Page 28 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
I stood and snatched up my sewing scissors. “I don’t care about popularity. I think that’s why I make you mad.” I walked off without waiting for her response.
Back at my table, I dropped the skirt and scissors before anyone noticed them shaking in my hand. I hated confrontations—hatedthem, but if Angelique wanted to call me transparent, she’d better be right about seeing through me. And she was so, so wrong. The only thing I cared about was getting out of here with a design scholarship to the SoHo School.
I hated that she could upset me so easily. After Delphine, anyone else should be a cakewalk, but Angelique unnerved me. She’d marginalized me with a few well-placed whispers after the stupid Cash incident. She didn’t say a word about the blowup the morning after it happened, but I had dealt with sidelong looks in my classes all day anyway. It wasn’t until Bran showed up in the cafeteria looking angry that I found out that she’d spread a rumor about me stealing a necklace from Cash’s mom.
It was one of those super crappy moments where you see in an instant that everything has changed and not for the good. She was an evil genius. Like a blob of tar passed from hand-to-hand, no matter what I did to try to scrub Angelique’s lie away, a residual stickiness would always remind the listener that once, Cam Landry had been accused of stealing. And maybe it wasn’t true because nothing was ever proven. But in everyone else’s minds, where there’s smoke, there’s fire...
After that, even the people who I’d been friendly enough with to exchange “hellos” avoided me when Angelique was around. No one wanted to risk being ostracized. Falling out with Angelique meant things like not getting an invite to THE party of the year, her Halloween bash where all the girls dressed in cheap polyester and called themselves “nurses” and “cats” and “sexy cops.” Then the boys wrangled up a two-dollar monster mask and came to ogle all the cleavage and lingerie costumes, and the adults looked on like it was all as precious and adorable as if these hormone-drunk teenagers were still a bunch of five-year-olds in superhero Underoos and towel capes.
Or so I’d heard.
What most offended me was the utter lack of imagination in their twenty-dollar strip mall costumes.
Anyway, exchanges like this were exactly why the last thingIwanted was another showdown over somethingAngeliquewanted, like the spotlight at New Orleans Fashion Week. Too bad for her I needed it way more than she did.
I had to do it.
Chapter 11
“Camille! Quit screeching!” Delphine hollered from the den.
I stormed in to confront her, too traumatized to worry about angering her. “I’m so done with this!” I dropped a box on the ottoman next to her, and a puff of dust rose from it. “Here, Delphine. Here are coupons that you will never use. Know where I found them? Sitting on top of a box full of rats. A whole nest. The mama ran over my foot. I am not digging through this trash anymore. It is beyond disgusting and probably illegal for you to even make me do it.”
You would think that after finding a dead cat, I’d be prepared for anything when I waded into the hoard. You’d be wrong. How do you prepare for a nest of baby rats in a box labeled “Photos” in Remy’s room? I had taken one look at the six pairs of red eyes glaring at me when I lifted the lid and screamed.
Delphine’s mouth hung slightly open, maybe in shock that I had yelled at her. “You’ve got nerve coming in here and jumping all over me,” she said. “That’s uppity behavior toward someone keeping food in your mouth and a roof over your head.”
My hands shook and I tried to keep my voice from doing the same. “I pay for my food. I pay for all my own stuff.”
Delphine glared at me and wheezed. “Are you unhappy, Camille? Because you can go on ahead and call the state. I’ll dial the number for you. They can come take you out and put you in a foster home with some nasty middle-aged father who likes to get his jollies off his teenage foster daughter. How’s that sound?”
My hands trembled with the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I don’t know if it was from the aftershock of stumbling across a rat’s nest, or the borderline insanity of defying Delphine. “You’ve been watching too many Lifetime movies,” I snapped. “But I’d rather take my chances than deal with your hoarding.”
She froze. I had never, ever used that word out loud with her before.
“You think you’re something so special ever since you started at LaSalle,” she spat. “What happens when you lose that, Camille? You think some foster family is going to bother themselves with dragging you to school Uptown if you end up out in Gretna? I don’t think so.”
She leaned forward, her eyes hard. “Settle down or you’re going to find yourself with a mighty quick transfer to one of the public schools. Maybe in the Ninth Ward. So go ahead and make the call. It’s your crap-shoot.”
She was right. LaSalle wasn’t a perfect school, but I was getting an education unlike anything I could get in the public school system. If she took me out of LaSalle, I’d have to pray I got into one of the handful of strong magnet schools in the district, and I didn’t know if they took senior transfers.
Delphine must have read the defeat in my face because she smiled, and triumph carved sallow wrinkles around her mouth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, calling me a hoarder. Those people are sick. I keep my stuff for a reason. Would a crazy person have a thirty-thousand-dollar Audubon print in her house? No. An investor would. So why don’t you go find my investment?”
An investor? It was a new, even crazier step up from being a “collector.” I wanted to laugh, but nothing was funny. This is where I should back down, but I was already in no-man’s-land. “Find it or what, Delphine?” I asked, tired. Was she really going to throw me out and lose her slave labor?
“Or what?” she repeated. Something hard and ugly laced her voice. She grunted and heaved herself up from her recliner, forcing me to take a step back. She leaned heavily on her cane and glared. “You see all my paperwork,” she said,paperworkbeing the term she used to legitimize the stacks of circulars, receipts, and the other scraps she couldn’t let go. “Something like a federal aid application could get lost in here pretty easy. It would be a shame if you couldn’t get the money to go to college.”
“You can’t keep me here, Delphine. As soon as I graduate, I’m leaving.”
“Maybe I can’t keep you in New Orleans,” she said. “But I can keep you from going there.”
I stared at her, not doubting for a minute that she would refuse to fill out my federal aid application to spite me. And until I knew whether I had a way around that, I couldn’t cross her. “Do you hate me that much?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
I snatched up the box of old coupons and turned to leave. “I’m throwing these out,” I said.
“You better not.” It was a threat.
