but he smiled and held out a fresh can of seltzer. “Looks like you’re all out. Want this one?”
“No, thanks.” Lily tossed her empty can in the recycling and crossed her arms. It took more effort for her to go over to the cooler than it did for everyone else, but that didn’t mean she wanted gestures of pity.
“No worries. I’m stopping for the night myself.” Mateo set down his beer bottle and smiled again. He was showing off that slight Puerto Rican accent that made the other girls joke about trying to turn him straight. “So, are you excited about Stanford?”
Lily hid her surprise. No one ever asked her about Stanford. “Yeah, I guess.”
Stanford had been the number one school—really, the only school—on Lily’s list for as long as she could remember. She’d been hearing about it since she was a kid. Her parents had met there. Every now and then she took down the old album and looked at the pictures of them laughing together over candy-colored drinks, playing Frisbee on manicured lawns, and making silly faces into a black-and-white photo booth, looking at each other with light in their eyes.
To see Lily’s parents today, you’d never know they were the same people. Their faces were creased from years of worry, and the light in their eyes had been replaced by the dull glow of fatigue and resignation.
At Stanford, though, her parents had been happy.
Maybe at Stanford, Lily could see what it was like to feel that way. She just needed to make sure Maria wound up there, too.
Lily had told a few people at Acheron she was going to Stanford, but no one seriously thought she’d get in. No one remembered that Lily wrote poetry for the school literary magazine, or that she’d worked her ass off as class vice president (“President” Delilah was pretty much useless), or that her application essay on why the Americans with Disabilities Act had set the disability rights movement back thirty years had been called “sheer brilliance” by all three of Acheron’s college counselors. No one cared that Lily was a fourth-generation legacy at Stanford, or that her grandfather’s name was up on a sign over the entrance to the political affairs building.
When people at Acheron looked at Lily, they didn’t see all the things she’d done. They only saw The Girl with the Crutches.
Lily had been in the popular group ever since she first transferred to Acheron in sixth grade, when her newness and her crutches made her exciting and exotic. Except for Maria, though, no one had ever bothered to talk to her about anything real. And she’d heard what people around here said about her and Stanford. That if she got in, it would be “affirmative action.”
Lily had been in an accident when she was a kid, and even after all the surgeries she still couldn’t make it twenty feet without her crutches. Her legs hurt like hell most of the time. There wasn’t a single day when Lily didn’t have to push past the pain just to swing down the three steps that led to the school cafeteria.
Adults excused her from everything from gym class to field trips with a condescending look. And these Acheron assholes thought Lily had an advantage.
“I’ve got an idea!” Delilah said. “Let’s play Truth or Dare!”
The room bubbled with excited murmurs.
“Oh, no. We can’t! Not after last time!” Caitlin leaned over and whispered something into Ryan’s ear.
Tamika tossed her phone down onto the comforter. “I’ll start!”
The others leaned in from where they were perched on the beds and rugs, each waiting to hear who Tamika would call on first.
“Let’s see . . .” Tamika always drew these things out so everyone would look at her as long as possible. “Kei. I dare you to tell us what really happened when you and Emily went behind the Rite Aid on the trip to Monticello.”
Everyone howled as loudly as they dared. Kei and Emily flushed, but they were smiling broadly.
God, Lily hated room parties.
It was so hard to care about all this drama. Lily tried to keep track of her straight friends’ romances—it was important to play along—but it got so exhausting. If Lily had her way, the whole school would consist of just her and Maria.
And if anyone should win the Kingsley Prize, Maria was the one.
But right now she was only in second place.
A lot of good second place did them. There was no chance of moving up with Delilah in the picture.
Maria might get into Stanford without the prize, but there was no way to know for sure. Winning was the only way to guarantee she and Lily could stay together next year. It was the reason Lily had bought the Ouija board in the first place. Maria had seemed so resigned to losing that Lily had to try something to snap her out of it, even if it meant pretending she believed in all the stuff Maria always said about spirits. Lily figured she could move the planchette, tell Maria she was destined to win, and maybe, just maybe, it would be enough to lift Maria over the top.
Lily would’ve tried anything by that point. She’d even broken the no-drinking resolution she’d been following ever since the end of freshman year just to get Maria into the old dining hall.
The worst part was, Maria deserved to win. Delilah most certainly did not.
The only reason Delilah was class president was because she’d thrown a weekend-long poster-making party on her parents’ private island in the Outer Banks over Labor Day, right before the election. The entire class was invited. Lily had spent the first week of school slathering aloe on her sunburn, glaring at the hundreds of VOTE DUFREY posters that lined the halls, and listening to eighty-seven renditions of “how Delilah hooked up with the hot college guy from the minigolf place and Ryan caught the whole thing on video.” Everyone agreed that Delilah was the biggest badass ever and she’d looked super cute in her purple lace bikini.
The rest of the world had to play by one set of rules, but Delilah Dufrey got to make up her own as she went along. It made Lily want to vomit.
By some miracle, Delilah only beat Maria in the election by three votes, so Maria was named class activity director. She got stuck running the student council bake sales. Delilah’s only job, apparently, was to sit at the front of the council room and yawn her way through the agenda at meetings.
But that wasn’t the end of Delilah’s crimes. Maria should’ve been captain of the soccer team, too. She was a better player than Delilah, but unlike Delilah, she didn’t hook up with the coach.
That was the most important difference between Maria and Delilah: Maria always followed the rules.
It was one of Lily’s favorite things about her. It was Lily’s least favorite thing, too.
If Maria hadn’t thought she was following some unwritten code, she’d have turned Delilah in last year when she saw her kissing Coach Tartar in the equipment closet. She’d have taken a picture and sent it anonymously to the dean. Or she’d have pulled Delilah aside during a practice and quietly blackmailed her into dropping out of the election. She at least would’ve done something when she spotted Delilah snorting up pills in the locker room.
Instead she’d let her every chance to get rid of the witch go by without a word. No one except Maria and Lily—and probably Brandon, since Maria still told him everything—knew the whole truth.
And why? Maria still believed in nice girls finishing first. Someday, she seemed to think, someone was bound to tally up everything she’d done and give her a medal for being a good person. It made Lily want to scream until her lungs ached—because it meant they were still at Delilah’s mercy.
It had been Delilah who’d picked Maria and Lily’s room for the party tonight. Their room was everyone’s favorite hangout spot. Sure, it was right next door to the old dining hall, but the room was also designated as “handicap-accessible,” so it was the only room in the whole dorm that had its own bathroom. That way, if you needed some