Regardless, I have to risk it. For myself, and for you, Jane. Please. Please find this. Please find me. I can’t survive here any longer.

I’m upstairs. You have to walk to the end of the hall and go through a closet. I don’t know the code to the door, but I think it might be the same as the code to the lake house, my birthday. Eddie isn’t good with numbers.

Jane, I am begging you.

Save me. Save yourself.

Please.

Her childhood was so absurdly Southern gothic she sometimes thinks she must’ve made it up.

But no, she actually made her past blander and more boring, a pastel replica of Blanche’s childhood. That was really for the best, though. No one wanted to know about the Too Big House in the middle of West Alabama. The dad who drank too much, whose fists were fast even when he was drunk. The mom who’d checked out on vodka and Klonopin so early in Bea’s childhood that she couldn’t remember her mother ever playing with or reading to her.

She hadn’t been Bea then, of course. Back then, she was still Bertha. Bertha Lydia Mason. Bertha had been her dad’s mother, Lydia her mother’s, and she’d always thought they could’ve at least done her the courtesy of reversing the names. Being a Lydia would not have been as bad as being a Bertha.

But that was hardly the worst thing her parents did.

She doesn’t remember the first time her father hit her. It’s as ingrained a part of her childhood as the canopy bed in her room, the place in her bathroom where the wallpaper never laid flat. Just there, like background noise. When he was drunk, when he was angry, sometimes, she thought, just when he was bored.

There had been money in her family at some point, close enough that her father remembered growing up with it and keenly felt the lack of it. It was money that had built the house, sometime in the twenties, but by Blanche’s childhood, the house was practically sinking into the red Alabama dirt around it. There was no money for things like repairing the roof, and when a leak started, when the ceiling literally began to rot away in an upstairs bedroom, Bertha’s parents just closed that door and pretended it wasn’t happening.

Bertha learns to do that, too. It’s easier, closing a door, creating a new reality.

She goes to the local public school because there isn’t anything else in her tiny town. Not just a public school, a county school, which, for a reason she never really understands, bothers her father more than a city school would.

Her mother had gone to boarding school near Birmingham. Ivy Ridge. She talks about it a lot, makes it seem like a paradise on earth, full of pretty girls in plaid skirts, redbrick buildings, tall, old trees.

Bertha looks it up on the computers at school, and it is even more beautiful than her mother had made it seem.

It is the easiest thing in the world to fill out an application.

Harder to get financial aid since her parents are supposed to apply for that, and they need tax returns and all sorts of other adult things Bertha doesn’t really know anything about. But she’s smart and resourceful, and one night after her father is passed out in what her mother still insists on calling the parlor, Bertha sneaks into his desk.

His papers are a mess but she finds what she needs, and by the time seventh grade is over, Bertha has an acceptance letter and a complete free ride to Ivy Ridge until she graduates so long as she maintains a high GPA.

It’s the hardest her father ever hits her, the night he learns what she’s done. Later, she’ll lie in her bed, tongue probing the throbbing place in her mouth where her teeth feel loose, but the pain is nothing. The pain is worth it because she’s built herself a life raft away from the sinking ship of her family.

It’s really what starts it all, changes everything—Ivy Ridge introduces her to a new life, introduces her to Blanche, but more importantly, it introduces her to a new version of herself. The one she didn’t know was there, the one who can make things happen.

The first day is so hot she can feel sweat pooling in her bra, slipping in a slimy trail down her back. Already, she can smell the powdery scent of her deodorant, and she suddenly has the horrible image of wet, yellowed spots under the arms of her brand-new white blouse.

She wants to check, but then what if someone sees her? And then she’s not only carrying the heavy weight of being named Bertha, she’s also the Bertha Who Looks at Her Own Armpits.

No, better to be sweaty than to be that freak.

The campus is gorgeous: brick buildings, violently green lawn, and even though her room isn’t quite as fancy—lots of linoleum, plain twin beds with scarred wooden frames—it still feels like paradise, being away from home, being away from them, and she never wants to leave.

She meets Blanche that first day. They’re not roommates—that comes later—but they live in the same dorm building, and Blanche has assigned herself as the unofficial greeter.

Blanche has the softest hair, and it falls down her back in a perfect smooth and shiny river, the color of coffee. Bertha’s own hair is brown, too, but not this kind of brown, not this deep shade that makes you want to reach out and touch it.

“Bertha?” she asks, wrinkling her nose, and Bertha feels herself curl inward, shoulders rolling in, spine folding. It’s a pose she’s taken a thousand times. If she could just shrink into herself enough, her parents wouldn’t notice her at all.

But Blanche puts a hand on her shoulder, keeping her from cringing. “No,” she says. “That’s not gonna fly. Don’t you have a nickname?”

Bertha has never had a nickname because she’s never had the kind of friends in her life who would give her one, and her parents barely call her anything at all.

Blanche smiles, teeth blindingly white in her tan face. “Bea,” she proclaims. “That sounds better.”

Bea.

It does sound better. It fits.

Bea. She sits up a little straighter, tries tucking her hair behind her ear with the same casual gesture she’d seen Blanche use earlier.

“Perfect.”

And it is.

That spring break, Blanche invites Bea to her family’s house in Orange Beach. Bea had actually never been to the beach before, but as soon as she sinks her toes into the sugar-white sands, she is in love, and this is the only place she ever wants to be, wind in her hair, salt water brushing her ankles.

Blanche laughs at her, wrapping an arm around Bea’s waist. “Okay, it’s pretty here, but it’s just Orange Beach,” she says, and suddenly Bea worries that she’s been too effusive, gushing too much. Country come to town and all that.