“Yeah. They’re supposedly really good. Zach sings and plays guitar, Brent plays drums, and Taylor plays the bass guitar and keyboard. The three of them are like royalty around here.”
I made a sour face, but was conscious not to look too bitter. Yes, Zach had already proven to be a jerk who would lash out and hurt someone just to be an ass, but taking it personally would only give a guy like him pleasure. All I had to do was forget about him and he’d have no power over me.
If only it were that easy.
2
Zach
Eight Years Ago
I hated her at first sight. I hated the way she was standing outside my party, looking in like we were the ones who deserved pity, like she was on some fucking high horse. I hated how she managed to look sexier in an ugly, floppy hat and ill-fitting clothes than all the girls scampering around with perfect bodies in tiny swimsuits. Most of all, I hated that she had the nerve to stand up to me.
I had wanted to put her in her place when I saw her. I wanted to see her lower her eyes or apologize for staring. It would've broken the fragile spell she was wrapping around herself, like she was Cinder-fucking-Ella. Then I remembered where Cinderella's name came from. Her mother-in-law made her sleep on the ashes to stay warm. The cinders.
She was a princess of the ashes, and that was all Gardener Girl was going to be when I was done with her. I'd find out whatever it was she thought made her so special, and I'd prove to her she'd burn it all just for a chance to kiss me. Then I'd cut her loose like all the rest. It would be as easy as breathing.
But finger fucking whatever her name was upstairs hadn’t felt like the sweet revenge I wanted. I’d expected Gardener Girl to glare—or better yet, to cry. Instead, she only seemed to glance up by chance after several minutes, and even then I couldn’t be sure she saw us. No temper tantrums. No storming off. She just said something to her sister and kept working. I threw Claire out a minute later, once I realized Gardener Girl wasn’t going to be that easy.
I looked for her at school on Monday. I didn’t even know her name. Not that I cared. Even if I did care, I wasn’t about to risk asking someone and having them blab to her that I was asking around. Instead, I cut a few classes and wandered the halls, glancing in windows until I finally spotted her in Mr. Smith’s Psychology class. Everyone had moved their desks into small clusters for what looked like a group project.
Then I saw who had pushed his desk up to hers. Brent. That fucking meathead. Girls liked him. He probably reminded them of a puppy. He was loyal. I’d give him that, but he should’ve already known Gardener Girl was off-limits. I’d started the game with her, and that meant she was on my board. She was my piece to toy with.
I yanked the door open without thinking. Mr. Smith was leaning on his podium at the front of his class. He looked up at me expectantly.
“Brent,” I said through gritted teeth, ignoring Mr. Smith and the entire classroom’s attention. All I could see was him sitting across from her with his stupid dimpled smile aimed right at her.
Brent turned to face me with raised eyebrows. “Yo,” he said. “Sup, Zach?”
“Get the fuck out here,” I growled.
“Woah, woah,” said Mr. Smith, who started moving toward me.
I gritted my teeth. “It’s important,” I said to Mr. Smith. It was as much of an apology as I could muster. Thankfully, it seemed like enough, because he crossed his arms and settled for glaring at me. The teachers knew who paid for the school, and they knew which students they couldn’t cross.
Brent shrugged and stood, saying something to Gardener Girl before he left.
I looked at her then and saw the way she was watching me. She liked what she saw. I knew she did. Probably hated herself for it, too, and that made it all the sweeter. Well, the feeling’s mutual, Gardener Girl.
I could really see her now without the dumb hat, and it was obvious why Brent had probably maneuvered into working with her. She was sexy in a non-self-conscious way, like she’d only recently matured into the ridiculously sexy body and still didn’t realize what she had. She didn’t wear skin-tight clothes like all the other girls, either. You had to dig a little to find what she was hiding beneath that loose-fitting The Clash t-shirt and black skirt with gray plaid patterns. Granted, I didn’t feel like I had to dig too far when my eyes fell to her smooth, athletic legs and I imagined how she’d taste.
Brent followed me out into the hallway and I pulled the door closed.
“Sup?” he asked.
“You need to find a new partner for your project. That girl is a gardener.”
His eyebrow arched up and he laughed a little, like he thought I might be joking. “So? I’ll bet she does a good job trimming her own hedges, then.”
I clenched my teeth, not wanting to have to spell it out because that would mean admitting it to myself, too. The thought of Brent getting anywhere near her hedges had me ready to punch a new dimple straight into his chin.
He raised his eyebrows higher, waiting for more of an explanation.
“Find a new partner.”
"I don't know what your problem is, Zach, but she's nice. She's a poet," he added with a stupid grin. "How many girls at this dumbass school have even read a poem before."
I glared. “Didn’t realize you were a poet. Which one is your favorite?”
“No clue, but I’m sure Aribella can educate me.”
Aribella. I liked the name. “New. Partner. I won’t ask again.”
Brent watched me for a long time, clearly trying to weigh what he valued more— the girl or me. I was a ticket to something better for Brent and Taylor. I knew that. It was why they put up with my attitude and it was why they deferred to me. Without me, they were just another set of high school kids who could play instruments passingly well. They were replaceable. And if Brent wanted to test that by chasing after Gardener Girl—Aribella—then he could be my fucking guest. There’d be enough room in the cinders and ash for the both of them.
3
Aribella
Present Day
I straightened, pressing my palm into my lower back and groaning while I tried to work out the sort of kinks only a long day of breaking down and setting up stage equipment could create. Yeah. Stagehand. Equipment manager. Audio specialist. You could call me whatever you wanted, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, not even if you called me a professional groupie.
Okay, the groupie part would be a stretch. I did usually take advantage of the free tickets I got for shows we set up, but I skipped all the puppy-dog love and obsessiveness for the bands. I’d fallen for musicians too many times in my life. Twice in Belvedere, and once as an adult. Four years ago, when I thought I’d grown up enough to stop making the same, stupid mistakes I made as a kid.
I thought about my notebooks full of poetry back home, some of which I'd started years and years ago. Sometimes I'd think back on my hopeful college years where all I wanted to do was forget the horrors of high school and… and him. I buried my head in school and poems, not even stopping to wonder how I’d make money when it was all over. I couldn’t even look at a tennis racquet or drive by a court without my stomach clenching and my cheeks burning with old, long-held anger.
His fault.
Winding up working stages across the country hurt. It was Zach’s fault too, and then it wasn’t. It was his twisted influence making sure I never was more than Gardener Girl. Never more than something beneath him. Something to be sneered at and labeled as worthless.
It only hurt because I knew a deep and dark part of myself had tried to seek out this life in a way because it reminded me of him. He was like a sore tooth or a pulled muscle I couldn’t stop prodding and testing just to see if it still hurt. Zach made it his mission to ruin everything for me back then, and go figure, he was good at everything he did, including ruining lives.
“You good?” Blake came up from behind and reached for my arm.
I flinched away, as if by reflex. All these years and I sti
ll felt marked by Zach, like he had put an invisible collar around my neck and held the leash somewhere in the shadows, ready to yank hard if I ever showed interest in another guy. I forced that thought down, refusing to let his cruel influence reach me even after all this time. I had pushed past it when I was in a serious relationship with Charlie. For all the good that had done me.
Zach didn’t deserve to be at the forefront of my mind. He didn’t deserve my attention. He was just a mosquito bite. Something I’d accidentally scratch without thinking from time to time, and the act of scratching would make it itch like crazy for a few minutes. All I had to do was wait through the worst of it, resist the urge to scratch, and it’d go away. He’d go away.
I manufactured a smile I hoped was convincing and nodded to Blake. “Good. Just a long night.”
“Yeah, well I heard something exciting that might take away a few of the aches. Guess who we’re setting up for tomorrow?”
We always had access to the set lists. When I had first started, I memorized who was playing and where we’d be weeks into the future, but now I just followed the crew and didn’t bother looking ahead.
“Who?” I asked, even though some inexplicable sense of wrongness and dread was already swirling around me, making me certain I knew exactly who he was going to say.
“Zach Thornwood.” Blake was smiling like an idiot, and why shouldn’t he be. Zach, the same cold-eyed boy with lips like fire and a tongue that tasted so sweet you could hardly believe the venom it was capable of. The same Zach who had taken everything I cared about and left it in ruins. That was also the Zach who had gone on to become a mega-star, the kind high school girls plastered posters of all over their bedrooms and devoted years of wasted time to fangirling over.
He was Ed Sheeran, John Mayer, and The Strokes all rolled into one and somehow not like them at all. He had managed to become huge and still never compromised his music to make it radio friendly or more marketable, and in the process he frustratingly made himself unique in the kind of way that people would talk about fifty years from now or even a hundred. Forget the fact that he could stop your heart with his looks. He was a bonafide rock star and deserving of all the praise he'd earned since he took the world in the palm of his talented hands.
I couldn’t even check YouTube without one of his music videos showing up as a trending result, usually with hundreds of millions of views. I made the mistake of clicking and watching once, stupidly thinking I was a big girl and didn’t care what Zach Goddamn Thornwood did anymore, but I snapped my laptop shut when the video showed him nuzzled nose-to-nose with some beautiful woman, inches from kissing her.
And I hated him all the more for it. I still wanted a do-over. I regretted the way things had ended up, and I wondered if maybe there had been a chance to save the good I knew was in him. It was stupid, though. There was plenty of good I could do in the world, and a guy like Zach was hardly deserving of the work when he put all of his energy into pushing everyone away.
“Hm,” I said thoughtfully, even as my stomach churned and broiled like I’d eaten something rotten. “Looking forward to it.”
Eight Years Ago
I had been in Belvedere for almost a month now, and I was starting to realize my initial impression wasn’t entirely correct. The people were fake like I had thought, but not all of them.
Brent Richardson seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Ever since he had started paying attention to me, everyone else was nicer, too. Everyone except Zach, at least.
I had a physical reaction to Zach, like he was the perfect cocktail of guy to get my hormones raging out of control. But hormones are just hormones. I could let my body be a stupid, teenage body without letting it influence my decisions. Brent was the one being decent to me. Zach didn’t deserve any part of me. Not even my time. I knew that, but I couldn’t stop thinking of the storm in his eyes and I couldn’t shake the temptation to dig deeper. I wanted to know what could make someone like him so angry.
If everyone in Belvedere had a skeleton or two in their closet, Zach must have a mass grave in his backyard. He always looked so tortured. I wasn’t sure how no one else seemed to see it. They all smiled and fawned over him like he was smiling back. They didn’t see the detachment in his eyes or the way he seemed to hold himself separate from it all.
He was a mystery. He was a black stain on a golden landscape. Out of place but oddly beautiful for the contrast. The poet in me was doing him too many favors, probably. I had been romanticizing him since I first saw him. None of that was fair to Brent, but I kept it all buried as deeply in my heart as I could. Maybe if I pushed it down far enough, it’d eventually shrivel up and die there.
I stood outside my psychology class with my back to some lockers while Brent towered over me with those soft brown eyes that made me feel important and wanted. He was nice. He liked to tease me, but it was always good-natured and he never said anything to try to upset me. I would have never admitted it to anyone, but I think I liked his attention most for two other reasons. Two shameful reasons.
One was that it worked like some kind of secret pass, like a lanyard with a card proclaiming “I’m with the band.” All the other kids who hadn’t so much as looked at me smiled and waved, offered me seats at lunch, and even invited me to parties. I didn’t let that please me too much, though. I knew they were all playing some kind of twisted game beneath the smiles, that one slip-up or the loss of Brent’s attention would spell my way straight out of their world. Still, it was better than feeling like a booger with legs, so I took what I could get.
The other reason was the way Zach looked at me when I was with Brent. I thought I had seen ice in his eyes that first day by the hedges, but the looks I earned when I was with Brent put that to shame. He looked at me like his name was written over every inch of my body in permanent ink, and he might kill Brent for daring to take me.
It was all petty and low and very basic, as the local kids would say, but it was easier to focus on the stupid games of high school drama than it was to wonder when my parents would push their luck too far again. Besides, it wasn’t particularly hard to enjoy Brent’s attention. He was gorgeous in a normal way, not like Zach. Brent drew open, unapologetic stares from girls when I walked with him in the hallway.
“I want you to be there,” Brent said. His hand was flat against the lockers by my head. It was a scene straight out of those made-for-high schoolers movies, the type where everybody is well-dressed and pimple-free. Brent was the classic gorgeous jock with the cocky smile. Kids stopping to high five, fist bump, or flick their chins up at him. Girls twinkling their fingers and waggling eyebrows at me. Smiling conspiratorially, like they’d all worked with me to set this match made in heaven up.
All this happened while my sort-of-boyfriend was asking me to watch his band play tonight at the battle of the bands. He’d be playing the drums, and it’d be the first time seeing the band I’d heard so much about. I was so sure they weren’t going to be any good that I was already preparing lines I could say and mentally rehearsing to make them believable. Wow. That was amazing! Maybe I’d spontaneously hug him after I said that? You were so good! I loved the part where you—I could laugh then and mimic some kind of drum solo.
I’d never had a real boyfriend, even though Brent hadn’t exactly put that label on us yet. This was all new territory for me.
His words barely registered. My mind was elsewhere, floating above my body so I could watch the scene with dizzying disbelief. This wasn't my life. I wasn't that girl. When guys showed interest in me, it was because they figured the new girl might put out, and when they realized I didn't, the attention dried up. Brent hadn't even hinted at anything like that.
For once in my life, I felt good. Cautiously good.
Then Zach showed up.
I felt him coming down the hall before I even saw him. An icy presence. An absence of air, like the pressure was dropping, like something far larger than a high school boy was moving toward me. I didn’t look. I d
idn’t even let my ears drown out the noise of Brent’s voice like they wanted to.
I wasn’t going to give Zach the attention he wanted so badly from me.
Apparently, that mattered little to him, because Zach took me by the shoulder and turned me to face him.
Brent pushed him back from me, his hand on Zach’s chest with enough force to say he wasn’t playing around, but not so much to start a fight.
I stood between them, heart pounding and body rigid.
Zach’s eyes took us both in coldly. They were so blue. Almost like they were lit from inside, beneath dark eyebrows that were black against his dirty blond hair. My mouth dried from his closeness, from the smooth perfection of his skin and the full lips. He was art. He was tragedy. He was trouble, and I hated him for all of it.
“You coming tonight?” asked Zach.
I peeled my eyes from Zach, looking to Brent when I responded. “I’ll be there to see you,” I said, making it clear that I’m talking to Brent and not to Zach.
Brent smiled easily at me, as if he couldn’t feel the force of Zach’s glare beside him.
A small crowd had gathered around us. I wasn’t sure if they were expecting a fight, or if they just naturally stopped to watch Zach whenever the opportunity presented itself. I almost couldn’t blame them. Except they all should’ve been able to see what I could see. He was the worst kind of poison, the type that smells and tastes sweet, so you don’t even realize you’re doomed until you’ve drank your fill.
“Good,” said Brent. “It wouldn’t be much of a show if my girlfriend wasn’t there to see it.”
Hate at First Sight Page 2
