by Rebel Hart
“Yeah. I’ll, uh, explain later?” I asked. Avery hesitated, so I tacked on, “Please.”
Avery shook her head at me. “Okay. I’ll see you at lunch.” With that, she left us alone again.
Deon pointed at Avery as she left. The Royal Court was established not long after Deon and I first met, back when I was still a poor kid in the slums. We’d spent more than one night laughing and mocking the organization, so it shouldn’t have surprised me when Deon scoffed and said, “What are you doing hanging out with someone from The Royal Court?”
I bit my lip. My brain was telling me to lie, but I didn’t want to start our reuniting off on that foot. “Um, actually.” I shrugged. “I’m one of them now.”
4
Deon
Cherri was standing in front of me again after four years of trying to keep my brain tethered to her memory, forcing it to try to show me what she would look like once I finally saw her again. I dreamed of her so many times, and I would never have imagined the person standing in front of me.
Her blonde hair had grown well past her shoulders and now hung down almost at her waist, and her blue eyes and thick lips still took up a majority of her face. She’d remained slender, but the last four years had been good to her in terms of her curves. Her breasts were impressive, and given my circumstances, it was difficult to keep my eyes off of them, but the fact that Cherri had such a beautiful face helped. Her hips curved out, and she wore a sundress that allowed those assets to shine.
Beautiful.
That aside, the information she’d just shared wasn’t just confusing. It was downright disturbing. She was one of The Royal Court. How did that happen? We’d spent a great deal of time making fun of them for the stuffed-up, rich brats that they were, and the last time I checked, Cherri wasn’t rich. Her family didn’t have much more money than me and my mom did, and they lived in a house on the same block as me.
“That’s… How the fuck did that happen?” I asked.
Cherri tilted her head to the side. “Well…”
“Cherri.”
Cherri and I looked over from where we were sitting, and a woman that sent a wave of chills rushing down my spine was walking over. She didn’t scare me, despite the fact that she had on a scowl worse than some of the people I’d spent my last four years with and a switchblade not-so-subtly hanging from a bracelet around her wrist. My concern was that she might recognize me.
Nikita Glover.
It was to be expected that the different people I’d had in my past would all be under this one roof, but after years of trying to keep the worlds apart, it was a little disheartening to see that they’d gotten together and baked a Fuck-You-Deon pie.
Nikita looked me up and down, but whether or not she recognized me, I wasn’t sure. She didn’t linger too much on me but instead tapped Cherri on the shoulder.
“Hey,” Cherri greeted. “What’s up?”
“You’re wanted,” Nikita replied.
“Oh, um…” Cherri looked at me, then at Nikita, then at me, then at Nikita. “Okay.” She gave me a quick glance. “Let’s catch up more later, okay? You owe me an explanation.”
I nodded. “That I do.”
As disappointed as I was to watch Cherri leave, I was relieved for a little more time to figure out exactly what I was going to tell her. Four years had given me a lot of time to think, but every time I considered that what I may say could scare her off, I changed my game plan. I’d considered everything from outright lying to acting like she should already know. There wasn’t really one perfect option, and ultimately, I was just going to have to come right out and say it and hope for the best.
Flinging my backpack over my shoulder, I followed the few remaining students out of the classroom. All eyes were on me as I walked, and even though I tried to pick an outfit that hid most of the muscles I’d amassed over the course of the years prior, my arms still fought against the fabric of my t-shirt. Between that, my goatee, and my impossible to hide tattoos, it was proving next to impossible to fly under the radar.
“Do you think he was held back?” I heard someone whisper to their friend.
“Maybe he transferred from another high school because he got expelled,” someone else said.
After what I’d been through the past four years, a little bit of whispering and rumor spreading weren’t enough to bother me, so I just ignored them and pressed on. My next class was science, down in the wing opposite the one my homeroom was in, so I had a long walk to draw attention. Hopefully, after a few weeks, I’d be old news, but I’d just have to endure it until then.
“Hey! Deon!” I looked over my shoulder just in time for a kid at least a foot shorter than me to hop up and fling his arm around my shoulders, pulling me down to his level. “How you been, bud? Been a while.”
I thought back to the neighborhood I lived in before everything changed, and I remembered the other kids that lived there that I hung out with, but given that most of them were black, the pasty-white kid with a goatee and newsboy hat looking at me didn’t strike me as familiar. There were a few white families, including mine and, of course, Cherri’s, but her brother was eight years younger than her. The other one did have a son, but he was older than me and would have graduated by now.
Coming to the conclusion that I didn’t know the guy hanging off me, I roughly shoved him back. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Come on, man. It’s me, Sicily!”
Around us, I could see several students rolling their eyes and whispering to themselves while pointing in our direction. Suddenly, I wasn’t the center of attention anymore, and whoever this guy was, he had a reputation around the school.
Again, Sicily reached out and tried to wrap his arm around me, but I slapped it away. “I don’t know you. Keep your fucking hands off me.”
Sicily held up his hands. “Hey, man. Relax. I’m just…” He leaned in. “You’re new, right? I’ve long needed someone with a little muscle to hang around, and you need someone who knows the lay of the land. Let’s help each other out.”
I glared at him. “I don’t like when people use me.” When I took a menacing step toward him, he backed up so vehemently he nearly toppled over. “Bitch,” I growled, and then turned and continued off toward my next class.
So much for not drawing any additional attention to myself. Of course the seediest guy in the entire school sought me out. Anger boiled over me, but I remembered traveling a similar course of protection four years ago and thought that, if he’d been having trouble, it probably wasn’t dumb to seek out someone with some stock to them.
I looked back over my shoulder, but Sicily wasn’t there anymore. Whatever.
If I came across him again, maybe I’d hear him out, but in truth, I didn’t need any more excitement finding me. My only two goals in coming to school at all, as opposed to getting my GED, were to reunite with Cherri again and graduate. I didn’t need some punk who didn’t seem to be the school’s favorite guy risking either of those things for me.
I turned the final corner toward my next class just as the five-minute warning bell rang. Kids were funneling into every other class in that hallway, but the classroom I was bound for was the opposite. There was a huge crowd of people standing outside, including the teacher.
Were they locked out?
Students parted as I approached. As much as it annoyed me that they were treating me like some kind of virus, I was at least glad for the opportunity to get a little closer and find out what was going on. The last of the people in the group to look at me was the teacher. Her eyes widened as she took a huge step to the side.
Even the teachers?
I opened my mouth to ask what was going on, but before I could get any words out, I felt the poking of a sharp object at my back. Glancing to either side of me, everyone was avoiding my gaze, even the teacher. In fact, they were all turning a blind eye.
“Well fuck all of you,” I said out loud.
“Move forward,” a voice hissed into m
y ear, and I recognized it immediately.
It was Nikita.
So it was safe to say that she did recognize me. As much as I wanted to turn and kick her ass for daring to pull a blade on me, I was trying to distance myself from trouble, not rush toward it, so I did as I was told. She reached around me and twisted the handle of the door to the classroom, pressing the blade a little more firmly against my side. I stepped forward. She pushed me forward, and when I was through the door, she retreated, shutting the door behind her.
“Fucking bitch,” I hissed.
“Well, that’s not any way to talk to an old friend.”
My heart dropped. I turned to the left, and the person I least wanted to see in the entire world was sitting on top of a desk in the back of the room. He was wearing a pair of peach-colored slacks, navy blue slip-on vans, and a white t-shirt with a navy blue jacket over it. For as much energy as I’d put into remembering Cherri, I’d put in that much energy or more trying to forget this guy.
He crossed his arms and smiled at me, and I turned to face him, crossing my arms as well. “Nathan. How did I not expect that you’d have commandeered the room like some sort of Abercrombie and Fitch Godfather?”
His resulting chuckle was full of malice. “How did I not expect that you’d show up here looking like a cutout from Criminal’s Digest?” he spat back.
“Good to see you’re still a snobby asshole,” I hissed. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
He laughed. “Ah, you’re still as petulant as ever, Deon.”
I smirked. “That makes two of us.”
“So tell me, dear brother of mine,” Nathan started, and I could have gone the rest of his life without him reminding me, “how was prison?”
5
Deon
Looking through the small window that each classroom’s door had, I could see that Nikita was standing in a way that would prevent anyone from seeing in.
“Scared?” Nathan asked.
A chuckle escaped through my lips before I could stop it. “I spent the last four years of my life in prison. Two of those in adult prison. My cellmate was a serial murderer. Your punk ass couldn’t scare me if you were twice your size and holding a blowtorch.” The truth was, if Nathan tried to pull something, I wouldn’t hesitate to body slam him through one of these desks, whether he was my brother or not. The plausible deniability of the fact that no one would see that was only sweetening the pot.
The arrogant smile on Nathan’s face faded. “You shouldn’t underestimate what I could do to you at the drop of a dime if I wanted to.”
“Is that right? Tell me, how exactly are you going to hurt me when I have nothing to lose?” I asked.
“Nothing?” Nathan asked. “Are you sure? There’s not a single thing you could stand to lose?”
Cherri immediately came into my mind. She and my mom were the only people in my life that I cared about, and my mom was beyond capable of taking care of herself. She’d stood up to the Loches once before and won, and if she had to, she could do it again. Cherri was tough as nails, always had been, but Nathan didn’t know the depth of our relationship. Even if Nikita had already told him that she saw us talking during homeroom, he didn’t know how I felt about her. If Cherri truly was involved in The Royal Court now, that inevitably meant that she and Nathan ran in the same circle. The last thing she needed was for me to give Nathan any fuel to dislike her or cast her out. The less he knew about my history with Cherri, the better.
“I can’t think of anything someone like you could take away from me,” I said. “I’ll admit, I’m mildly impressed by the fact that you even have the teachers under your thumb, but I think you and I both know that it’s your last name that scares them much more than your first.”
Nathan’s upper-lip curled into a scowl. “Everything I have, I worked for,” Nathan said. “Everyone here bends to my will because of me and no one else.”
“Sure, bud.”
“Don’t forget, we’re cut from the same cloth. Everything you hate about him is in you somewhere,” Nathan said.
My hands were balled into fists before I could stop them. “That man has nothing to do with me,” I said. “You think spending a year trying to turn me into another one of his carbon copies is going to give me some sort of restored faith in him? For my mom raising me by herself for ten years, that shit was barely a blip on the fucking radar, and now…”
I fanned my arms out to either side of myself, flashing the several tattoos I’d acquired over the last four years. One of my mom’s name, written in beautiful script up the inside of my left forearm. The letters of my mom’s last name, my last name, Keane, on the backs of my fingers on my left hand. The scaly viper, whose tail started just above my right elbow and coiled around my arm down to where its head was sitting in the palm of my right hand—a sigil of the gang I stuck with in the adult prison.
“I don’t think he’s going to be rushing to take any candids with me anytime soon.” I looked Nathan up and down. “You’ve got the carbon copy shtick down pat, though.”
Nathan’s lips pursed as he glared at me. “I’m nothing like him.”
The only thing Nathan and I had in common was that we both hated our father. We were two sides of one coin, and the only reason Nathan was on the house-in-the-hills side while I was from the slums-side was that his mom looked better on posters.
My mom was a down to earth, Ireland native who came to the United States in search of the nonexistent American Dream. What she got instead was Connor Loche, a nose-in-the-air asshole with an inability to keep his dick in his pants. Despite already being married to Nathan’s mom, Connor met my mom at the post office and couldn’t resist a new-to-Postings woman who didn’t know who he was just yet. He laid on the charm, the kindness, the promises of taking her away from her lower-class life, but those promises all went up in smoke when my mom discovered that not only was Connor Loche married, but he also had several mistresses all across Maine, some even in other states.
She ended things with him immediately, but not before she got knocked-up. Nine months later, I was born. My mom did the right thing and told Connor about his illegitimate son, but he’d just had a kid of his own with his wife and couldn’t be bothered. Why he came around after ten years, looking to drag me into his high-brow lifestyle, I never understood, but I barely made it a year. I wasn’t an ascots-and-fencing kind of guy, and when I went back to my mom to celebrate Christmas a year later, I refused to return to South Postings. Connor tried to muscle a custody order, but when my mom revealed that she had evidence of Connor’s continued affairs, he backed off. So ended the disgusting chapter of my life that involved the Loches.
Or so I thought.
Here I was again, four years later, looking my mini-Connor of a brother in the face, feeling something between bad that he couldn’t escape too and angry that he would dare approach me when all I wanted was to leave him in my past.
“Are we done here?” I asked. “I’ve had just about enough of looking at your dumb fucking face.”
“No,” Nathan said. “I have a proposition for you.”
The scoff I let out was so loud it echoed off the empty classroom walls. “A proposition for me? Go ahead, rich boy. Tell me what you have to offer me that I’d even be remotely interested in.”
“A way up,” Nathan replied.
“A way up?” I repeated.
“Yeah.” He fanned out his arms, mocking my earlier action. “Join The Royal Court. Serve by my side as my brother.”
“Serve?” I didn’t know whether to be amused or pissed.
Here I was, a man who had been to an actual prison with actual criminals, and my brother was, walking around like a fucking Hollister gangster. He wanted me to serve at his side? The few times I started to say something, I stopped, not quite sure of how to respond to such a request. It felt disgusting just to be offered.
“If you need time to think about it, that’s fine,” Nathan said.
I sho
ok my head. “The only thing I need time to decide is whether I’m gonna knock your fucking lights out with my fists, or just piledrive you and be done with it.” Flashing the middle finger on my right hand never felt so good. “You can take your little royal court”—I whined the words—“and shove it up your rich, entitled ass.”
A quick moment of fear or maybe even pain flashed across Nathan’s face before it went back to his scowl. “You’re gonna regret that.”
“I’ll try to mask my concern,” I responded flatly. “Come near me, and you’ll see exactly what I learned while you were out here, playing fake-president with your little friends.”
Nathan nodded at the door, and a few seconds later, it opened. Students started to filter into the room. They moved in a rush because the class had already begun, and when everyone finally settled down into their seats, I could see that both Nathan and Nikita were gone.
“Please take a seat,” the teacher said, but her voice was weak, and she was shaking as she said it.
I stormed to an open desk near the back of the classroom and threw myself down into it with rage boiling in my blood. It was because everyone was running around like he was the king of the goddamn world that Nathan believed he was some big, important person. It would be no skin off my back to teach him that he was actually relatively small in the grand scheme of things, but after everything my mom and Cherri had already been through, I wanted to keep my head down and my nose clean.
That didn’t mean Nathan wouldn’t get his ass kicked if he made the first move. With him snaking around, and on the heels of his less-than-frightening threat, I’d have to keep my wits about myself even more than I was already planning on. Staying away from Nathan and, by extension, my dad was the ideal option. Even if all he could do was keep me in an unpopular, lowly position in the school, as long as Cherri knew that was bullshit, the rest didn’t matter to me.
