That’s all that matters, right?”
Lily rolled her eyes. Caitlin, and all the other pathetic excuses for humans in this room, probably thought the dance really was all that mattered.
“What’d your parents say?” Emily asked.
Maria shrugged. Her parents hadn’t said a word. Not to her, anyway.
Lily, Maria, and Brandon had been brought into Dean Cumberland’s office that morning while the dean called their parents one by one. Lily’s mother had been so relieved to hear Lily wasn’t hurt, she barely even listened to the part about the drinking and the rule breaking. Brandon’s father had announced over speakerphone that Brandon would be grounded all summer, and did Dean Cumberland think that was punishment enough or should he take away Brandon’s computer and his phone, too?
But no one had answered at Maria’s. Not at either of her parents’ offices or on their cell phones. Finally the dean left a sternly worded message with Maria’s mother’s intern.
Maria had called her parents to explain. She’d left a voice mail pleading for her mother to call her back. But Maria’s phone didn’t ring that day.
Instead a dorm monitor stopped by their room while Maria was out at soccer practice. She told Lily the dean had spoken to Maria’s parents, and to tell Maria the girls didn’t need to worry about last night—the chandelier would be easy enough to restore for next semester.
Lily had never met Maria’s parents, but she knew enough about them, and about how Acheron was used to dealing with the genteel Southern families who were its livelihood, to know what that meant: the check was in the mail.
That didn’t help with Brandon’s two strikes, though. He was stuck staying in his room all night from now on. Unless he wanted to risk getting caught again. Three strikes on your record meant a minimum one-year suspension.
Sucked for him.
Lily hadn’t been in the mood for a party after what had happened the night before. Neither had Maria. Still, though, Delilah had asked. She wanted to celebrate, she said, because Acheron had done so well on the Kingsley Prize finalist list that morning.
And when Delilah Dufrey asked for a favor, you didn’t say no.
You wouldn’t think it to look at her, slumped on the floor giggling at a joke everyone else had forgotten ten minutes ago, but Delilah could be terrifying when she wanted to be.
That afternoon Delilah had caught Lily and Maria in the cafeteria. She’d made a big show of fixing her lip gloss in her pocket mirror and said, “Don’t you guys think it would be awesome if we hung out in your room tonight after lights-out? We’ve all been working so hard with the big game coming up. We deserve to take a break. I mean, we all saw how amazing the list was, right?”
There was no saying, No, Delilah, I don’t think that would be awesome at all, actually. Not unless you wanted to lose every friend you had.
That was the kind of power Delilah wielded. Somehow, she’d appointed herself the queen of the senior class.
It wasn’t as if Lily and Maria weren’t popular. Maria was almost as high up the totem pole as Delilah. Two boys had already asked her to homecoming, and even though she’d turned them both down, rumor had it another offer would come in before the week was out.
But “almost” didn’t cut it. At Acheron, if Delilah Dufrey didn’t like you, you might as well resign yourself to spending your high school career with the mousy-haired girls who gave themselves teddy bear tattoos with ballpoint pens.
It wasn’t just that Delilah was hot, either. Though she was, of course. She was hotter than she had any right to be, with her long blond hair and her sparkling eyes and her pert little nose that was so perfectly shaped the freshmen took bets on whether she’d had a nose job.
Nope. There had never been a single thing wrong with Delilah Dufrey.
She’d been unanimously elected homecoming queen last year, and everyone already knew the same thing would happen this year too. She was first in their class, edging out Maria by one one-hundredth of a point. She was senior class president and captain of the soccer team, the cross-country team, and the debate team. She was only vice president of the Gay-Straight Alliance, but that was because Mateo had founded the GSA back in their freshman year. And, of course, because Delilah wasn’t gay. At least, not gay enough.
And as of today, Delilah was first in line for the Kingsley Prize.
The Cawdor Kingsley Foundation Prize went to five graduating seniors from Virginia private schools based on their grades, extracurriculars, and all the other usual stuff. Each of the five winners came from a different school, and Acheron had had a winner every year since the award was created. It came with a free ride to the college of your choice, plus two years of grad school. Winning it pretty much guaranteed you’d get into any college in the country.
At Acheron, winning the Kingsley Prize was just called “winning.” You said the word and everyone knew exactly what you were talking about.
Cawdor Kingsley himself was dead now, but before that he’d been some rich “Southern gentleman” who’d made his fortune running manufacturing plants that had killed every fish, plant, and amoebic creature in half the rivers in the state. Like many a Southern gentleman before him, he’d been a proud member of his local White Citizens’ Council, barely one step removed from the Klan. Now his great-grandkids were trying to redeem the family name by giving his money away to everyone they could think of.
The preliminary list of finalists had gone up early that morning, with Delilah’s name right at number one. The list was just a formality, though. Everyone had already known the prize would go to Delilah. That was how it worked when you’d already won everything else there was to win. Most of the seniors hadn’t even bothered to put their names in.
That was the reason Maria had spent the evening getting drunk and glassy-eyed. Or part of the reason, anyway.
Officially, there would be a second round of judging in a few weeks, because the prize committee was still accepting late applications. They wouldn’t announce the declared winners until after Christmas.
Not that it mattered. Delilah was in first place now, and when the time came, Delilah would win. Then she’d get into her dream school, Princeton, and she wouldn’t even have to pay for it. Winning made you the most important person at Acheron. The alumni threw you a huge party. You’d be on the front page of the school newspaper and the local paper, too. Best of all, your name got added to the official Kingsley plaque, the first thing the student ambassadors showed to every group of prospective parents who came through the campus.
Every senior knew Delilah was guaranteed to win this year’s Kingsley Prize, just as they knew she was a shoo-in to win homecoming queen. Most of them knew about Delilah’s oxy habit, too, but no one seemed to care.
It had been more than a year since Delilah first started sidling up to Lily in the cafeteria, asking if she’d gotten her prescription filled yet. Lily was supposed to take the pills for her legs, but she hardly ever did—anything stronger than an Advil made her feel out of control, which made her anxious and nauseous, and sometimes that was worse than the pain in the first place—so at first she started giving Delilah one pill at a time, when she asked. Slowly, that turned into two pills at a time. Then four. Now Lily just handed over the whole bottle at the start of each month, saving only a couple for her really bad days. Once last semester Maria had seen Delilah bent over the sink in the locker room, snorting up the crushed pills with a rolled-up dollar bill. Super-classy homecoming queen behavior.
“Hey.” Mateo sank onto the bed next to Lily. He was sweaty, with dark hair curling over his forehead, but he smiled and held out a fresh can of seltzer. “Looks like you’re all out. Want this one?”
“No, thanks.” Lily tossed her empty can in the recycling and crossed her arms. It took more effort for her to go over to the cooler than it did for everyone else, but that didn’t mean she wanted gestures of pity.
“No worries. I’m stopping for the night myself.” Mateo set down his beer bottle and smiled again. He was showing off that slight Puerto Rican accent that made the other girls joke about trying to turn him straight. “So, are you excited about Stanford?”
Lily hid her surprise. No one ever asked her about Stanford. “Yeah, I guess.”
Stanford had been the number one school—really, the only school—on Lily’s list for as long as she could remember. She’d been hearing about it since she was a kid. Her parents had met there. Every now and then she took down the old album and looked at the pictures of them laughing together over candy-colored drinks, playing Frisbee on manicured lawns, and making silly faces into a black-and-white photo booth, looking at each other with light in their eyes.
To see Lily’s parents today, you’d never know they were the same people. Their faces were creased from years of worry, and the light in their eyes had been replaced by the dull glow of fatigue and resignation.
At Stanford, though, her parents had been happy.
Maybe at Stanford, Lily could see what it was like to feel that way. She just needed to make sure Maria wound up there, too.
Lily had told a few people at Acheron she was going to Stanford, but no one seriously thought she’d get in. No one remembered that Lily wrote poetry for the school literary magazine, or that she’d worked her ass off as class vice president (“President” Delilah was pretty much useless), or that her application essay on why the Americans with Disabilities Act had set the disability rights movement back thirty years had been called “sheer brilliance” by all three of Acheron’s college counselors. No one cared that Lily was a fourth-generation legacy at Stanford, or that her grandfather’s name was up on a sign over the entrance to the political affairs building.
When people at Acheron looked at Lily, they didn’t see all the things she’d done. They only saw The Girl with the Crutches.
Lily had been in the popular group ever since she first transferred to Acheron in sixth grade, when her newness and her crutches made her exciting and exotic. Except for Maria, though, no one had ever bothered to talk to her about anything real. And she’d heard what people around here said about her and Stanford. That if she got in, it would be “affirmative action.”
Lily had been in an accident when she was a kid, and even after all the surgeries she still couldn’t make it twenty feet without her crutches. Her legs hurt like hell most of the time. There wasn’t a single day when Lily didn’t have to push past the pain just to swing down the three steps that led to the school cafeteria.
Adults excused her from everything from gym class to field trips with a condescending look. And these Acheron assholes thought Lily had an advantage.
“I’ve got an idea!” Delilah said. “Let’s play Truth or Dare!”
The room bubbled with excited murmurs.
“Oh, no. We can’t! Not after last time!” Caitlin leaned over and whispered something into Ryan’s ear.
Tamika tossed her phone down onto the comforter. “I’ll start!”
The others leaned in from where they were perched on the beds and rugs, each waiting to hear who Tamika would call on first.
“Let’s see . . .” Tamika always drew these things out so everyone would look at her as long as possible. “Kei. I dare you to tell us what really happened when you and Emily went behind the Rite Aid on the trip to Monticello.”
Everyone howled as loudly as they dared. Kei and Emily flushed, but they were smiling broadly.
God, Lily hated room parties.
It was so hard to care about all this drama. Lily tried to keep track of her straight friends’ romances—it was important to play along—but it got so exhausting. If Lily had her way, the whole school would consist of just her and Maria.
And if anyone should win the Kingsley Prize, Maria was the one.
But right now she was only in second place.
A lot of good second place did them. There was no chance of moving up with Delilah in the picture.
Maria might get into Stanford without the prize, but there was no way to know for sure. Winning was the only way to guarantee she and Lily could stay together next year. It was the reason Lily had bought the Ouija board in the first place. Maria had seemed so resigned to losing that Lily had to try something to snap her out of it, even if it meant pretending she believed in all the stuff Maria always said about spirits. Lily figured she could move the planchette, tell Maria she was destined to win, and maybe, just maybe, it would be enough to lift Maria over the top.
Lily would’ve tried anything by that point. She’d even broken the no-drinking resolution she’d been following ever since the end of freshman year just to get Maria into the old dining hall.
The worst part was, Maria deserved to win. Delilah most certainly did not.
The only reason Delilah was class president was because she’d thrown a weekend-long poster-making party on her parents’ private island in the Outer Banks over Labor Day, right before the election. The entire class was invited. Lily had spent the first week of school slathering aloe on her sunburn, glaring at the hundreds of VOTE DUFREY posters that lined the halls, and listening to eighty-seven renditions of “how Delilah hooked up with the hot college guy from the minigolf place and Ryan caught the whole thing on video.” Everyone agreed that Delilah was the biggest badass ever and she’d looked super cute in her purple lace bikini.
The rest of the world had to play by one set of rules, but Delilah Dufrey got to make up her own as she went along. It made Lily want to vomit.
By some miracle, Delilah only beat Maria in the election by three votes, so Maria was named class activity director. She got stuck running the student council bake sales. Delilah’s only job, apparently, was to sit at the front of the council room and yawn her way through the agenda at meetings.
But that wasn’t the end of Delilah’s crimes. Maria should’ve been captain of the soccer team, too. She was a better player than Delilah, but unlike Delilah, she didn’t hook up with the coach.
That was the most important difference between Maria and Delilah: Maria always followed the rules.
It was one of Lily’s favorite things about her. It was Lily’s least favorite thing, too.
If Maria hadn’t thought she was following some unwritten code, she’d have turned Delilah in last year when she saw her kissing Coach Tartar in the equipment closet. She’d have taken a picture and sent it anonymously to the dean. Or she’d have pulled Delilah aside during a practice and quietly blackmailed her into dropping out of the election. She at least would’ve done something when she spotted Delilah snorting up pills in the locker room.
Instead she’d let her every chance to get rid of the witch go by without a word. No one except Maria and Lily—and probably Brandon, since Maria still told him everything—knew the whole truth.
And why? Maria still believed in nice girls finishing first. Someday, she seemed to think, someone was bound to tally up everything she’d done and give her a medal for being a good person. It made Lily want to scream until her lungs ached—because it meant they were still at Delilah’s mercy.
It had been Delilah who’d picked Maria and Lily’s room for the party tonight. Their room was everyone’s favorite hangout spot. Sure, it was right next door to the old dining hall, but the room was also designated as “handicap-accessible,” so it was the only room in the whole dorm that had its own bathroom. That way, if you needed some privacy, and you were wasted, you didn’t have to go all the way down the hall and risk getting caught by a dorm monitor.
Their room also had a thick gray carpet none of the other rooms had, and that helped muffle the party sounds. Over the past year, that carpet had accumulated half a dozen spilled-beer stains. Lily had tried every carpet-cleaning spray she could find, but no matter how hard she scrubbed she hadn’t been able to get rid of those spots.
Tonight, though, stains were the last thing on Lily’s mind.
She needed to talk to Maria about what had happened.
Not about the chandelier, or the calls to their parents, or Brandon’s two strikes. She wanted to talk about the part of the night she could barely remember.
What the Ouija board had said. What it meant.
Why Maria had acted so strange. As if she knew something the rest of them didn’t.
Delilah was sitting on the floor with her back propped against Maria’s bed, her eyes heavy-lidded and her head tilted onto Kei’s shoulder. She rubbed his knee with one hand and twirled her ever-present tube of clear lip gloss with the other. She’d draped Lily’s grandmother’s quilt across her lap to keep out the chill.
Maria, who analyzed everything, had a lot of theories about why Delilah needed to do drugs to have fun. She thought Delilah had family pressure to live up to. A profound inability to find release. A deep, hidden reservoir of self-loathing.
Lily had a theory, too. It was that Delilah was an asshole.
And while there were a thousand reasons they hated Delilah, there was one thing that bothered them above all.
Delilah had been the first girl Lily ever kissed.
Kei finished hedging his way through the story about what happened with Emily behind the Rite Aid—it was awkward, since everyone knew Emily had hooked up with a guy from Georgetown Prep later that night—and Delilah stood up. “My turn!”
“It’s Kei’s turn,” Lily said. “Have you never played Truth or Dare before?”
Delilah ignored her. “Maria! Truth or dare?”
Maria sighed. She and Lily always picked dare.
Delilah lifted her chin triumphantly. “I dare you to give Ryan a lap dance.”
The room filled with muted catcalls. Ryan grinned, blushed, and patted his lap. Caitlin and Tamika both glared at Maria, who was blushing too.
Lily wished Delilah were a bug she could step on. One quick squishing sound and she’d be out of their lives. Poof.
Maria was walking slowly toward Ryan when her foot caught on the edge of the carpet and she fell onto Mateo’s outstretched legs.
“Whoa, there, whoa.” Mateo laughed as he caught her. “I think Princess’s had enough party for tonight.”
Had Maria done that on purpose? Lily honestly couldn’t tell. Maria was a very, very good actress.
“Oh, come on, she doesn’t get out of her dare just because she’s drunk,” Delilah whined. “Everybody’s drunk.”
“How about if Maria does an alternative dare,” Mateo said. “She can, like, name all fifty states in alphabetical order in under three minutes.”
“That’s the most boring dare ever.” Delilah groaned.
Maria sat up. “Alabama, Alaska, Arizona . . .”
It was actually kind of funny, since Maria had just chugged a beer and kept hiccuping. She got tripped up on Delaware and Iowa, and everyone counted down at the end to make sure she really did it in three minutes. When she was done, she was flushed and giggly.
“Austin,” she said. “Truth or dare?”
“Dare.” Austin didn’t hesitate.
“I dare you to tell us the scariest story you’ve ever heard.”
“Whooo!” A bunch of people giggled.
Austin didn’t laugh. “You don’t want me to do that, Princess.”
“What’s the matter, Austin?” Tamika whispered. “You scared of ghosts?”
Austin still didn’t laugh.
“I’ve got a scary story!” Delilah said. “This one time, I went running by the lake at night and —”
“Wait, wait, Maria just said to tell a scary story,” Kei interrupted. “Not about something that happened to you.”
“But it was scary!” Delilah said. “It was the scariest story ever!”
“You did not go out running by the lake at night,” Tamika said. “No one goes out to the lake at night. Besides, the security guards would catch you.”
“No, I totally did it,” Delilah said. “It was a couple of years ago. All of a sudden it got really cold, like, out of nowhere, and then I heard someone else run past me. He totally brushed my sleeve. Which was weird, because I hadn’t seen anyone else running. And when I turned to see who it was, there was no one there!”
“Dun-dun-DUN!” Kei whispered loudly. Everyone, even the boys, dissolved into giggles.
Lily closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like if she really could get rid of everyone else and have the whole world to herself. Her and Maria.
If only there were a way . . .
