“But the book,” I say. “My notebook.”
Hayes has a pained, sad look on his face.
“I have a scar, Hayes. Emily shot me in the fucking shoulder. I was in the hospital for a week. No one made that up.”
“You did get shot that night, Kiera. But it wasn’t Emily who shot you. It was Mr. Arlington.”
Memory is an unreliable thing.
My mother said that to me when I was lying in the hospital after I was shot.
“That’s not what happened,” she said. “You don’t understand what you saw.”
And I was on a lot of drugs, but not enough drugs to erase that memory of her and what she said. Certainly not enough to erase what I witnessed at the Legacy Alumni Party that night I moved into the dorms at Essex senior year.
She was there that night. She had been baking for days. Something she did only once a year for this party.
She is an alumna and I was her legacy, so every year I was at Essex we attended the party together. She wore a long, gold gown with several layers of cream chiffon in her skirt so the gold was more of a pale yellow to the eye. Her lips were the most beautiful shade of pink and her long, blonde hair was pinned up, but little bits and wisps escaped in flowing tendrils in all the right places. She was very soft and sexy. Looked every bit the erotica author part, if you knew who she really was.
And I did. So she did.
I was in black. I wanted to be different than her. I wanted my stories to be different, I wanted my life to be different, I wanted to be the opposite of Antoinette Bonnaire in every way imaginable.
So I wore black and my dress was short and tight. My eyes were lined, my lashes were fake and thick, and my lips were red. I was dark and hard. A creature of the night.
I think that’s why they noticed me that night.
Connor Arlington and Hayes Fitzgerald.
Sofia Astor and Camille DuPont.
It was the dress, but not the dress. It was me, but not me.
So I caught their eye while I was watching my mother flirt with Christopher Arlington at her pastry table.
I saw Connor and Hayes watching me watch her from across the room as I leaned against a doorjamb, firm scowl on my face. And then I was approached. Not by Connor and Hayes, but Sofia and Camille.
Sofia, always in a red dress at these kind of things, was wearing something professional and appropriate for a job interview at Victoria’s Secret. Meaning extremely sexy and seductive, but in a way that said, “I have power, don’t fuck with me.” Which caught my eye and I remember thinking, So. She wants to be different tonight too. Because it was a skirt suit with a tight, cropped jacket that accentuated her pushed-up breasts. She wore diamonds around her throat and four-inch heels on her feet.
Camille was in blue. A column silhouette dress embellished with glittery things and a tulle overskirt to soften up her tall, thin frame. This was Camille as I’d seen her the past three years. Not that we spent much time together, but we were in the same classes and fashion was something Camille took seriously. She brought her Fifth Avenue life to upstate New York with her.
It was hard to look away and be aloof, so I failed at that. I watched them carefully as they approached me, smiling like she-wolves with an agenda.
“You look lovely tonight, Kiera,” Sofia said.
“Thank you. You two as well.”
“Where’s your book?” Camille asked. “You don’t go anywhere without a book.”
She didn’t mean a book for reading. She meant my notebooks. Of which I have many. But the one I had tonight was small, a little bigger than my palm, and I had it clutched in my hand behind my back.
“This book?” I said, revealing my secret.
Sofia looked at it with longing. The cover was real. Some hundred-year-old erotica book with gold-gilded lettering I found on my mother’s shelves this past summer. But all the pages had been ripped out so I could make new pages and sew them in. It felt good to do that. Rip apart a story and remake it into something new. Something mine. “What do you write in there?” Sofia asked.
“Everything.”
“What’s that mean?” Camille asked.
I shrugged. “What I see.”
“So you write about us?”
“I leave out the names. Only use initials. It’s mostly just a character study.”
“Can I read it?” Sofia asked.
“No,” I said.
She pouted a little. And even though I already had an opinion about who Sofia Astor was, I put it on hold. Because I knew she was a writer, like me. Like Camille. We’ve been taking classes together for the past three years. And she intrigued me with the few stories she shared in class. Camille as well. Though for different reasons. Sofia had an impressive grasp of the English language. Her words were poetic and rhythmic and I enjoyed them. She was going to be published soon. I knew that. Was a little jealous of it, to be honest. Because she had New York connections and really, that’s all that matters when you’re an aspiring author.