Fake Heiress, Step Aside I Plan to Graduate and Inherit

I was three pages into my AP Economics review when Maren Calloway slid into the seat across from me in the library and set her phone faceup on the table between us. The screen showed a group chat I had muted twice that week. A bonfire at Saltcliff Point. A picnic. A "last big night before finals" that had nothing to do with finals and everything to do with the fact that my grandfather sat on the board of the endowment that funded half of Hollow Creek Academy. "You're coming," Maren said. It wasn't a question. She had the kind of confidence that came from a trust fund I didn't have but a last name everyone recognized. I looked past her to where my stepbrother Cove was pretending not to watch us from the reference stacks. He had gray eyes like our father's and a habit of showing up wherever I was, as if he had been given instructions. Maybe he had. My stepmother had a way of knowing things before they happened. "I'm not coming," I said. I turned a page I had already read twice. Maren sighed like I had insulted her personally. "You never come. Every time we plan something, you have an excuse. It's the study group, it's the college essay, it's your grandfather's dinner. You're about to graduate, Ilse. You're about to inherit one of the largest private fortunes in the state. You don't get to act like you're still the scholarship girl you were in ninth grade." I wasn't the scholarship girl. I had never been. My father had married into money twice, and the second time, he married Cove's mother, and people had been confused about which of us belonged where ever since. I put my pen down. "Bonfire at Saltcliff in June means ticks, fog, and the kind of driftwood smoke that gets into your hair for a week," I said. "I'll pass." She picked up her phone and typed something. "I told them you'd say that." I didn't ask who "they" were. I already knew. Maren collected people the way other people collected concert tickets: she didn't love them, she just liked having them. And tonight's guest list, I had noticed on her screen, included my stepbrother, my lab partner, and three girls from the equestrian team whose parents were on the same foundation committee my grandfather chaired. I watched her leave through the glass doors, and I watched Cove watch her go. Then I put my economics binder in my tote and walked the long way home, past the boathouse and the dock, because it was shallow-water season and the harbor smelled like diesel and salt and I liked the sting. By nine that night, the fog had rolled in thick enough that my bedroom windows were silver. I was on my bed with my laptop open, half-watching a recorded lecture on monetary policy, when my phone buzzed. Cove, from downstairs. Cove: Maren wants you to know the fire is going and you're missing it. I didn't answer. Ten minutes later, another buzz. Cove: She says everyone's asking where you are. I typed back with one thumb. Me: Tell her I'm studying. Cove: She says you're scared. I set the phone down. Maren could say whatever she wanted. I was not scared. I was careful. There is a difference, and the difference is everything when your name is on a trust document that four other adults in the room would happily erase. At eleven-forty, I woke to my father knocking on my door. He had his phone in his hand and his face in the particular blank expression he used when he wanted me to believe he was calm. "There's been an incident," he said. "At the bonfire."