Chapter 18 #2
The party should have been intimidating.
Instead, after the first ten minutes, I realized it was easier than school.
At school, people had time to inspect you.
At parties, they wanted you to make things feel brighter.
They wanted someone who laughed at the right moments, pulled quieter girls into conversations, let boys think they were funnier than they were, and knew when to turn attention away before it became cruel.
I could do that.
I could do that better than almost anyone.
By nine, I had made a girl from the equestrian team feel forgiven for spilling soda on her skirt.
I had convinced two boys not to start a fight over something neither of them actually cared about.
I had made Lila laugh so hard she grabbed my arm and declared in front of everyone that I had to come to everything from now on.
And Katherine stayed beside me through all of it. She didn’t enjoy herself and she didn’t know where else to stand.
She followed half a step behind me from the kitchen to the pool room to the terrace, her hand sometimes brushing my sleeve when the crowd shifted too quickly.
When people spoke to her, she answered either too bluntly or too quietly.
When they asked what she thought of someone’s outfit, she gave the actual answer.
When a boy named Miles tried to flirt with her by saying she looked “intellectual,” Katherine asked him if he meant that as a compliment or an apology.
He did not know what to say.
I laughed and touched his arm before the silence could turn awkward.
“She does that,” I said. “It means she likes you.”
Katherine looked at me sharply.
Miles looked relieved. “Oh. Cool.”
He walked away smiling.
Katherine leaned close to my ear. “It absolutely did not mean that.”
“I know.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“Because now he thinks you’re charming.”
“I don’t want him to think that.”
“Yes, you do.”
She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again.
Because she did.
We both knew she did.
Later, on the terrace, Lila handed me a drink and asked whether people in France partied differently. I had never been to France. I had never been anywhere. But everyone turned toward me, waiting, and the attention moved through my body like warmth.
So I smiled and said, “They pretend to be more elegant about it, but they’re worse.”
Everyone laughed.
Katherine stared at me from the edge of the group. Awe looked too much like resentment on her face sometimes.
When the conversation moved on, she pulled me toward the railing.
“You just made that up.”
“Yes.”
“You said it so easily.”
“You told me Americans think all French people sound the same.”
“That doesn’t mean you should improvise foreign sociology.”
I laughed, but she did not.
Her eyes searched my face with a strange intensity.
“What?” I asked.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Become what people want so quickly.”
The question should have felt like praise. Instead, it felt like she had placed a hand against something bruised.
I looked back toward the party through the glass doors. Lila was telling someone I was hilarious. Miles was watching Katherine from a distance with confused interest. Two girls I barely knew were whispering over their phones, and when one noticed me looking, she smiled.
I smiled back automatically.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Katherine’s voice softened. “Yes, you do.”
Maybe I did.
Maybe I had learned too young that survival depended on reading a room faster than anyone else in it.
My father’s moods. My mother’s silences.
The Montgomerys’ invisible rules. Bellamont’s hunger for beauty that looked effortless.
Every room had a temperature, a rhythm, a set of desires people pretended not to have.
All I did was adjust.
“You do it with school,” I said.
Katherine frowned. “That’s different.”
“No, it isn’t. You see systems.”
“Cells and social groups are not the same thing.”
“They are to you.”
She considered that, unwillingly interested despite herself.
Then she looked back through the glass doors at the party.
“They like you more than me.”
The statement was quiet enough that the music almost swallowed it.
I did not answer immediately because denying it would insult both of us.
Instead, I leaned my shoulder against hers. “They don’t know you yet.”
“They know me enough.”
“No, they know the version of you that corrects people at lunch.”
“They should stop saying incorrect things.”
I smiled faintly. “That’s not how friendship works.”
“Maybe friendship should work better.”
Something about the sentence made my chest ache.
I turned toward her fully. “You don’t need them.”
Katherine looked at me then, and the hurt in her face was so immediate I almost regretted saying it.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “You have them.”
The words settled between us in an awkward silence.
Below the terrace, the Hawthornes’ lawn stretched dark and perfect toward a line of trees strung with fairy lights. Inside, someone shouted my name, and several people laughed.
“Céline, come here!”
I felt Katherine hear it too.
Her expression changed before mine did.
I should have stayed.
I should have told them to wait. I should have taken Katherine’s hand and made the party widen around both of us properly. I should have understood that every time I stepped toward the people calling my borrowed name, I left her standing behind with the real one.
Instead, I smiled apologetically.
“Just a second,” I said.
Katherine nodded quickly, already closing herself off.
“Go.”
So I went.
That was how it began to happen.
Not all at once. Not cruelly. Not even consciously at first.
I became the girl people invited to places, and Katherine became the girl who came with me.
At school, she still corrected my essays and explained biology after dinner and rewrote my lab reports until they sounded like someone who belonged in honours classes.
At parties, I softened her edges, translated her bluntness into wit, turned her awkward silences into mystery when I could.
We helped each other.
That was what we called it.
And for a while, it was true enough to survive on.
* * *
By winter, people no longer said Katherine and Céline.
They said Céline and her cousin.
Sometimes they did not say Katherine at all.
When we came home late from parties, my mother would be waiting in the cottage kitchen with tea she pretended she had not stayed awake to make.
Katherine would spread her books across our table and begin fixing whatever homework I had neglected, still wearing eyeliner I had put on her hours earlier.
“You need to stop guessing on lab questions,” she said one night, circling an entire paragraph in red.
“I don’t guess.”
“You wrote that mitochondria are emotionally resilient.”
“That was metaphorical.”
“It was wrong.”
I leaned back in my chair, still half-dizzy from music and perfume and being wanted all night. “You’re mean when you’re tired.”
“You’re stupid when you’re lazy.”
My mother looked up from the sink. “Katherine.”
Katherine’s face changed instantly.
“I didn’t mean stupid,” she said quickly.
I waved it off before my mother could make it bigger.
“She means academically hopeless. It’s fine.”
“It isn’t fine,” my mother said quietly.
Katherine looked stricken.
The guilt. The apology. The reminder that even inside the cottage, where Katherine sat in socked feet at our kitchen table eating my mother’s toast, there were still words she could say that landed differently because of who she was and who we were.
My mother dried her hands slowly on a dish towel.
“You help each other,” she said, voice gentle but firm. “So speak to each other kindly.”
Katherine lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mira.”
My mother softened at once because Katherine always sounded so young when she apologized sincerely.
“It’s all right.”
But it wasn’t, not entirely.
After my mother went upstairs, Katherine stayed quiet for a long time.
Then she pushed the corrected worksheet back toward me.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I know.”
“You’re not stupid.”
“I know that too.”
Her eyes lifted to mine.
“Do you?”
The question unsettled me more than the insult had because the truth was complicated.
I knew I was not stupid when I walked into a room and understood immediately who wanted attention, who wanted comfort, who wanted to be envied, and who wanted to disappear.
I knew I was not stupid when I helped Katherine survive lunch tables and parties and girls who smiled like knives.
I knew I was not stupid when strangers leaned toward me within minutes of a conversation.
But then Katherine placed a biology worksheet in front of me, and I became twelve again, staring at a world written in a language I could imitate but not truly speak.
“I know,” I said again.
Katherine did not look convinced.
Maybe that was why she kept helping.
Maybe that was why I kept letting her.
Because at Bellamont, everyone thought Céline was effortless.
Only Katherine knew how much of me she had to hold up from behind.