Chapter Nine #2
“Then why is she here?” Chelsea said, keeping her tone low but dangerous.
She was watching Margo with a sort of vitriol I’d rarely seen before.
She’d always been anxious, sure, the first person to call out a worst-case scenario.
But that had been from a place of worry or fear.
This felt more like rage, and I didn’t know what to make of it.
Though, I supposed, I didn’t know her all that well anymore.
I’d spoken to her about as much over the past half decade as I had Margo; which is to say, almost not at all.
Ignoring Chelsea hadn’t been personal. It’s just that I couldn’t handle coming back as they rebuilt—though my mom asked, then begged as the years stretched on.
Chelsea had understood my intentions much faster—what my silence meant—and she was far less kind than my mom, or Wes.
Six months after the fire, she sent me her final text: You’re a coward.
I’d deleted it and blocked her number, proving her right.
“I was going to ask you the same question,” I said under my breath, fake smile bright on my face. “She’s here with The Atlanta Times.”
Chelsea blinked rapidly, mouth going slack, like she’d had her factory settings rebooted. “She’s here as a fucking reporter? Are you kidding me? How did that happen?”
Now was not the time to acknowledge that this may have been the first time on record that Chelsea had ever said the word fuck, so I resisted the temptation. “Don’t look at me. I wasn’t in charge of the press invites.”
“You weren’t in charge of anything, if I remember correctly.
” Her nostrils flared, and I knew this was no longer about Margo.
This was all of her resentment toward me, built up over the past five years and maybe even longer, finally bubbling over in real time.
Margo’s arrival in the mess hall this morning was merely the catalyst. An easy reason for her to finally open the floodgates.
The tension stretched taut between us. “Chels, I didn’t know she was coming. She scared the shit out of me—snuck into my mom’s cabin during dinner last night.”
She stuck a finger in my face, as if I’d just admitted to Margo having pointed a loaded gun at me.
“That’s a crime. Breaking and entering. I don’t care if she has to walk back to Atlanta, she’s out of here—” She tried to push past me, presumably to head straight for Margo, and I could only imagine the scene that might be about to unfold.
This weekend—the one that she and my mom had worked themselves to the bone to make perfect—would be tainted with scandal before it even started.
I grabbed her arm, but I wasn’t about to tell her what we’d found last night, or that I’d agreed to help Margo. I didn’t think that would go over particularly well.
“Take a breath,” I said instead, and Chelsea stilled, like I knew she would—not because she wanted to listen to me, but because I’d said it the way my mom would have.
“Margo Pierce is writing a story about Dread’s Cove for The Atlanta Times, okay?
Now is not the time to piss her off. You know she plays to win.
You’re just going to have to smile and nod at her for the next few days.
This is happening. There’s no stopping it. ”
I chanced a look at Margo, who was sniffing the carafe of oat milk before daintily pouring the world’s smallest splash into her mug.
Before she took her first sip, I watched as she closed her eyes for a beat too long, like she was centering herself.
It tugged at something in my chest. I wouldn’t say it to Chelsea, but there was another reason that I wanted to help her, that I’d only just started to realize: I pitied her.
The fire had taken Dread’s Cove from my family, from Chelsea and all of us who had grown up here. And that had been a tragedy.
But Margo had suffered, too. She hadn’t shared much that summer about her family life, but I knew she had a single mother who she wasn’t close to. Steph had been her life raft. Her found family. Now, she had no one.
I’d thought about Steph, and the fire that burned her alive, every day since it happened.
During the year I’d been dating Trevor, and things had been good, my fixation on Steph had been what pushed him away, in the end.
Even now, thoughts of that night kept me from sleeping; it would play out across my closed eyes, a terrible movie that I couldn’t turn off.
So although she’d never let me ask her about it, I knew it must have been worse for Margo.
Chelsea crossed her arms and sighed, the sound more like a growl. “Don’t let her ruin this for us. We can’t trust her. I know she’s up to something.”
My shoulders tensed at her use of us and we. She’d been outright ignoring me the past two days, but now that Margo was here, we were back to being aligned.
But the truth was that, if she’d had her way, I wouldn’t have been on the invite list, either.
No, I’d be back in Atlanta, under permanent exile, while they reopened the camp without me.
She could fill my mother’s shoes, in the way I’d always been expected to, and they could all have their perfect happily ever after. No traitors allowed.
“Listen, I haven’t exactly given you a warm welcome,” Chelsea began.
I gave her a look.
“Anita was like a mom to me. I’m still—” She stopped and scrunched her nose, her classic tell that she was trying to keep back tears.
“None of this is easy. For any of us. I get that, and I’m sorry.
But think this through, before you let her get close to you again.
There is a lot riding on this weekend. We don’t want any… complications.”
She was attempting diplomacy, but there was no question of what she meant.
Me, turning into a complication. Me, allowing Margo to dredge up the past when everyone was trying to move forward.
Me, making rash and stupid decisions, making things harder on all of them. Just like I’d done five years ago.
After the fire, I’d left them all behind, built a completely new life on maybe and not sure yet and I’m too busy to talk about this right now. I’d cut almost everyone off, except my mom.
I only gave her scraps, even though I could feel how much it hurt her. I wouldn’t talk to her on the phone; I’d only answer every third or fourth text, but she kept trying.
But it was too hard. I knew what they all thought—that I was throwing my life away, the plans I had and the people who cared about me, all because I was fixated on the death of a girl I hardly knew.
“I’ve got it under control,” I said, and swept past her.
I thought she might stop me, but she didn’t.
As I made my way across the crowded mess hall to Margo, I put on a vacant smile, waving blandly to the reporters and the alums I’d yet to greet.
I almost tripped over my own feet when I saw little Kendall Everton, all grown up, flirting with a group of old campers who must have been college-aged now, like her.
She blinked several times, like she was trying to place me, then looked pointedly away. My back stiffened as another wave of shame rolled through me. But I kept walking.
I made myself smile broadly, ignoring the whispers that I could hear at my back. I pretended I didn’t hear the guy next to her say, “It’s fucking crazy that she’s the one in charge.”