by Alexa Woods
peeked around her open door and saw Arabella Ferguson there.
If people thought their Mondays were rough, they should try one at
Fairfield Upper Academy. The private high school catered to Cincinnati’s
elite. The tuition for a year cost more than most people paid for college
admission. The chances of getting into a good college were increased by
attending a good high school like Fairfield, and June’s parents had urged
her to take all her brightness and bundle it into applying for a scholarship.
It was rough, going to a new school for her last year. She didn’t know
anyone when she’d started and all the rich, spoiled, entitled kids knew she
was both fresh meat and hadn’t grown up in the same gated communities
and mansions with freaking pools in the backyard and sports cars in the
driveway.
Arabella turned to her group of friends, four other girls who were all
various shades of blonde. None of them were as pretty as Arabella. They
didn’t dare upstage her, and all of them, including Arabella, were on the
cheer team.
She held her nose in June’s direction and pretended to gag. “Ugh, it
smells like old trash. Rotting garbage. That’s it. Right. Poverty. The stench
of little miss ‘call on me in class all day because I’m so smart that I got a
scholarship to be here’.” Arabella laughed obnoxiously and Christine,
Charlene, Aberdeen, and Savannah joined in, their forced giggles feeding
Arabella’s mean-girl giggles.
“I heard your dad’s a mechanic. He spends all day working on the cars
he’ll never be able to afford. Must be hard, wanting something so badly,
knowing that you’ll never have it. Oh, I have an idea. Maybe I could talk to
my dad, and he could come work for us. My dad is always complaining
about how his cars need tuning this and fine tuning that and whatnot. Oh,
wait. I’m sure he doesn’t work on things like that. Probably just the regular
junk the rest of the world drives. But if your family needs the help, I could
talk to my parents about getting your mom a job as our maid. If she could
be trusted not to steal the silverware.”
The other girls glanced at each other nervously, but still laughed on
command when Arabella was done, like trained monkeys. Fairfield had a
strict no bullying policy, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. It happened
to June. A lot.
“How very sixteen-hundreds of you.”
What was wrong with her? She knew that despite having everything,
there must be something. People didn’t bully for no reason. There was
obviously something in Arabella’s life that wasn’t right, something she
wasn’t getting that she needed.
Arabella scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, just the silverware comment. It’s very old-fashioned.” June knew
she should just shut up and take it and hope Arabella got tired of bullying
her and moved on to someone else. If she didn’t react, there’d be no
satisfaction in it for her tormentor.
So far, two months into the school year, it hadn’t worked.
Arabella scowled, dodged around June’s open locker door, and reached in
for her biology textbook. She tucked it against her chest and leaned back, a
sick smirk on her face. “Thanks for lending it to me. I hope you don’t mind
having to replace it when I accidentally drop it into the garbage chute
tonight. You know, where you sleep.”
The textbooks weren’t assigned. They were purchased. Her scholarship
covered her books too, but not if she had to replace one. June knew the
textbook could easily cost sixty to a hundred dollars. She worked part time
at an ice cream shop and that would easily be two to three shifts to replace
it.
She held out her hand. “Please give me back my textbook.”
“But you were so nice to lend it to me because I forgot mine at home
today.” Arabella blinked innocently.
June’s lips parted. She had been about to say that she’d tell someone
about the book, but she knew how stupid that was. She would never tattle
on anyone, let alone Arabella. That would be like throwing gas on the fire,
and Arabella didn’t need more fuel.
“If you’re so smart, you won’t need it,” Arabella taunted. “You seem to
have all the answers in class. I’m sure you can get by just fine without it.
That is, if you can’t afford to replace it.”
“I need it,” June protested. “You know that my family isn’t well off.
You’re always telling me I smell poor, and you know that I live downtown,
not anywhere near where anyone else here lives. I have no idea why you
hate me or why you want to make my life hell, except that it’s easy for you
to dislike what you don’t understand, and try to grind down what you feel
threatened by so it can’t rise up.” June snapped her mouth shut. She’d said
way too much. She should have said nothing and just tried to reach out and
get her book back. Anger and annoyance had gotten the best of her.
Scarlet crept up Arabella’s neck, up towards her pink shellacked lips.
“Did you hear that?” she screeched, sounding every bit like a shrill crow.
Aberdeen glanced around nervously. June felt like doing the same,
hoping that Summer would come walking over to her locker and save her.
Summer was better at dealing with Arabella’s aggression. They were on
equal footing, and Summer didn’t let anyone push her around. She would
have the perfect thing to say. Something snarky and witty, and it would send
Arabella on her way because Summer wasn’t an easy target and Arabella
didn’t like to be humiliated or bested, especially not in front of her posse.
Savannah scowled, while Christine stared at June in surprise. It seemed
like her growing a backbone had taken them all by surprise.
“Just give her the stupid book back,” Charlene, who was almost as
fearlessly mean as Arabella was, said evenly. She tossed a mass of blonde
curls over her shoulders. “She’s so basic it’s disgusting. She does smell like
trash. She is poor. She needs all the help she can get. She wouldn’t even be
here if it wasn’t for charity. She’s a charity case.”
“CC,” Arabella giggled with cruel delight. “I think it suits. It’s better than
June. Your parents were so stupid they couldn’t come up with a better
name? Had to pick the month you were born in?”
June hadn’t been born in June, but there was no way she was rising to
that taunt.
Arabella’s eyes swept over June, so cold and spiteful that she shivered
despite her resolve to stand there, her body totally rigid. “You’re probably
the same size as my little sister. She’s in eighth grade and still looks like a
boy. When she cleans out her closet, I’ll make sure you get her rejects. You
could use them. I’m nice like that, you know. Always looking out for other
people.”
Even if Arabella had been nice and offered something like that for real,
June would rather have walked over hot coals than accept. She and Summer
weren’t even close to the same size—June wasn’t curvy and gorgeous like
Summer was—but if they we
re, she wouldn’t share her clothes either. She’d
feel weird doing something like that. She was so sure everyone would
know, because she couldn’t afford designer brands and trendy crap.
“Here.” Arabella wound up, and before June knew what was happening,
her textbook, which probably weighed at least twenty freaking pounds,
came flying at her head.
She wasn’t athletic in her best moments, and even though she ducked,
she was too slow. The book caught her on the lower half of her face. It felt
like someone had thrown a water balloon at her, except the bursting balloon
was filled with pain, not water, and that wet stuff trickling down her face?
She was so shocked she just stood there while her body vibrated with pain.
Finally, she realized she should raise her hand. When her fingers came away
red, her head started to spin. A dull roar erupted between her ears.
“Oh shit,” Savannah whispered.
“Fuck, Arabella!” Charlene hissed. “Why’d you do that? She’s bleeding.”
“She’ll tell on us now,” Christine agreed. She planted her hands on her
hips, daring June to do any such thing and see what happened.
Aberdeen just stood there, looking decidedly sorry and out of place, but
there was no way she was going to risk her status with the popular crowd to
say anything. She turned her gaze down to her white gladiator sandals. That
was the shit thing about Fairfield. They viewed themselves as progressive
for having abolished uniforms, but it just made everything worse for kids
like June. Granted, there weren’t many scholarship kids, so not many
looked out of place.
Arabella looked smug. “She wouldn’t tell anyone.” She sounded very
certain about that. “She’s clumsy. She opened her locker and the book fell
out right onto her face.” She stared June down menacingly, one perfectly
waxed and lightened brow raised in challenge. “Isn’t that right, Charity
Case?”
June said nothing. She bent and picked up her textbook. Her lip was
leaking all over the place, and she dipped further into the shadow of her
locker in search of a tissue. She told herself that Arabella hadn’t meant to
hurt her when she’d hurled the book at her. Had she? Was she really that
vicious?
Why does she hate me so much? I’ve never done anything to her.
It was very obvious that June was smarter, but the last thing Arabella
seemed to care about was intelligence. School wasn’t about academics for
girls like Arabella. That was the last thing on their mind.
June sensed she was alone, and when she peeked over her shoulder,
Arabella and her mean-girl gang had moved off. June was thankful that at
least the textbook hadn’t hit her glasses and broken them. That would be the
last thing she needed. Her face ached and stung, but she’d already stopped
the blood by pinching her lip for a few minutes. She tucked her book back
into her locker, shut the door firmly, and walked quickly towards the
bathroom where she could clean up and rinse the heat of humiliation and
anger from her face with cold water.
Chapter 3
Arabella
Deep breaths. Count to ten. This is going to be fine. It’s all going to be
fine.
“This is the lunchroom. Isn’t it great? I love the free fruit. You can help
yourself to that. And, of course, the coffee is also free.”
Tina Rodgers, one of the more junior marketing coordinators, had
probably drawn the short straw when it came to the office tour. She did it
happily, though, with a genuine smile on her face.
“If you love this, you’re going to love the company barbeque coming up.
We always wanted to do a potluck, but someone would probably food
poison someone else, then someone would sue, so it’s always a catered
thing, but it’s nice. Did they tell you about it?”
Marketing departments could be run differently, but at New Shooz 2uz,
seriously the most original, slightly awful name in history, but somehow it
kind of worked, the marketing was done by one team.
“Uh, yeah. It was mentioned.”
“It’s this Friday. We all get the day off with pay. Yay!” Tina looked like
someone who would be bubbly, and she was. She was petite, with a bright
pink pixie cut, piercings in her cheeks, septum, and lower lip, and a
penchant for wearing fun, bright clothes.
“It sounds like it’s going to be great,” Arabella forced out. The words
practically wedged in her throat.
If someone had told her who she would be working for, whose company
she’d be working at, and who would one day be her boss above all bosses,
there was no way she would have applied. Unfortunately, she’d been so
desperate for a position that she’d sent out no less than fifty or sixty
resumes to so many different jobs she lost track.
After the investment company she’d been working for had downsized
their marketing department, meaning closed it altogether and got rid of
everyone but the very senior staff, and even then, they only kept their jobs
with major pay cuts, she’d found herself running out of time. She’d even
applied to jobs that had nothing to do with marketing.
It might have been shameful flipping burgers, but at least she could have
kept the dang lights on. As it turned out, she didn’t have to resort to that.
She got a great position in her field, a job where she could use her talents
and experience. It paid well. It was a great opportunity at a uniquely artistic
company. The job had great benefits and promised to have lots of perks,
including a great work environment where people didn’t hate their lives or
their jobs.
After her interview and the phone call telling her she got the position,
she’d sat down on her couch and had a good cry. She’d poured herself a
glass of water, got out her laptop, and sat down to do the research she
should have done ahead of time, learning more about the company – and its
CEO.
That’s when she’d realized her mistake.
“Well, I’ve shown you the reception area, the lunchroom, and the
meeting rooms. The rest you’ll probably learn as you go. Do you want me
to take you to your office?”
“Sure. That would be great.”
“We all get our own offices here. Isn’t that awesome? No cubicles for us!
June is really progressive. It’s super cool for someone to start a company all
on their own while still in college and be really good at it and get
successful, and still schlub it at work with all of us, slogging away at the
daily grind.” Tina threw a hand over her mouth as they walked down the
hallway from the lunchroom through a maze of offices Arabella knew she’d
be lost within a few minutes. “Don’t say schlub. Or slog. She would never
think of being here as either of those things. She loves this place. This is her
passion. I mean, it’s pretty cool. What’s not to love about this?” She pointed
down at her shoes, which were bright red with little bats on the front. “I
designed these bad boys myself. Freaking cool, if I do say so.”
Arabella liked them. She liked Tina too, though her high scho
ol version
of herself would have targeted her like she was a freaking bullseye.
So…back to that mistake.
It turned out that June Erickson, the girl she’d bullied in high school
unmercifully and with zero remorse because she was a teenage turdbag, was
now a CEO. Of the very company she’d had been hired at. How about them
apples? Yeah, she was seriously screwed.
After hours spent trying to figure out how to turn down the new position,
Arabella knew she was going to have to take it, at least until something else
came along. She had bills to pay and her parents were depending on her.
After they’d declared bankruptcy and her dad had barely avoided jail time
for the damn scheme he’d been involved in running, they’d turned to her.
Katrina, Arabella’s younger sister, wasn’t an option. She was still in
college. She’d had to extend her four-year plan into a six- or eight-year
plan, given that she no longer had a fund to help her pay for tuition. She had
to work part time and go to school part time. If Arabella wanted to keep the
small bungalow where she and her parents lived—her mom and dad in the
basement while she took the top floor—she needed a job and she needed
one fast.
“Okay. This is it. I hope you like it. I think they look classy, with all that
glass, but some people hate it. It makes them feel all exposed and open.”
The office building was located in downtown Cincinnati. June was an
Ohio success story, it turned out. She was making change happen all over
the world with her innovative ideas and she’d never moved to New York,
LA, London, or any other big, popular, metropolitan city where smart,
successful people usually ended up. She’d stayed right there, and her shoes
were a massive success in Ohio, more so than anywhere else, because
people supported her for being a homegrown girl.
“Yeah. It’s great.” Arabella stepped in and stared out the massive
windows on the one side of the palatial office. They were tinted so that the
sun wasn’t unbearable. New Shooz 2uz was located on the fifth floor of a
twenty or so storey high rise, and the view from where she stood was quite
nice. Not too high up to be intimidating, but high enough that the streets
and rooflines below were still seen from an interesting angle. The rest of the
office was made of clear glass. The whole thing was utterly modern, from
