Page 98 of Gilded Fake

On shaking legs, I left Preston and joined them, and they told me Royal was in the hospital, and I pretended that’s why I was there. Baron asked why I had talked to Preston, and I said I wanted to make sure he hadn’t done anything to Royal. It didn’t make sense, but I didn’t have it in me to think up a lie. I silently thanked the crying baby, which had kept Baron from overhearing what I said to Preston. But I felt him watching, and I knew I had to stop with the ridiculous idea that I deserved freedom, or love, or anything of my own.

Villains didn’t get happy endings.

Sometimes, if they were lucky, they got to survive. That was all I could hope for, and I wasn’t even going to do that if I wasn’t more careful. I couldn’t save Colt. It was too late. All I could do now was try to save myself, and maybe, when he got out of the hospital, I could find a way to repair the damaged I’d done.

twenty-one

Rumor Has It…It’s the last day of school for seniors! Will any last-minute reveals about the elite come to light? Or have we heard the last of their juicy secrets?

Gloria Walton

I pull up to school and breathe a sigh of relief when I turn into the parking lot. It’s over. Everyone will come back to walk in the graduation ceremony in a few weeks, but today is the last day of classes for seniors. I made it, if just barely.

I hope somewhere, Dawson is proud of me. He’d hate to see how far I’ve fallen, hate to see what I do for a living. But maybe he’d be proud I survived, no matter how I did it. Maybe Dad would be if I wrote and told him. Maybe even my mother couldn’t help but be impressed. She may not have been perfect, but she taught me to do what it takes to survive, no matter the cost.

I cruise down the rows of cars in the student lot to the last one. After Colt ignored my texts all day yesterday, I couldn’t sleep last night, so I drove around looking for him. When I couldn’t find him, I finally admitted defeat and lay in bed replaying last year’s loss on a loop in my head. At least that time, I deserved to lose him.

Now I’m groggy and functioning on autopilot, my brain caught in an endless anxiety spiral. What if something happened to him again?

When I turn down the last row, my heart bursts into a flurry of wings inside my chest. Dixie stands in the middle of the road, her arms crossed, blocking my spot so I can’t turn in. Seeing her makes the fear ratchet up a dozen notches. Has Colt told anyone about us? Does his dad even know? If something happened, Mr. Darling would probably tell Dixie, not me.

The thought makes my heart tear in two. His family will probably always hate me.

I’m trembling so hard I can barely hold my foot down on the brake in time to stop. For one sickening moment, I picture what would happen if I didn’t. I picture her body sailing through the air in slow motion, like Myrtle’s in “The Great Gatsby.” I picture her spinning off into the sky like a butterfly caught on a sudden gust, disappearing into the blue.

Poof! Gone from our lives forever. I could live happily ever after with Colt, and she would never inject her toxic love into his veins again, never cloud his mind and isolate him and make him dependent on her like she did for so long.

But my foot sinks onto the pedal, and I jerk to a stop and pull the brake. I take a breath and throw open my door, stepping out of the car into the blanket of still, summer heat. No gusts of wind carry Dixie away. She’s planted there, so firmly in my way I think if I hit her, my car would wrap around her like she’s a tree instead of a human, and I’d end up in the hospital without a thing to my name. Not Colt, not my diploma, not even June Bug.

“Can I help you?” I hear my voice like it’s someone else’s, the biting tone familiar after so many years of using it as a weapon in someone else’s war.

“Yeah, you can leave Colt alone,” Dixie says. “You ruined my reputation, so you won that one. Take the win, Lo.”

“Don’t call me that,” I snap.

“School’s over anyway, so I don’t need them,” she says, flicking her fingers toward the lot. “I just need Colt, and now I’ve got him, and I won’t let you ruin that too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re back together,” she says smugly, holding out her hand to display her engagement ring. “He doesn’t want to see you today—or ever. We’d appreciate if you’d keep your skanky claws to yourself and never speak to him again.”

“Liar,” I say flatly, though my tired body sways on its feet. It feels as foreign as my voice when I use the bitch queen tone the Dolces required. I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted in my life. It’s not just from missing one night of sleep. It’s from the worry, the panic, the desperation that chewed at every nerve in my body all night, the claws of anxiety that shredded my mind as I drove from one place to another, searching for him at his house, his grandfather’s, the ice cream place, the tattoo parlor, the warehouse where he organizes the fight club.

In a final fit of delusion, I drove to the places that meant something to us together—my work, Cotton Montgomery’s pool house, and the quarry sometime around dawn. Before coming here, I stood at the foot of the building where we hid on Halloween last fall, calling up to him like fucking Romeo, since the scaffolding was gone and I couldn’t climb onto the roof again.

But he was gone as completely as a ghost, as his sister, his brother.

The one place I didn’t check was Dixie’s.

Now it’s not just last night’s exhaustion that’s dragging my feet into the pavement like quicksand, the weight of my body too much for me to carry any longer. This whole terrible year crushes me, and on top of that, the years that came before it, every moment since we left Savannah adding to the smothering weight. The only bubbles in the molten lead that is slowly pressing me into the ground are the shimmering, spectral moments I spent with Colt, each one a gasp of air to a girl buried alive in front of everyone’s eyes.

I couldn’t draw enough air to scream, but he gave me enough to live.

I can feel the pavement cracking under my feet, giving way, the earth ready to swallow me alive, to give me the resting place I’ve craved for so long. I’m not scared anymore. It will be a relief. To lay my butterfly body down and let the dirt wrap around me like a cocoon, to know that no one can hurt me anymore. To know I don’t have to keep fighting for breath. I can just sleep.

A car pulls up behind me, but they don’t honk. It’s some sophomore, unsure how to treat me after Colt claimed me so publicly, after I was the pariah for most of the year, after being queen for two years. A few people have started to turn our way, noting the chance for drama, weighing the urge to be on time with the desire to see a confrontation. The confrontation wins, and people start to gather, watching us from a distance.

“Leave him alone,” Dixie says again. “I’m not going to warn you again. I’ve already destroyed you, even if you don’t know it yet. So do yourself a favor and stop trying to steal my man before you ruin your life more than you already have.”

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