Page 89 of The Debutantes
“Whatever.” Margot snapped the lighter shut, shoving it into her pocket.
“Wait,” I said. Panicked, now, feeling her slip through my fingers. “I didn’t—”
“Have you ever thought that maybe Ilikehaving a friend who understands what it’s like to be me?”
Shocked, angry tears sprang to my eyes, but I blinked them away, tightening my jaw.
“I understand you,” I told her, but my voice came out weak.
She shook her head. “You don’t understand what it’s like to come from families like ours.”
Ours,meaning hers and Lily’s. Not mine. My biggest fear, raw and out in the open like a pulsing organ in her palm.
“Oh, so I wasn’t born far enough into the one percent to get it?” I spat.
Margot shrugged. “It’s like you said. Being a debutante is the most important thing I’ll ever do, at least as far as my family’s concerned.”
“But you don’t have to.”
“No, you don’t get it. Idohave to.” She hesitated. “And maybe I want to.”
“Youdon’t,” I argued. “You literally just wanted to burn this place to the ground.”
“I don’t know what I want!” She flung up her hands, her voice so sharp and pained that it startled me. “Maybe I’m angry. Maybe I’m trying tofixthis. Because maybe I don’t think it’sso coolto fucking despise the place I grew up in.”
Her words stopped me dead in my tracks. They were an accusation, plain and simple.
“And don’t try to pretend you don’t,” Margot said. “The second you graduate, you’re leaving and never coming back. Right? You say it all the time.”
“I—” My voice wilted in my throat. She was right. It wasexactly what Lily had implied that night on the levee, thrown back in my face.
You’ll be out of here soon enough, right?
“Me and Lily are lifers. She’ll go to Vanderbilt, fine, but she’ll come right back here and settle down. She has to. Our families wouldn’t let us leave, even if we wanted to. And I don’t. This place is messy, and it’s full of bullshit, and yeah, sometimes I hate it, but it’shome.I love it enough to stay and fix the broken stuff. And honestly, April, I really don’t understand why you’re so ready to just leave it behind.”
Because it’s doomed, I wanted to say. Because this city is literally sinking. Because it’s full of racists and elitists and politicians who think they have a right to tell us who we can love or what we can do with our bodies. People who want to stick us in tight dresses and heels and parade us around a ballroom like it’s all we’re good for, like it’s an honor to be an object.
But it’s also full of life and music and joy and people like Margot—people so brimming with it that all I can hope for is to catch a spark, to cup it in my palms like a firefly before letting it go.
But I didn’t say any of that. I just stared at her, my mouth dry and my tongue stone.
Margot nodded.
“Lily was right about you,” she said.
And that was it. The match that sent the fire roaring until it charred away every last part of this thing we’d built together.
So I did exactly what she told me I would: I left her behind.
The Den never burned, in the end. The Krewe found it wrecked the next day, and there was a brief panic about finding the culprit, about how they’d fix it all in time for Mardi Gras, but all of that was forgotten when Margot’s body was found.
The parade still rolled that year, right on schedule. Even a dead Queen, it turned out, wasn’t enough to break them.
But our secret has been threatening to break me ever since.
Only, the Jester didn’t have it right, not all the way. Because as scared as I was of someone knowing what Margot and I had done to the Den, I was more terrified of facing what I’d done to her. Of knowing that I could have saved her, if only I’d stayed.
Now, at the river’s edge, the wind whips by, raising goose bumps on my bare arms. I clutch my camera close, thinking this is the kind of night Margot would have loved. A little chill in the air. The distant sounds of the Quarter, the water rushing past.
