The Magnolia League - By Katie Crouch Page 0,85
a new pair of kid gloves from a silver tray, and “walk the stairs.” The house has a grand, curving staircase that descends to the front hall, and each debutante’s father escorts his daughter down the stairs as her name is announced. At the bottom of the stairs is the real party: food, booze, guests, escorts, the band. The only thing left to do after you walk the stairs is give your dad the first dance.
There’s only one problem: I don’t have a dad. No mom either. My grandmother took care of that. So I am to be presented by the queen of the Magnolia League herself, Miss Dorothy Lee. Just looking at her makes me want to scream. I have to get away from her. I have to go somewhere quiet so I can think and figure everything out, because as long as I’m near her, my brain is like a roaring river full of nothing but hate. But at the moment I have to stand at her side in the receiving line.
“Dr. and Mrs. Jonathan Bailey, this is my granddaughter, Alexandria Lee.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I say automatically.
They give me limp handshakes and move down the line.
“Are you on drugs?” my grandmother hisses out of the side of her mouth.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Don’t vex me. You are being obnoxiously vague tonight.”
“Okay, then. Here’s the deal: I want to go to college.”
“Mr. and Mrs. William Cox, allow me to present my granddaughter, Alexandria Lee.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
Handshakes. They move on.
“You are going to college,” my grandmother whispers.
“No, Grandma,” I say, and I relish at how she stiffens when I use the G-word. “I want to go to NYU or Brown. Or Reed. Somewhere out of state.”
“Out of the question. We will be far too busy to send you to some godforsaken Yankee school.”
“Also,” I say, “the Blue Root would kill me, wouldn’t it? I mean, my car might careen off a cliff or something.”
To her credit, my grandmonster doesn’t even flinch as the next guests approach.
“Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Bradshaw, allow me to introduce you to my granddaughter, Alexandria Lee.”
“Hello,” I say.
“She looks just like you,” Kate Bradshaw says, beaming, and then moves down the line.
“This is neither the time nor the place,” my grandmother hisses. “Whatever that Sina told you is sheer lies and manipulation. Only a child would believe anything she says.”
Sina? Why would she think Sina told me anything?
“Oh, Buck, Hattie. How special to see you. Mr. and Mrs. Buck Getty, meet my granddaughter, Alexandria Lee.”
“She looks just like her mother,” Mrs. Getty says.
“I bet she’s as curious and as smart as her mother too,” Buck adds.
“Well, I always try to remind her of what curiosity did to the cat,” my grandmother says under her breath.
The Buck Gettys move on.
“So tell me the truth yourself,” I hiss.
“Khaki Pettit ran off to New York thirty years ago,” she says. “She’s always been a blabbermouth, and she told her new society friends there about our secret. People started asking questions—someone even sent a reporter down. God forbid! We had to go collect her and end her engagement to a horrid man she’d met.”
“How nice of you.”
“She would have been miserable, and she would have ruined everything.” My grandmother smiles at a passerby. “After that, we all realized that there needed to be an incentive to stay in Savannah. There needed to be limits. So I did what was necessary to restore some security and order. I put Khaki in a local Betty Ford for a while so that no one up north would find her credible, and I had the Buzzards set some boundaries.”
“So if I leave Savannah, I die?”
“A Magnolia may not leave once she’s had her initiation ritual,” my grandmother says, pausing and looking at me somewhat sadly. “Which you have.”
“So I’m stuck here?”
“All Magnolias return eventually.”
“And what about Mom?” I ask quietly. “She’d had her initiation too. Didn’t you think about that?”
To my surprise, my grandmother’s flinty eyes fill with tears.
A red-nosed penguin waddles up to her. “I hope it’s not the company,” he bellows.
“Eddie Reauchauer! You rascal! Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Reauchauer, please meet the light of my life, my granddaughter, Alexandria Lee.”
They shake my hand. They move on down the line.
My grandmother pauses before she speaks.
“I thought she was dead,” she says quietly. “It had been almost twenty years. I didn’t know.”
“That’s no excuse. You’ve still got her blood on your hands.”
“Don’t you judge me,” my grandmother says. “I lost my daughter, only to