by L V Chase
Cin gets up without taking my hand. She leaves without another word. I follow behind her.
"Cin," I call out after her. "Hold on, Cin."
She stops in front of the elevator and presses a button. Eric's already gone. I stand at her side.
"Cin."
"I don't want to talk," she says. "I'm taking the stairs."
I grab her by the arm before she can walk away. "Fine. No talking."
When the elevator arrives, we ride down it silently. Once outside, we separate without another word. It's clear that she doesn't want me to follow her, and I'm fine with that. I already know where I'm going.
It takes me a few minutes to track down Aurora. She's back at her villa, and she quickly opens the outer door when I bang on it.
"Grayson?" she asks. She's in a slippers and white loungewear.
I yank her roughly out of the villa into the cold air outside.
"Grayson!" she yelps. "What the hell?"
I grip her upper arm tightly with one hand so that she can't run away. "You know what you did. That was your video tonight with me and Cin. What the hell was that all about?"
She doesn't say anything, just smiles like a smug bitch. I grab her with both hands and shake her once violently.
"Aurora!" I shout.
The smile disappears, replaced by frightened eyes and a fake puppy-like expression. "I...I just did it. I had to. Grayson, I had to."
"You had to do jack shit. The hell are you doing?"
Aurora bites her lip. "I had to. It's not what you think, Grayson. Please, you have to believe me. He made me do it. He made me."
I stare at her for a long several seconds before the meaning of her words hits me. I'd said almost the same thing to Cin myself already.
"Who?" I growl.
Aurora's eyes widen. She shakes her head vigorously. "I can't say. He...he said he'd expose it all. Destroy us. Take down our family."
Damian. That colossal fucker. I'm even more furious than before, but I'm confused as fuck, too. He wanted me to hurt Cin so that he could get on her good side, pretend to be her Prince Charming. Why would he want to expose Cin's video like this? It makes no sense, like he's trying to hurt her, not win her over.
I don't understand Damian at all, except for one thing. I think I'd kill him if I could. I think I would.
19
Cin
While it’s theorized there are five stages of grief, I can confirm that there are five stages of public humiliation.
Unlike with grief, it doesn’t start with denial. The implosion of shame first kills you from the inside, and then the damage is visible from the outside as your body flushes and you lose all ability to speak.
The second stage is when that shame shuts down all of your senses. You feel like you’re watching everything from above. You’re numb to it all.
The third stage is denial. You fall asleep, praying that you’ll wake up and find out that the day never happened.
The fourth stage is waking up, recognizing that the day and its events absolutely happened, that everybody watched you having sex, and now you have detention with the guy that you had sex with.
The fifth stage is walking through campus, hoping beyond hope that everyone has moved on, but finding out that everyone is watching you.
Sometimes, they pretend not to. They whisper to their friends, and they burst into giggles.
Several of the boys watch blatantly. They make exaggerated gestures of licking their lips. They grab their crotches. They call you Touchdown for fucking on the football bleachers.
In this stage, I should be drowning in the humiliation, but I’m swimming in memories from yesterday. In our meeting with Principal Walsh, Walsh had accused Grayson of breaking the projector in the projection room, and Grayson didn’t deny it. It would imply that he wasn’t the one who broadcast the video for everyone to see.
I can’t risk hoping that he did it out of a desire to protect me. At best, he didn’t want anybody to recognize he was the man fucking me. He didn’t want people to think he’d fallen so low.
As I approach the dining hall, I see the woman with the blonde hair, the low-cut shirt, and the tiny skirt that’s two sizes too small, but I don’t believe it’s my mother in front of the dining hall until I’m less than a few feet away.
“Mom,” I say. A spark of surprise ignites, growing into a firestorm of anger. I come to an abrupt stop in front of her. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Baby!” she sings out, hugging me tightly. She sways me back and forth before letting me go. Her smile is wide enough that her swollen, red gums are visible.
“I’ve done it,” she says. “I’ve figured out a plan that will take me out of that ugly-ass apartment and get me some place nicer. When you come back home, we’ll have money to go to every store in Manhattan. We’ll get brand new wardrobes. We’ll eat at fancy bistros. We could do it every day!”
I dig my nails into my palm. “Does this have anything to do with you stealing Grayson’s phone? Because that plan only succeeded in shredding the last tiny particle of hope I had for humanity.”
“You’re always a bummer, Cinnamon,” she says. “It’s no wonder I need to drink.”
“It’s easy to be a bummer when your plans always backfire on me,” I say. “Your last plan involved me tricking Grayson into getting pregnant, in case you don’t remember.”
She waves away my words, but her smile isn’t as big anymore.
“I’m done with that plan,” she says. “I have a much better one.”
I throw up my hands. “When your first plan was ruining the life of a man, your daughter, and a future grandchild, how much better could the second one be? Do you want me to keep popping out rich men’s babies until I have a cult? How many babies do you want, Mom? How many would be worth sacrificing, so that you can finally be happy?”
Her smile falters. She purses her lips. She crosses her arms over her chest, her fingertips pressing hard into her arms.
“I see,” she huffs. “You think you know so much better than me? Cinnamon Reeves, the girl who couldn’t spell teacher in fourth grade wants to lecture me? The girl who spent twice as long to read every book she was ever assigned? The girl with such bad handwriting that your teachers didn’t even try to grade your papers? You think you’re better than me?”
My anger is starting to ebb, but I cling to it. “Smarter? No. But I know I’m better than you. At least I’m willing to try to be more than a gold digger.”
She grabs for me, but I take a quick step back from her.
“No!” She stomps her foot. “You aren’t going to lecture me, Cinnamon. The problem with my last plan was that I was hoping you’d be smart enough to snag someone of Grayson's status. But I was wrong. You’ve always been a bit soft in the head. You didn’t try because you know you’re not smart enough to pull it off. I’m going to be the one who snags Grayson.”
I nearly laugh. I cover my mouth with my hand, trying to keep it contained. A couple of girls pass by us, eyeing both of us. The whore and her mother.
“It’s not funny, Cinnamon,” she says. “You don’t need to constantly be a bitch.”
“Mom,” I say, dropping my hand back down. “Grayson is an asshole, but he’s an asshole with choices. He has high standards, a wide selection of beautiful women, and he despises desperate people. You wouldn’t be able to snag him if you stood in front of him naked and pissed gold.”
“I’m not desperate,” she seethes.
“Every time we talk, you mention how you’re running out of time because you’re getting old,” I say. “You couldn’t be more desperate if you were begging to get into Heaven.”
She tugs on the bottom of her short shorts. “I thought you’d be happy that I found a way for us to succeed. I thought you’d be happy that you wouldn’t have to get knocked up and make the same mistake of having a teenage pregnancy like I did. But you’re too jealous to accept that I could come up with an idea that you couldn’t.”<
br />
“I wasn’t trying to come up with a gold-digging idea,” I hiss. “I don’t care what ideas you come up with.”
“You’ve been a burden since the day you were born,” she retorts. “I keep giving you chances to make it up to me, and you’re too self-entitled to see how much you owe me.”
“If I’m self-entitled,” I say, “it’s because I learned from the best.”
She lunges forward like she’s going to hit me. I don’t flinch. She glares at me. I glare back.
She spins around, stalking towards one of the parking lots. I turn back to the dining hall, yanking the door open.
This is a mistake.
Inside the dining hall, a large banner has been nailed up. On the banner, my face from my school ID has been superimposed on a woman’s naked body, while the body is superimposed on bleachers. A speech bubble beside my face says Call me when you want to score on more than the field.
Their laughter sounds like a siren, shrill and rising and falling as I pass by various classmates. I stop at the end of the line for the breakfast grill. The laughter eventually quiets, but it only means I can hear the whispers.
She was getting fucked so rough—
I bet Touchdown screwed the whole football team at home, and she wants to do it here.
I heard the man she was fucking was Coach Lanner.
Sarah told me that the bleacher section is still sticky.
A hand grabs my shoulder. I spin around.
“Fucker—" My fist swings back, but I stop.
It’s Damian. His nose is pinched by a splint, and his bottom lip is split. Bruising spreads at the inner corner of his eyes, while another deep bruise blemishes his left cheek. Still, inexplicably, he’s smiling.
“God, I’m sorry, Damian,” I blurt out. “I thought you were—literally, anybody else.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it,” he says, ruffling his hair. “I’ve been punched enough in the last few days. I’m used to it now.”
Sometimes, when he’s boyish, it reminds me of how much difference time and money have made with him. Seventeen-year-old Damian wouldn’t have tried to threaten or strike Grayson, even if he thought Grayson deserved it.
“Are you doing okay?” Damian asks. “We haven’t had much time to talk since the talent show. I didn’t mean for things to go that way. My temper got the best of me, and my friends wanted to defend me.”
“Am I doing okay?” I echo.
I look over at the banner. He follows my gaze.
I shrug. “Apparently, I own a business on the bleachers and have a great advertising team, so I’m doing great.”
“I didn’t even see that,” he says, averting his eyes. He fiddles with his jacket zipper.
“Who were those guys you were with?” I ask. “They don’t go here.”
“No, we just all came together to see the show. You know Jake—he went to school with us—and the other three were friends I’ve made in the last year.”
The line moves. Damian and I take a couple of steps forward.
“But I’m sorry about that whole shit show,” he says. “I shouldn’t have reacted like that while you’d just been humiliated.”
“It was a shit show before you, Jake, and the whole male population got involved,” I say. “The only reason I’m not completely on board with the fight taking attention away from my sex tape is Jay.”
“Aw, Cin.” He wraps his arm around me, pulling me into a sideways hug. Somewhere behind us, I hear a boy making fake orgasm noises. “How is Jay doing? I haven’t had time to visit.”
“I only saw him briefly, and he was sleeping,” I say. “But they said the damage isn’t permanent.”
“Eric is a psychopath. Jay should press charges.”
I nod. In a lull of silence between us, soft chants of the nickname ‘Touchdown’ taunt me.
“Damian, I’m going to look into transferring back to our old school,” I say. “There’s no coming back from this.”
Damian takes in a sharp breath. “Come on, Cin. We only have like eight months left, and with the number of days off we have, it’s closer to seven months. Don’t—"
“You know I hate to be a coward, but I’ve also been stuck in enough bad situations to know when I should have bailed earlier. I have to get out—"
“Don’t throw away a great future because of self-entitled assholes,” he interrupts. “They’ll just move onto their next victim, and you don’t want them to think they can keep doing that. Just stand up to them. Show it doesn’t affect you. You had sex on the bleachers. Do you honestly think nobody else has either?”
“That might actually make the situation worse,” I say. “Because I’ve never seen them clean those bleachers.”
The last boy ordering takes his breakfast. He looks me up and down, smirking, before heading over to his table.
I step up to the cook.
“What can I get you?” he asks me.
“Can I get the Viking Breakfast Sandwich?” I ask.
“Make that two,” Damian interjects. He pulls out his wallet. “I’ll pay for this one. You’re going to need to save up your money because you’re staying here. Cinnamon Reeves doesn’t throw in the towel.”
“I’m just tired, Damian,” I say. “It’s been a long two months. It never ends. I don’t want to give up, but if you’re getting chased all over the jungle by a lion, you know the lion is just toying with you. You either give up or keep wasting energy until you trip and die.”
“Lions live in the savannah.”
“And, apparently, I’m also an idiot,” I say. “Thank you for reminding me. My mother reassured me that I’m too stupid to accomplish anything, and I’m starting to think she’s right.”
“Your mother is a bag of trash that managed to fit into a thirteen-year-old’s clothing. You should check for any pre-teens that are missing their clothes.”
I snort, leaning up against him. He wraps his arm around me, resting his head on top of mine. It’s nice. This is how things could have been if my mother hadn’t ruined us with her scheming. And now, she was scheming again.
It should feel good to despise her. In the small amount of times I’ve fantasized about marrying rich, it was so I could move across the country, far away where she couldn’t find me, and live without worrying about what she was doing next. But I couldn’t ever abandon her. I’m all she has, and when I’m gone, she could dive straight into her coping mechanism of drinking until she blacks out.
And I was the one who ruined her life.
Damian pulls away as the cook sets our breakfast sandwiches on the counter. He hands me my plate.
“Should we go to the art room?” he asks.
I nod. It’s going to be strange being in there without Jay, but nobody else hangs out in the art room.
As we walk, Damian takes a bite out of his sandwich. The Viking Breakfast Sandwich is sliced rib-eye, egg, jalapeño cheddar, and sautéed onions on a seeded bun. It feels more like a lunch or dinner meal, but it’s too delicious to care about time constraints.
“How could you walk away from this school?” he asks, his voice muffled by his crammed mouth. He swallows. “I’d consider paying the fees just for the food.”
I laugh. “Of course, you’d see the food as making up for a hundred shitheads trying to make my life miserable. Are you saying that if someone was getting tortured, we could just serve them Roman Academy food, and they’d be grateful for the torture?”
“I’m just saying it’s a hell of a lot better than jail food.”
I take a bite out of the sandwich. It is, by all definitions, strange and delicious. As we chew and walk, his words sink deeper into my mind.
“Jail food?” I ask. “I thought you said you just paid a fine for the marijuana arrest.”
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Very on-brand for our neighborhood. “It’s just a joke, Cin. If I ever go to jail, I’ll give you a serious food review.”
A twinge of anger swells under his vo
ice, but he quickly turns to me, giving me a goofy smile.
“Just another reason for you to stay,” he says. “You get me into fights. You might actually get to see me go to prison, and I can be your professional food critic.”
A lightness returns to his step, but I can’t laugh with him. It feels like we’re tempting fate. It feels like I’m still standing on that school stage, but the only one who’s laughing at me is Damian.
“This is a mop,” the janitor enunciates. “You stick it into the bucket, you wring it out using this little mechanism here, and you wipe it over the floor. Smartest to do it up and down, not side to side. The trick is to be as far away from the door as possible and work your way towards it. Otherwise, you end up walking over where you’ve cleaned. But since there’s two of you—well, I’ll let you two smarty-pants figure that one out, eh? Got to use that pricey education.”
This janitor has been talking down to Grayson and me for the last five minutes. Normally, I’d consider it justified, but I’m not one of these rich, sheltered kids. I know how to use a mop. You learn how to use a lot of cleaning equipment when you live with an alcoholic. Grayson’s blatantly ignoring the janitor, just flipping through his phone instead.
“As much as I’d enjoy watching you kids struggle, I promised the missus I’d be home.” He shrugs. “You know it’s love when you’re willing to eat her cement stroganoff and skip out on watching some pampered kids get blisters.”
He totters out of the dance studio. I’m left alone with Grayson. During in-school suspension, we’d nearly been on opposite sides of the room. The teacher had watched us with an eagle eye. We’d all sat quietly, all of the boys pretending they hadn’t just tried to kill each other and hadn’t managed to hospitalize the one man who wasn’t involved with either group. After the school day was done, we’d all trickled out.
But there aren’t eight people creating a wall between us now. There isn’t a teacher commanding silence, so the silence never acts like stitched-up skin—it’s a continuous, aggravating reminder of an open wound.
Grayson’s hands are swollen, the knuckles bruised as he grabs one of the brooms. I take the other one. He starts in the left western corner. I move to the left eastern corner.
