by C. L. Stone
He nodded and focused on North and Kota. “Give the orders to the others. If she gets called out of class again, no one is to follow her. We need to make it look like she’s playing this game.”
“We can’t do that,” Kota said. “We’ve got another problem.”
“What now?” Mr. Blackbourne asked.
Kota glanced at me. “Tell him.”
I bit my lip, tucking my hands behind my back to hide my shaking. “McCoy grabbed me this morning.”
North’s intense eyes narrowed in on my face, his hands clenching into fists. “How? When?”
I glanced at Mr. Blackbourne. North’s temper scared me.
Mr. Blackbourne frowned, inclining his head. “Tell us what happened.”
I sucked in some bravery. Learn to trust, I told myself. “After I was excused by Mr. Hendricks, Mr. McCoy found me in the hallway. He grabbed me, telling me he was keeping an eye on me.”
“Show them where,” Kota said, his tone calmer than before, as if relieved this information was out.
I gazed at the floor and placed a palm at my hip bone.
“He gripped her hard, too,” Kota said. “I saw the red marks. She’ll probably have bruises.”
“Christ,” North breathed out, his fists knocking against his thighs. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” I said.
“Like hell there isn’t,” North barked.
“Settle down, North,” Mr. Blackbourne commanded.
“No. Let’s go after him. Confront him now. Let’s get his ass fired. He can’t do that.”
“Who are we going to talk to? Mr. Hendricks?” Mr. Blackbourne asked.
“We could talk to the school board,” Kota said.
“If this gets out,” Mr. Blackbourne said in a calm tone, “they will demand to inform and talk to her parents while they investigate.”
North had his mouth open to say something but stopped short. Kota’s face fell. This was an impossible situation. My parents weren’t available. I couldn’t risk exposure over something like this.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” I repeated quietly. “He either knows this or he has something else on me to make sure I can’t complain to Mr. Hendricks or anyone else. It’s his word against mine, anyway.”
“You’re correct to assume he might have something that lets him think he can come after you, Miss Sorenson,” Mr. Blackbourne said. “But we will do something about this. North is right. This can’t continue.”
“I can try to avoid him.” To me, it seemed like the only solution. Next time I was trapped in the hallway, I’d run, or do something. I wouldn’t stand there. He scared me earlier, caught me off guard. I didn’t want to put myself in that situation again. I also didn’t want more trouble for the guys.
“We didn’t pull you from one problem just to leave you with another,” he said. “Let us worry about Mr. McCoy. From now on, you should never to be alone with him. If you ever see him, in front of people or not, and my team isn’t around you, you should contact me immediately and leave the vicinity. I don’t care when or how. If he tries to pull you out of class and we’re not there, don’t follow him. Call me instead.” He turned to North. “In the meantime, we need recorded surveillance on McCoy. Work with Victor to make sure that happens by this afternoon.”
North nodded, his jaw firm.
“Should we follow her out of class, now?” Kota asked.
Mr. Blackbourne’s lips twisted. “Only if it is McCoy coming for her himself.” He turned to me. “Otherwise, keep your phone close and call if you’re ever called out of class for anything. I’ll follow with the installed cameras and I’ll make myself available in the front office. We’ll draw too much attention if someone follows behind you every time.”
My fingers fluttered to the base of my neck, rubbing at the tip of my collarbone. I didn’t like this plan. If they caught him again doing it, what else could they do? I did like the thought of them following him with cameras though. If anyone else was getting hurt by him, they could get help.
It struck me as strange that I was being given what almost amounted to orders. A thrill swept through me to be included. It wasn’t all about helping me this time, either. It was to help them.
The bell rang. North cursed. “Never enough time.”
“Meanwhile,” Mr. Blackbourne said, pointing at me, “tomorrow bring your violin as expected, but be ready for training. Kota, she’s to get self-defense training this weekend. Make sure someone is available to make that happen.”
“I’ll do it,” he said.
North picked up my things, leading the way out of class. Kota remained behind to talk to Mr. Blackbourne.
I walked beside North, with my arm brushing his as he slung my things over his back. He didn’t acknowledge it, locked inside his own head as he marched forward.
Victor was out in the main hallway and waiting. He perked up when he saw us coming, but frowned when he caught North’s serious expression. “What happened?” he asked.
“Long story,” I said quietly.
Victor frowned, reaching for my hand, his thumb smoothing over the skin between my thumb and forefinger. “Tell me on the way.”
♥♥♥
By lunchtime, the others had been informed of the new plan. As soon as North, Victor and I arrived at the courtyard, Victor pulled a laptop from his bag, and sat on the grass. “I need cover,” he said.
Did he mean a shield? I could do that. Since I was beside him, I sunk to my knees next to him, sitting back on my heels.
Victor beamed at me, his fire eyes lighting up. “Princess, I love that you did that, but you’re not exactly what I need right now.”
“Move over, short stuff,” North said, nudging me in the shoulder.
I knee walked across the grass to sit next to Luke and Gabriel. Silas and Kota sat on the bench behind Victor while North and Nathan perched themselves on either side of Victor and started talking over his head. The rest of us clustered around in a circle.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Luke in a half-whisper.
Luke lifted his gaze from his package of chips to check where I was looking. “Computer stuff.”
“Computer stuff requires sitting together like this?”
A chop landed on my head. Gabriel smirked at me from my other side. The red crystal studs in his earlobes sparked in the sunlight. “Stop asking so many questions.”
“But isn’t it obvious we’re masking what he’s doing?”
Luke and Gabriel laughed. Gabriel dropped his hand onto my head, massaging at my scalp. “Trouble, stop. Don’t you think we know?”
I sighed, pursing my lips. “Don’t I get to know? I mean he’s fixing McCoy’s cameras, isn’t he?”
“Ixnay on the ... whatever’s Pig Latin for cameras. Don’t let the kids overhear,” Gabriel said, reaching around me to grab at Luke’s chip package.
Luke relinquished his food with an eye roll.
“Say thank you,” I muttered to Gabriel.
Gabriel narrowed his eyes at me. “Thank you, Luke,” he taunted, but grinned.
Luke laughed. “Well what do you know. She’s teaching Gabe manners. Never thought that would happen.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Gabriel said, throwing a chip at his head.
Luke and Gabriel started talking over me about another class they shared. Meanwhile, I focused on Victor. I felt like I hadn’t seen him in a while. Now the first chance I had to run into him with any amount of substantial time, I was in trouble and he was working to fix it. It made me think about the time he asked me out in the attic. Since then, so much had happened and he’d been busy with Academy work. It made me wonder if he forgot.
As I gazed at him, his eyes lifted, meeting mine. I lifted an eyebrow, confused.
“Stop it,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re distracting.”
“Sorry,” I said, scrunching my shoulders. I could
n’t do anything right today.
Victor flashed a smile at me, returning to his work.
By the end of lunch, Victor sent a text to Mr. Blackbourne to let him know his work was finished. I was guessing cameras would be recording like they wanted, but Mr. McCoy wouldn’t stay in his office all day. Would they have all the cameras running all day long? Or how would they get someone to monitor Mr. McCoy all the time? I pushed it to the back of my mind. Academy business. Let them handle it.
On the way to my next class, Silas walked ahead of me, and Kota walked next to me as his class was near ours. The hallway narrowed, with clusters of students, making, it slow progress.
When we stalled, Kota reached for my hand.
The boy next to me nudged my arm. He jerked his chin at me. “That your boyfriend?”
My eyes bugged out. “I ...” I didn’t have an answer.
“Yeah,” Kota said over my head at him, the command penetrating his voice. “She’s with me.”
Silas stiffened in front of us, slowing his steps enough that I nearly bumped into him.
My breath caught. Was he serious? I looked back at him but his eyes were focused on the kid next to us.
The boy nodded his head at Kota. “You know she was holding hands with that other dude in the hallways.”
“She’s with me now,” Kota said in the same sharp tone. His fingers pressed into my palm, gripping me as he pulled me closer.
My heart was thundering and my cheeks were on fire.
The kid only smirked. The crowd shifted around us. The kid nudged someone on the other side of him, whispering. They laughed. Was it about us?
Kota leaned in, whispering in my ear. “If anyone asks you if any one of us is your boyfriend, you say yes. I don’t care who you’re with.”
Why would he want that? I didn’t quite understand. They were my friends but claiming they were my boyfriends? And all of them?
I thought of the notes I often got in class that North and the others collected. Were the guys trying to keep me from talking to anyone else? This confused me a lot. Next year, they would all be gone from this school and back at the Academy, wouldn’t they? Shouldn’t I make at least a couple of friends so I’d have someone to talk to when they were gone? Maybe not this kid, but Kota was so abrupt with him. He didn’t give him a chance when he could have just been curious.
Kota followed us to class, but said a quick word to Silas before moving on. Silas took one look at me, nodding to Kota, and ushered me into the classroom.
All I could think was what would Victor say when he heard about this? What about North or the others; what would they think? It just seemed crazy.
As Silas and I took a seat in biology, he started pulling paperwork out of his bag behind me as I turned to him. “What did Kota say?” I asked him.
“He said you’re too cute for your own good,” he said, collecting his biology book.
“No really,” I said, blinking at him in disbelief.
Silas’s lips parted as he stared at me. “What do you want me to say? Should I repeat it verbatim? He said, ‘Sang’s too cute for her own good.’ I agreed with him.”
I released a short breath. He said that? And Silas thought I was cute, too? “I ... oh.”
Silas grinned at me. “What did he say to you?”
I blushed. “He said if anyone did that again, like if they asked if you were my boyfriend, I was supposed to say yes.”
Silas beamed. “Well? Kota’s the boss. Have to do what he says.”
I nodded slowly, turning in my seat to let the information sink in. Every other incident from that day temporarily left my mind. Kota and Silas thought I was cute. Kota and Silas would claim to be my boyfriends. I didn’t dislike the idea, but it left me wondering how I would ever know their true feelings if we were going to be playing pretend when other people were around.
Dating was complicated.
BIG QUESTIONS
The biology teacher didn’t do me the favor of teaching an actual lesson so I could sink into the sweet oblivion of half listening while processing the information. Instead, he asked us to open our books and pair up with someone to answer the questions from a chapter. Silas looked happy. I was glad for the break in class routine, but felt unsettled and now more shy than ever.
For the workload, all I had to do was read the questions out loud to Silas. He took them down and then wrote the answers without reading the text.
I leaned over the desk, scanning over his work. “How did you know the answer?”
“I’m smarter than I look,” he said, finishing the final question. He glanced up at me hovering over his shoulder to read what he was writing. “What?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
Silas laughed, passing the paper to me. “Write our names.”
“That’s not exactly better,” I said as I scrawled my name on the page. For fun, I wrote his name in girly script and putting a heart over the “i".
Silas grinned at me. “Cute.”
“Victor got mad at me when I did it to his name.”
“Victor’s got an image to maintain. Meanwhile, I don’t really care what people think of me.”
“What’s Victor’s image?”
“He’s the almost-famous pianist,” Silas leaned over his desk, propping his head up in his hand. “And his parents are rich. He’s usually the center of attention.”
My lips parted. “Really? I haven’t seen that side of him.”
“He tries to keep a low profile here. He prefers it. I think that’s why he was excited to come here. Normally he has to be very aware of who he’s with and what he’s doing. Here, no one knows who he is, but he still has to be careful. I don’t know what he worries about. Kids here don’t read gossip in the society columns.”
“Victor gets written about?”
Silas laughed loud enough to draw the attention of some of the other groups around us. “Not as much anymore. I think his prodigy days are almost over. But there’s a pile of girls hoping to get his attention and be the first Mrs. Morgan.”
My heart fluttered. Victor was a prodigy. Other girls wanted him. That had to be true about all of them, though. They were handsome and nice and while they might not be almost-famous, they had a lot of attractive assets. Victor had asked me out on a date. Was he dating other girls, too? Was I just one of many?
Silas’s eyes traced over my face. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.”
It was probably rude to sit here and talk about Victor when he wasn’t here. “Sorry, no. It was just a surprise. I guess I still don’t know you all very well.”
His mouth softened. “We’ve been busy.”
“Just a little.”
“Let’s fix that. Let’s go out this weekend.”
My heart started thundering in my chest. “Us? This weekend?”
“Unless you’re busy.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. My eyes flittered to the other students for only a moment. It was a nervous gesture because he was asking me out in the middle of class.
“Our first football game is this Friday,” he said. “There’s a party after. I have to go. North has to, too. We’re part of the team so we can’t say no. You want to go?”
So I wouldn’t be alone with him. I’d be with North, too. It wasn’t an individual date. It was a friend thing. That made me feel better. “Yeah,” I said. “Oh wait ... what about the game? I get to watch that, right?”
Silas grinned. “If you want, but you shouldn’t sit alone. North and I can’t watch you from the field.”
I blushed again at the thought of him suggesting I needed a babysitter just to watch a football game. “What should I do?”
“Ask one of the others. Nathan or Kota or someone.”
Ask the guys? That sent my fingers shaking and I hid them under the desk, in my lap. I had to ask someone to go with me to the football game, so Silas could take me to the party with him and North after. It felt like I was asking someone on
an almost-date, under the condition that there would be another almost-date I had to go to after.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “I mean yes, sounds like fun.” I wanted to believe it would be fun, though I was nervous about all of it. A game. A party! Sang Sorenson at a party, like a normal person.
Academy boys were changing everything.
♥♥♥
In my next class, I was nervously tapping the eraser of my pencil against the desk as I waited for Victor to show up. He slid in at the last minute before the bell rang. I’d been itching to ask him to the football game. He’d asked me out, so I thought he wouldn’t say no if I asked.
Only my tongue got stuck to the top of my mouth. I’d glance back at him during the lecture, he’d flash a smile, and I’d chicken out and stare off toward the front again. It almost felt like I was asking him to do me a favor rather than asking if he’d like to go. ‘Silas won’t let me go to the game before he takes me to the party unless I take someone. Will you babysit me?’
Before I found my courage, class was over. I collected my things. Victor followed me out to the hallway.
When we were walking beside each other and away from class, he reached for my hand. “Sang?”
My stomach buzzed inside. “Yes?”
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, his fire eyes subdued, but the corner of his mouth had drifted up.
My lips parted. “Wrong?” My mind raced for an answer to his question. Was there something else I hadn’t told them? With everything going on, it wouldn't surprise me, but how many things could be wrong with me today?
“It looked like you wanted to say something and you kept stopping. Are you okay?”
Apparently my face was as readable as Mr. Blackbourne had said. My eyes flitted to the other students passing around us as we crossed toward the gym. “I wanted to ask you something but ...”
Victor halted in the middle of the hallway, turning to me. An eyebrow arched up. “Ask.”
My face felt like it was on fire, lit up by the sparks in his eyes. “I ... um ...”
“Princess,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “After everything else today, I’m not going to flinch at a question, whatever it is. Just ask me.”
