Now that I live here, I probably have to read them all. A sort of macabre book club, to get to know my grandma through her work. I pull a copy of Killer Queen off the shelf and thumb through it. The back cover reminds me of the general plot. A homecoming queen is offed the night of the dance, drowned in her high school pool. I think they made a movie out of this one. My mom used to groan whenever she’d scroll past her mom’s adaptations on streaming, steering us to dense foreign dramas and quirky indies instead. But I’m curious about Maura’s breakout hit. I open to the first page and already see this one has a supremely confident heroine as well. The opening paragraphs are a treatise on the haves and have-nots of high school, with an emphasis on the main character’s beauty and popularity.

I shut the book, lost to anxieties about tomorrow, my first day at a new school. Is this the kind of place still deeply entrenched in the bullshit high school politics of old movies, which seemed quaint, retro cool at Pasadena Central High? According to my mom, the five-disparate-stereotypes teen stuff of John Hughes movies was legit back in the day, but at my school everyone was pretty friendly, and no one cared if you were into sports or academics or drama or whatever. There was definitely no nerds versus jocks dichotomy. I got decent grades and did theater and was on the swim team and fangirled hard for BTS. I contained multitudes, and no one ostracized or bullied me for anything. Wasn’t particularly popular, either, but who cares? Seaview, however, is a small town. I’d heard things about faraway, less progressive places, lost to time.

Maura’s book is certainly a time warp. She wrote it in the eighties but set it in the seventies. I return to the pages, picturing bell-bottom jeans and feathered hair as the pretty sixteen-year-old Melinda “Melly” Watts walks the halls of Seaside High (real life inspiring fiction, I guess), then discovers homecoming queen Cassidy’s body in the pool at the dance. The writing is punchy, a bit melodramatic, but definitely engrossing. Maura paints her cast of characters with a vivid charm, but there’s an ominous undertone. I’m already guessing at suspects. Melly’s best friend screams frenemy, and her math teacher is on the wrong side of attentive.

A nearby desk clock tells me it’s almost two a.m., and knowing I need to go to bed, or at least try to, I put Killer Queen back and return to my room.