Accomplished: A Georgie Darcy Novel

by Amanda Quain

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Georgiana Darcy gets the Pride & Prejudice retelling she deserves in Amanda Quain's Accomplished, a sparkling contemporary YA featuring a healthy dose of marching band romance, endless banter, and Charles Bingley as a ripped frat boy.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Georgiana Darcy should have been expelled after The Incident with Wickham Foster last year – at least if you ask any of her Pemberley Academy classmates. She may have escaped expulsion because of her family name, but she didn’t escape the disappointment of her big brother Fitz, the scorn of the entire school, or, it turns out, Wickham’s influence.

But she’s back for her junior year, and she needs to prove to everyone – Fitz, Wickham, her former friends, and maybe even herself – that she’s more than just an embarrassment to the family name. How hard can it be to become the Perfect Darcy? All she has to do is:

- Rebuild her reputation with the marching band (even if it kills her)
- Forget about Wickham and his lies (no matter how tempting they still are), and
- Distract Fitz Darcy — helicopter-sibling extraordinaire — by getting him to fall in love with his classmate, Lizzie Bennet (this one might be difficult…)

Sure, it's a complicated plan, but so is being a Darcy. With the help of her fellow bandmate, Avery, matchmaking ideas lifted straight from her favorite fanfics, and a whole lot of pancakes, Georgie is going to see every one of her plans through. But when the weight of being the Perfect Darcy comes crashing down, Georgie will have to find her own way before she loses everything permanently—including the one guy who sees her for who she really is.

A Macmillan Audio production from Wednesday Books.

Release date: July 26, 2022

Publisher: Wednesday Books

Print pages: 316

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

My big brother, Fitzwilliam Darcy, could suck it.

I mean, seriously. He’d already spent the last four months being whatever the brother-equivalent of a helicopter parent was, but this truly took things to a whole new level. He didn’t even pretend this little Saturday visit was because he missed me, his one and only sister. It was explicitly to check in on me, to make sure I had plans to do my homework and go to class and not illegally deal Adderall to my fellow high schoolers.

Which, sure, is what happened last year. But I wasn’t about to do it again.

As I stepped out of my dorm at Pemberley Academy and into the bracing central New York air, I shivered and pulled my peacoat closer to my chest. September was such a crapshoot up here—it could be seventy-five degrees and perfect, or it could be down in the thirties, just to mess with all the new kids whose parents shipped them up from Florida for the best education on the East Coast. I’d grown up out here, knew how to deal with cold, but freezing September days still always felt like a betrayal.

At least I wouldn’t be exposed to the elements for long. Fitz’s car was parked directly in front of the dorm—if he were any closer, he’d already be in the wood-paneled lobby. He’d finally bought something new in the couple of days since he’d dropped me off at school, so I didn’t recognize the exact model, but Fitz always got the same kind of car. Classy, not at all flashy, but expensive enough for people who knew cars to stop and take notice. I was not one of those people, so as I climbed into the passenger seat, I only mentioned—

“This car has fewer cup holders than the last one.”

“Hello to you, too.” Fitz’s car may have changed, but he never did. Tall and dark-haired, people usually managed to guess that we were siblings at first glance, with our shared sharp features and hazel eyes. The main difference was the constant look of disappointment glued to my big brother’s face whenever he was around me. “It’s good to see you.”

“Same. Why did they take away some of the cup holders?” I drummed my fingers on the armrest, which was definitely heated. A nice touch, a classy consolation now that he’d moved back to freezing upstate New York to babysit me. “Where are you supposed to put your drinks?”

“There are still two cup holders in the front seat, which only holds two passengers.” Fitz sighed as he pulled out of the driveway of my dorm, turning to head off campus. I was allowed to have guests in the dining hall, and the entire staff at Pemberley would fall to their knees in praise if Fitz showed up for breakfast. Ever since he’d graduated the year before last, it was all I’d ever heard from everyone. How’s Fitz? Where’s Fitz? Such a shame, I heard he had to transfer, he must be happy to be closer to you. Which was exactly why I’d never let him join me there. “Why would you need more than two cup holders?”

“You’re telling me you don’t foresee a single circumstance in which a person might want more than one drink?” As we passed through the gates of Pemberley, I let myself exhale. Those gates, with their cast-iron finishes and literal spikes on top, felt like my personal iron maiden these days. Ever since The Incident, but, if I was being honest, before that, too. “Picture it with me, big brother. You’re driving cross-country. Epic road trip. Grand Canyon, probably.”

“It would be a better use of both time and money to fly.”

“Okay, but you didn’t.” It was as good a distraction as any, to banter the way we used to, to pretend for a few minutes that The Incident hadn’t irreversibly ruined us. That the last six months of our lives hadn’t been garbage. I flicked at the lock on my door, up and down, until Fitz activated the child locks and I was forced to stop. “You’re driving. It’s late. You need some caffeine, but it’s also about a million degrees, because you’re in the desert, and our pale Yankee bodies aren’t suited for those kinds of conditions.”

“And?”

“And…” I paused for dramatic effect. Tall trees, some of their leaves already changing, whipped past my window. “And you want coffee, but you also need a cold drink! Boom. That’s two cup holders, right there, and now you’ve deprived your passenger of their beverage options. That is terrible hospitality.”

“Well, when you take up interior car design, that can be the first thing you correct.” If you didn’t know Fitz, you’d never hear the edge of a joke in his voice, but I’d learned to recognize it. This was what his sense of humor had whittled down to over the last few years. Brief glimpses of what my brother used to be.

We pulled into the parking lot of Townshend’s, a diner that Fitz (of course) had discovered when he was at Pemberley. We’d driven here together at least once a month my freshman year, his senior, when he’d pull himself away from the demands of applying to all the world’s top colleges and leading the debate team to victory to hang out with little old me. We’d order bottomless pancakes, even though the diner had threatened to take them off the menu after one specifically epic eating extravaganza the day before spring break. For an extra couple of bucks, they’d put whipped cream and M&M’s on them, too. Fitz’s laugh would be more than an edge to an admonishment and I’d be glad to hang out with my brother, the only family I had left.

It wasn’t the sort of place our parents had taught us to visit, with its absence of cloth napkins and a sommelier, but since my dad passed away four years ago, when I was twelve, and my mom had taken the opportunity to abandon me and my brother to the staff and to each other, it wasn’t like there was anyone to stop us.

Now I just had Fitz to stop me.

“No. No way.” The squeals of the hostess echoed through the relatively empty diner as we pushed through the door, the warmth of the overactive heater inside a welcome reprieve from the biting cold. “Tell me that’s not Fitz Darcy.”

“Jenn.” Fitz raised up his mouth in what might be called a smile, had his eyes gotten involved. Squeals were basically standard when grown-ups around Pemberley saw Fitz. If the teachers, support staff, and local townspeople could have voted for homecoming king, it would have been him, every time.

I mean, it wasn’t, because the homecoming court was a teenage popularity contest and actual human popularity among our peers was not something that either of us had ever excelled at. Fitz was more the valedictorian type, while I was … neither of those things. But still.

“What are you even doing here?” Jenn led us to our table way more slowly than I would have liked, my stomach already growling. “Hasn’t the semester started for Caltech? Or do you geniuses out there need less time in class than everyone else?”

“I’m at SUNY Meryton this year, actually.” The remnants of Fitz’s smile disappeared as we settled into the torn vinyl booth at the back of the diner, where the smell of griddled foods threatened to overwhelm me. “I transferred to be closer to home.”

“Why would you—oh.” Jenn’s face flashed with a recognition I needed to get used to as she looked over at me, and I wanted to melt into the vinyl, become one with the vinyl, since I was pretty sure vinyl booths never had to feel guilty

about a single mistake they had made over and over again for the rest of their lives. Plus, they got to live next to the pancakes, and kids dropped food into the cracks of the seating all the time. It would be a less humiliating life than the one I currently led. “Right.”

The Pemberley Academy gossip mill churned hard and fast. It had been all over school within hours when Brian Churlford’s dad, a state senator, had gotten caught taking his mistress on a Canadian joyride. The GroupMes had lit up when Andrea Smithing paid one of the townies to take the SAT for her, and she’d gotten kicked out.

So when I, Georgiana Darcy, heiress to the Darcy empire, little sister of school Golden Boy Fitz Darcy, got caught up in a drug scandal at the end of sophomore year, yet managed to avoid expulsion simply on the basis of my family name? People found out pretty quickly.

My fingers twitched and I willed myself not to curl them into fists. Darcys didn’t show when they were upset.

“Our usual order, Jenn, thanks.” Fitz’s hands gripped onto the plastic menu, white around the knuckles. “And add an orange juice, for my sister.”

“I just brushed my teeth,” I said, as Jenn took the menus and fled the scene as fast as she could, obviously grateful to avoid Darcy Drama. “You don’t need to order for me.”

“I know the way you eat when I’m not around, Georgie.” He pulled out his phone to fire off a quick text, then turned his undivided attention back to me. “The vitamins in that juice might be the only ones you get all week.”

“Funny.” I rolled my eyes. Fitz was just three years older than me. Not old enough to act like my dad, and yet. I squirmed under his gaze, intimately aware of the oncoming conversation that I had no way of avoiding.

Sure enough, Fitz leaned forward on his forearms across the table, fingers intertwined. No elbows involved, naturally. My brother might be in a trash diner eating trash pancakes, but he was still a Darcy, and he never forgot it. Never let me forget it.

“Have you heard from him?”

Actually, no, I hadn’t expected the conversation to go to him that quickly, this early in the morning. My stomach churned unpleasantly. “Obviously not.” Jenn returned with our drinks, a huge mug of coffee for Fitz and a Diet Coke for me. The small glass of orange juice she set down next to it was accompanied by an apologetic smile as she backed away. “He doesn’t have my number anymore.” Fitz had gotten me a new phone number in the weeks following The Incident, once he’d pulled me out of school. It was a real boon to my already nonexistent social life.

“He hasn’t tried to email you?” Fitz continued to press as I blew bubbles in my Diet Coke, which I knew would annoy him. The soda annoyed him enough. “Or … slide into your DMs or something?”

I grimaced. “No, Fitz, Wickham hasn’t tried to ‘slide into my DMs.’” It was barely a lie. Just a … rearranging of the truth. And I hadn’t even read his emails, which had all poured into my phone when Fitz briefly reinstated my internet privileges over the summer.

Hadn’t read them that

much, anyway.

More than once.

Fine, twice.

“Beanpole.”

“Don’t call me that.” He’d taken the nickname up after Dad died, in some sort of weird-for-a-then-sixteen-year-old paternal instinct. “What did you want this to be, Fitz? A super-fun breakfast where I tell you that hey, it doesn’t matter that I got pulled out of school two weeks before the semester ended last year? That I had no way to contact anyone the entire summer, so I couldn’t even try to explain my side of the story, and now the entire student body hates me?”

“If you hadn’t gotten mixed up with a drug dealer—”

“I didn’t know he was a drug dealer!”

“Pancakes!” Jenn’s voice, a trilled out singsong, cut through a fight that was quickly turning vicious. Before I got to add, and you’re the one who wanted us to be friends. Fitz and I both leaned back, my brother straightening the collar of his button-down. I didn’t bother to try and adjust the wrinkles out of my tie-dyed Camp Sanditon T-shirt. “You two know the drill. No new plates until this one is finished. Are we trying to break any records today?”

“The world is wide and full of possibilities, Jenn.” I kept my gaze on my brother as I spoke, his eyes smoking with anger. “Let’s not rule anything out.”

The two of us spent the next ten minutes in relative silence, punctuated only by my aggressive chewing and the whoosh of the whipped cream can. Jenn brought plate two out to me the moment I finished my first, which left me with a lot more goodwill toward her than I’d started with. Fitz, meanwhile, had only moved a few of his pancakes around, clinging to his coffee cup like it was a lifeline as he watched me.

“You’re going to choke.”

“And you’re going to lose our pancake battle.” I nodded toward his plate, where the glob of butter on the top of his stack had melted into a mess of grease that dropped all down the sides of his food. “Catch up.”

“I’m not that hungry.”

“Right,” I said. Fitz’s appetite had declined when our dad died and disappeared entirely after he’d found me with Wickham. His coffee consumption, on the other hand … Jenn filled up his cup without a word as she passed by, and he winced as he took a long draw. “That stuff’s going to give you an ulcer.”

“Trust me, coffee isn’t going to be the thing that gives me an ulcer.” He looked away from me, down into the inky blackness of his cup. This time, I was the one who winced. No one delivered an underhanded jab like a Darcy. Fitz had learned that skill from our mother. “No friends left at all?”

“Not a one,” I said, around a mouthful of pancake. Not that I had many to begin with. I’d never quite managed to find my rhythm at Pemberley, and once Fitz had graduated, things obviously went from bad to worse. The few friendships I had made in band were quickly destroyed in the wake of

Wickham. “Well, someone held the elevator door for me, last night, when I went down to the stacks in the library. But then they saw my face and they pressed the door closed button right before I got there. Except those don’t work and so I got in the elevator anyway, and we were stuck together for four floors.” The memory stung, while Fitz looked … well. Unaffected.

My brother used to take my side no matter what. But even before The Incident, if I was being honest, things had shifted between us. It didn’t change all of a sudden, after Dad died. Or even after Mom left. It happened gradually enough that I never noticed, like how you don’t feel yourself growing taller but suddenly none of your pants fit.

I didn’t notice that Fitz and I were growing apart until suddenly, we didn’t fit. When Fitz told me that he was going to California for school, at first I’d thought, How could he?, but months of unreturned calls and unanswered texts became Of course he did.

And then I’d let Wickham destroy our relationship the rest of the way.

“I remember how slow those elevators are.” Fitz sighed, then cut off the world’s smallest piece of pancake and popped it into his mouth, making sure he had chewed and swallowed it completely before he spoke again. “I’m not trying to ruin your life here, Beanpole. Can you maybe try to understand that?”

Yeah, I didn’t need to hear him repeat it. I knew what Fitz thought—that the only person who had ruined my life was me.

So, I returned to my bubble-blowing. Trying to talk to my brother about this was pointless—always had been, and always would be. He didn’t want to hear about the reasons I’d messed everything up. He wanted me to move on, with his direct supervision to make sure nothing like this ever happened again. To just pretend it had always been like this between us. Like he hadn’t been my best friend before, and not just a weird quasi–father figure.

And I had a plan. I did. But telling Fitz would only lead to admonishment, and for once I was going to take care of things myself.

“You’ll have to talk to me eventually,” Fitz finally said, draining his coffee. “We’re going to have these ‘hangs’ every weekend until you’re back on your feet.”

“Add ‘hangs’ to the list of words you shouldn’t say.” Just watching Fitz drink that much coffee made my own heart speed up. “Do you want me to bring my homework with me? Let you initial it before I bring it back to my teachers?”

Fitz dropped his fork onto his plate and opened his mouth, but he didn’t speak. I could feel the unsaid words between us. Feel his disappointment, the truth at the base of all of our conversations now. I left California for you, so you better not screw this up any more than you already have.

He’d never say it. That would involve discussing our feelings way more than any self-respecting Darcy ever did.

But it was always there. Every time he texted or called me to check up. Every time, over the summer, when he’d cut off my internet privileges or made me read in the living room, where he could watch me. When he’d searched my room, the day he’d taken me back home at the end of the spring, to make sure I didn’t have anything illicit there.

I could still remember what it was like last time, when he’d dropped me off at Pemberley

at the start of my sophomore year. He’d hugged me tighter than he ever had before.

“You’ll be okay, Georgie. Pemberley is yours for the taking, right?”

“I’m going to miss you.” My voice was embarrassingly thick with tears, as it had been all morning. Luckily, there was no one else around. Fitz and I were at Pemberley a week before any of the other students arrived, so he could settle me in before he headed to California. Darcy privileges.

“Not as much as I’m going to miss you, Beanpole.” He pulled back from our hug, where I’d left a trail of snot on his Oxford shirt. So mature. “But you’ll be fine. I promise.”

“How do you know?” I didn’t feel okay. I’d spent my whole freshman year glued to my big brother’s side, and now what? I was just supposed to exist here without him? No one knew me like Fitz did. “What if I spontaneously self-combust?”

“Darcys don’t self-combust.” Fitz’s eyes crinkled with the hint of laughter, something I would soon see only over FaceTime. “But I do have something that’ll cheer you up.”

“Caltech is opening a satellite campus in the middle-of-nowhere New York?”

“Almost.” Fitz leaned past me, out of my dorm room—a single again, thank God—and into the hallway. “Wickham? Want to come out?”

I whipped around, faster than I would have assumed humanly possible. No way. No way.

But there he was. Wickham Foster, our former childhood neighbor and, oh yeah, the person I’d had a gigantic crush on for literally forever, here, at Pemberley Academy, in the (extremely well-toned, by the way) flesh.

“Wickham?” I managed to keep the squeal out of my voice—oh, the restraint—as he sauntered over, grinning. Wickham never hurried. “What are you doing here?”

“I transferred, kid.” He shook Fitz’s hand, then reached out and pulled me into a hug that made my whole body zip from the contact. It had been a couple of years since I’d seen Wickham—the funeral, I realized with a start, was the last time—and although he’d always been aggressively good-looking, it was like all of his already hard edges had sharpened into focus.

“You’ll show Wickham around, right, Georgie?” As Fitz turned to me, I reminded myself that he had no idea how I’d felt about Wickham, growing up. Or possibly now. “He’ll be in band with you. You can help him get adjusted.”

“Of course.” I stood up tall, put on my best smile, and did my best to look like a bona fide sophomore in high school. Wickham glanced over toward me again, and this look was slower than before. Like it meant something. “It would be my pleasure.”

“Mine, too,” he said, and it was a good thing Fitz stepped away to check something on his phone just then, because he wouldn’t have liked the way Wickham looked at me.

Maybe it would have been better if he’d seen. Maybe he could have stopped it. Or maybe 

I’d already stepped onto the path toward my inevitable destruction, and there was nothing my brother could have done.

Now, back in our booth, which felt more claustrophobic with every passing second, Fitz pushed back his plate of barely touched pancakes. Instead of saying anything, he waved Jenn down once again.

“Check, please.”

Just like that, he was finished with me. Just like everyone else.

CHAPTER TWO

Lying on my back in my dorm room bed the next afternoon, the velvety-plush comforter I’d taken from the Darcy estate in Rochester beneath me, I stared up at the Sage Hall poster I’d taped to my ceiling and tried to will myself to disappear into it.

When I’d first put it up last Thursday, my new roommate, Sydney—in the first words she’d spoken since we’d both arrived—had wrinkled her nose and asked, “Did you put that up there because it’s like, a sex thing?”

It didn’t seem worth pointing out that she’d already decorated all four walls of our tiny double with framed photos of flowers that looked like they’d been discarded from the dressing room decorations of a Forever 21, leaving the ceiling as the only space for my poster.

I’d just looked her straight in the eyes, whispered, “Only one way to find out,” and continued my unpacking until she eventually fled the room to hang out with the other girls in the color guard and undoubtedly spend the whole time crying about how she couldn’t believe she’d ended up with a roommate like me.

The feeling was mutual.

No matter how much I stared at the cast of my favorite BBC show posed in a family portrait with their huge manor house behind them, crowd-favorite servants lurking in the background, I didn’t get sucked into the rabbit hole. I sighed and sat up, pulling my laptop toward me. If I couldn’t put myself in the show IRL, I could at least spend the rest of my day reading about it.

I’d gotten into Sage Hall back in middle school, right after my family fell apart. Fitz was up here at Pemberley, I was being cared for by a rotating cast of staff, and Mom had finally admitted she wasn’t coming back from whatever Eat-Pray-Love bullshit she had embarked on that month, signing her rights of guardianship over to Fitz, who got emancipated minor status at sixteen to make decisions for both of us. Things at home weren’t, like … fun, so I spent most of my days scrolling through Tumblr. A few dozen Sage Hall GIF sets in, and I was intrigued. Ten minutes into the first episode, and I was hooked.

I wrote my first fan fiction a month later, which was absolute garbage that I’d since deleted from the bowels of the internet. But I kept writing, kept working, and got kind of good, I guess. And I found people like me, who didn’t know what my last name meant to the world. Who just thought I was cool, that my fics were worth reading.

Not that I’d put up anything lately. I hadn’t written since Wickham.

Anyone else would have been expelled. I should have been expelled when Fitz showed up last year and discovered Wickham dealing Adderall out of my dorm room. Even though Fitz scared him off without involving the cops, the dean found out, and it took everything in Fitz’s power—the power of my family name—to keep me from expulsion. Since there was no evidence tying me to a crime, or even a violation of school rules, I’d told them the truth: that I’d had no idea what Wickham was doing. And since no one testified to the board that they’d ever seen me involved with the drugs … they’d let me stay, a testament to my privilege as a rich white girl but, more specifically, a Darcy.

Wickham hadn’t been so lucky.

It seemed, afterward, like everyone except me had known Wickham was taking advantage of my single room as his distribution headquarters whenever I wasn’t around. All my fellow rich kids hated me for cutting off their supply, and everyone else thought that I’d reported the considerably more popular Wickham because I couldn’t keep my nose in my own business. I was an irredeemable narc in the court of Pemberley Academy.

I, naturally, had fallen for the biggest lie of all, because I’d thought that Wickham loved me. I’d sure thought I loved him.

So now I was here, stuck at Pemberley surrounded by the results of my mistake, the naivete of a sixteen-year-old-girl with a crush on her childhood neighbor who thought he might actually care about her when no one else seemed to.

But, of course, it turned out Wickham was just using me. Using my room and my ignorance with plans to use a lot more.

His emails still taunted me from my in-box, even though I’d managed not to read any of the ones that had come in during the last few days. They all had tantalizing subject lines like “Hey” and “Sup, kid?” which would be enough to make me auto-delete an email from anybody else.

And I knew what they said, too, because they were certainly just echoes of the ones from earlier in the summer, containing nothing but manipulations designed to get me to let him back into my life. To let him twist his way in until, once again, my life was nothing but Wickham. And I couldn’t do that again. I wouldn’t.

I really needed to delete them.

But God, every time someone in the hall glared at me, every time I got that ache inside that I’d never be good enough … it made me want him.

I took a deep breath, tried to clear my head. Fitz would want me to tell him that Wickham was still contacting me, obviously, but there was no way I would admit that to him.

The day he’d found us in my room was still seared into my brain.

Wickham in the doorway, trying to block Fitz from entering, Fitz shoving past him, shouting like I’d never heard my brother shout before—

No. No way. The way he’d looked at Wickham had been horrifying enough, but the way he’d looked at me? Shut it all the way down. I wasn’t going to dredge that memory up any further. ...