by Callie Rose
He was still fucking pissed.
I ignored the four boys and headed into the building, trying to let the rush of victory override the panic at what would come next. I’d promised to meet every taunt and prank that was thrown at me, and it was a dangerous game of one-upmanship to play.
Adena and Sable glared at me all through seventh period. Sable’s forearm was hidden by the sleeve of her uniform, but she held her arm near her chest protectively, as if I’d almost hacked it off instead of just cut it. I was honestly a little surprised she hadn’t reported me to Dean Levy, but I figured it had to be because she wanted to get back at me on her own.
If she brought the admins’ attention to this whole thing, they might try to do something to stop all of this. And none of my tormentors wanted that.
After class, Adena cornered me in the hallway near a case full of trophies, yanking on a fistful of my hair to make me stop. I spun around in a panic, but no one was coming at me with scissors, thank fuck.
The blonde girl shook her head, her blue eyes flashing with malice. “I hope you’re happy, you trashy slut. You could’ve fucking killed Sable.”
I reached up to rub my scalp, which stung like a bitch. “Well, maybe that’ll teach her not to run with scissors.”
She shot me a look of contempt, ignoring the press of bodies pushing past us in the corridor. “You think you’re some kind of fucking vigilante now? Some badass bitch? You think if you just show the Princes how tough you are, they’ll all become obsessed with you again and take you back? ’Cause I’ve got news for you, Idaho trash. That will never happen.”
My jaw tightened. Take me back? That’s what she thought I wanted? For the Princes to enfold me in their fucked up rich kids club again?
I couldn’t even answer, couldn’t force words through my clenched teeth. But Adena didn’t wait for a response anyway.
“Give it up, you dumb slut. Mason and I got back together over the summer, and he told me everything. And trust me, he’ll never let you back in. He fucking hates you.”
My heart lurched in my chest, like it had momentarily forgotten how to pump blood. For some reason, her words twisted like a knife in my gut, and I hated the feeling. After what Adena had done to me last year, jumping me with the help of her fucking minions, it stung to know Mason would still want her, would still take her back.
But what did it matter?
The tall, brown-haired Prince had never been mine, in any sense of the word. And given what I knew about him now, maybe I should be happy he and Adena were together again. They fucking deserved each other.
And who knows. Maybe Mason was the one who told Adena to attack me.
He and the other Princes had seemed shocked and angry after it’d happened, and Elijah had taken me back to my room and tended to my cuts and bruises. But if so many other things last year had been lies, why not that too?
Some part of my mind still couldn’t believe it—couldn’t believe that Mason would’ve deliberately sent Adena after me like that. But that was the part of my brain I refused to listen to anymore. The part that hoped to find goodness in a world inhabited by monsters.
“Good,” I forced out. “I hope the two of you have a long and awful life together. And I hope when you have kids, your demon baby’s horns shred your fucking vagina.”
Adena’s mouth dropped open as her face reddened, and she shoved my shoulders hard, knocking me back into the side of the trophy case. “Watch it, you bitch!”
I pushed myself away from the large wooden case, hands curling into fists as I stepped toward her. But maybe she’d learned a thing or two from Sable, because before I could do anything else, she turned and hurried off through the dwindling trickle of students.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, but it hardly mattered, I was more on edge than I’d been even during my first semester at Oak Park, constantly waiting for the next fight, the next attack. Fighting back felt good, but it was also terrifying and exhausting.
The more I pushed back, the harder the Princes and their minions would come after me, and it was just a matter of seeing who broke first.
All week, I’d spent the evenings holed up in Prentice Hall, doing homework or typing away at my computer as I searched for more dirt on the Princes. Leah was still ignoring me, which meant Maggie and Dan were sort of doing the same, and most of the other kids only spoke to me to call me names or threaten me.
Oliver was in my second period Trigonometry class, and he made a point to be nice to me, sitting next to me and chatting me up. I wasn’t quite sure where it was coming from, but considering so many other students seemed to hate me, it was hard to say no to a friendly face.
On Friday, he asked me if I’d like to go to the football game on Saturday night. I honestly didn’t want to, but since I was determined to show the Princes they couldn’t control me, it would be a good chance to drive that point home. And besides, Oliver was one of the few kids at Oak Park who’d ignored the Princes’ directive to make my life hell.
“Yeah, sure.” I nodded, stuffing my Trig textbook back into my bag.
“Awesome.” He beamed, his dark brown eyes lighting up. “The game’s at 7:30, so I’ll come by your dorm to pick you up at like seven?”
“Okay,” I said absently. My attention was already shifting toward navigating the hallway to my next class.
“Great. It’s a date.”
Oh.
A date.
That hadn’t been exactly where my mind had gone when he’d asked me, but of course he thought it was a date. And maybe that was okay. I hadn’t been on an actual date in over a year—none of the time I’d spent with the Princes could qualify—and as messed up as everything in my life was, I still craved a normal high school experience.
I limped to the end of the week, exhausted and ragged but still alive.
Still here.
My attempt to meet and match every shitty thing done to me was exhausting, and honestly, I was falling behind. But it seemed to be working. Some kids had switched from bullying me to ignoring me, and Sable gave me a wide berth in the halls, almost like she was a little afraid of me.
Saturday was a home game, so Oliver and I were able to walk right over to the stadium from my dorm. As we made our way inside the large structure, he put an arm around me, gripping my shoulder lightly. It was an intimate gesture, and even though it felt a little strange, I didn’t pull away. I’d been nervous about going to the game when so much of the school was out to get me, but having Oliver by my side helped.
I tried to keep my focus on the brown-haired boy beside me instead of players on the field, but I found my gaze settling too often on the jersey that read 23—and above that, Whittaker. Finn moved like something superhuman as he played, and it reminded me painfully of our talks about dance and football. Everything I loved about ballet, I could see in the game he was playing, and I wished I could enjoy watching him tear across the field or spike the ball after a touchdown.
When he tugged his helmet off during a break in play, his blond hair looked slightly darker from sweat, and his gaze darted up, finding me in the stands as if I had summoned it somehow.
“I’ll—be right back. I’ve gotta go to the restroom,” I blurted to Oliver before leaping to my feet and scrambling over the row of bodies to the aisle.
I sat in the stall for a good five minutes before I returned to the stands. Finn had his helmet back on and was running the ball down the field, and he didn’t look up toward me again for the rest of the game.
We won, but I hardly even noticed.
Oliver talked me into going to the after-party too, but as soon as we walked through the door, I regretted it. The Princes were holding court in the large living room, and just like Finn’s had during the game, all of their gazes immediately found me.
Jesus. How the fuck do they do that?
A gaggle of girls surrounded them, and I found myself glancing around, looking for Adena. I hadn’t noticed her with Mason in the halls o
f the school at all, which made me wonder if she’d been lying about them being back together.
Ruby Bratton was making a serious play for Elijah, but he absently pushed her away as his hazel eyes watched me. I hadn’t spoken to him since Tuesday, when I’d told him there was no way I’d leave Oak Park, and every time he’d seen me since then, he’d shot me a look that was equal parts anger, frustration, and worry.
“Hey, you want a drink?” Oliver leaned down to speak loudly into my ear over the music.
“No.” I shook my head, raising my voice too. “Thanks.”
His brows pulled together. “You sure? Nothing?”
“Yeah.”
I hadn’t had a drink all summer, and I didn’t plan to start now. My dad had died of alcoholism, and my grandpa was a heavy drinker. Last year, I’d been stupid, but the whole point of coming back here was to not repeat my damn mistakes.
Oliver grimaced, looking like he was pretty sure I was making a mistake right now. “Okay… If you say so. I’m gonna go get one for myself though.”
“Sure.”
I nodded tightly, already tempted to cave and get a drink too. Not because I needed it so bad, but because I needed something to do. I could still feel the Princes’ gazes burning into me, and I felt like a sitting duck just standing there.
“Be right back.” Oliver pecked me on the cheek and started off through the crowd.
As soon as he disappeared, I felt it—a shift of energy across the room. Moving as a single unit, Mason, Cole, Elijah, and Finn stepped toward me, and my heart jumped into my throat.
I wanted to punch Elijah in the fucking dick. For all his whispered warnings and worried glances, he was still backing the other three on this.
He was still on their side.
I stiffened, drawing myself up and bracing to face whatever unknown threat was about to be unleashed on me. “What do you want?”
“Did you come here with Oliver Hedelston?” Cole asked.
Before I could answer, Oliver returned. He had a red Solo cup full of something, and he cast the Princes a suspicious look as he stepped up beside me, slipping an arm around my waist this time.
“What the hell are you doing, Hedelston?” This time it was Mason who spoke, and his green eyes flashed as he cocked his head. “Are you fucking with what doesn’t belong to you?”
Anger flared, bolstered by a pain so deep it might as well have cut to the bone. I didn’t belong to anybody, and Mason had given up any claim he might ever have had on me the night he told me he considered breaking my heart a “side benefit” of wrecking my life.
I wanted to grab the cup out of Oliver’s hands and throw the drink at Mason. I wanted to crumple the plastic into a little ball and shove it down the stuck-up Prince’s throat.
But instead, I turned my body toward Oliver’s so that his arm around my waist brought us into each other’s embrace, chest to chest. Then I wrapped my arms around his neck, rose up on tiptoes, and kissed him. He only hesitated for a second before his lips moved against mine, his grip on me tightening slightly.
He wore a little too much cologne, and the smell overwhelmed me with our faces this close together. There wasn’t a lot of chemistry in the kiss, but my lips moved against his with a fierce intensity anyway. I kissed him to prove a point—to myself, to the four boys watching us, to the whole damn world.
The Princes didn’t own me.
Nobody did.
And nobody got to tell me what to do.
When my lips were swollen and I was about to pass out from the strength of Oliver’s cologne, I finally pulled away from him. He blinked down at me before a pleased, satisfied smile spread across his face.
But he was the only one smiling. My heart was beating too hard, the anger in my veins burning too hot, for me to smile about anything.
And the Princes? They all stood in stony silence, gazes shifting back and forth between me and the curly-haired boy.
I had noticed before that although they often functioned almost like a single entity, there were moments when they seemed to break apart, becoming separate individuals, no longer bolstered by the group.
This was one of those times. They stared at me as I stared right back at them, and each of their expressions was distinctly different.
But none of them looked happy.
Chapter 6
We didn’t stay long at the party after that. I claimed I had a headache, and Oliver agreed to drive me back to campus. He walked me to my door and tried to kiss me again, but I ducked my head, avoiding his lips.
Honestly, I never would’ve kissed him at the party in the first place if it hadn’t been to prove a point. I liked him, but I was wary about trusting anyone, and I although he was a good looking guy and seemed nice enough, I had a hard time mustering the same attraction for him that I’d felt for all the Princes.
Still felt, even though it burned a hole in my soul to admit it.
Oliver seemed disappointed, but he rallied and asked me to go out again the next weekend.
“Sure. That would be nice.” I smiled, trying to force myself to feel something for him, to be attracted to someone who might be good for me for once.
The headache I had made up to escape the after-party was rapidly becoming real, so I made my excuses and slipped inside. As I padded up the stairs to my second-floor room, I rubbed hard at my temples, trying to banish Mason’s words from my mind.
The Princes had acted like they still had some claim to me, like I was some thing they could use, toy with, or break whenever they wanted.
I’d kissed Oliver to piss them off, to prove them wrong. But I couldn’t help but think that despite my little demonstration, there was some truth to Mason’s words.
For the two and a half months I’d been in Sand Valley before Erin Bennett showed up, not a day had gone by when I didn’t think about the Princes. I’d spent every free moment in the library researching their lives, trying to dig up dirt on them. I had a little black book with a section for each of them, and a flash drive to store incriminating evidence.
Obsession with those four boys, with the vengeance I was determined to wreak on them, had taken over my life, blotting out all other dreams and goals.
In a way, I was theirs, even though I’d never wanted to be.
To remind myself of who I was—of who I wanted to be—I threw myself back into dance on Monday.
I kept expecting Adena or someone else to invade my little sanctuary on the second floor of the gymnasium. All the Princes knew I came up here to practice during class. Hell, Finn had spent almost half the previous year hanging out with me in this little room. It was one of the few memories I allowed myself to keep, to leave untarnished by the bullshit that had followed.
The small dance studio had been our neutral ground, our Switzerland, and there was some part of me that still believed everything that’d happened in this room had been real. As if, like in a true demilitarized zone, Finn and I had both shed our weapons and armor before we stepped through the door.
As if the person I’d gotten to know inside these four walls actually existed.
Somewhere.
I shoved thoughts of Finn aside, refusing to let my gaze track to the spot near the door where he used to sit, and sank into a low plié. It would take a bit of time to get my body back into the swing of things, but nowhere near as long as it’d taken last fall. I had trained hard all last year, and although three months off was a long time—in dance terms, anyway—I was determined to reach and surpass my old level quickly.
This was the real reason I was here. To pursue the life I wanted.
Bringing down the Princes will just be a “side benefit”.
The girl in the mirror grinned evilly at me as she rose up onto the balls of her feet.
I spent the rest of the period going through drills and stretches, reawakening muscles in my body that’d started to lose tone. It felt good to be in this familiar room, with the abandoned mats and heavy bags piled in the corner, and f
or that single hour, I let myself focus on something besides my revenge.
The rest of the day passed without incident, but Tuesday and Wednesday were awful. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was related in any way to the party after the football game, and the anger on the Princes’ faces that night. A couple of times, Oliver stepped to my defense when people called me names or threw shit at me in the halls, though I couldn’t help but notice he only did it when it was underclassmen or people so low on the hierarchy they were basically invisible.
I couldn’t really blame him. I hadn’t asked him to stick up for me, and he was one of the only people in school who did. At least he was doing something, even if what he did made no difference at all.
On Thursday, Adena stole all my books and notebooks from my locker and burned them in a dumpster near the adjunct buildings. Every note I’d taken for half my classes was lost, and I had a sudden flare of panic that she’d burned my little black journal—but I never kept that in my locker. It stayed in my backpack, kept with me at all times.
I had to go to the registrar’s office and beg for replacement books, which I got after paying a hefty fine and enduring a lecture from the woman behind the counter. And when I went to go put the new textbooks in my locker, I found that it’d been broken into again. Someone had scratched disgusting messages all over the inside of the door and walls, and the outside was decorated with just one word.
Trash.
So fucking original.
I hated that it still got to me. The things they’d written in my locker were just words—they couldn’t actually hurt me. Couldn’t leap off the scratched paint and attack me.
But not all wounds were physical. My dad had taught me that lesson many times over before he died. And as much as I wanted to ignore them, the hissed names and scrawled notes calling me everything from a worthless slut to a thief to a disease-riddle piece of trash did hurt.
