Prologue

Their names were Alexander and Lillian Budd, but no one ever called them by their names. They weren’t “Alexander and Lillian,” they were sim­ply “the twins.”

The two had their own indi­vid­ual faults and imper­fec­tions, but together they were a sin­gle, almost inde­struc­tible, unit. A short­com­ing in one was com­pen­sated by an excep­tional tal­ent in the other. Certain chil­dren excel from a young age at com­pli­cated math­e­mat­ics or clas­si­cal vio­lin or com­pet­i­tive eat­ing, but the Budd twins were prodi­gies with an inher­ent abil­ity for life itself.

As they grew up, it was clear that when the two of them were together—which was almost always—nothing could stand in their way, noth­ing would be too dif­fi­cult or devi­ous, noth­ing couldn’t be con­quered by the sim­ple force of their indomitable will. Not even high school.

Beaumonde Academy is the most elite pri­vate high school in New Orleans: it was prob­a­bly founded more than a hun­dred years ago, and it surely has a minus­cule teacher-student ratio, and those teach­ers are prob­a­bly wise and atten­tive and bet­ter paid than most uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors, and Beaumonde stu­dents almost cer­tainly go on to become well-rounded suc­cess sto­ries who thank their beloved Latin teach­ers when they win Nobel Prizes and National Book Awards and Daytime Emmys.

But none of this mat­tered to the twins. To them, Beaumonde Academy was sim­ply another chal­lenge to con­quer, another inge­nious puz­zle to solve.

In their first semes­ter at Beaumonde, if the twins were known at all, they were known only as “that over­dressed snob with the hot-ass sis­ter.” By the end of the year, how­ever, the two of them com­manded the under­class­men; soon, being over­dressed and snobby was not only okay, it some­thing that all the boys wanted to be and all the girls wanted to be with.

The Budds knew that you didn’t win by play­ing the game…you won by con­trol­ling the game itself.

Alexander Budd had a seduc­tive charm, a quick wit, and a stun­ning wardrobe. Before long, he was the pride of the school, the pin­na­cle of the stu­dent body, and the absolute beat­ing heart of Beaumonde Academy. He knew every­one, he was aware of any­thing that hap­pened within the school and was often the cat­a­lyst behind most of it. He had no offi­cial title at the school, he par­tic­i­pated in no extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties, but he was respon­si­ble  for almost every­thing that tran­spired there. He made intro­duc­tions, he granted favors, he played matchmaker.

His stun­ning sis­ter Lillian was quiet and fierce and intel­li­gent and chaste and looked like a par­tic­u­larly fine spec­i­men of a long-thought-extinct race of ancient beings. Because she looked so dif­fer­ent from any­one else at the school—and, it was sus­pected, any­one else in the entire world—she almost never caused the sort of resent­ment and jeal­ousy that other women have towards the gor­geous in com­mer­cials for low-fat yogurt and diet soda. Alexander could charm hun­dreds for an after­noon; Lillian could inspire life-long loy­alty, one per­son at a time.

The twins were, to use the vul­gar and sim­plis­tic term, “the most pop­u­lar kids in school,” but mere pop­u­lar­ity was never their aim. It wasn’t enough for them to run Beaumonde Academy…they had to recre­ate it from the ground up. They had to make it Proper.

At the begin­ning of sopho­more year, Alexander described for his class­mates a night­mare in which every teenager bought iden­ti­cal out­fits at the same three or four stores at the mall. The clothes were poorly made with low-quality mate­r­ial; they were ill-fitting because an XL of twenty years was now labeled an M. The uni­form of the American Teenager was jeans that didn’t fit, paired with a cheap cot­ton T-shirt adorned with the logo of the store where they’d bought it on clearance.

There was a time, he said, when the young, edu­cated, and rea­son­ably attrac­tive actu­ally dressed and acted as though they were these things. But no more…today the gravest sin was to stand out from the crowd. Now, in the Age Of Comfort, equal­ity had been achieved at last, not by lift­ing up but by stoop­ing down: sweat­pants and base­ball caps for all, and let any­one who refuse them be labeled arro­gant, pre­ten­tious, elite.

Adults were no longer inter­ested in look­ing like adults, Alexander told them. When you’re forty and you dress like a tod­dler, you begin to act like a tod­dler. And so the social fab­ric was begin­ning to unravel..etiquette was for­got­ten, email replaced sta­tionery, grown men bragged about how long it had been since they’d worn their one suit.

But there was hope. In an world where every day a tai­lor went out of busi­ness, where every wannabe rebel wore the same t-shirt bought at the same store, where adver­tis­ers insisted you could only be a true orig­i­nal by buy­ing their mass-market products…in a world like this, to dress and act like adults from a for­got­ten age was actu­ally a vic­tory of sub­ver­sive non-conformity.

If a small and ded­i­cated group of teenagers became pas­sion­ate about how they looked, how they dressed, and how they acted, then they would begin to change their school and, even­tu­ally, the world. This was the only rebel­lion left in this ruined age, and—if done right—it would be revolutionary.

Style is substance.

• • •

The Beaumonde Academy prom was the crown­ing event of the Budds’ junior year. Traditionally held the night before grad­u­a­tion, the Beaumonde prom is actu­ally more of a for­mal din­ner with an hour or so of stiff danc­ing tacked on at the end. That year, how­ever, the stu­dents attempted the waltz, the tango, and the fox­trot to vary­ing degrees of suc­cess and dig­nity. The chief attrac­tion of the dance floor, though, wasn’t the danc­ing but the chance to show off their Budd-approved evening attire and the air of effort­less sophis­ti­ca­tion with which (they hoped) they were wear­ing it.

Three years into the Budds’ reign at the school, Beaumonde Academy had been trans­formed. The stu­dents had thor­oughly embraced Alexander’s vision and had slowly rein­vented them­selves. Soon the halls of the school were filled with boys in neck­ties and fit­ted trousers talk­ing to girls wear­ing tai­lored dresses and sim­ple unadorned jew­elry. There were pen knives and mono­grammed hand­ker­chiefs, per­fumed let­ters and cig­a­rette cases.

The stu­dents, though, knew what the twins had estab­lished wasn’t even about the clothes. It was about dis­cov­er­ing a way to live with grace and poise, about always know­ing what to say and do with­out ago­niz­ing over it like other teenagers. It was about believ­ing in and being a part of some­thing that was larger than your­self, and the feel­ing of sat­is­fac­tion that comes from doing a small part to make it happen.

After the jazz combo brought the last dance of the prom to an end, the boys bowed to their part­ners and escorted them back to their seats. It was time for the final and most impor­tant event of the evening, the pre­sen­ta­tion of the McMillan Award. This award, the high­est honor at the school, sup­pos­edly went to the grade that best exem­pli­fied the spirit of Beaumonde Academy, but it was only tech­ni­cally a con­test: the win­ners were allegedly deter­mined by a mys­te­ri­ous and arcane set of guide­lines, but the fact is it just went to the grad­u­at­ing seniors every year.

Well, almost every year. That year, for only the fourth (or was it the fifth?) time in their school’s his­tory, the junior class upset the seniors to win the McMillan. It really shouldn’t have shocked any­one, con­sid­er­ing what an impact the Budds, their Gang, and the rest of the class had made on the Academy, but at the time it seemed unfath­omable. The McMillan Award is com­pletely mean­ing­less, and there­fore obsessed over by the stu­dents, teach­ers, and alumni of Beaumonde Academy. This made the juniors’ win a Very Big Deal, as it hadn’t been won by a class other than the seniors in over ten years.

This was the night that every­thing would change. As the juniors cel­e­brated their win—tastefully and Proper, of course—they knew this was the turn­ing point. Junior year was over…just ahead would be the tri­umph of senior year.

And after senior year the real work would begin. After grad­u­a­tion, Beaumonde stu­dents would spread out across the coun­try, doing for their col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties what the twins had done for their high school. Soon, what had begun as a rebel­lion would become a rev­o­lu­tion, as tens of thou­sands of Proper col­lege grad­u­ates spilled out into that vul­gar world beyond, ready to rebuild it in their own more ele­gant image.

It was a ridicu­lous goal, a laugh­able one, and no one except the twins ever took it very seri­ously. But on prom night, as the rest of the juniors took pic­tures of the Budds hold­ing the McMillan, it didn’t just seem plausible…it seemed inevitable.

They said it would be the night every­thing would change, and it was true, noth­ing would be the same again. That same night, just a few hours later, City Councilman Lucas Budd—the twins’ father—would be sprawled on a side­walk on the edge of the French Quarter, hand­cuffed and rav­ing, with clothes askew and legs akimbo, as police pho­tog­ra­phers care­fully cat­a­loged the pow­ders and pills being gen­tly lifted from his trunk. There were even reports that a young man fled from the scene, but they were never proven.

Overnight Lucas Budd would go from being one of the city’s only true cru­saders to polit­i­cal poi­son, and within two weeks, Mrs. Budd would announce that she and the twins were spend­ing the sum­mer in her child­hood home of Lafayette, shield­ing her fam­ily from the toxic media envi­ron­ment her husband's activ­i­ties had created.

Back at the prom, though, this was all yet to come. No one there knew exactly how much things were going to change that summer…all they knew was that they were at the end of an extra­or­di­nary year and a tri­umphant night.

Everyone was happy, every­one was loved, every­one was Proper. But the stu­dent body knew that none of what they’d achieved—the clothes, the award, the elegance—would have been pos­si­ble if it weren’t for the unsmil­ing sib­lings at the front of the recep­tion hall, pos­ing for pic­tures with the McMillan Award.

Their names were Alexander and Lillian Budd, but no one ever called them by their names. To every­one at Beaumonde Academy, they were bet­ter known—out of admi­ra­tion, out of jeal­ousy, out of fond­ness, out of envy—as sim­ply The Darling Budds.

This is not their story.