Pride or Die

by CL Montblanc

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers; YA LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

In this delightful dark comedy debut, when the members of an LGBTQ+ club find themselves accidentally framed for attempted murder, it's up to them to clear their names before it's too late.

It’s kind of hard to graduate high school when you’re the prime suspect in an attempted murder.

Seventeen-year-old Eleanora Finkel just wants to finish her senior year and get the hell out of Texas. But when her club meeting inconveniently coincides with an attack on the school’s head cheerleader, she and her friends find themselves in the hot seat.

In order to clear their names and ensure the survival of their club for future queer teens, they’ll have to track down the real culprit themselves. But Eleanora is far from a professional detective; she’s riddled with anxiety, annoyingly attracted to the case’s cute victim, and her trusty crochet hook feels insufficient for fighting off a murderer. Can this ragtag group of unlikely sleuths find their way out of an entire freaking murder mystery before one of them is next?

Release date: April 15, 2025

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

The Hillview High LGBTQ+ Club was, with all due respect, an entire goddamned joke.

For one thing, it took place in the U.S. History classroom, where the enormous, judgmental face of former president George W. Bush observed our club members from every angle as though monitoring for signs of unsavory homosexual activity. Half the group swore up and down that the portrait’s eyes even followed them around like a fucked-up Haunted Mansion painting.

As club president, the least I could do was try to make the decor a little more welcoming.

I really owed it to my members, even if only two of them had bothered to show up to our meeting that day. It was kind of my own fault for planning it during the school pep rally, but finding a better time to gather the troops on a busy Friday afternoon had been virtually impossible. Most days, Tyler usually had Model UN or soccer practice, while Noah tended to disappear around the time his favorite Twitch streamer was scheduled to go live, which was surely a coincidence and nothing more.

“We need to redecorate before the Club Fair next week,” I began with an authoritative nod, gesturing toward the posters of famous Americans—most of them from our home state of Texas—lining the room. “Nobody’s gonna sign up at this rate. The vibes in here aren’t exactly screaming ‘diversity.’”

“Agreed, Fink,” said Noah, kicking his sneakers up onto his desk. “The only questionable white guy who should be allowed on our walls is me. Okay—maybe Davy Crockett can stay too, just because I’ve always gotten queer energy from him.” He slapped a palm against the concrete wall, his obsidian rings lovingly grazing the man’s cheek.

Tyler scrubbed a hand over their face and up through their coffee-brown buzz cut. “Is the problem really the posters, or is it the fact that joining our club is like voluntarily registering to get bullied?”

It was most definitely both—but that second part was going to be much harder to fix.

“What if some people like having their houses wrapped?” Noah suggested with a shrug. “Free toilet paper.”

“We can’t go through another year of torment.” I sighed, plunking my tattered bag of art supplies onto my desk. “Not if we want the club to stand any chance at a future.”

The whole reason I had founded this club, back when I was a sophomore, was so that people like us could find one another, support one another, and know that they’re not alone in the world. Especially in a town full of “traditional” families with bigoted values. The problem was that if nobody signed up this year, it would die after us seniors graduated. The future queer kids of Hillview would lack a safe space at school in which to congregate and be themselves in peace.

Over the past two years, I’d made sure that we followed every regulation, hit every imposed deadline, and persisted despite all the obstacles. And much like a cockroach, but gayer, the club had continued to withstand nuclear threats against its life from our homophobic school administration. My stubborn determination had ensured the LGBTQ+ Club’s survival through all sorts of crap that got thrown at us.

But what the club wouldn’t survive, I feared, was Kenley Stevens.

I had actually been optimistic for our future at the beginning of last year’s Club Fair—our very first one. At that time, the general attitude my classmates had toward queer people was “tolerant,” in that they totally ignored me as opposed to throwing around slurs. A few had even come up to me expressing interest—one freshman with lily-pink hair had pulled me aside to say how excited she was to join a community for kids like her.

It was like being face-to-face with my younger self.

And on the day of the fair, I was pleasantly surprised to find people were flocking to sign up—dozens of them, in a line that ran all the way out the door. I’d freaking done it! I’d made sure that I was the last LGBTQ+ student to ever come into Hillview bearing that incomparable burden of loneliness and fear ever again.

Enter head cheerleader Kenley Stevens.

She’d waltzed up to me that day with such an innocent expression on her beautiful, cherubic face, and I was ready to welcome her with open arms. But before I could finish writing her name on my clipboard, she’d said it.

“Um, so just to clarify, what kind of club is this supposed to be, exactly? Because Principal Ballard’s Club Fair memo said that this was supposed to have … sandwiches?”

“Sandwiches?” Noah had snorted. “I fuckin’ wish.”

Kenley’s lips formed a condescending frown. “Y’all were listed as ‘The BLT Club.’”

The embarrassment hit me instantly, heat flooding my cheeks.

“N-no, the principal must have made a mistake. This is an LGBTQ+ Club,” I stammered, silently praying for the earth to swallow me whole. “Like, lesbian, gay—”

And then the room had erupted into chaos.

Tyler was instantly surrounded by hangry, homophobic Model UN guys accusing them of false advertising. The girl with pink hair, who had shown up as promised, sprinted from the room with tears in her eyes. And a cluster of cheerleaders swarmed toward me like vultures to carrion, cackling at the sight of Kenley interacting with Eleanora Finkel, School Lesbian.

One of Kenley’s cronies, Shelby—who I was actually friends with until fifth grade when her family joined some religious cult and my mom banned me from ever going to her house again—had snatched the sign-up sheet from me and crumpled it into a ball. “You can’t trick us into signing up for your woke propaganda thing for some free food. This is just super gross and embarrassing…”

This type of comment was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but it still hurt to hear it from a girl I’d traded Shopkins with at age seven, back when love was either unconditional or based on delightfully fickle shit like your favorite ice cream flavor.

Kenley had given me a pitying look. “I’m sorry, Sandwich Girl.”

And just like that, organized queerness became one of those hot things to make fun of for the entire school year, like cutoff jorts or Derek Handel’s weird haircut. Of course nobody new wanted to sign up after that.

Kenley made sure to single me out almost every day in the hallway since then, always calling me “Sandwich Girl,” and she still wasn’t even remotely the worst of what I had to face last year.

I even found the pink-haired girl again, but she absolutely refused to come near me.… So. So much for “a safe space for future LGBTQ+ students.” Things were looking even worse than they had been before the club started.

But maybe, just maybe, with enough effort, we could turn things around this year. Before my friends and I graduated and it was too late, and there wouldn’t be anybody left to keep the club alive for Pink Hair Girl and all the future Hillview students who needed our modest refuge from the homophobic nightmare that was Cabotsville, Texas.


Copyright © 2025 by CL Montblanc