But then Blanche splashes her and dashes off into the surf, leaving Bea standing alone.

* * *

Her father dies her junior year.

She doesn’t go back for the funeral.

Later, there’s a voice mail from her mother, and it’s the most lucid she’s ever sounded. Bea had braced herself for screaming, for slurred recriminations, but instead, her mother is kind. Sweet, even. Calls her “Bertha-Bear,” a nickname Bea hates, but hasn’t heard since she was a little girl. Wants her to come home for the summer. Wants to try to fix things now that Daddy is gone.

And she’s shockingly tempted.

It’s Blanche, though, who reminds her she doesn’t owe Mama anything.

Bea hasn’t told Blanche everything about her past, not wanting her friend to know just how shameful it all is, how dark. But Blanche isn’t stupid, and Bea knows she’s picked up some things. “You don’t have to go,” she tells Bea, and Bea sits on her bed, absentmindedly pulling at the loose plastic on her phone case.

“I have to go somewhere for the summer,” Bea replies, and Blanche smiles, plucking the phone out of Bea’s hand.

“Come home with me, then. We have the space, and it’ll be fun!”

It’s amazing to Bea that Blanche can make that offer, that she doesn’t see it as the huge thing that it so clearly is. For Blanche, it’s that easy. She can take Bea under her wing for an entire summer, and no one will mind, no one will think Bea takes up too much space.

So Bea says yes, and it’s the best summer of her life.

Later, when her mother leaves her a voice mail, drunk and screeching about ungrateful daughters, Bea knows she made the right choice.

And if she hadn’t known it then, she would have at the end of the summer, sitting on Blanche’s massive canopy bed, the one with the lace trim and the pillows in all different shades of green.

Blanche is smiling as she fastens the necklace around Bea’s neck. It’s a sterling silver initial, a B on a delicate chain, and Blanche holds up her own identical charm to Bea’s face.

“We match,” she says, and Bea doesn’t know why she suddenly feels like crying.

They’re together their entire high school career, Bea and Blanche, Blanche and Bea.

Even “the Bs” occasionally. Bea loves that.

She sometimes thinks Blanche doesn’t.

* * *

Bea’s acceptance letter comes just a few days after Blanche’s, and she’s so excited that she can’t help but leap off her bed as soon as Blanche comes in after class, squealing, “I got in!”

Blanche smiles at her, but her expression is a little confused and she asks, “Got in where?”

Bea laughs, nudging Blanche’s shoulder. “Um, Birmingham-Southern, obvi,” she says, and it actually takes her a moment to realize that Blanche’s smile has slipped.

“Oh, wow,” Blanche says, but it’s faint, and suddenly Bea knows she’s made a mistake, fucked this up somehow, but she’s not sure how.

“I thought you’d be excited,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like we have to room together there, too.”

Bea laughs to show how stupid that idea would be even though it’s exactly what she’d been thinking they’d do.

Blanche laughs, too, but just like her smile, it’s not real, and when she sits down on the edge of her bed, she says, “I guess I just thought you’d want to go to Randolph-Macon since you got in. And, like, hardly anyone here did. I didn’t.”

Which had been exactly why Bea didn’t want to go to Randolph-Macon. She’d applied because Blanche had, but she hadn’t thought she’d get in, and when she had and Blanche hadn’t, Bea had dismissed it altogether.

But now she stares at Blanche and says, “So … you want me to go to Randolph-Macon?”

Sighing, Blanche starts brushing her hair. It’s shorter now, just below her earlobes, and she’s lightened it. It doesn’t suit her as well as her dark hair did, but Bea had told her she loved it anyway.

“I just think maybe we should each have our own … things, you know?” Blanche says, and then she meets Bea’s eyes in the mirror. “We can’t be ‘the Bs’ forever.”

For the first time, Bea realizes that Blanche isn’t wearing her B necklace. Probably hasn’t worn it in weeks, and Bea just hasn’t noticed.

She feels her own pendant practically burning against her skin.

“Right,” she says with a little laugh. “You’re right. That would be stupid.”

Blanche is clearly relieved, her smile brightening into something genuine as she puts her brush down and turns around.

“I knew you’d get it,” she says.

So Blanche goes off to Birmingham-Southern, and Bea heads to Randolph-Macon, and they keep up on Facebook, through texts, but Bea doesn’t go back to Birmingham. She gets an internship with an interior design firm her junior year, and then she’s in Atlanta, and just two years after college, thanks to the contacts she’s made, she’s launching Southern Manors.

She doesn’t see Blanche again until they’re twenty-six, and finally, finally, Bea makes the trek back to Alabama, not even bothering to let her mother know she’s there.

There’s a mini-reunion in Five Points, some bar that’s too loud, the drinks too expensive, but it’s fun, being back in Birmingham, seeing the Ivy Ridge girls again. Seeing Blanche.

Whatever weirdness there’s been between the two of them vanishes the second they see each other, Blanche squealing and throwing her arms out to hug Bea.

Her hair is shorter, almost severe, but it’s pretty with her slightly elfin features, and Bea has a brief moment of wondering if she should try something similar. But no, what looks good on Blanche won’t always look good on Bea, and besides, Bea is looking pretty good herself these days as Blanche immediately points out with a shrieked, “You bitch, look at you!”

The other girls also want to know what Bea’s secret is, how she looks so great, who cuts her hair, all of that. The truth is so simple, though.

She’s rich now.

When they’d known her at Ivy, she was lacking their patina of wealth and class, so of course she seems different to them now, of course she now looks prettier and better.