I understood the expression. I looked like them, but I was representing something they hated.
The final stop of the Ridgewood to Crestwood bus was at the base of the hill near Crestwood Academy. I stomped off into the morning sunlight and started my walk up the hill to my demise. On the road beside me was a sleek black BMW convertible, its top ripped back.
I couldn’t look away. The boys in the car—three of them, in total—were like predators in jet-black sunglasses, hunting me. Heavy hip-hop blared from the car speakers as it slowed down.
All three of them were the most gorgeous boys I had seen in my life. They were most likely seventeen or eighteen-years-old at most—but all of them looked like they were going on twenty-five or twenty-six years old. In the back, one of them stretched out, making his dirty blonde locks glow in the sun. The one in the passenger seat had sandy brown hair and enormous, broad shoulders that seemed to stretch out his Crestwood uniform when he turned to say something to the driver.
But the sight of the driver almost destroyed me. My stomach swirled with panic. You could clearly see he was the tallest of all of them with dark tousled hair. He gripped the steering wheel with a near-violence and seemed to stare me down as the sports car rolled by, not hearing whatever it was the guy in the passenger seat was saying to him. I guess it didn’t matter.
Before I could continue my reckless staring, the driver smashed his foot on the gas pedal and surged the car up the hill toward Crestwood Academy. I whirled around, not wanting to lose sight of them. My knees knocked together and I probably looked like a little nervous school girl. Jesus Christ!
I realized then that I had seen that dark tousled head of hair before. The driver was Kieran—the kid who had crashed one of our Ridgewood parties last year because Michael’s mom had fucked his dad.
That night, he had looked more like a monster more than a gorgeous magazine model. The blood had splattered off his knuckles as beat the shit out, Michael. Kieran had made a mockery out of him on his own turf. His face was so messed up. The stitches had left some wild scars. Of course, nobody had reported anything to the authorities and Michael had just said it was a stupid fight that broke out—that he had gotten caught in the middle of it.
I wondered if Kieran ever knew what Michael looked like after he’d fucked him over so bad. I wondered if he cared. Probably not.
As if Crestwood elite had to care about anyone or anything besides themselves.
I reached back and tugged at my dark chestnut locks and glanced down at my legs, the skin newly-shaved and glowing. More and more cars passed me by, as I headed up to Crestwood. I kept my eyes straight ahead and walked up the footpath, which snaked through the trees. This was the first day of the rest of my life and I prayed to God all would go well.
I was suddenly too curious to turn back. Even if it meant facing whatever it was, they wanted to ‘pay me back’ with up there in the Academy.
But I had been asked to attend the Academy, rather than being born into it. And didn’t that make me better than any of these lazy, entitled Crestwood Elites?
Chapter Seven
The yellow tarp remained hanging over my artwork across Crestwood’s stone wall. I wanted to pause and take another look at what had started it all, but the first bell was ringing inside the walls of the Academy. I stretched my long legs toward the door and whipped inside to discover the panicked early-morning rush. It looked like rush hour in Grand Central Station.
Thankfully Mrs. Crooks had given me a brief tour and showed me where my locker was the previous week. I joined the stream of students toward the second-floor hallways, turning over my locker combination in my head. All I had to do was pick up my first two books and find my first-class—French, just like back in Ridgewood.
There was a girl next to my locker, undoing her own. She had long toned legs and her blonde curls cascaded down her back like a waterfall. Her slender fingers eased around the lock as she tossed her head back, looking someone from a teen magazine. When I reached the space beside her, she turned her head quickly, flashing me a row of perfect white teeth and bright crystal blue eyes.
“God! Are you the new girl?” She asked, giving me a welcoming smile.
The voice was friendly and alive. I tilted my head. I’d never had someone so beautiful, with wealth and ability—pay any sort of attention to me. I was a sucker for it.
“Yes,” I answered. “Is it that obvious?”
The girl laughed good-naturedly. Her laugh literally sounded like rain tinkling on a glass windowpane. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just that most of us have gone to school together for years. I heard you were coming and well— it looks like our lockers are right next to one another. Oh—I’m Hailey, by the way. Hailey Blair.” She extended her hand and I glanced down at her perfect manicured fingernails that were covered in a deep shade of crimson.
I shook it briefly and then it came to me. “Oh! Blair. You aren’t somehow related to...”
Hailey rolled her eyes slightly, although it was clear she was proud of it. “My grandfather has been the headmaster here for decades. You have to imagine how hard it is for me. It’s like he’s watching my move every move.”
Of course. All these rich assholes were related to one another. But then again, Hailey didn’t seem—like an ass? She continued to grin at me. I blinked at her hand, twirling around her lock. She hadn’t opened it yet. Had she forgotten her combination?
No, she was just being polite and talking to me. Couldn't that be true?
“Well, thanks for saying hi,” I told her as I turned to my own locker and twirled the lock to the right numbers. “I took the bus up from Ridgewood today and I have to admit. I was pretty nervous about...”
Just then, I opened my locker. A scream tore through me and I leaped back, staring at the impossible horror in my locker.
Inside there were four dead mice hanging by their tails, which were wrapped around the coat hooks at the top. Their paws hung down, making it look like they were holding an enormous sign. The sign read: ‘END THE RIDGEWOOD INFESTATION.’
All the blood drained from my face. I could see the students gathering around me as they started to cackle and shriek with laughter. Elbows stuck into me like swords, as more and more Crestwood members recognized me as their fresh blood, the new girl from Ridgewood that had an enormous mark on her back.
Dead mice? Had someone actually hung dead mice in my locker?
It wasn’t just disgusting. It was fucking evil.
Laughter rang out beside me. My eyes flickered toward the pretty blonde girl beside me—Hailey Blair, a girl who had just greeted me with beauty and grace. Now, her face was scrunched up like the devils.
So. That hadn’t been her locker beside mine, after all. She just wanted the best seat in the house.
“Look at her face!” Hailey Blair cried as her finger pointed at me. She reached forward and gripped my chin, moving my head side to side. “She thinks she can come in here and paint horrible pictures of my grandfather on the side of our Academy, and just get away with it?” Hailey shot me a venomous glare. “Well, she really does have another thing coming to her.”
With all my strength, I tugged my face away and shoved my locker closed. I rushed toward my first-period French class like I was on the track team, my eyes beginning to fill with tears. As I walked, the students in the hallway broke off into their own first-period classes and I leaned up against a wall taking in a deep breath trying to calm myself. A moment later, my footfalls echoed in the now-empty halls and I couldn’t get the image of the dead mice out of my head—how helpless they had been, their little hands hanging down.
The French teacher, Madame Peters, instructed that I take a seat in the second row. If she noticed I was sweating and blotchy, she didn’t mention it. I collapsed into my desk and blinked to my left, feeling like I was in a damn nightmare. There, two rows back was Hailey Blair, beaming at me like she was the sun itself. She gave me a little, girlish wave.
“O
h? I see you’ve met our new student, Miss Blair,” Madame Peters said. “Everyone, this is Kennedy Harper.”
“From the ditches of Ridgewood,” someone coughed under their breath, several rows back.
I turned quickly, attempting to see who it was and all that greeted me were smug ass faces.
“Yes, well. I hope you’ll all help me give her a warm welcome,” Madame Peters continued before instructing us to turn to page sixty-two in our notebooks.
As I flicked toward the page, I felt the burning gaze of someone off to my left in front of Hailey. I turned to see that the driver of the convertible BMW from earlier that morning—Kieran himself—stared at me with a menace, his eyes were hard and dark blue and glittering, and his jaw was set and chiseled, revealing nothing but impossible hatred. His French book was spread out before him, but he seemed happy to glare at me without pause.
His Crestwood Academy uniform was unbuttoned at the top, revealing the hints of some kind of tattoo on the left side of his chest. His shoulders were thick and his biceps were threaded at the sleeves of his Academy shirt. He looked like he was close to tearing it off, ripping onto a motorcycle, and getting the hell out of town.
“What are you looking at, Ridgewood scum?” he growled and I blinked back toward the front of the room, cursing myself for giving him the time of day. I heard Hailey purr at Kieran, “That’s right, baby. Tell her what’s what.”
At this, Kieran spat, “You idiot. I’m not your fucking baby. Get your hands off of me.”
My heart pattered wildly. There was a lot to unpack from the previous twenty minutes. It was clear that Kieran had some sort of hierarchy over Hailey, although Hailey was the headmaster’s granddaughter and of course even richer than Kieran himself (although when it came down to it, how much did millionaires care who had more millions? This wasn’t a question I could answer. We’d never had anything).
“You don’t think we didn’t catch wind of your little charade before first period today?” These were the husky words from another one of the boys from the convertible, the one with thick, tousled blonde locks. He flashed Hailey a vicious smile that was difficult to read, yet seemed soaked in anger. “You think you can just go around making up your own rules?”
Hailey bucked back tighter against her desk chair, her nostrils flared. “Fuck off, Caleb,” she muttered. “You’re the one who compares all Ridgewood idiots to vermins.”
“Class, I’m going to pair you up for the conversations listed on page sixty-two,” Madame Peters announced. She then marched through the classroom, dotting her thin finger from desk to desk and matching people together. When she reached my desk, she put me with the third boy from the convertible—the athletic, football-player type with honey brown eyes and thick, shimmering brown hair.
Seconds later, the boy yanked his desk up next to mine. It looked like he hardly needed to use his muscles to do it. He looked at me curiously, his eyes glowing. Again, I felt like I was on display.
“What?” I heard myself demand, surprising even myself. I had already had enough of this bullshit today and it wasn’t even lunch yet. It was only five minutes into first period.
“Oh, nothing,” the boy replied, his voice bouncing and playful. “I just wanted to take a good hard look at our new Ridgewood trash. I don’t even think you’re recyclable, are you? Just as well. You’ve already turned into Hailey’s plaything. Maybe we’ll keep you for a bit. Bounce you around just like a cat and a mouse.”
“I’d love to see you try your hand at saying that in French, asshole,” I spat back. “Come on. Show me that super famous Crestwood intellect, hmm?”
The boy cut me a crooked smile. “The girl has teeth,” he shot back and bit into his fist to show theatrics. He shoved himself a bit closer to me then, so much so that I got a taste of his cologne. The musk of him filled me with a strange sense of longing and warmth grew from my belly, surging toward the space between my legs.
Maybe it was just the thrill of the endless hatred of knowing that the only way to fight this fire was with my own.
I began to speak my soft, lulling French, making my eyes smaller, beadier. At first, I started speaking from the conversation guides on page sixty-two. But after a moment, I switched into my own topic, asking, “What gives you the right to treat me like I’m a second-class citizen?”
To the guy’s credit, he caught on to my plan almost instantly. I had thought maybe he was shit at French, but he responded back with style and a near-perfect accent. “It’s written all over your face. Your hair—that trashy ombre shit at the ends and your super-cheap makeup. Do you think we can’t smell your second-rate perfume? You smell like all the maids and cooks and gardeners that we hire up out of Ridgewood. And frankly, that’s where you belong, isn’t it? You should be under the table, shining my shoes—and opening your mouth to give me a little extra something else, just to show how grateful you are.”
I stirred in my seat at his last words with a strange level of anger and desire. “What’s your name?”
The boy snuck his firm hand out—calloused from years of playing sports, I thought, yet it was warm and thick. I took it as he said in French, “I’m Dante. Dante Franklin.”
I knew the Franklin name. Hell, everyone in Ridgewood and beyond knew it. The Franklins were a married lawyer team who ordinarily worked with the upper-echelon of the greater Los Angeles area. Last year, when an actress was in the midst of suing her director for sexual harassment, she had called the Franklins. They had nearly put the director in prison, citing his misuse of power. In the end, he’d had to pay something like half a billion dollars to the actress. The story had been on the news for months.
“Mm-hmm,” I said as my eyes swept over his features. These boys were insanely gorgeous. He had high cheeks bones and a very prominent dimple in his right cheek when he cracked a smile.
Madame Peters called out that it was time to return to our own formation, back to normal class. Dante Franklin winked at me, whispering, “This isn’t the end of our little conversation. I’ll have you know that I’m still expecting that shoeshine sooner than later.”
“In your dreams, playboy,” I spat back.
Chapter Eight
After French class, I avoided my locker and hustled to my second period, which was the Crestwood Chronicle newspaper. I had been a part of the Ridgewood High newspaper since my freshman year and it had always given me immense pleasure—drawing silly cartoons of the students, interviewing staff members, and writing articles. I had thought maybe, just maybe that the Crestwood Chronicle would help me build some sort of life for myself at Crestwood.
But I was already off to a horrible start and I wasn’t feeling very hopeful, not after how my morning started.
Once I stepped inside the Crestwood Chronicle office, I felt a wave of comfort. Like the headmaster’s office downstairs, the Crestwood Chronicle office featured an enormous, decorative fireplace with antique couches and chairs. There were gorgeous paintings of previous heads of the Chronicle that dotted one wall, along with old newspaper clippings that told the story of big events at the school over the previous hundred years. Across the very top of the far wall, gold letters wrote out, ‘Crestwood Chronicle: Since 1907.’
Growing up in Ridgewood, I had never honored anything that old. We didn’t have traditions or stories that kept us going, the way Crestwood did and I almost felt envious in away. I inhaled sharply at the strangeness of being involved in something over 100 years old.
It was like I was suddenly stitched into the folds of a bigger story.
A light, airy voice called my name, then. I spun around to see a girl wearing long black boots, her flat black hair a straight sheet behind her. Her eyeliner was the most precise I had ever seen, whipping out in little cattails.
“You must be Kennedy, right?” the girl asked, her eyebrows stitching together.
After the debacle with Hailey Blair that morning, I was a little apprehensive about trusting anyone who wanted to know who I was.
But of course, there at the Chronicle, it was expected that I give my name.
“That’s me,” I offered and gave her a genuine smile.
“Wonderful,” the girl said. She sped forward, bringing her hand up to shake mine. “I’m Teony—Teony Jessup. I’m the editor of the Chronicle, two years running.”
A few other people cycled in from the hallway and took their stances on the couch, at the table. Teony continued to blink bright, deer-like eyes at me. “I took the liberty of reading a few of your pieces from the Ridgewood High newspaper.”
“Oh?” I was surprised and couldn’t help but throw a jab. “I thought all Crestwood people’s eyes immediately bled when they read anything relating to Ridgewood.”
Teony laughed a bit nervously, seeming unsure about how to categorize me in her head. “Now that you’re a Crestwood, will your eyes bleed?”
“No. I don’t think so,” I returned and shifted.
“Well, suffice it to say, your stuff is really good,” Teony continued. “You attack everything with a really wonderful angle. You’re honest and logical and creative. I think we here at the Crestwood Chronicle can learn a lot from you. We’re glad to have you on the team.”
I looked at her with a perplexed expression, expecting a trap, but there was none—only a compliment that I wasn’t expecting. Someone shoved up against me, nearly toppling me over. I blinked up at none other than Caleb, the blonde guy from the convertible that morning. I drew my hand over where he had hit, knowing that a bruise would form.
“That’s when you say thank you, Ridgewood,” he sneered. “In case you need to learn some manners.”
“Caleb. Please.” Teony said, her face growing shadowed.
Caleb understood her words, and he slowly walked off. His looks were a bit different than the other two boys—dirty blond, flashing green eyes, ruggedly handsome. He looked at everyone as though he, instead of Teony, ran the newspaper. I could see this cut into Teony, although it seemed like her hands were tied.
Wicked Blue Bloods: A Highschool Bully Romance - Crestwood Academy Book 1 Page 5
