As I Descended. Robin Talley

high on oxy. The combination of caffeine, fake sugar, and prescription painkillers had her at maximum intolerability.

      “It was crazy,” Maria told Austin. Lily could see her hiding her smile. “Anyway, they told our parents too.”

      “As long as they don’t stop you from going to homecoming,” Caitlin said. She’d climbed onto Maria’s bed and wrapped herself around Ryan. Tamika, who’d been dating Ryan up until yesterday, glared at them from the other side of the room. “That’s all that matters, right?”

      Lily rolled her eyes. Caitlin, and all the other pathetic excuses for humans in this room, probably thought the dance really was all that mattered.

      “What’d your parents say?” Emily asked.

      Maria shrugged. Her parents hadn’t said a word. Not to her, anyway.

      Lily, Maria, and Brandon had been brought into Dean Cumberland’s office that morning while the dean called their parents one by one. Lily’s mother had been so relieved to hear Lily wasn’t hurt, she barely even listened to the part about the drinking and the rule breaking. Brandon’s father had announced over speakerphone that Brandon would be grounded all summer, and did Dean Cumberland think that was punishment enough or should he take away Brandon’s computer and his phone, too?

      But no one had answered at Maria’s. Not at either of her parents’ offices or on their cell phones. Finally the dean left a sternly worded message with Maria’s mother’s intern.

      Maria had called her parents to explain. She’d left a voice mail pleading for her mother to call her back. But Maria’s phone didn’t ring that day.

      Instead a dorm monitor stopped by their room while Maria was out at soccer practice. She told Lily the dean had spoken to Maria’s parents, and to tell Maria the girls didn’t need to worry about last night—the chandelier would be easy enough to restore for next semester.

      Lily had never met Maria’s parents, but she knew enough about them, and about how Acheron was used to dealing with the genteel Southern families who were its livelihood, to know what that meant: the check was in the mail.

      That didn’t help with Brandon’s two strikes, though. He was stuck staying in his room all night from now on. Unless he wanted to risk getting caught again. Three strikes on your record meant a minimum one-year suspension.

      Sucked for him.

      Lily hadn’t been in the mood for a party after what had happened the night before. Neither had Maria. Still, though, Delilah had asked. She wanted to celebrate, she said, because Acheron had done so well on the Kingsley Prize finalist list that morning.

      And when Delilah Dufrey asked for a favor, you didn’t say no.

      You wouldn’t think it to look at her, slumped on the floor giggling at a joke everyone else had forgotten ten minutes ago, but Delilah could be terrifying when she wanted to be.

      That afternoon Delilah had caught Lily and Maria in the cafeteria. She’d made a big show of fixing her lip gloss in her pocket mirror and said, “Don’t you guys think it would be awesome if we hung out in your room tonight after lights-out? We’ve all been working so hard with the big game coming up. We deserve to take a break. I mean, we all saw how amazing the list was, right?”

      There was no saying, No, Delilah, I don’t think that would be awesome at all, actually. Not unless you wanted to lose every friend you had.

      That was the kind of power Delilah wielded. Somehow, she’d appointed herself the queen of the senior class.

      It wasn’t as if Lily and Maria weren’t popular. Maria was almost as high up the totem pole as Delilah. Two boys had already asked her to homecoming, and even though she’d turned them both down, rumor had it another offer would come in before the week was out.

      But “almost” didn’t cut it. At Acheron, if Delilah Dufrey didn’t like you, you might as well resign yourself to spending your high school career with the mousy-haired girls who gave themselves teddy bear tattoos with ballpoint pens.

      It wasn’t just that Delilah was hot, either. Though she was, of course. She was hotter than she had any right to be, with her long blond hair and her sparkling eyes and her pert little nose that was so perfectly shaped the freshmen took bets on whether she’d had a nose job.

      Nope. There had never been a single thing wrong with Delilah Dufrey.

      She’d been unanimously elected homecoming queen last year, and everyone already knew the same thing would happen this year too. She was first in their class, edging out Maria by one one-hundredth of a point. She was senior class president and captain of the soccer team, the cross-country team, and the debate team. She was only vice president of the Gay-Straight Alliance, but that was because Mateo had founded the GSA back in their freshman year. And, of course, because Delilah wasn’t gay. At least, not gay enough.

      And as of today, Delilah was first in line for the Kingsley Prize.

      The Cawdor Kingsley Foundation Prize went to five graduating seniors from Virginia private schools based on their grades, extracurriculars, and all the other usual stuff. Each of the five winners came from a different school, and Acheron had had a winner every year since the award was created. It came with a free ride to the college of your choice, plus two years of grad school. Winning it pretty much guaranteed you’d get into any college in the country.

      At Acheron, winning the Kingsley Prize was just called “winning.” You said the word and everyone knew exactly what you were talking about.

      Cawdor Kingsley himself was dead now, but before that he’d been some rich “Southern gentleman” who’d made his fortune running manufacturing plants that had killed every fish, plant, and amoebic creature in half the rivers in the state. Like many a Southern gentleman before him, he’d been a proud member of his local White Citizens’ Council, barely one step removed from the Klan. Now his great-grandkids were trying to redeem the family name by giving his money away to everyone they could think of.

      The preliminary list of finalists had gone up early that morning, with Delilah’s name right at number one. The list was just a formality, though. Everyone had already known the prize would go to Delilah. That was how it worked when you’d already won everything else there was to win. Most of the seniors hadn’t even bothered to put their names in.

      That was the reason Maria had spent the evening getting drunk and glassy-eyed. Or part of the reason, anyway.

      Officially, there would be a second round of judging in a few weeks, because the prize committee was still accepting late applications. They wouldn’t announce the declared winners until after Christmas.

      Not that it mattered. Delilah was in first place now, and when the time came, Delilah would win. Then she’d get into her dream school, Princeton, and she wouldn’t even have to pay for it. Winning made you the most important person at Acheron. The alumni threw you a huge party. You’d be on the front page of the school newspaper and the local paper, too. Best of all, your name got added to the official Kingsley plaque, the first thing the student ambassadors showed to every group of prospective parents who came through the campus.

      Every senior knew Delilah was guaranteed to win this year’s Kingsley Prize, just as they knew she was a shoo-in to win homecoming queen. Most of them knew about Delilah’s oxy habit, too, but no one seemed to care.

      It had been more than a year since Delilah first started sidling up to Lily in the cafeteria, asking if she’d gotten her prescription filled yet. Lily was supposed to take the pills for her legs, but she hardly ever did—anything stronger than an Advil made her feel out of control, which made her anxious and nauseous, and sometimes that was worse than the pain in the first place—so at first she started giving Delilah one pill at a time, when she asked. Slowly, that turned into two pills at a time. Then four. Now Lily just handed over the whole bottle at the start of each month, saving only a couple for her really bad days. Once last semester Maria had seen Delilah bent over the sink in the locker room, snorting up the crushed pills with a rolled-up dollar bill. Super-classy