Could it really be true?
Did a girl really die at a Darling party?
Turns out, it’s really fucking true. Now that I know it’s real, that a real person, a person our age, is under the ground in one of these plots, the last thing I want to do is go stand over her bones.
“Come on,” Dixie says, grabbing the tattered flowers from my arms and marching toward the back of the cemetery, her red hair flying. My standing up for her seems to have lit a fire under her ass, and she can’t wait to defy Devlin, too. I grudgingly admire her for it, even if I don’t really want to follow her. She’s never been here, but it doesn’t take a genius to find Destiny’s grave.
It’s piled with so many white flowers that it looks like a funeral shroud covers the grass in front of her headstone. I swallow hard and take a step in that direction, my knees threatening to buckle. All I can think about is the girl under there, a girl who wanted to jump into a pool, not to die but to be brave. To get applause, to get slaps on the back and screams of admiration. She didn’t sink to the bottom and inhale chlorine. Her mother didn’t find her floating, facedown, with her hair fanned out around her head.
Who called her parents? Who told them? Who pulled her out of the water? Who realized she wasn’t swimming, that she hadn’t come up?
I sink to my knees beside the bed of white flowers covering her like a down comforter. I imagine lying under there, under six feet of earth and the weight of a blanket of grief, how heavy it would be. How it would hold you down and trap you, so you could never rise again.
“I don’t think you should be friends with me,” I choke out, staring at the white petals around my knees.
“What?” Dixie asks. “Are you okay, Crystal? What’s wrong?”
“Devlin’s going to make my life hell,” I say. “You saw how much he hates me. I can’t involve you in that.”
“So far as I can tell, he hates everyone,” Dixie says. “And besides, I was already the Darling Dog. He can’t do much worse than that.”
“Remember when I asked you to be my friend?” I say. “I told you I’d done all the head cheerleader stuff, that I wasn’t a very good person.”
“Yeah…”
“I’m not good,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. “I’m not a good person.”
“But you said you were starting over,” Dixie says. “I mean, yeah, your brothers have done some pretty bad stuff, but you haven’t done anything bad since you got here. I think people should get a second chance even if they did something bad before.”
“What if what they did was unforgiveable?” I ask the ground in front of me, where a dead girl lies buried. “I was worse than Devlin. I didn’t just call someone a dog. I… I almost did this to her.”
“What?” Dixie asks, lowering herself to the ground beside me.
“The worst part is, I don’t even know why,” I whisper. “I didn’t even know the girl.”
“Who was she?” Dixie asked. “Someone in New York?”
“Yeah, she went our school. She was just… She was one of those girls who tries so hard it’s too hard, you know? Like, she’d insert herself into conversations she overheard that didn’t involve her. She was so desperate about wanting to be part of everything. And for some reason, my friend just got it in her head that she hated this girl. She couldn’t stand her.”
“And you went along with it because your best friend hated her.”
“Yes,” I admit, shame burning in my cheeks. “I didn’t at first. I told her to leave the girl alone, but she’d comment on her posts online and mock her at school when she was being desperate. And the girl, she didn’t do anything. She wouldn’t stand up for herself. It was infuriating. You just wanted to shake her and tell her to have some self-respect.”
“Like me,” Dixie says softly.
“No,” I say quickly. “Not like you.”
But maybe she’s right. Maybe that’s part of what drew me to Dixie. I never knew that girl, never knew what was going on in her head or why she was that way, and maybe in some subconscious way, I wanted to understand.
“Veronica was my co-captain on the cheer squad, and a year older than me,” I say. “Even when I felt like things were good, I always felt like I was walking on thin ice. I was only a sophomore, and I knew I’d gotten the co-captain spot partly because she had put in a good word for me. She knew how hard I worked, how many nights I stayed up practicing routines until four in the morning.”
“Then it sounds like you deserved it,” Dixie says, her freckled face so earnest I want to hug her. “You earned it.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “But it wasn’t just that. It’s all about who you know, who you impress, who’s on your side. I was popular, Dixie, but I was miserable. I was in therapy and taking medication, but I couldn’t stop feeling like the ground was going to drop out from under me at any moment. Like if I made wrong move, everything I’d built for myself would come crashing down.”
“Because of your friend?”
I laugh softly and tell her something I’ve never told anyone. “You know that lipstick I always wear? I called it my signature color.”