Up the skirt
Savannah is a Southern town draped in live oaks and Spanish moss. It is picturesque and humid, a place where everyone knows everyone else. The social rules here are as ancient, stubborn, and immovable as the white columns lining the streets. Noah Holloway, fifteen years old. She attends St. Cecilia Academy, Savannah’s most prestigious private parochial school. The campus is steeped in the scent of pine-scented floor wax and "old money." The girls wear plaid skirts and sit in cliques at lunch; the prime center spot always belongs to Katie and her "squad of beauties." Noah is neither ugly nor stupid. Yet, she lives her life like a sheet of tracing paper—desperately copying Katie’s lip-gloss shades, her accent, and that frivolous adoration for the football players. Her father is a moderately successful local real estate developer, and her mother is an active member of the Garden Club. It isn’t a cold household, exactly; it’s just that everyone is living out their own private script. The things Noah says at the dinner table are never truly heard to the end. She hasn’t come out. She doesn’t even know if what she’s in counts as a "closet." She only knows there are thoughts she shouldn’t harbor—thoughts as forbidden as the images of crucified saints on the church’s stained-glass windows.