Before I can even pretend to look offended, Ben shoves Colin against the wall and pins him there. Ms. Prisby squeaks and hurries over to break up the fight, but not before Ben tells Colin, “You ever talk about her like that again, and I’ll break your face, you got it?”
Colin holds his hands up in surrender as Prisby pulls Ben off of him. She glares at me, but I ignore her. “Ben and Colin, to the headmaster’s office, both of you,” she orders.
Ben rolls his eyes and follows her out into the hall, where everyone has gathered to watch two of the most popular guys in school fight over me.
As I stroll to my locker, I pretend not to notice everyone’s sudden fascination. Arabella stops cold when she spots me, glowering at me until I walk past her. Her eyes are like two frozen blue flames burning into me, and I swallow, holding my head up high.
Suddenly, I’m shoved from the side, crashing into the solid wood of the lockers. I spin around to find Arabella smiling frigidly at me and turning to walk away. Before I can react, a teacher I don’t know comes barreling down the hallway. “What on earth are you doing?” she asks, her bluntly cut brown hair almost shaking with rage as she stares at Arabella. “Both of you to the headmaster’s office at once!”
She marches us to Harriford’s office. The hallway has gone silent, the only sound our heavy footfalls as wide-eyed students watch us pass. Arabella keeps trying to send me dirty looks, her mouth twisting in ridiculous grimaces, but I’m too busy figuring out how to control this situation.
The secretary looks up when we walk in, her eyes slipping over Arabella and landing on me in a scowl.
“This one shoved the other one,” the teacher tells her, and I can see it takes the secretary a few moments to understand that I’m the victim in this situation. Her mouth curls in distaste. This is not the story she was hoping for.
The headmaster’s door opens, and Ben and Colin come out, looking at me curiously. Ben’s gaze flicks from me to Arabella, and his confusion intensifies. Before I can talk to him, the secretary orders me into the office, her sour face so hostile that it’s almost amusing.
Once again, Harriford doesn’t look pleased to see me. I’m still not off the hook for sneaking out of Ben’s room. But his disapproval quickly shifts to Arabella when the teacher tells him what happened.
“What’s going on?” he asks me after he gestures for Arabella and me to sit down on the chairs facing his desk.
“She’s been bullying me for a while,” I murmur, staring down at my clasped hands. “I don’t know why she hates me. But this isn’t the first time she’s shoved me.”
I can nearly feel the fury simmering off of Arabella, but I keep my head down. “She spread rumors about me shagging the gardener!” she bursts out. “And she told my friends that I had something to do with Emily getting expelled. And she’s a manipulative little slag!”
It hits me then that, besides Arthur, Arabella might have the truest grasp on my character of anyone at this school.
“Even if these stories are true,” Harriford says with a long glance at me, “that’s no reason to shove someone, Arabella. I’m going to have to give you an in-house suspension for the week. You’ll be doing your homework in an empty classroom all day, and you won’t be allowed to eat with your friends.”
“But that’ll put a mark on my permanent record!” Arabella protests. “Universities will see that.”
“You should have thought about that before you shoved her, then,” Headmaster Harriford says in a tone that lets us know we’re dismissed.
Arabella must be biting her tongue to stay silent as she rises to leave.
“Ms. Foster?” Harriford asks. “A moment, please.”
I sit back down and ignore Arabella’s powerful glare as she walks out the door.
“I gave you detention three days ago. I just saw your boyfriend about a fight. And now you come in having been involved in another one. I’m concerned, Ms. Foster.” His forehead crinkles, making his face even smaller and his bald head even more grotesque.
“I know it looks bad, Headmaster Harriford,” I say calmly. “But Ben was provoked into that fight because they insulted me. And Arabella—she just attacked me out of nowhere.”
He gives me a hardened look, and I realize that I’m not as secure at this school as I thought. I try to look as helpless as I can, shrugging my shoulders and biting my lip.
“Try to stay out of trouble from now on, all right?”
I nod quickly. “Yes, sir.”
I walk out and pass the secretary without a look. She’s not who I need to worry about now.
I know it’s only a matter of time before Arabella attacks me again. And this time she won’t be content with just a shove.
I wait in the shadows of the stacks during lunch, where Ben will know to find me. After almost half an hour, he finally comes, his face flushed and angry. “Arabella shoved you?” he asks.
I nod. “Harriford suspended her for a week.”
“She deserves it,” he says bitterly.
I have to hide the flicker of triumph in my eyes. “What did Harriford do to you?” I ask.
“Suspension,” he spits out. “Even though it was Colin’s fault. I told Harriford what he said about you, and he just gave some, you know, bullshit ‘fighting’s not the answer’ speech. I’m out for two days, and it’ll go on my record.”
“I’m so sorry,” I murmur, clasping him in a hug. He presses against me, and a metal shelf behind me digs into my back. “It’s like the whole stupid school is out to get us,” I add, ignoring the discomfort.
He nods into my neck. “We won’t let them.”
“Of course not,” I say, burying my smile in his shoulder.
CHAPTER 26
It takes me a few days after Ben’s suspension to realize that Arabella must be thinking up a plan to destroy me now that I’ve gotten her suspended. Her glares have become pregnant with self-satisfaction and suppressed excitement, and one dark mid-January afternoon when I pass her in the yard, she actually smiles at me, her eyes filled with cunning, and I grit my teeth. She has a secret, and I have to get ready for its fallout.
I doubt she can shake Ben’s faith in me, though, if that’s what she’s hoping for. The first night in February, to celebrate the end of our month-long detention, he and I slip off to the cottage to spend the night reading the anonymous student submissions for the literary magazine and sleeping in each other’s arms until we have to sneak back in.
Around midnight, I’m staring into the flames, trying to figure out what Arabella has planned for me, when Ben looks up from the story he’s reading.
“What’s the matter?” He brushes a rough hand over my cheek, catching my attention. His hazel eyes flicker like liquid gold in the firelight.
I straighten my shoulders and roll my eyes with a small smile on my face, like I’m making fun of myself. “Nothing. I’m just thinking too much, that’s all.”
“Less thinking, more reading,” he says with an echoing smile, tapping the pile of pages in my hand.
I wrinkle my nose.
“Which one are you reading now?” he asks, noticing my expression.
I riffle through the pages in my hand, staring down at them. “It’s this sappy short story about two watches.”
“Sappy?” he asks.
I sigh. “One’s a digital watch and one’s an analog, and they’re not supposed to be together, but they fall in love. Rip-off of Romeo and Juliet, basically.”
I look back up to see that his expression is carefully guarded, and my mouth falls open. “Oh, God, this is your story, isn’t it? The one you wrote about me?”
He nods, but I breathe out in relief when I see a smile playing on the edges of his mouth. “You’re the digital watch. Because, you know, you’re new and uh, revolutionary, I guess. To me, at least.”
“It’s not bad
writing at all,” I scramble. “The writing’s really good. It’s just that I’ve never liked Romeo and Juliet.”
“Why not?” he asks, surprised. “I thought, you know, all girls loved Romeo and Juliet.”
“Haven’t you learned by now that I’m not like all girls?” I tease. “But really, it’s horrible. It’s a tragedy—that’s even in its title. And Romeo is a fickle hero. In the beginning he’s all swoony and pining for Rosaline, and then he sees a pretty girl at a party, and—poof—suddenly Rosaline is nothing to him. Then he and Juliet kill themselves for no good reason. They’re not in control of their emotions, and those emotions destroy them.”
I realize that I’m ranting and stop myself. My cheeks are flushed, and I’ve been throwing my hands all over the place. Juliet isn’t the only girl not in control of her emotions.
I take a deep breath as Ben laughs at me. “Is that all?” he asks.
I nudge his shoulder, putting on a reluctant smile. “It just annoys me, that’s all.”
“But it’s about the power of young love,” he protests.
“The power of young love to destroy,” I say. When I look up at him, I find him studying me, his hazel eyes dark, his mouth in a serious line. I spoke without thinking, and now I hold my breath, waiting for him to realize that I’m right.
Instead, he cups my face in his hands and pulls me close to him. I lean in, expecting a kiss. But he keeps looking at me, drinking me in. I try to look enchanted instead of nervous.
“I love you,” he says. His voice is clear, strong.
It takes me several moments to absorb his words. And what they mean.
I did it. I made him fall in love with me.
But I don’t feel the way I thought I’d feel. I’m not excited, not anywhere near it. What I feel is something more like cold dread.
I’m supposed to smile a delighted smile and declare that I love him, too.
I can’t.
I pull away from him, standing up and backing into a corner of the room. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I whimper before I can stop myself.
The air between us becomes something heavy and terrible.
Ben rises slowly and approaches me. He holds up his hands, showing me he means no harm. “Vivian,” he says. And he fills that word with such . . . devotion. Almost like it’s a prayer. He says my name again, and I start to cry.
He rushes to me now, enfolding me in his arms. Hiding me away from the rest of the world.
I sob onto his shoulder. I’m terrified, and it takes me a moment to realize what I’m terrified of. I’m terrified of myself. Of what I can do to this boy. Of what I’m supposed to do.
Yet even as I realize this, I’m trying to come up with a way to spin this sudden panic attack to my advantage. And something within me hates myself for that.
My tears slow and then dry up completely, but Ben still holds me. He won’t let me go until I tell him to, and I have no desire to do that. I stay buried in his shoulder for several minutes, trying desperately to control myself.
“I love you,” he murmurs in my ear. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”
I blow out a breath between my teeth and finally lean back, looking him in the eyes. I say the only thing I can say. “I love you, too.” It tastes like a lie coming out of my mouth. Like poison. Because I don’t mean it. I don’t love him. But hurting him—it’s starting to hurt me.
He beams at me, his smile suddenly stretching wide across his face, and then we’re kissing, and I can’t take my poisonous words back.
I don’t offer him any Molly, and he doesn’t request any. He’s already addicted to me.
CHAPTER 27
The day after Ben tells me he loves me, I head to the nurse’s office. I’ve taken care not to go there, since Mother told them I have some kind of heart condition that I barely understand to get me out of the sports requirement. I don’t want an interrogation.
But there’s something I have to know. Something that has been plucking at the back of my mind since I met Emily and learned that her EpiPen had gone missing around the time Mother was trying to get rid of her. And now, with the memory of Ben’s confession and the feel of his kiss on my lips, I can’t stop this one doubt from breaking through.
The nurse, a thin woman with a brisk smile, looks up when I walk in. “Can I help you?” Her dark blouse and pants stand out against the sterile whiteness of the room.
I smile broadly, though my stomach feels like it’s flipping over on itself. “I’m doing a research project on allergies, and I was wondering if you had an EpiPen I could look at? Just so I have a better sense of what it does.”
“Well, we do,” the nurse says, standing from her chair and rummaging through her shelves of supplies.
“You do!” I say, a little too enthusiastically.
She hands me a plastic case with a needle inside that I pretend to find fascinating.
I can feel her watching me, and I wonder how long I need to examine this needle to make my story convincing. “You’re lucky,” she says finally. “We ran out of these a few months ago. Had to get a new shipment in November.”
My throat grows dry, and I clear it. “You ran out?”
“Yes. The computer system said we had three left, so we didn’t check. Can’t trust computers.”
I shake my head. “No,” I say, my heart pounding so loudly that I can hardly hear myself. I hand the case back, my hands trembling. “Thanks so much. That should do it.”
I escape before she has a chance to stop me.
I’m running to Arthur’s shed before I even realize it. I need to make sense of all this, and he’s the only one I can talk to. He’s the only one who can help sort out all the questions that are screaming in my head.
I slam my fist on the rough wood of his door until he opens it. His eyes, full of confusion, sweep the landscape behind me as he pulls me inside. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks once we’re out of sight.
“Was she going to kill Emily?” I ask. My voice is high-pitched and panicked, and I try to take a deep breath, but it gets caught in my chest.
The anger in his eyes fades into uncertainty, but only for a moment. “Sit down,” he growls. “Breathe.”
I shake my head, crossing my arms over my chest. “Was she?”
“Are you telling me you really didn’t know?” he asks. He hasn’t moved away, and there’s less than a foot of space between us. He’s close enough to see every emotion flashing across my face, emotions I can’t stop.
I shake my head. “I didn’t think—I didn’t think she would do something like that.” I finally get a good deep breath and breathe out slowly. I need control.
“Of course she would. Revenge is the only thing that matters to her. I would have helped Emily deny those rumors about her and the teacher, somehow, but I knew if I interfered, my father would kill her. I had to watch her get expelled, knowing that you would come soon to take her place.” He steps closer to me, his tall frame filling my field of vision. “I didn’t want you to come here. I was naïve enough to think I could spare you from all of this.” His voice is low and raw.
“It’s what I was raised to do,” I remind him. “Nothing could spare me from it.”
“Your mother was ready to kill an innocent girl just to get you a spot at this school. How can you act like you don’t care?” He reaches his hand out and nearly brushes my shoulder before he draws it back.
Another deep breath. “She won’t kill me.” I say it with as much conviction as I can muster, but I can’t look up to meet his eyes.
“You really think that?”
I nod firmly, trying to clear my face of all emotion. “She’s my mother. She needs me.”
He steps forward. “Don’t you know what she did to her own mother?”
I freeze, not even daring to breathe, my eyes fixed on a knot
on the wooden wall, not on him. I don’t want to hear this.
“She had my father cut the brakes on her car. Her mother kicked her out of the house for having you, so she got my father to make her murder look like an accident.”
I force myself to look at him, searching for any sign of deception, any flicker of untruth. But in his dark stare, all I see is the boy I’ve always known.
“Why would he agree to do that?” I ask, grasping for anything that might make this story fall apart. “Why would he kill someone for her?”
“Because he’s in love with her. Because she manipulates him just like she trained you to manipulate everyone.”
“But it really could’ve just been an accident.”
He sighs, shoving a hand through his hair. “It wasn’t. I overheard your mother once. She was ranting at the portrait of her mother, you know, the one over the fireplace? She was muttering, ‘What mother kicks her own daughter out?’ Over and over, until she threw her drink at the painting. And on top of that, my father once showed me how to cut the brakes in a car.”
“So?” I ask, brightening. “That’s it? It’s just a coincidence. Just because your father knows how to cut someone’s brakes doesn’t mean he killed Mother’s mother.”
“You know I’m right, Viv.” His words are soft and regretful and more hurtful than if he had shouted them. He thinks he’s telling me the truth.
I picture the portrait of Mother’s mother that hangs over the fireplace in the den back in upstate New York. That woman with her diamond necklace and haughty expression. “No, it’s not true. It can’t be true. She always, always told me that family is the most important thing. She loved her mother, even if she disowned her. The car wreck was just an accident.” I try to find comfort in the words, but the room is spinning. I close my eyes.
Suddenly, Arthur’s hands are firebrands on my shoulders, and my eyes fly open. His dark stare flashes with anger. “Do you still not see what she’s turned you into? You can’t keep playing her game.”
I Am Her Revenge Page 15
