We Made It All Up

by Margot Harrison

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers

Synopsis

A contemporary, high-stakes thriller about how reality becomes more twisted than the fantasy novel two friends are writing when the real-life subject of their fiction turns up dead and they’re the suspects, for fans of Mare of Easttown and One of Us Is Lying.

Celeste is the talk of the town when she moves to Montana from Montreal, but the only friend she makes is Vivvy, the heir to the town’s founder and a social pariah. Inspired by a passion-fueled school incident, they begin writing a love-story fanfic between the popular guy and the school stoner, one that gradually reveals Celeste’s past. While her bond with Vivvy makes Celeste feel safe and alive again, Vivvy keeps prodding Celeste to turn fantasy into reality. When they finally try, one drunken night on a dark mountainside, Celeste is the one who ends up kissing golden boy Joss. And Joss ends up dead.

Celeste doesn’t remember the end of that night and can’t be sure she didn’t deliver the killing blow. Could she still be that scared of getting close to a boy? Secrets are hard to keep in a small town, and even Vivvy seems to suspect her. Exploring the winding passages of the cave where Joss died, Celeste learns he had his own dark secrets, as does Vivvy. The town isn’t as innocent as it appears.
 

 

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Release date: July 12, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 343

Sample

NowSATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 11:40 PM

Joss Thorssen spins the bottle, and then we persuade him to kiss each of us. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

It shouldn’t be okay, but here on the dark mountainside, with the lights of town winking far in the distance, maybe it is.

He starts with Vivvy, because she’s the closest. When his head dips toward her, a fist clenches in my chest—envy or excitement, I don’t even know. Though I’ve never kissed Joss, barely touched Joss, in some strange way I still feel like he’s mine and she’s mine, too. We’re coconspirators, Vivvy and I. He’s what we conspire about.

I force myself to watch as Vivvy closes her eyes. Joss kisses her on the right cheek, the left cheek, corner of the lips, forehead. Soberly, ceremonially, like a holy man performing a rite. Vivvy’s face has gone as still as a waxwork.

Then Joss rises, staggering a little on his bad ankle, and walks around the fire to Seth, his foot swiping the bottle on the way. When he spun it a few minutes ago, it pointed at Seth, who sits with his back to the valley. Now it points up the hill toward the cave entrance.

The mountain breeze is scathingly cold, but the liquor is a furnace in my chest. Vivvy has grabbed her phone again and started tapping, and I wonder how she can concentrate on anything but what’s happening right now.

Seth flinches when Joss touches him, as if he expects to be hit. Then he goes still the way Vivvy did, eyes closed.

Joss repeats the exact sequence of kisses he gave Vivvy. It’s over in three seconds, and he’s on his feet again, swaying unsteadily toward me.

I brace myself because I’ve only been this close to him once, and yes, I’ve imagined this, but not like this. When Joss’s fingers close on my shoulders, when I smell him—the realness, the bigness, the alien musky maleness of him—I stop breathing or moving. My eyes stay open, unseeing.

Right cheek, left cheek, beside the lips, between the brows. I feel it but I don’t. My skin 

is ice. He smells of motor oil and weed.

I’m about to exhale when Joss’s head dips again, his pale hair brushing my cheek. He kisses me full on the lips, his warmth resting there just long enough for sensation to rush back into all my nerve endings. My limbs melt. My lips move.

And then his are gone, along with his warmth and his smell and the itching sense of his closeness. I close my eyes and feel the liquor rush through me, dilating my blood vessels. Already it seems as if I just watched that happen instead of living it.

Joss kissed the new girl. Joss kissed the weirdo. What a twist!

When I open my eyes, Joss is limping toward the line of cedars that screen the cave entrance. “Gotta take a leak,” he says, sounding weirdly satisfied. “Vivvy, you got another bottle?”

Vivvy opens a bottle and puts on a log. Flames jump in the pit, red against the vast darkness of the valley. I don’t want to think about the almost smugness in Joss’s voice, so I grab the bottle and take a swallow of something that tastes like mouthwash, then a swig from my thermos of tea for good measure.

I can’t look at Vivvy. My face is flushed, and I feel like I’m grimacing, but maybe it looks like a wild, triumphant grin.

Seth lurches toward the bottle, blocking the fire and the stars. “Joss chose you,” he tells me.

The lone frail birch on the slope is dropping its gold-coin leaves, and decay is thick in my nostrils. Did Vivvy hear that? No, she’s busy with her phone again. I hand Seth the bottle, shake my head. “It doesn’t work that way.”

Any minute Joss will come back. I still feel his lips, my warmth opening to his, the burn of his stubble. Do I want to be chosen?

I don’t do self-inserts. I am not the heroine of my stories, and this started as a story—my story and Vivvy’s.

Then Joss whistles and calls my name, and I see Vivvy’s head jerk hard to the side, and I don’t care how the story’s supposed to go.

I rise and go to the nook between the cedars and the cliff. His hand emerges from the dark and pulls me inside, where the dirt is bare and fine and soft and you can’t see the town’s lights, only the stars. And just for a moment, I think this was always supposed to happen. 

ThenTWO AND A HALF MONTHS AGO
(THURSDAY, AUGUST 29)

The first thing I noticed waking up each morning in Kray’s Defile was the quiet.

No grumbling of trucks, no sirens, no laughing gangs of students headed to the corner dépanneur. Just a cool, layered stillness that felt thick enough to slice.

It was quiet as I showered and dressed and ate toast and peanut butter at the breakfast bar. Our rental house was the first actual house I’d ever lived in, and it didn’t disappoint, with its breakfast bar and laundry room and even a wood-paneled basement rec room that looked like nobody had done any recreation in it for the past fifty years.

We were down to the heel of the stale white bread that Dad had picked up at a mini-mart on his commute from Billings. I shoved it into the toaster, remembering how Mom would bring home a bag of bagels three times a week from our favorite bakery in Montreal, chewy and slathered with sesame seeds. I put “shopping trip” on my mental list. Surely there had to be a supermarket with whole-grain bread within forty miles?

This town was a way station, I reminded myself, stepping out onto the overgrown lawn. Not my home.

Sometimes where you are is just a step on the way somewhere else—Dad taught me that. All academics know it, he said. He was here for a temporary, grant-funded job, in this place you could pass in a blink on the interstate, and I’d chosen to leave Mom and come live with him for a fresh start. In two years, I’d be off to college—anywhere away from Montreal. Next year maybe I’d get my license and commute to Billings for college courses. Though having my own car still felt like a pipe dream, and the roads here…

They were so long. So lonely. So much empty space.

As I walked to the bus stop, a neighbor came out and picked up her newspaper, her hair in a majestic style I hadn’t seen outside of old movies. She called to me: “Hi, hon, is your dad at home?”

“He’s off early, Ms.…” I didn’t know her name. I should know her name.

“Well, I have a little tip for him. If he looks in the book under ‘lawn care,’ he’ll find Carlsson’s, but they charge an arm and a leg…”

I stopped listening closely. She just wanted to talk about her nephew, who was taking a break from college and would mow and trim for a song.

She thrust a slip of paper into my hand. “Tell your dad. He won’t regret it.”

So this was a place where people noticed your lawn. We’d never had one before.

I stashed the paper away. Maybe I should call the nephew; Dad wouldn’t remember to do it himself.

It was quiet on the bus: lots of pasty-white faces, flannel shirts, headphones. No eyes on me, and that was a relief; I didn’t want to be the one thing that was out of place here, like our overgrown grass. I kept my eyes to myself, hoping my light blue T-shirt and jeans were neutral enough.

In nearly a week at this school, I hadn’t spoken to anyone except Sarah Blessingham, my assigned physics lab partner.

When I stepped off the bus, the air surprised me as it still did sometimes—a fresh whoosh in my lungs, making my heart pound and my eyes tear. I swung around, and there, across the road from the school, was the mountain pass, the “Defile” itself, looming over the town like a craggy granite iceberg.

It was so enormous, sharp-edged against the blue sky, that I wanted to stand on the sidewalk and stare. To take it in. But people pressed past, shoulders and elbows brushing mine, pushing me onward.

A fresh start. A way station. None of it is any use if you can’t blend in.

The school lobby was all people yelling, grabbing, exchanging phones to share photos, whooping with ear-shattering laughter. I kept to the edges, skirting two scarecrows dressed in blue-and-yellow jerseys that stood propped against the trophy case, each holding a hockey stick. ON THE ICE, said one jersey. FEEL THE SPIRIT, said the other.

Hockey was big at my school in Montreal—hockey is big in Montreal generally—but this “spirit” thing was new to me. On the way to my locker, I passed three giant hand-painted “spirit” posters, then two knots of girls wearing pastel uniforms. What was their sport? I couldn’t tell.

It was like walking into the past, or into one of those soapy high school shows where everybody gets excited about sock hops and harvest dances. Maybe that was why people looked past and around me. I belonged to another time, another plane of reality.

Physics. Trig. Spanish. Lunch. Health. I had simple rules: Sit in corners and back rows. Don’t raise your hand. Do speak when called on. Blend in.

Clock hands bounced like twitching muscles, and it was time for AP English.

Ms

. Linney didn’t quite fit in here, either, which made me like her. She had a weird hair-dye situation going on: butter yellow at the crown of her head and brown looped into a basket shape on her shoulders. I stared at her nude, glossy lips as she handed back quizzes and bantered with the boys in letter jackets. They didn’t seem to think her hair was weird. Was my hair weird?

“It’s time for our first Shakespeare monologue victim. Ah, yes. The brave Mr. Thorssen. Mr. Larkin, I believe you’re in the director’s chair today?”

Over the course of the semester, we’d all have to do an oral presentation in pairs, actor and director/coach. Memorizing and reciting Shakespeare was nothing new for me, but I dreaded doing it here. People might think I was showing off.

I didn’t know the name of the slender boy who sat in the designated “director’s chair” in the front row, but I knew Joss Thorssen. If Kray’s Defile High was a soap, he was the star. His broad shoulders filled out varsity letter jackets, royal blue and marigold yellow, and people were always fist-bumping him and yelling, “Thorssen!” I’d heard him say he signed up for the earliest possible monologue slot so it wouldn’t interfere with his hockey season.

Now he had to become Richard, murderous Duke of Gloucester.

Standing before us, Joss clenched both fists and stared at the floor like he would rather be about anywhere than here. “‘Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York…’”

He trailed off, and a few people chanted “Yeah” encouragingly.

“‘Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; / Our bruised arms hung up for monuments…’” Joss’s fists had loosened, but he still spat out the words like he was in a race.

My lips moved, silently reciting the speech along with him. He’d skipped some lines, and “bruised” should have had two syllables.

Joss went on, and I sensed a growing tension in the room, like we were all holding our breaths for him to reach the finish line and stop mangling the words. “‘I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion, / Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, / Deform’d, unfinish’d—’”

“Dude,” said a tenor voice. “Sorry to interrupt, but you’re killing me.”

It was the “director.” His legs sprawled into the aisle, his mouth twisting sardonically. If I had to guess, I’d have placed him toward the bottom of the Kray’s Defile social hierarchy—skinny and corpse-pale, with greasy black hair and a ripped T-shirt.

“C’mon, dude.” The director pulled himself upright, planted both elbows on his desk. “Are you even thinking about the words? You sound baked.”

The room filled with brief, appreciative snickering, followed by abrupt silence. We weren’t supposed to laugh at Joss.

Ms. Linney said, “Keep it respectful, Seth. Observations, not judgments. Would you like 

to stand up and explain how you see the character of Richard?”

“Do I have to?” The director—Seth—hauled himself to his feet. Joss stared stoically at a spot just below the windowsill.

“So this guy, Gloucester, Richard, whatever. He’s all privileged and, like, born to a noble family. But he has a hunchback, and everybody in his world has a problem with that. Girls aren’t into him. Even dogs bark at him.”

Joss continued his study of the wall. Around me, people were tensing. Maybe they were afraid Seth would make them laugh again.

“All because of his physical appearance. Which isn’t his fault.” Seth’s words came quicker and louder, like he was determined to get a rise out of Joss. “You need to get inside Richard, not just say the words. Have you ever felt like everybody hates you?”

A girl tittered. Someone in the back muttered, “Look in the mirror, freak.”

My cheeks burned. We all knew it wasn’t Joss who was the outcast, with his corn silk hair and firm jaw. And we knew Seth was taunting Joss for a reason—because no one thought he’d dare.

At last, Joss looked up. He had what some girls call “puppy dog eyes,” guileless blue and droopy at the corners, a little lost. “Sure, I’ve felt that way,” he said, as if it were another line he was reciting. As if he knew he had to say it, but he wasn’t 100 percent sure what it meant.

“You’ve felt like a monster?” Seth took a step, another, closing the distance between them. His voice rose. “Seriously? Richard freaking hates himself. Do you have the slightest clue?”

“But you just said—” Joss couldn’t seem to finish the thought. The full blush on his pale cheeks and neck made quite the spectacle.

“Aw, now he’s done it,” a boy muttered behind me, like he expected Joss to haul off and punch Seth.

I half expected that, too. What I didn’t expect was what happened: Joss’s lips pressed together, and he took a stutter-step and sank to his knees. On the floor. In front of Seth.

A girl in my row gasped theatrically—one of the pretty ones. Beside her, a weedy little girl with a pale, bunched-up face just stared.

Nobody spoke. Joss swayed on his knees like he was considering getting up again.

Seth took a step back. He moved like he hated his body, but his eyes were as blue as Joss’s, with long lashes that made me think of willows at dusk.

Joss’s fists clenched. “I know you think I’m a monster,” he said in a small voice. “I may not know much, but I know that.”

“It’s some kind of psych,” whispered the boy behind me. “Thorssen’s gonna pound him,

Ms. Linney cleared her throat.

Seth said, “Monster. You said it, not me.”

Joss rose in a blur and towered over Seth, his whole body coiled with rage. “Why are you on my ass all of a sudden? What the hell is your problem?”

“Okay, boys, can we please—”

“You got it.” Seth backed away from Joss, audibly gloating. “You finally sound like Richard. You want to strangle me, you want to pound me into next week, so give it a try. Stop pretending to be nice.”

“Stop it,” I said.

It was my first time speaking in class in Montana without being called on. Heads whirled to look at me. Even Joss turned, his body going still.

My mouth was dry, my breath a weak gust in my throat. “You’re pushing him too hard. When you push actors too hard, they shut down.”

That’s what a girl in my McGill drama workshop told Frank, our director, after he asked me creepy questions in front of the whole class. Maybe it would work here, too. Maybe not.

“He doesn’t look shut down to me,” Seth snapped.

Joss didn’t move. The girls were all staring at me, especially the weedy one. She had a short blond bob like a twenties flapper, and she wore a Victorian blouse with a cameo brooch.

Ms. Linney jumped in: “That’s an excellent point, Celeste. Pushing too hard is counterproductive. Seth, could you express your critique in a way that’s less—”

But Seth had had enough. “You’re so full of shit, Joss,” he said, backing toward the classroom door. “You may not be deformed in a way people can see, but you’re an asshole, and you’ll always be an asshole, and you’re just too dense to—”

The bell rang.

Seth vanished into the corridor. Some of the large, letter-jacketed boys tried to go after him, but Ms. Linney stopped them short with a frantic spiel about the assignment.

I got up as unhurriedly as I could and walked to my locker. My mouth was dry, and something pressed against my throat and chest, making it hard to breathe. My feelings tended to make themselves known by wrapping around my neck like pythons, never announcing their names.

You’ll never be an actress if you don’t let yourself feel, Frank said in my memory. A fascinating face, but your emotions terrify you.

Frank was always pushing me, like Seth had pushed Joss just now. Always wanting me to feel. I’d come here with Dad rather than stay with Mom so I could stop feeling—stop worrying about boys not liking me, and about grown men liking me too much. To blend in and just be for a while.

As

 I worked the locker combination, a silvery voice said, “That took balls.”

It was the weedy girl with the bob. Up close, her eyes were whitish-green like lichen, and her mouth didn’t look like it should have “balls” coming out of it. She added, “Somebody needed to slow Seth down before he got in real trouble. He’s not a bad person.”

I nodded noncommittally, already ashamed of the role I’d played in the classroom. This was none of my business.

But she kept right on talking: “When Joss was down on his knees, and Seth finally looked at him, I honest to God thought they were going to kiss.”

Could I have misheard her? The scarecrows and spirit posters weren’t the only retro thing about this school; I hadn’t seen a single rainbow banner or pin, or a same-sex couple holding hands, and nobody ever discussed pronouns. “Are they, uh… a thing?”

The girl shook her head, looking satisfied to have gained my attention. “Joss’s always been with girls. But I mean, c’mon, that wasn’t a regular fight. That was a special, steamy fight. That was psychodrama.”

My mouth must have been hanging open, because she added, “Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking it.”

I lowered my gaze to the spearmint-green linoleum. I was thinking it now, okay, visualizing Joss pulling Seth into a passionate kiss, but that didn’t mean she knew anything about me. She couldn’t hurt me.

“You’re from the city, aren’t you? Out of state somewhere?”

Before I could deny it, she stuck out her hand. Her grip was spidery and strong, and she seemed older and younger than me at once, her eyes glittering.

“I’m Vivienne Kray,” she said. “Vivvy, if you insist. Sorry I weirded you out; I do that to 

watch.” people sometimes. See you around.”