The Southern Fawn

The paper was already in her pocket when Scarlett realized what had happened.

She found it when she reached for her exam booklet—a folded rectangle of thin examination paper, creased at precise intervals, with a single line written in careful, printed letters:

Question Seven, Part B: See Question Three, Part A.

Scarlett stood up so fast her chair fell backward. The sound echoed through the silent examination hall like a gunshot, and thirty heads turned toward her. At the front table, Miss Croft, the head of the Academic Committee, looked up from her ledger with an expression of slow, methodical fury.

"Miss Beauregard," she said. "Sit down."

"I didn't put that there," Scarlett said. Her voice was steady, which surprised her. Her hands were not.

"Sit down, Miss Beauregard."

She sat. She placed her hands flat on the desk and stared at the grain of the wood. Behind her, she could feel the heat of thirty pairs of eyes—the daughters of cotton barons and church elders and men whose grandfathers had built this town with hands that knew how to break things without leaving a mark.

The search took place immediately. Miss Croft herself came to Scarlett's desk, picked up the folded paper with two fingers, and examined it as though it were something dead she had found on the side of the road.

"Your handwriting?" Miss Croft asked.

"No."

"Your paper?"

"No."

Miss Croft's mouth tightened. "You will accompany me to my office. The rest of you will continue your examination."

The walk across the quad was twenty-three steps. Scarlett counted them because counting kept her from running. She passed the old magnolia tree—the one that had been here before the Academy was built, the one that Miss Croft said was a symbol of the school's connection to Southern soil—and she thought, absurdly, about how magnolias only bloom for a day. One day, and then they fall, brown and rotting, and nobody picks them up because they're supposed to be beautiful.

Miss Croft's office smelled of camphor and old paper. She closed the door, locked it, and placed the folded paper on her desk.

"Miss Beauregard," she said, "I have known your family for thirty years. Your grandmother sat on my mother's debutante committee. Your grandfather—God rest him—was one of the men who endowed this building." She gestured toward the window, toward the main hall. "And now you are standing in my office, accused of cheating on the State Academic Competition exam."

"I didn't cheat."

"That is not for you to say. That is for us to determine." Miss Croft sat down behind her desk and steepled her fingers. "Do you understand what is at stake here? The State Competition is not a class test. The top three scorers receive scholarships to Oxford. Three scholarships. And the Beauregard name has been associated with this Academy for four generations."

"The Beauregard name," Scarlett said quietly.

Miss Croft did not miss the edge in her voice. "Your family's contributions to this institution have been significant."

"My grandfather is dead."

"Yes."

"My father lost the plantation in the Great Depression."

"Yes."

"And I am sitting in your office because a piece of paper appeared in my exam that I did not put there."

Miss Croft's eyes narrowed. "That is an accurate summary."

Scarlett sat in Miss Croft's office for two hours. Two hours of questions that were not really questions but statements in question form. Two hours of being told that the Beauregard family had a reputation—words like "eccentric" and "unpredictable" and once, carefully chosen, "prone to dramatic gestures." Two hours of listening to Miss Croft talk about "the weight of history" and "the expectations that come with a name like yours."

When she finally left, the sun was going down, and the sky over Oakcreek was the colour of bruised peach. She walked home alone, through streets lined with houses that had been painted white before the Civil War and had never stopped pretending that nothing had changed.

The Beauregard house was exactly what she had expected: large, empty, and full of ghosts. Not real ghosts—Scarlett did not believe in ghosts. But the house had the particular weight that comes from too many people having lived and died in the same rooms, leaving behind the residue of their hopes and their failures.

She went to her room, closed the door, and sat on the floor with her back against the bed. She thought about calling Asher.

Asher Thibodeaux lived on the other side of town, in the part of Oakcreek where the streets were unpaved and the houses were made of wood that had been painted and repainted until the paint had become geological—layer upon layer of white and cream and faded blue, like sedimentary rock. His family had lived there for five generations. His grandfather had worked for the Beauregards, as his grandfather before him had. It was the kind of history that South Carolina carried in its bones.

Asher was seventeen, had been shooting since he was eight, and had never said anything to Scarlett that was not exactly what he meant. She had met him two summers ago, at a church social, when he had shown her how to hold a Winchester rifle and she had shot through the centre of a paper target at fifty yards and he had looked at her and said, "You shoot like you're angry," and she had said, "I'm always angry," and he had nodded as though that made perfect sense.

She picked up the phone. Her finger hovered over the operator's number. Then she put it down.

If she called him, she would have to explain. And if she explained, he would come over. And if he came over, people would talk. And if people talked, it would be worse.

So she did not call him.

Instead, she did what she always did when the world became too much: she walked to the edge of town, to the old shooting range behind the abandoned cotton mill, where the trees grew thick enough to block the view of the house and the sound of the town.

She was not there when Asher arrived. He found her sitting on the porch of the old mill house, her knees drawn up to her chest, watching the sun sink behind the pines.

"You look like hell," he said.

"Thank you. That's exactly what I needed to hear."

He sat beside her. He did not touch her. He never touched her unless she asked him to. It was one of the things she respected about him—the way he understood the difference between closeness and intrusion.

"What happened?" he asked.

They told him everything. The exam, the paper, Miss Croft's office, the two hours of questions. Asher listened without interrupting, his expression changing only slightly—his jaw tightened, and his eyes went very still. When she finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"The Marches," he said finally.

"What?"

"Cordelia March. Her father is on the Academic Committee. Her mother donated the wing where the exams are held. If someone wanted to frame you, it would be someone with access to the exam room before it was set up."

"Who has that kind of access?"

"Anyone on the Committee. Or anyone they've asked for help." Asher looked at her. "Why you?"

Scarlett considered this. "Because I'm the easiest person to ruin in this town. I have a name that means something to people who care about names, and a family that means nothing to people who care about money. I'm the perfect target."

Asher was silent for a moment. Then he said: "I'll help you."

"How?"

"I know someone who was cleaning the exam rooms yesterday. The janitor. His name is Otis. He works at the Academy after his regular job at the garage. He'll talk to me."

"Asher—"

"Don't. I'm not asking for permission. I'm telling you." He stood up. "Stay here tonight. Don't go anywhere. Don't talk to anyone at the Academy. I'll call you tomorrow."

He left. Scarlett watched him walk down the dirt road, his figure growing smaller and smaller until it was just another shadow in the fading light.

The next morning, Otis told Asher something that changed everything.

He told him that he had been in the exam hall the afternoon before, cleaning the windows, and that he had seen a girl he recognized—Cordelia March, in a dress that cost more than Otis made in a month—sneak into the room at around four o'clock, when the halls were supposed to be empty. He told him that she was carrying something small and folded, and that she had looked over her shoulder the way people look over their shoulders when they are doing something they know they should not be doing.

"Which desk?" Asher asked.

Otis hesitated. "I don't know the desk numbers."

"Did you see where she stood?"

"Yes." Otis pointed. "Right in front of desk seven."

Desk seven. Scarlett's desk.

Asher thanked Otis and walked back to town with a feeling in his chest that was not hope and not anger but something darker and more useful than both.

He went to see Scarlett that afternoon. She was sitting on her porch, just as he had left her, and when she saw his face she knew.

"What did you find out?"

He told her. Everything. Cordelia March. Four o'clock. Desk seven. The folded paper, placed carefully in the corner of the desk where the morning examiners would not notice it until they were searching for something to blame.

Scarlett listened without speaking. When he finished, she said: "I can't prove it."

"Yes, you can."

"How?"

"Otis will testify. He saw March in the room. That puts her there. And if she was there at four o'clock, when the room was supposed to be locked and empty, then she had the opportunity to place the paper."

"Otis is a coloured man telling a story about a white girl in a white building. Miss Croft won't even listen to him."

Asher's expression did not change. "Then we don't go to Miss Croft."

"Who else?"

"The Presbyterian church. Mrs. Whitfield—Agnes Whitfield's grandmother. She's on the Academy Board of Directors. And she's the only person in this town who scares Miss Croft."

Scarlett stared at him. "You know the Whitfields?"

"My mother taught Sunday school at Presbyterian for twenty years. I know everyone in this town who matters." He paused. "And everyone who matters doesn't matter to the people who think they matter."

It was the most political thing Scarlett had ever heard Asher say. She filed it away.

Three days later, Scarlett stood in the Presbyterian church on a Sunday morning, wearing her only good dress—the blue one with the white collar that Agnes had lent her—and told her story to a room full of people who could either destroy her or save her.

Mrs. Whitfield listened. She was an old woman with silver hair and eyes that had seen everything Oakcreek had to offer and had not been impressed by any of it. When Scarlett finished, Mrs. Whitfield was quiet for a long time.

"Miss March?" she asked.

Scarlett nodded.

"Has anyone asked her about it?"

"No. Because no one knows how to ask a March daughter a question."

Mrs. Whitfield stood up. She was smaller than Scarlett expected, but she filled the room simply by being present. "I will ask her."

She did. The next day, Cordelia March was summoned to Mrs. Whitfield's house, and two hours later she walked out of it without her grandmother's blessing, which in Oakcreek was roughly equivalent to a social death sentence.

Miss Croft dropped the charges on a Thursday. She did it with a statement about "insufficient evidence" and "the importance of due process," but everyone in town knew the truth. The Whitfields had spoken. The Marches had answered. And the Beauregard girl—whom everyone had assumed would simply disappear, quietly and without fuss—had not disappeared at all.

Scarlett walked home through the oak-lined streets of Oakcreek feeling the particular exhaustion that comes after fighting a battle you did not choose and winning a victory that feels less like triumph and more like survival.

She stopped at the edge of town, at the spot where the dirt road met the paved street, and looked back at the Academy. The building was white and elegant and utterly indifferent to the lives that moved through its corridors. It would stand there for another hundred years. It would break other girls. It would save other girls. It would do both things without understanding the difference.

Behind her, a car pulled up. Asher was driving. He did not offer her a ride. He never pushed.

"I'm not going home yet," she said.

"I know."

"I wanted to stand here for a minute."

He nodded. "I'll wait."

Scarlett stood in the June heat and thought about magnolias and how they only bloom for a day. She thought about her family name and how it was both a shield and a wound. She thought about Asher sitting in his car, waiting for her to be ready, and about the fact that in a town where everyone was trapped by their history, he was the one person who had chosen to stay—and that choice meant more than any grand gesture ever could.

Eventually, she got in the car. They drove home in silence, the radio off, the windows down, the sound of cicadas filling the space between them like music.

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Author Note & Copyright: