Chapter 13 Lucky Thirteen
lucky thirteen
Dolly Beckett
Everything at school went on the way it does when a student dies.
Only a few people had been there, but everyone felt it.
Destiny wasn’t just a popular cheerleader and the daughter of a founding family, she was vivacious and outgoing and fun, the life of every party.
And now, she was the death of the party.
Preston came back to school all bruised up from the fight with his dad, and people gave him a wide berth.
She’d died at his house, after all. Cheer, dance, majorettes, and football team members all pledged to wear black armbands for the rest of the year.
There were announcements about the school psychologist and counselors being there for people.
Girls cried in the hall. We had a memorial assembly and decorated her lockers in the hall and the gym.
Friday morning when we got to school, I stopped at her parking space, which was filled with flowers and cards and stuffed animals.
It had rained, and everything was soggy and bedraggled.
It had only been a week, but it already felt like everyone was moving on while I stood in place, still frozen in shock.
“Come on,” Devlin said. “We’ll be late.”
“Go ahead,” I said, releasing his hand. “I’ll be in soon. Tell homeroom I’m here.”
He nodded and turned away. Preston was watching, but I shook my head.
He pressed his lips together, then turned and walked away too.
I wanted to be alone, but the week had been a whirlwind of concerned parents, tearful peers, and curious townspeople.
I had a car, but I didn’t even drive to school alone.
For Devlin’s sixteenth birthday, his dad had given him the vintage car they’d rebuilt together.
It was a chariot—a long, sleek, powder blue Bel Air that was his pride and joy.
In it, I’d felt glamorous. I arrived to school each morning like a queen next to my king, with Devlin’s two cousins in the back seat.
But now the attention that came with it felt stifling.
I stood at the end of her parking space for a minute before I realized Colt was still there, a step behind me.
“Want me to go, too?” he asked when I glanced over my shoulder and saw him.
“No.”
He stepped up beside me and took my hand, and we stood there just thinking about her together.
“I wish I’d gotten her pregnant that night,” he said suddenly.
I turned to him. “What do you mean?”
“The night in the treehouse,” he said. “When we first slept together. I was so stupid and nervous, I couldn’t believe a hot older girl wanted to have sex with me. I didn’t even think about using a condom.”
“You didn’t?” I asked, my brain balking. All this time, I’d thought that condom wrapper that fell out of the sleeping bag was theirs.
“We were both freaked out about it. I was so happy I literally cried when she texted to tell me she’d gotten her period. I was fucking thirteen, Dolly. What was I going to do with a kid?”
“It’s okay,” I said, squeezing his hand. Even though he was only two years younger than me, Colt had always been like a little brother. I hated to see him hurting. “I’m sure she was relieved, too.”
“She was,” he said. “She kept saying how lucky we’d gotten.”
“It was Destiny,” I said. “She always got lucky.”
Until she didn’t.
“She said if she got pregnant, she’d give it up for adoption, but I don’t think she’d have been able to. Not once she saw it. I mean, can you imagine how fucking gorgeous our babies would have been?”
I tried to laugh, but I got all choked with tears, and it came out all wrong. “Shut up,” I said. “You’re making me cry again.”
“I just keep thinking, that was only a year ago. If she’d had a baby, she would’ve been at home last week. She wouldn’t have been at that party.”
“You can’t do that, Colt,” I said, gripping his hand tighter.
“If you let yourself go down that road, you’ll never stop.
You can’t think about the ifs. There’s too many.
If your Grampa’s wife hadn’t been remodeling the bathrooms, we might have done it at their house.
Is it their fault? If I hadn’t suggested we swim in our underwear, would we even have gotten in at all?
If Preston hadn’t been distracting me, would I have told y’all to stop jumping?
If he’d told you to stop because it might wake his parents, would you have jumped that last time?
If his parents had come out and told us to quiet down, would it have been soon enough to save her?
If she hadn’t chugged that last drink, would she have jumped better? ”
He shook his head. “We’ve been jumping off that balcony for years. I don’t get it.”
“It was always dangerous,” I said. “We’re not invincible. But maybe she had it right. Life is short, and she always lived it that way. You know? She wasn’t afraid of anything.”
He wiped his face and laughed. “Damn, Dolly. You shut up. I’m gonna fucking cry if you don’t stop.”
We stood there for another minute, even after the last bell chimed from inside the building. “Or maybe she should have been afraid of something,” I said. “Maybe if she didn’t live like life was short, it wouldn’t have been.”
Colt shook his head. “Now I’m going to be the one who says don’t go down that road.”
“It’s true, though,” I said. “Life is precious. Sometimes we don’t act like it. She always pushed me to do things, crazy things. I’ve jumped off that balcony, too. But I was supposed to keep her anchored, to tell her when she went too far. I should have stopped her.”
“I was holding her hand,” he said quietly. “I felt it, when she hit the side. I let go.”
His voice cracked, and I turned and wrapped my arms around him, and we cried together.
Her funeral was the next day. The whole town showed.
I heard bits and pieces of conversations between Dad and his cronies and Mama and the ladies who lunched that there was some kind of investigation into Preston’s dad and rumors of a lawsuit.
It wasn’t too unusual to have infighting among the founding families, though usually it was over business or property, not death.
Still, Preston’s father was a lawyer who could get out of anything.
His mother was a Delacroix, some kind of cousin of the guy who had married Destiny’s mother and adopted her, and everyone knew Mrs. Darling didn’t have a bone in her body that wasn’t made of pure sugar.
Her warmth and sweet nature could smooth over anything.
There was a weird moment at school when Preston got caught in some rumors because it came back up that he’d slept with Destiny, who was some kind of distant cousin of his, if only by marriage.
If it bothered him, it was hard to tell.
He was stoic and withdrawn and got in a fight that month, but then, he’d always been a little moodier and rougher than the other Darlings.
For the first time since Devlin had proclaimed the Darling boys as equals, there was a bit of a question in people’s eyes about Preston, though.
He wasn’t just a player and a king. He was different somehow, a bit apart, not just a Darling but a dangerous man, like his father and grandfather.
But he was still a Darling, and you couldn’t knock a Darling down.
A different type of girl started going for him that winter, the good girls who wanted a little splash of bad in their lives.
Devlin and Colt never once wavered from his side, never gave the slightest acknowledgement to anyone’s concerns about Preston.
It was sweet, the way they were there for each other, the way tragedy deepened their bond instead of tearing them apart.
I knew Preston needed it, and I told myself it was silly to resent him, to feel slighted when Devlin repeatedly brushed me off to spend time with his cousins instead. Sure, it looked like they were just hanging out playing video games, but I knew there was some kind of male bonding aspect to it.
Or at least that’s what I told myself, so I didn’t feel completely abandoned as I cried into Peanut Butter’s fur, mourning my best friend’s death.
I’d wanted to be alone the week after, and now I’d gotten more than I bargained for.
My boyfriend had all but disappeared into the comfort of his big, loving family, leaving me to the quiet solitude of the house where I’d danced along the halls as a child.
I still had friends, of course, but there’s a difference between a friend and a best friend.
As different as we’d been, Destiny knew my heart, my deepest dreams and fears.
She wasn’t just a friend who would go get a mani-pedi with me to feel better, like Carmen did a few weeks later.
She was the friend who would go give my boyfriend a piece of her mind when he was being a dick and I was too afraid to do it, who would stand up for me when I didn’t stand up for myself.
Now she was gone, and I didn’t know how to mourn her, let alone move on.
She had been a part of not just my life, but me.
She wouldn’t have wanted me to cry and wallow in my big, empty house where my stepmother gave me dirty looks and my dad said consoling words that only made me feel worse.
She would have told me she couldn’t be my crutch forever, that I’d have to learn to stand on my own eventually.
I didn’t want to, though. I wanted to stand with her forever.
Finally, I took my dog Peanut Butter and went to stay at Mama’s for a month instead of the customary two weeks at Christmas. I needed the distraction and change of scenery.
The second tragedy that ruined junior year happened on New Year’s Eve, at the annual exclusive and notoriously wild Darling party.
It was always held at Grampa Darling’s estate, with the Den of Iniquity open only to those who signed non-disclosure agreements and paid an entrance fee before being admitted.
The Darlings didn’t need the money, but charging for admission kept the room even more private.
It was the most exclusive of the exclusive.
Devlin and I didn’t go in that year. I’d checked it out the year before, my curiosity getting the better of me, and seen that it was pretty much just an orgy. Neither of us had any interest in that. So we weren’t in the room when two football players roofied and raped Lacey Murdock.
There were no phones allowed past the door of the party, let alone in that room, but the Darlings made quick work of the guys.
By the time school started back up after winter break, they were both in the hospital, having sustained injuries severe enough that they never came back to Willow Heights.
I knew Preston must have been responsible for the excessive violence.
Colt wasn’t into fighting, and Devlin only did what was necessary to maintain his reign at the school.
When I found out who the guys were, and realized one of them had been at Preston’s house the night Destiny died, I felt sick.
I didn’t want to know that someone I’d hung out with, who’d seen me in my underwear, was capable of something like that.
If I’d been in that room, if I hadn’t had Devlin looking out for me, it could have been me.
Instead it was Lacey, who had no boyfriend to look out for her.
I knew I should be horrified by the severity of the punishment, but in the dark recesses of my heart, I was glad Preston had taught him such a permanent lesson.
Lacey stayed in the group, but she was different, even more so than everyone else.
Nothing stayed the same, and I hated it.
I wanted everything to be the way it had been sophomore year, when our lives had been so simple and good.
I’d had a boyfriend I loved and a bestie who loved to push me just a little out of my comfort zone but would never make me do something I truly didn’t want to do. Life had been perfect.
Now everything had changed. Not just that, but I had started to question things. I wasn’t even sure everything had been the dream it looked like in hindsight.
Destiny had been my best friend, but was I hers?
She hadn’t even told me she had a pregnancy scare.
She’d told Colt. Since he was the one who’d had sex with her, it made sense that she’d tell him, especially because he wasn’t some random hookup.
He was one of her close friends. But why hadn’t she told me?
Had she been scared I’d judge her for being reckless because our outlooks were so different?
I was sure that was it, but it hurt to know that she hadn’t trusted me to have her back no matter what, even if I didn’t always agree with her.
Then there was the little bomb Colt had dropped before Destiny’s funeral.
I hadn’t made a big deal of it because it was such a small thing compared to everything else going on that year.
But it nagged at the back of my mind. I was afraid to bring it up to Devlin, so I just sat on it, watching him and Lacey every time they talked, wondering if he wished he’d chosen her.
If he thought he could have saved her if he was her boyfriend instead of mine.
Most of all, I wondered how they could both still face me with no shame after what they’d done.