Chapter 18
Selena (Past)
By the end of my first few years at Bellamont Academy, people had stopped asking where in France I was from.
The lie had held long enough that the details no longer mattered to anyone but Katherine.
She had drilled the story into me with such relentless focus that I could now answer the most basic questions without hesitation.
My supposed mother had worked between Marseille and Paris.
I had moved around too much to feel attached to one city.
My accent had faded because I learned English young.
The story was vague enough to survive curiosity and specific enough to sound expensive, the kind of background that made people nod with polite understanding instead of digging deeper.
But the real reason people stopped asking was simpler than any story we had invented.
They liked me. After that, truth became less important than the way I made them feel when I walked into a room.
At Bellamont Academy, people only questioned what made them uncomfortable.
If they liked your dress, your laugh, the way you leaned in when they spoke, they stopped worrying about the rest. They let mystery become charm because charm was easier to enjoy than suspicion.
Katherine noticed before I did.
“You’re doing it again,” she said one afternoon while we sat in the library during study period, her red pen moving across my biology worksheet with sharp, precise strokes.
I looked up from the page. “Doing what?”
“That thing where people decide you’re fascinating even though you haven’t said anything particularly intelligent.”
I smiled because I knew it would annoy her. “Maybe I’m naturally fascinating.”
“No one is naturally fascinating. People are either informed or loud.”
“That’s a tragic worldview.”
Across the library, two girls from our year glanced toward our table, whispered something, then smiled when I caught them looking.
I smiled back automatically, soft enough to seem kind but not desperate enough to seem eager.
Katherine watched the entire exchange with her mouth pressed into a thin line.
“They invited you to Lila Hawthorne’s party, didn’t they?” she asked, not looking up from the worksheet.
I looked back down at the page. “Maybe.”
“Céline.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Saturday.”
She went very still for a second, then returned to marking my answer as if she had not cared in the first place. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I was going to.”
“No, you weren’t.”
I said nothing because she was right. I hadn’t told her yet because some part of me wanted to hold the invitation privately for a little while before it became ours.
That was cruel, maybe, but I had so few things that arrived in my hands first. Katherine had given me Bellamont, the uniform, the backstory, the vocabulary of this life.
Almost everything I had here had passed through her first.
But the invitation had not.
Lila had asked me at lunch, her voice bright with casual certainty, as if it was obvious I belonged in a room full of girls whose mothers wore diamonds at school fundraisers and whose fathers had buildings named after them.
“You should come Saturday, Céline. It’ll be fun.”
Not Katherine and Céline.
Just Céline.
I hated how good it felt.
Katherine capped the red pen and slid my worksheet back across the table. “Your answer for question three is terrible.”
“You say that about all my answers.”
“Because most of them are terrible.”
“That feels targeted.”
“It is. You’re confusing osmosis with diffusion again.”
“Those are almost the same thing.”
Katherine looked genuinely offended. “Never say that in public.”
I laughed, and for a moment she almost smiled too. Then the silence settled again, heavier than before.
I tapped the corner of the worksheet with one finger. “You can come with me.”
She looked up too quickly.
“To the party.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I know.”
Her face closed in that familiar way, the way it did when she wanted something badly enough to pretend she didn’t.
“I don’t care about Lila Hawthorne’s party,” she said.
“Good, because Lila Hawthorne’s parties are probably boring.”
“She has an indoor pool.”
“That sounds mildly less boring.”
“And her older brother got suspended last year for setting off fireworks on the lacrosse field.”
“That sounds fun,” I say.
Katherine gave me a flat look. “That sounds clinically stupid.”
I leaned across the table. “Come with me.”
She looked down at her notes. “I don’t think she invited me.”
“She won’t care.”
“She will.”
“She won’t if I say I want you there.”
Katherine’s expression shifted at that. She tried to hide it, but I saw the small, hungry flicker beneath her composure. It was the same expression she had the first time I waved at her from the kitchen window, the same startled relief of being chosen before she had to ask.
“You’d do that?” she asked quietly.
Something in my chest softened. “Of course.”
The answer came easily because I meant it.
That was the hard part to explain later, even to myself.
I did love Katherine. I loved her in the library with her red pens and her terrifying science notes and her little frown whenever someone misused a word.
I loved that she could tell when I lied badly and that she always carried extra pencils because she assumed the world was incompetent.
I loved the way her whole face changed when she explained something she understood.
I just also wanted to be seen without her standing beside me.
Both things were true, and at fifteen, I did not know what to do with that much contradiction inside one friendship.
* * *
On Saturday evening, Katherine arrived at the cottage two hours before the party with a garment bag over one arm and a makeup pouch in her hand. My mother opened the door and immediately looked worried.
“Miss Montgomery, is everything all right?”
“Yes,” Katherine said, stepping inside with the seriousness of someone arriving for surgery. “Céline can’t wear what she planned.”
My mother looked at me.
I looked at the black dress lying on the sofa.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“It’s depressing,” Katherine replied.
“It’s black.”
“You are fifteen, not a widow.”
My mother made a small sound that was not quite a laugh.
Katherine unzipped the garment bag and revealed a pale blue dress with a soft square neckline and tiny buttons down the front. Simple, but clearly very expensive, the fabric was luxurious to touch.
My mother’s face changed before she could hide it.
“That’s too much.”
“It doesn’t fit me right,” Katherine said.
I looked at her. “Yes, it does.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
She was lying. We all knew it.
My mother touched the fabric carefully between two fingers, not quite stroking it, as if afraid to leave a mark.
“Katherine,” she said gently, “your mother might not want—”
“My mother won’t notice.”
I changed upstairs while Katherine waited in my bedroom and pretended not to watch me too closely.
The dress fit like it had been made for me, which was unfair because nothing in my life had been made for me.
It skimmed my waist, softened my shoulders, and made my legs look longer.
When I turned toward the small mirror above my dresser, I barely recognized myself.
Katherine stood behind me, reflecting over my shoulder.
Her face was unreadable.
“Well?” I asked.
She stepped closer and adjusted one loose strand of my hair. “You look like Céline.”
The words made me feel happy.
My mother was quiet when we came downstairs.
She smiled, but her eyes looked wet.
“You look beautiful,” she said.
I turned away too quickly. “It’s just a dress.”
“No,” she said softly. “It isn’t.”
Katherine looked down at her shoes.
For the first time, I wondered if she heard the same thing I did beneath my mother’s voice.
That every beautiful thing I wore belonged to someone else.
* * *
Lila Hawthorne’s house sat on the other side of Blackwater, farther inland, where the estates had tennis courts instead of ocean views.
Her parents were away in Boston, which made the party feel more exciting to everyone than it probably deserved.
By the time Katherine and I arrived, the driveway was already crowded with cars driven by older siblings, and music spilled through the front doors into the warm summer night.
Katherine slowed beside me at the entrance.
I felt it immediately.
Her body changed in crowds. Her shoulders rose slightly. Her mouth tightened. Her eyes started moving too fast, tracking every laugh, every glance, every possible mistake before it happened.
I slipped my hand around her wrist before she could retreat.
“Don’t look like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re about to take an exam.”
“I’m always about to take an exam.”
“That’s deeply sad.”
She huffed, but some of the tension eased.
Inside, the house smelled like perfume, chlorine from the indoor pool, and the sharp artificial sweetness of cheap vodka hidden inside expensive juice bottles.
Girls in silk tops and boys in rolled-up sleeves drifted through the rooms with the lazy confidence of people whose mistakes would be explained away by their parents later.
Lila spotted me almost immediately.
“Céline!”
The way she said my name made people look.
I felt Katherine stiffen beside me.
Lila crossed the room and kissed both my cheeks like we were European socialites instead of ninth graders at a party with stolen alcohol.
“You came!”
“Of course, you invited me.”
“I know, but still.” Her eyes flicked briefly to Katherine. “Oh, hi, Katherine.”
Lila’s tone was slightly rude, almost dismissive.
Katherine’s mouth curved into something that almost resembled a smile.
“Hi.”
“She came with me,” I said, keeping my voice light.
Lila recovered immediately. “Of course. Come on, everyone’s by the pool.”
And just like that, Katherine was allowed in because I had brought her.