Standing in my hotel room, one day before what’s supposed to be the most exciting moment of my family’s life, Lacey looks wan and haggard. Her normally bouncy blond hair is limp and brittle at the ends, as if the life has been sanded out of it by her thumb and forefinger—a telltale sign she’s been freaking out. That makes two of us.
“I did something, too,” I say. “But I think you already knew that.”
I throw my phone onto the bed beside where she’s standing.
TIME IS RUNNING OUT.
When she sees all the texts, her breath catches; clearly she’d hoped to get to me first. I try not to feel sympathy, even though her anguish looks genuine. I want to get through this without feeling anything at all, if possible. But the longer Lacey is silent, the angrier I am. I shouldn’t have to go first, but she can’t seem to muster the words—whereas I have a thousand of them right now, none of them polite, and I’m scared to open my mouth in case they all tumble out at the same time.
As usual, my mouth opens anyway.
“Do you hate me this much?”
“No,” Lacey says emphatically.
“Then how could you?” This is supposed to sound coolly accusatory, but it comes out wounded.
“How could you?” she fires back.
“It isn’t what you think,” I insist.
“How do you know what I think?”
“Well, I guess I’ll read all about it when Clive publishes your tell-all,” I snap. “The Royal Flush himself, finally flushing me. How long have you been in on his sleazy little game?”
“I wasn’t! He tricked me into it!” she said.
“Bullshit. He can’t have pulled this off overnight,” I said. “He’s been going at us anonymously for nine months now. You haven’t spoken to me in almost that long. You expect me to believe those two things aren’t connected?”
Lacey closes her eyes. “They’re not,” she insists. “All I did was trust him. You can’t expect me to have figured out he’s a shithead if you never did.”
“Even so,” I say, “the only person you should have talked to about any of this was me. And you know that. Which makes me think you hit the self-destruct button on purpose.” My voice cracks. “Why are you even here? To gloat? I saw the photo you left for me. Why didn’t you give that to Clive, too?”
Her lip trembles. “I love that picture. It was a peace offering,” she says.
“Funny,” I say, pointing wildly at my phone, “because that feels like war.”
We are both trying to keep our voices down so the Bex Brigade doesn’t hear anything.
“Why does he say he’s got proof, Lace?” I demand. “What kind of hard proof could he possibly have, of any of this? What don’t I know?”
Lacey swallows hard. “I’m on tape,” she says. “The proof is me.”
“Don’t worry, Cilla, they won’t mind. We have no secrets,” we hear, and then Mom charges through the door. “Ah, here we go. What a sight for sore eyes,” she says, clicking it shut behind her. “I knew you two wouldn’t let a little disagreement ruin the—”
Her voice trails off as she notices Lacey and me trying and failing to arrange our faces into casual expressions, all while barely looking at her and not at all looking at each other.
“So you’re not hugging this out,” she says, Fancy Nancy immediately back on the shelf. She looks so pretty in her green suit, some of the optimism not yet having drained from her face. “This cannot just be about Paris. What’s really going on?”
Lacey and I turn away from each other. We are silent. Mom crosses her arms.
“Out with it, or I will get Barnes and Marj in here,” she says.
Lacey looks at me, as if it’s my job to run this show. This irritates me just enough that I do it—which of course is classic Lacey.
“Freddie and I kissed,” I blurt. “And I gather Lacey saw it and told Clive, and now he’s blackmailing me for insider information on the Royal Family. Like, indefinitely. Or else.”
At the word blackmail, the color drains from my mother’s face. At or else, she sways.
“If this is some kind of prank,” she says thinly, “it’s not funny.”
“No, it’s not funny,” I say. “She stabbed me in the back.”
“Look who’s talking, Killer,” Lacey says.
“I told you, it wasn’t—”
“Oh, right, as if—”
“Girls.” Mom’s tone makes us twelve years old again. She gropes like a blinded woman to the armchair in the corner and