Cruel Riches: A Dark Bully Romance (The Kings of Crestmoore Academy, Book 1)

by Elle East

  The waiter brought over my meal and placed a salad with blue cheese and walnuts in front of me. Dammit, I thought. I needed to start paying more attention to what I was ordering.

  The rest of lunch consisted of me half-listening to whatever boring conversation the Queens were having and picking around the blue cheese in my salad to eat what little I could. Once it was over I jumped out of my chair, saying that I had to go back to my room to get a book I had forgotten. I practically ran out of the dining hall ahead of everyone else. Even though it was part of my plan, it still made me uncomfortable to be in the lion’s den.

  On my way back to my room I ran into Manuel and Beth.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, smiling.

  Both of them exchanged looks with each other before returning my greeting. What was that about? I wondered.

  I started to walk passed them when Manuel stopped me. “Maddy?”

  “Yeah?” I turned back around.

  “We…” Manuel started before stopping and looking at Beth.

  “Maddy, we… just wanted to make sure you’re all right,” Beth finished for him.

  I frowned, confused. “Yeah, I’m fine. What’s up?”

  “It’s just that you’ve… been sitting with the Queens and, uh…” Manuel sputtered to a stop.

  “We just wanted to make sure you’re ok,” Beth said.

  “You can tell us,” Manuel said. “We could try to help.”

  “I’m fine, guys,” I laughed in a way that I thought was reassuring but the looks on their faces were so serious that I quickly stopped.

  “It’s just that, um,” Manuel tried to say before Beth finished the thought for him. “The Queens are… you need to be careful around them.”

  “I know, trust me, I know. I appreciate your concern, but I’ll be fine. I don’t really have a choice.”

  They exchanged another look.

  “The Kings are bad,” Manuel said. “But the Queens may be worse.”

  I just nodded. There was nothing else I could say and all these warnings were starting to scare me even more than I already was.

  “Thanks, guys. I appreciate it, really I do. I need to get going though, I’ll see you later,” I said and continued on my way to the Bell Tower.

  I had the strong sudden desire to talk to Dean. I wanted to hear his voice and tell him everything that I was experiencing and get his opinion. He was the only one I knew who could even begin to understand what I was going through—but I couldn’t, I could only email him and this was not the type of thing you put in an email.

  When I reached the stairs to the Bell Tower, I turned back around and headed to class. I hadn’t needed anything from my room, I just wanted a break from the Queens before next period. Next was Gym, and I had both Victoria and Jayla in that class, but luckily I also had Ava and Cecily too.

  I got to the field house just in time to change into my gym uniform before class started, which consisted of red gym shorts—which seemed a little too on the short side for me—knee-high white socks, black short-sleeved shirts, and black running shoes with white stripes. I ran out onto the field to join the other girls who were gathering in a semicircle around the gym teacher.

  I went to stand next to Ava who smiled and whispered, “Hi”, before the teacher started telling us the drills we would be doing that day. I was distracted and had a hard time paying attention to what she was saying.

  It was a beautiful day. The sun was beating down so even though the air was crisp and cool it felt warm where the sun touched you. We were on the girls’ field. Crestmoore was still strictly segregated by gender when it came to athletics, which was so different from my last school where they barely had enough money to run one athletics program let alone two.

  The wide field was a lush green that stretched to the ocean on one side. The sun was reflecting off the water, and it was almost blinding if you stared at it for too long. You could see the forest from pretty much wherever you were, and the leaves had a significant amount of color to them. The rich red and yellows contrasted with the dark greens of the grass. The imposing Crestmoore building stood behind us on a slight hill so that the school seemed to keep watch over all the island. I watched a “V” of geese as they flew over our heads, heading for warmer weather in the south.

  “—good with that, Baker?” the teacher asked as she turned to me.

  “Huh?” I asked in surprise.

  I had been daydreaming and had not heard a word she said.

  The teacher shook her head in annoyance and exasperation while a couple of the girls giggled behind their hands.

  “I said that you are going to be the goalie. Got that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Now go to your positions!” The teacher blew the whistle and all the girls scattered.

  I fell into a jog beside Ava.

  “Ok, I can see from the ball that we are playing soccer, but do you know which team I’m on?” I asked.

  Ava shook her head in mock exasperation and laughed. “Maddy! How can you be kicking everyone’s ass in marks but be such a space cadet in class?”

  “This is Gym, this isn’t class. Anyone with two legs can pass this course,” I joked.

  Ava laughed. “Don’t tell Coach Hoss that, or any of the girls on Crestmoore teams, they are a lot stronger than you and will totally kick your ass!”

  “Oh they definitely could,” I said and laughed. “But seriously, what team am I on?”

  “You’re the goalie for the other team.” She pointed across the field in the opposite direction.

  “Ok, thanks! I owe you,” I said as I veered off and started running towards my team.

  I checked out the other players and sadly realized that both Jayla and Victoria were on my team. They both smiled as I came closer and I managed a smile too.

  The game was uneventful. I wasn’t the most coordinated or athletically inclined person around, but I managed to hold my own as goalie. Our team was stacked, we had the best players in the class so it wasn’t a fair match at all. I had seen that type of favoritism by teachers before and it didn’t surprise me that they made sure the Queens’ team would win. It was just another way that the school catered to the Royalty.

  It was almost the end of the game and it wasn’t surprising that we were ahead by a lot. There was a girl from the other team coming up the field with the ball and I vaguely recognized her as someone who had pushed me in the hall and called me names—but that didn’t really narrow it down because most of the school had done that.

  She was coming quick and no one on our team was able to stop her. It looked like I would have to try to block her, which I really didn’t want to do because based on how she was handling the ball I was sure she was on the school’s women’s soccer team. Coach Hoss must have mistakenly put her on the other team instead of our rigged one.

  I kind of squatted down and put my hands out in what I thought was a good imitation of the soccer goalies I had seen on tv. I hadn’t had to block many goals in the second half of the game because our team was so good so I had just been staring off at the beautiful blue ocean and I felt a little stiff.

  The girl was coming closer, and I started shuffling back and forth trying to anticipate where the ball would go. I noticed from how she was dribbling the ball she was following me with her movements. Wherever I went she moved the ball to face me.

  I suddenly realized what was happening, but it was too late. I tried to bring my hands up to my face to protect it but I was too slow and the ball was coming too quickly from the soccer player’s powerful kick for me to block it. I felt the impact and my head snap backwards. I heard the loud smack before I felt the pain. I fell backwards and landed with a hard thud on the unforgiving ground.

  I grabbed my face as pain radiated outwards from where the ball had struck me right in the eye socket. I heard other people around me asking if I was ok but I couldn’t open my eyes. Involuntary tears were streaming down one cheek.

  I felt a hand touch my sho
ulder, and I instinctively flinched away.

  “It’s me,” Victoria said. “Are you ok, Maddy?”

  “Yeah, I’m ok,” I managed to say.

  But I didn’t think my face was ok at all. I was embarrassed and just wanted to go to the washroom by myself to assess the damage.

  “Back,” I heard Victoria say in a tone that wasn’t aggressive but left no room for argument.

  Immediately all the voices around me went silent and I could hear the wind in the leaves of the trees. I managed to sit up, and I felt Victoria’s small hands helping me.

  “You ok, Baker?” I recognized Coach Hoss’s voice.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled around my hand that was still holding my face.

  “We got her,” Victoria said, and I felt her and another pair of hands slowly help me to my feet.

  I couldn’t open the eye that had been hit, but I could open the other enough so that I could walk back to the field house. Victoria and the other person who turned out to be Jayla, helped me. I looked back at the field. The other students were walking into position to finish the game, but Ava and Cecily were still staring at me, a Queen under each of my arms.

  Ava and Cecily were framed by the goalie posts where I had been hit, the lush field in the background. What I saw on their faces forced me to look away. They looked scared, and I could tell they were scared for me, but there was also something else there that was a hundred times worse. I could see in their eyes a hint of suspicion. They were starting to suspect that maybe I couldn’t be trusted anymore.

  I let Victoria and Jayla guide me inside the building. What I had feared was coming true. My plan of getting close to the Queens was succeeding, but by achieving my goal I was starting to lose the true friendships I had made at Crestmoore. I felt so alone.

  They led me past the room full of perfectly kept wooden cubbies where we stored our backpacks and class uniforms and into the washroom. I gripped onto a sink with my free hand and slowly pulled my other hand away from my face so I could see how bad it was. All three of us sucked in breath through our teeth at the same time when my face became visible in the mirror.

  The flesh around my eye was already starting to swell and turn a dark color. I tried to open it and even though it stung I forced it open. Luckily it wasn’t too bad and didn’t look like I had any real damage to it. It was a little red but would probably clear up in a day or two.

  “Thank god,” I said under my breath.

  “You got hit in the face by that soccer ball,” Jayla said.

  My brow automatically furrowed, but then I winced in pain. I saw Victoria gave her a look.

  “Um, yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say. No duh, Jayla.

  “You just might not have seen it because, you know, it hit you in the eye,” Jayla explained.

  “Oh… thanks.”

  I couldn’t help but notice the slight eye roll that Victoria couldn’t suppress before she turned to me and asked if I was ok.

  “I’m all right. Nothing’s wrong with my eye, which was what I was really worried about. I’ll have a wicked black eye for the next couple days though, but that’s not too bad. Could have been a lot worse.”

  Victoria nodded, her delicate mouth turned up in a sympathetic smile. “Did you want to go see the nurse?”

  “I’ll be ok. I’m just going to go get changed and head to my next class. Maybe I’ll stop off at the dining hall on the way to get some ice. Thanks for your help, both of you. That was really nice of you guys.”

  Victoria waved away my gratitude. “It was nothing. You would have done the same for us.”

  “Of course,” I said, but I knew that I wouldn’t have.

  Looking in the mirror and seeing the three of us together, we made a weird picture. I looked like their captive. Next to me was Victoria who was so small and so beautiful that she looked ethereal, which was in contrast to tall, plain, mousy-haired Jayla who was on my other side.

  I shook my head slightly. I didn’t like that I was judging their looks. People couldn’t control what features they were born with and it wasn’t fair to judge them on whether or not they were beautiful. I didn’t think I had been this superficial before. What was this school doing to me? I thought as I walked back into the changing room to put my class uniform back on.

  By the time I had finished, the rest of the class started filtering in. Ava and Cecily walked towards me. Ava mouthed “OMG,” while pointing at my eye. “I know,” I mouthed back. Before they could reach me though, Jayla came up to me and they stopped in their tracks.

  “We have Bio next, let’s walk together,” she said with a smile.

  “Oh,” I sputtered and looked at Cecily who was also in my Biology class and who I always walked with.

  Cecily looked at me wide-eyed, waiting for what I would do.

  I couldn’t say no to Jayla, I needed the Queens. I needed them to help my mom. My hands were tied.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to cover up my disappointment with a fake smile that I hoped looked genuine.

  Jayla smiled back, and we started walking out of the field house together. I looked at Cecily and Ava and there was no mistaking the look in their eyes now. They felt sorry for me, but they definitely didn’t trust me anymore. My heart broke.

  Chapter 14

  I started eating all my meals at the head table after that. I also walked to my classes with the Queens. After the Kings had stormed away from another meal because, as Archer put it, they deemed my presence “so unappetizing that I wouldn’t be able to keep anything down anyway”, they stopped sitting at the head table. They actually stopped coming to the dining hall at all. I assumed they were getting their meals delivered somewhere else and when I asked Claudia about it she said they were probably eating in the Kings’ Court, which was another option that was available to Royalty—not the other students of course, everyone else was only permitted to eat in the dining hall.

  I heard whispers from the student body that Victoria was disrespecting the Kings by bringing a scholarship student to their table and that the less embarrassing option for them was to avoid the dining hall all together while they regrouped and thought of a counterattack. It all seemed so complicated and full of so many subtleties and unspoken rules that I didn’t understand, it just didn’t seem like it could possibly be worth it. How did these people even have time for school work when they were playing this complicated, underhanded social chess match?

  Ever since I started being seen with the Queens, the bullying had lightened up. Trash was still getting piled in front of my door, but after the janitor fixed the lock that someone had purposely jammed, I hadn’t been trapped in my room again. The shoving and name calling had gotten noticeably better too. All the other students seemed confused about how to act around me and I couldn’t blame them. I had gone from bully target number one to hanging out with the most powerful girls at school, people weren’t really sure how to treat me—and that unfortunately included the scholarship students who had become noticeably colder and more guarded around me.

  I was right about my eye; it swelled up pretty badly over the next couple days and left me with a black eye. I tried to cover it with makeup but gave up since it didn’t look any better. Victoria made the girl apologize to me one day at lunch, which was awkward, especially since the girl was twice Victoria’s size and didn’t seem like she wanted to apologize at all, but she did exactly what Victoria said. I accepted her apology—even though I knew she had hit me in the face on purpose, a special present from the Kings I assumed.

  By the end of the week I was used to the routine. I was waiting for Victoria outside her classroom, which was right next to my math class, so that we could walk to lunch together. I saw some of the scholarship students pass by on their way to the dining room. They didn’t bother inviting me to join them, but at least they returned my little wave of acknowledgment.

  Victoria came out, and we started walking down.

  “You know what, I’m not feeling the dining ha
ll today,” she said.

  “Hm?” I asked.

  “It’s not fair that the Kings get to eat in private and don’t have to make an appearance. Let’s do that today. If they aren’t going to keep up their Royal duties, then neither are we.”

  “What are we going to do?” I asked, confused.

  “It’s so much nicer to eat in a private room rather than that deafening excuse for a dining hall—it’s practically a public school cafeteria,” she said it with such disdain I practically winced. “Come on.”

  She grabbed my hand and I couldn’t help that I jumped slightly. I had become more comfortable in the Queens’ presence, due to exposure therapy, but was still on edge when I was around them. They had been nothing but nice to me, but I was just waiting for the big reveal when they finally showed me what horrible thing they were up to.

  Victoria led me down the hall, her warm and dry hand in mine, which to my embarrassment was slightly damp. On the way we ran into the other Queens who were coming to meet her. Victoria was very obviously the leader, and it showed. They all came to her.

  “We’re eating in the Queens’ Study today,” she said as we rushed passed them.

  I saw the look of shock on all their faces and I didn’t quite believe that I had heard her right either. The Queens’ Study was off limits to everyone who wasn’t a Queen—I hadn’t been at Crestmoore long, but even I knew that that was one of the unbreakable rules of the school. I didn’t even think Kings were allowed in the Queens’ Study.

  “Uh, Victoria?” I heard Claudia say as we walked.

  Victoria ignored her and Claudia knew what that meant and didn’t ask again. We walked in silence until we came to a door with a symbol on it. We were on the top floor but I didn’t recognize the hallway; I didn’t think I had been down it before. The symbol was a square with an X on top and the lines of the X extending outside of the square. The four quadrants made by the two shapes were all filled in.