Bitter: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Wicked Brotherhood Book 1)

by Eden Beck

  And sometimes, still, it feels like I’ve always been there.

  Jasper didn’t spring for anything better than economy class. Not like I blame him, a $2,000 charge on his credit card probably doesn’t look suspicious at all to his parent as opposed to whatever first class costs. Plus, it’s not like we’re friends.

  This might even be his way of punishing me.

  The plane lands without incident and I spill out into the airport with the other passengers. The woman who checks my passport says, “Welcome home,” with such gravitas that I feel like I’ve returned from some sort of international mission. I just nod and scurry past her.

  My dad is supposed to pick me up from the airport. I wander out with just my carry-on, peeking into the little overpriced airport shops that seem to think people want to buy glass ornaments every time they’re about to board a plane. I didn’t need to check a bag, since I’ll just be going straight back to school before I know it. It’s dark out and definitely cold—but I’ve gotten used to the cold in Switzerland.

  Just as I’m digging my oversized hoodie back out of my carry-on, I hear someone call my name across the crowd, and I turn to see my dad, Jeff Trevellian, in his khakis and button-up. He looks the same as ever; brown hair, brown eyes, tall, slim build. I actually got my frame from him, not my mom, who’s much stockier.

  I always hated the gangly arms and legs that took me years to grow into. Who knew I’d come to be thankful for those genes, for the ability to pass as a boy—a basically prepubescent boy, but a boy still.

  “Dad!” I call out, surprising myself as a rush of emotion wells up in my chest, forming a lump in my throat. I clutch my backpack to my chest as I rush over to him.

  He smiles a bit as I come to a stop in front of him.

  “Hey, kiddo. Lemme take your bag.”

  I hand it to him and follow as he turns and heads out of the airport. Dad’s never been a hugging kind of guy, so I don’t expect any physical affection. The stupid grin that spreads across his face as we silently head to his car is enough to let me know he’s glad I’m home.

  “So,” he says as we reach his sedan, “a friend of yours bought your ticket, huh?”

  “Yup.” That’s the easiest explanation, and for once, it’s actually the truth. Or at the very least as close as I can get to it without explaining everything.

  The quiet car ride from the airport to home takes about an hour. Dad and I barely say two words to each other. It’s nice to just sit in silence with someone I actually know after being surrounded by strangers for months.

  “Home sweet home,” Dad says as he turns the car into the driveway, the exact same way he says it any other time he drives home. As he says it, I know those three words are likely the highlight of any conversation between us for the duration of my stay.

  Our house is okay. It’s nothing special, a two-story suburban-type deal; vinyl siding, dormers, square windows. There’s the beginnings of a garden out front. My mother starts one almost every spring but she never keeps up with it. Dead plants line the front of our porch, little wilted reminders of dreams past. Footprints litter the snow in our small front yard, and the Christmas lights we never take down from our porch railings are lit up despite the fact that the holiday is still far off.

  Dad pats my shoulder fondly before he shuts off the car and climbs out. I smile a little when I get out myself. He grabs my bag and heads toward the front door, crunching through the front yard, and I follow just outside his footsteps so I can crunch, too.

  I’ve been feeling independent and almost grown-up at school, but the minute Dad swings open the front door for me to cross the threshold, I’m transported straight back to who I was before I got on that plane at the beginning of the school year. I step over our worn-out welcome mat and onto the hardwood floors of my early childhood.

  Immediately, I’m struck by the sheer amount of noise.

  All four of my brothers are in the living room, screaming at some sort of sports thing on TV. My mom has the radio playing in the kitchen while she cooks something that’s sizzling loudly on the stove. Mom got a dog once I left, and he’s barking at her while she waggles some food above his head.

  “Home sweet home,” I sigh as Dad shuts the door behind us.

  At the sound of my muttered voice Caleb looks up, sees me, grins, and vaults himself over the back of the couch, making my other brothers cry out. He rushes toward me and, before I can react, catches me up in a bone-crushing hug that transitions smoothly into a headlock.

  “Caleb!” I yell, adding to the noise of the house.

  Mom finally gives her dog a piece of whatever food she’s been teasing him with and wipes her hands on her thighs as she lays eyes on me too.

  “Alex! My baby girl’s finally home!”

  “Your baby girl’s been pretending to be a boy,” Caleb laughs, attempting to give me a noogie—but I wriggle out of his grasp and flit away, toward the kitchen.

  Mom also grabs me in a hug, but this one doesn’t hurt. I melt into her. She’s short, stocky, almost like a pillow, and she’s so comforting and familiar. She runs her hands over my short hair. Suddenly, Caleb’s words finally find their way into my brain, and I whirl to face him when Mom lets go of me.

  “What do you mean?” I demand, too shocked to feel anything else. This secret, my secret, isn’t something I was expecting to come up.

  But Caleb just eyes me pointedly.

  “I found out about Bleakwood,” he says mockingly, then adds, “Please, Alex, it took like a five-minute Google search.”

  I stand frozen in my spot.

  My other three brothers—Blake, Spencer, and Mason—have climbed over the back of the couch and are heading toward the kitchen, grinning.

  “Yeah,” Blake says. He’s the oldest of us at 22, but the shortest of the boys. Built like Mom, he’s broad-shouldered and wide, with a round face and unruly blonde hair. “All-boys school, right? How d’you manage that?”

  “She got a scholarship,” Mom says proudly, ruffling my short hair affectionately this time.

  I look back at her, the shock fading from surprise to disbelief. “You … you don’t care that I’m pretending to be a boy?”

  I was sure she’d make me come home if she found out. So sure that I’ve been avoiding the few phone calls she’s attempted over the last weeks, sure that as soon as I heard her familiar voice I’d feel compelled to tell her everything.

  Compelled to tell her something that apparently wasn’t as shocking for her as it has been for me.

  “No,” she replies as she heads back to the stove. “Honestly, I’m glad you got yourself into a good school. Your brothers are always breaking things—”

  “—not me!” interjects Spencer, pushing his shaggy blonde bangs away from his face.

  “—and they’re draining our money ‘til we’re flat broke,” Mom continues conversationally, a smile in her voice. “You’ll probably get into a great college off this Bleakwood thing.”

  I should be thrilled that they’re not going to force me to leave Bleakwood, but instead I feel something more like disappointment. All this time I’ve carefully hidden this part of my life, and the first people to find out about it … don’t even care.

  I’m not allowed to wallow in my self-pitying thoughts for long.

  Mason grabs me from behind and lifts me up, half-tossing me to Blake, who puts me in a half-nelson and spins me toward Spencer. Spencer reaches for my ribs and starts to tickle me, but they’re still bruised, so his fingertips just brushing against them sends pain shooting up my sides. I kick out reflexively and connect with his chest.

  “Ow!” he yells, stumbling back.

  “Don’t touch my ribs!” I scream, but Mason slips into Spencer’s place and tickles me harder, ignoring the kicks I deliver to his knees. “Stop! It hurts!”

  “I’m just tickling you!” Mason yells over my shouts. “Besides, you’re a boy now, right?”

  “It’s not about that!” I yell, squirming a
nd landing a lucky kick to his groin. “My ribs are bruised, you idiot.”

  Immediately, he groans, turns pale, and falls over. Laughing, Blake lets me go, and I drop to my feet and double over myself, clutching my aching ribs.

  “Bruised ribs?” Caleb asks concernedly from the living room, leaning against the bar that separates it from the kitchen.

  “I had a bad run in with a set of stairs.”

  He eyes me for a moment too long, his head cocked to the side as he examines me more closely.

  “You fell down some stairs?” Disbelief is heavy in his voice.

  “Yes,” I groan, leaning against the counter. Mom reaches into the cabinet where we keep the medicine and pulls down a bottle of painkillers. Her dog sniffs my face while I’m bent, then licks my cheek. At least one person in this house is being gentle with me. “It fuckin’ hurt, too.”

  “Alex, language!” Mom says, fetching me a glass of water.

  “Sorry,” I mumble.

  “Take some medicine and then put a nickel in the swear jar.” She points to the jar almost brimming with coins on the bar. “Do they have a doctor at that fancy school? Did you get looked at?”

  I feel myself squirming where I stand. I’m not used to this. This isn’t the first time I’ve ended up with a nasty set of bruised something-or-others. In a house like mine, it’s kind of … inevitable.

  “They have a nurse.” I straighten and pop the ibuprofen she offers. Having lost interest, Blake and Mason begin wrestling with each other behind me. “But she’s really good.”

  “Did she find out?” Spencer asks nonchalantly. He gets his own glass of water and sips it as he watches Blake and Mason.

  “About what?”

  “About your being a fake boy,” Caleb laughs.

  “Yeah. But she’s not gonna tell. Woman solidarity and all that.” I make a mock cross sign over my chest before shooting a look across at my father, who’s drifted into the kitchen to give Mom a peck on the cheek. “You guys really aren’t bothered by this?” I ask them, gesturing to my hair.

  Dad shrugs, but Mom says, “Honestly, it worried me at first. I thought we may have five sons instead of four sons and a daughter.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father pale and scurry out of the kitchen so quickly.

  I make sure to raise my tone so he can still hear me over the sound of the rising volume on the television.

  “Oh. No, I’m just pretending for school,” I say.

  “Well, I’ll love you no matter what,” she says warmly, patting my hair. “Now go take a shower. You smell like an airplane.”

  This unexpected twist has left me feeling lost in my own house.

  I thought that eventually revealing the truth about my life at Bleakwood would be a huge weight off my shoulders, that getting this huge weight off my shoulders would help me shed the trauma I’ve faced there and help me separate it from who I really am.

  But this casual way my family found out, the fact that it was never really a secret from them in the first place, it’s left me feeling more vulnerable than ever somehow.

  The upstairs of the house has four bedrooms; one for Mom and Dad, one for Spencer and Caleb, one for Blake and Mason, and one for me.

  My room is the smallest. Sure, I got mad about it some when I was younger, but it makes sense—I get my own room while my brothers have to share.

  I’ve only been gone for a few months, but I feel like decades have passed since I put all the stickers on my bedroom door. I feel nervous somehow. It’s like a stranger’s room. My eyes pass over the different band stickers, the “no boys allowed” sign I made when I was twelve.

  Just a few short years ago, I wouldn’t have let Alex from Bleakwood into this room.

  Now I am Alex from Bleakwood.

  I take a deep breath, seize the doorknob, turn it—and it’s locked. I grin. Suddenly, all that unfamiliarity melts away, and I’m at home again. Really at home.

  I dig a coin out of my pocket and use it to unlock my door. It’s not a particularly clever trick, most doorknobs have a little slot in the handle that makes it easy to do … but it never really caught on with my brothers. They preferred the method of barging into a room that left the door swinging off its hinges.

  I, on the other hand, have always preferred a more subtle approach.

  I tuck my penny back into my pocket and slip into my room. It’s just like I left it, which is good … but more than a little surprising. I’d half expected one of my brothers to have claimed it in my absence and turned it into some teenage boy’s sweaty den by now.

  But here it is, exactly how I remember it.

  There’s my twin-size bed with the faded hand-me-down SpongeBob sheets. There are my plain blue curtains, taken from Caleb and Spencer’s room once they got blackout ones. There’s my white dresser with little yellow flowers painted on the handles, a freebie from a cousin who moved to Cincinnati for college … and also the only piece of furniture in the room that actually looks like it might belong to a female.

  Most of the things I own are secondhand. Even this T-shirt used to be Mom’s.

  Shit, even my school choice was handed down. Caleb was the one who got the pamphlet for Bleakwood.

  I don’t have my bag—Dad already took it to the laundry room—so I head for my dresser, passing by the shelf with all my academic trophies. I’ve won a lot of quiz bowls and spelling bees. And essay contests. And math competitions. My brothers’ rooms are filled with awards from hockey, baseball, football, soccer, and even surfing, in Spencer’s case, you name it; but I was always the smart one.

  The nerdy one—a fact that my brothers were not want to let me forget.

  Just wait until they hear that I signed up for lacrosse. They’ll never let me hear the end of it.

  There’s a soft knock at my door.

  “Who is it?” I call, still rooting through my dresser drawers for something comfortable to wear. I happen across a pile of hand-me-down sports bras and push them aside to a more prominent place in the drawer. Those will come in handy for hiding the boobs on a day-to-day basis once lacrosse season is over.

  “Me,” calls a male voice from the other side of the door. It takes me one second to register that it’s Caleb. I really have been gone long. My brother’s voices have started to meld all together into one.

  “Read the sign.”

  He laughs. “Come on. Can I come in?”

  I toss the shirt I’m holding onto my bed and cross my small room to open my door. Caleb ducks his head to enter and scoots across the floor to my bed, plopping down on the edge of it. I shut the door behind him and head back to my dresser.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m checking on you,” he says.

  I shoot him a look and go back to digging through my drawers. Caleb’s eighteen, only two years older than me. I’ve always been the closest to him out of my other brothers—or as close as you can be to a boy who’s hell-bent on stuffing you inside cabinets or whatever. Despite that, he can still get protective.

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, I mean,” and here he glances once towards the open door for listening ears, “did you really fall down the stairs?”

  I grab a pair of shorts and turn to him. “Yeah, actually. Why?”

  He fidgets, his eyes darting around the room. He grabs my Scooby-Doo alarm clock off the chair that serves as my nightstand and turns it over in his hands. “Normally people say that kind of thing when … uh … well, girls say that kind of thing … .er, women, I mean, say …”

  “Spit it out, Caleb.”

  He sighs. “Sometimes victims of domestic abuse use falling down the stairs or bumping into things as excuses when they’ve been battered by their spouse.”

  I’m taken aback. “‘Victims of domestic abuse’? ‘Battered by their spouse’? What the hell, Caleb?”

  He shrugs. “I’m taking a criminal justice class as an elective this semester.”

  “Ah.” That explains thing
s. I was scared for a moment that maybe he’d fallen on his head or maybe I’d actually stepped into an alternate reality where my brothers used words like “victims” and “battered” on a regular basis.

  Caleb doesn’t say anything else right away, he just keeps lingering beside my bed. It takes me a moment to realize he’s actually looking for an answer here.

  I think on his question for a moment, though really, I think he’s asking two.

  One, did I really fall down the stairs, or did something else happen?

  Two, do I have a boyfriend?

  Caleb doesn’t look at me, but he places my alarm clock back on the chair and reaches for one of my notebooks from last year.

  “So?” he asks finally, flipping idly through my pages of math notes.

  “Yes, I really fell down the stairs,” I say with a sigh. “I was at a party in a church, and I fell down the bell tower steps.”

  “A party at a church?” he repeats, frowning, still not looking up at me.

  “Uh, well, it was an abandoned church. It’s like the party spot.” I shrug. I don’t want to offer up any more information than that.

  He nods thoughtfully, seemingly staring at a doodle of a sword in the margins of the page he’s on.

  “And I don’t have a boyfriend,” I add.

  His shoulders relax and he snaps the notebook shut. “I mean, I didn’t ask.”

  “Sure.”

  Caleb’s shit at hiding his emotions; I can tell he’s relieved. I turn back to my dresser and start digging some underwear out of it.

  “And you’re sure that you’re only pretending to be a boy?”

  I turn on my heel and fix him with a look that makes him squirm.

  “I’m not trans, if that’s what you’re asking,” I say before turning back to the drawers. “I just need to pretend to be a boy to get through school.”

  “I mean, there’s a guy in my criminal justice class,” Caleb says, “and he’s kind of—he wears, like, these chest binder things, and—”

  “That’s really cool for him,” I say, cutting him short. “But I’m still very much a girl, Caleb. That hasn’t changed.” I feel my face flush. As much as my brothers can annoy me - and even bully me, it’s true—they sure seem supportive. I fully believe that if I actually was a transman they’d move right along with their lives with their little brother instead of sister. Hell, maybe they’d even prefer it.