The Weight of Blood (18)

“Well, I love the club’s strawberry cheesecake,” Jules said from across the table. “Daddy always brings me back a slice after a golf game. They even made me—”

“Ugh! No,” Charlotte moaned, head down in her phone.

“What?” Jules snapped.

“Another article. This time on CNN. Ugh, this is, like, so embarrassing.”

“Must be a slow news week,” Jules said, rolling her eyes. “They’re totally milking this. What I really want to know is who’s the asshole who filmed us? That’s so not cool.”

Charlotte moaned again. “I don’t want to be known for being that girl who went to that school and bullied that Black girl!”

“No one bullied her!” Jules barked. “Yeah, we threw some shit at her, but so what? Happens every day in the caf and nobody else goes crying over it. No one shoved her into a locker, made her drink piss, posted naked pics of her on Insta, or anything like that.”

Wendy cocked her head to the side with a raised eyebrow.

“What, Wen?” Jules barked.

Wendy remained silent. It wasn’t worth the fight.

“Oh no! Now they’re talking about our proms,” Charlotte whined.

Wendy’s back straightened. “Why?”

Jules threw her a sharp “Don’t play dumb. You know why.”

Charlotte pouted. “But we’re not the only school that has separate proms. Other schools do it too.”

“Yeah, but it looks bad that we do after . . . well, you know,” Kayleigh said, nervously glancing at Jules.

“Great! Now our school is totally going to be known for being racist! It’s gonna follow us wherever we go!”

“Don’t be so dramatic!” Jules snapped. “And who gives a shit what they think? We already got into college.”

“But what if they rescind?” Charlotte cried, her voice peaking. “It happens, you know.”

Wendy’s stomach turned. Charlotte had a point. This black mark could stay with them through their collegiate careers. What if scholarship committees noticed? What if people brought it up when Kenny went pro?

“Oh God, what if cameras show up to prom and start filming us?” Charlotte cried. “We’ll be all over social media, and everyone is gonna know. Is this about to ruin our lives? What’d we do? I can’t go to prom now!”

Wendy’s mouth dropped. Charlotte had been talking about prom since they were in middle school. She’d practically fainted during Chris Lively’s promposal. So, if she of all people was reconsidering . . . then it must be really bad.

Were other kids going to bail out on prom? The very prom she was in the middle of planning?

“Would you relax?” Jules chuckled, wrapping her hair into a messy bun. “I’m telling you, they’ll forget about this in two weeks.”

“Not with all the attention those Black Lives Black Pride protests are getting over in Greenville,” Wendy countered, her brow furrowed. “Those protests have been popping up all over the country.”

“Why?” Charlotte asked.

Jules waved it off. “Something about some kid getting killed for doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing in the first place.”

“So what do we do?” Kayleigh asked.

Wendy felt the familiar pressure calling her to action. She was good in a crisis, good at fixing things. Wasn’t she the one who got Jules out of that whole beer-in-the-locker-room fiasco? And when Jason banged up his dad’s new truck, hadn’t she found the perfect mechanic to fix it before he came home? Wendy had to do something. She couldn’t let the end of their senior year be marred by scandal.

I could fix this, she thought, tapping her chin, then snapped her fingers. “A distraction! We just need to give them something else to focus on.”

“We can upload that video of Jason and Kayleigh hooking up on V-day,” Jules said with a chuckle. Kayleigh threw a fry at her.

“No. That’s the total opposite of what we need,” Wendy said. “We need something that’ll bring out our best! To show that we’re good people and that we all get along just fine around here.”

“Like volunteering at a soup kitchen?” Kayleigh offered.

“She means get along with Black people,” Charlotte said. “Not get along with the homeless.”

Wendy glanced across the room at the table where most of the Black kids sat. They must think we’re a bunch of assholes. Wonder if Kenny ever wanted to hang out with them. Does he talk to them when I’m not around? They probably sit at parties trashing us . . .

That’s when the idea hit her. “What about . . . instead of two proms, we combine them?”

The group stared at her in silence.

“Combine proms?” Charlotte uttered in disbelief.

Adrenaline rushed through Wendy’s veins. “Yes! Like have one big giant prom that everyone could go to, all at the same place.”

“OMG! That would be amazing!” Kayleigh squeaked, clapping her hands.

Jules scoffed. “You’re joking, right? Tell me you’re joking.”

“No, don’t you get it? It’ll show that we’re all really friends here. That we’re not racist or anything like that.”

“Of course we’re not racist,” Jules snapped. “We have Black friends. You have a Black boyfriend. We don’t need to have one prom to prove that!”