by Anna Martin
Jared rubbed his hands through his short, dirty-blond hair and let the water run onto his face. Hadley had installed one of those rainforest showers, and he adored it. After considering (and dismissing) rubbing one out again, Jared quickly washed the rest of his body and turned off the water.
Before turning off his light and going to sleep, Jared forced himself to memorize both his schedule and the map of the school. The last thing he wanted was to get lost or end up in the wrong classroom. If nothing else, he didn’t want to go and make a fool of himself.
With tired eyes, Jared plotted the route from one class to the next, forcing the journeys into his memory so by his second day at school, he’d be able to walk around like he’d always been there. Jared already knew that if he showed one ounce of vulnerability, the vultures around here would eat him alive.
Chapter 3
The next morning, Jared walked into his homeroom class two minutes before the bell rang. That was a tactical move.
The room was almost half-full, and he made his way through the desks, stopping at the third row from the back. There was a girl with pale hair and glasses sitting at one of the desks.
“Is it assigned seating in here?” he asked.
She blushed and ducked her head. “No. You can sit wherever.”
Jared nodded. “Thanks.”
He continued on to the back row, where there was one seat left. Right next to Clare.
“Morning,” he said with a nod.
Clare looked up, met his eyes, then went back to filing her nails. “Well observed,” she said drily.
Ignoring her, Jared slipped into the available seat and leaned back until the chair tipped up on its back two legs, pulling his phone from his pocket. With time to kill, he played Candy Crush until the sunlight spilling in through the window was blocked by someone large.
Jared looked up and grinned at Chris. He looked vaguely ridiculous in the uniform they all had to wear, his tie appearing almost noose-like around his thick neck.
“Yo, you’re in my seat, homie,” Chris said, his voice a thick drawl.
Jared let the chair fall back to all fours with a thunk. “You wanna sit on my lap, Big Poppa?” he said with a smirk.
Chris laughed, but there was a definite edge to his pose. Jared had ruffled him.
“Take a seat, Mr. Wallace,” Bowen said from the front of the room.
Jared rolled lazily to his feet and inclined his head with his hand on his chest, a respectful bow. Clare observed the entire exchange with interest. She obviously knew it was Chris’s seat and had let Jared sit down anyway. Probably so she could watch how it would play out.
By this time the class was full, or near enough, and the only seats free were at the front of the room. Jared tossed his bag over his shoulder and took a window seat, leaving Adam’s seat next to the door free. Adam slid into it as the bell finished ringing.
After the events of the day before, Jared had decided the only way he was going to survive this school was to play the game. He wasn’t sure yet what the rules were, or even who was playing, but losing was not an option. While Adam was surely going to be a very attractive distraction, Jared knew he was going to have to focus on more than just his calculus class.
Things were about to get interesting, and Jared had every intention of shaking it up.
“Military school, eh? Guess you’re good at sports, then, Mr. Rawell.”
Jared rolled his eyes. The gym teacher, whose name he hadn’t bothered to remember, was a walking cliché, right out of the cast of a Fox teen drama. Overweight, balding, clearly had absolutely no control whatsoever over the group of seniors who were lounging around the gym doing what appeared to be whatever the fuck they wanted.
“Sure,” Jared said. Bored. He was bored.
“What do you play, then?”
“Lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, and basketball, if I’m forced to,” he said evenly. “Put me on a football field, and I’ll run the wrong way. On purpose.”
Coach regarded Jared closely, his expression unreadable.
“Look, can I just go work out, please? I’m out of shape.”
“Sure,” Coach said. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, Mr. Rawell.”
The gym was better equipped than most fee-charging places Jared had been to. The cardio kit was shiny and brand new, by the looks of it. All the girls in the class were currently on a line of treadmills, their headphones plugged into the TV screens that were tuned in to Gossip Girl or some shit.
It was like an invisible line had been drawn across the room: girls on one side, on the treadmills and ellipticals, and boys on the other with the weights. There was clearly some macho pissing contest going on to see who could lift the most weight.
After taking a look around, Jared muttered “fuck this” and crossed the invisible line to the girls’ side of the gym.
Clare and Mia weren’t in this class, but Ryder was, so Jared hopped onto the treadmill next to hers. Ryder’s dark eyes widened comically, and she almost fell out of step.
“What are you doing?” she hissed at him.
“Um, running,” Jared said. He immediately set a fairly quick pace and, while jogging, plugged his earbuds into his phone to play music.
“Boys don’t usually come over here.”
“No shit.”
“You’re strange,” Ryder said, and Jared slowed enough to answer her.
“I’m a lot of things, Ryder. I’m gay. I’m tall. I’m an avid reader of gay pulp fiction and eighteenth-century French literature. And yes, I’m probably strange, too.”
“Don’t you care what people think?”
Jared shook his head, pushed his earbuds into his ears and turned the speed up on the machine. “What people think means exactly shit to me,” Jared said, content that his music would drown out her reply.
He covered five miles at a decent pace, then slowed down and accepted a bottle of water from the girl on his right, chugging deeply and nodding his thanks. This period led straight into lunch, so even after the bell rang to signal the end of the hour, Jared stayed, wanting to push himself a little further.
The girls disappeared into their locker room, and Jared thought he’d been left alone until someone hopped onto the machine Ryder had just vacated. It almost made Jared jump, but he forced his reactions down and looked over.
Great. Hemlock.
Jared nodded and turned up the speed again, wondering how far he was from his personal best of a five-minute mile. Apparently it wasn’t the day to find out.
Hemlock reached over and whacked the button that turned down the speed. Jared pulled his earbuds out, annoyed.
“What the hell?”
Adam shrugged. “Just thought we could chat.”
“I’m not much of a chatter.”
“That’s a shame. There’s been a lot of it about you.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Jared said easily, slowing down to an easy walk. The run had done him good, much better than posing with the weights. He grabbed his towel and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck.
“People are intrigued about you, Rawell. You’re in with Chris and Clare already, and those are two tough nuts to crack.”
“Chris is cool,” Jared said with a nod. “Clare is a class-A bitch.”
Adam laughed, a sharp, clear sound. “Yeah. God, I love that girl.”
With the machine slowing to a stop, Jared stretched his calves, and his neck from side to side, then shook out his aching limbs.
“Well, it’s been nice and all….”
“Wait. I’m partying on the weekend. You should be there.”
“Jesus, you’re arrogant.”
Adam grinned. “Be there,” he repeated and turned the speed up on his treadmill.
In the locker room, Jared was pleased Adam hadn’t followed him in; most of the boys were done in the showers and were finishing preening or leaving already. The last thing he wanted was rumors circulating about him and the only other openly gay guy in sch
ool. Especially when he’d vowed to Clare and her fellow witches he wasn’t going to give Adam the satisfaction.
There was clearly something going on with Clare, and it wasn’t as simple as her wanting to be completely in control. Jared wasn’t stupid—he could sense a trap from a mile away, and it might have been a while since he last had to deal with manipulative women, but he’d grown up with a mother and two older sisters who were masters at getting their own way, so he was familiar with the concept.
Since he could, and apparently it was bugging the other kids, Jared walked into the cafeteria and immediately found a seat at Chris’s table, sitting down without being invited.
“What up,” Chris said.
Jared grinned.
“You been messin’ with these basic white kids in gym?” Chris asked, then offered him a fist-bump across the table. Jared laughed.
“I ain’t getting into a testosterone-fueled, look-how-big-my-balls-are contest,” Jared said, cracking open his Pepsi. “If anyone wants to take a look, they can suck on ’em.”
Chris laughed and threw his arm around Clare’s shoulder. She looked for a moment like she was going to throw him off, then decided against it.
“So you got on a treadmill,” Clare said. “Big fucking deal.”
“I know, right?” Jared said. She seemed confused that he’d agreed with her. “Something going down at Hemlock’s this weekend, so I hear. You supplying?”
Chris nodded. “Fo’ sho.”
“I’ll take an eighth,” Jared said. “Keep some back for me?”
“A’ight.”
“Can’t make it Saturday,” Mia said, sliding into a seat at the end of the table with a plate of cheese fries and a bottle of Odwalla. Jared shook his head in disbelief at her lunch choice and stayed purposefully silent on the topic.
“You better have a decent reason not to be there,” Clare said. “Or Hemlock won’t let you in to the next one.”
“There’s a family thing,” Mia said. “Ben’s home, and—”
Her words were drowned out by the collective groan of the dozen or so people at the table. Jared raised an eyebrow at Clare, trusting her to explain, while Mia looked extremely put out by their reaction.
“Mia’s cousin is Ben Haggerty, better known as Macklemore,” she said. “For fuck’s sake, don’t be impressed. You’ll get dropped so quickly, you won’t know what happened.”
“I didn’t know I’d been picked up,” Jared drawled.
Mia sniffed and dunked a fry into a pile of ketchup. “You say that now, but I bet it’ll be a different story when you want me to get him to play at prom.”
“Nah, we gettin’ Sir Mix-a-Lot this year,” Chris said with a wide smile, leaning back in his chair. “Baby got back.”
“How the fuck are you going to book Sir Mix-a-Lot?” Clare asked, pushing his arm off now. “You talk so much shit, Chris.”
Jared watched their argument with interest, wondering who he’d be able to grill for more information on their relationship. They seemed like one of those established power-couples, but they didn’t appear to be romantically linked at all. There was definitely something simmering there, and Jared wondered if it was a “Daddy won’t let me date a black guy” situation. Clare certainly was Snow White pale, and he imagined race relations in this snobby, upper-class town were tense.
“So, when did you get pulled in?” Chris said, directing his question at Jared.
“Huh?”
“You split yesterday. When did they pull you into the office?”
“I didn’t get pulled in anywhere,” Jared said and drained his Pepsi. “Why, was I supposed to?”
There was a general “oooh” around the table.
“What?” Jared repeated.
“No one skips here,” Clare said. “They have this whole thing about truancy and zero tolerance. I can’t believe they didn’t catch you.”
Jared shrugged. “Either no one noticed, which is fine, or no one cares. Which is even more fine.” From the look on Clare’s face, he could tell she was reluctantly impressed.
“That never happens,” she said slowly. “It’s a boarding school. They catch everyone.”
“I’m not a boarder, though. Neither are you guys.”
“A few of us were, when we were younger,” Ryder said. “I told my mom I wasn’t going to board from my sophomore year onward. So she moved here.”
“No one cares, Ryder,” Clare said in a bored voice.
“I have a feeling my dad is paying Hadley serious money to keep the house,” Jared said, playing with the ring-pull on his can and interrupting Clare’s vitriol. “There’s no way she’d still be here otherwise. She likes the heat too much. All this rain would drive her crazy.”
“That’s Hadley Saunders, right?” Mia asked.
Jared nodded. “Yeah.”
“You’re living in the old Saunders house.”
“Yeah.” There was something going on, another something someone had failed to tell him. “What about it?”
“Oh, man,” Chris said with a shit-eating grin. “He doesn’t know.”
“I don’t care,” Jared said, forcing disinterest into his voice as he leaned back, tipping his chair onto its back two legs. “Whatever.”
Mia leaned in, clearly unable to deal with the tension any longer. “Ms. Saunders got that house in a divorce settlement, right?”
“That’s what I heard,” Jared said.
“The guy she was married to is the principal here.”
Jared raised an eyebrow. “So what?”
“So that house is a family heirloom,” Clare supplied. “His great-grandfather or something built it from the ground up. The fact that your aunt took it….”
“Wait, she was, like, twenty years younger than him or something. Extramarital affair turned second marriage turned second divorce, right?” Jared didn’t know the details, only the bits he’d picked up from his mother’s screaming arguments with Hadley.
Clare nodded. “Right. And Saunders went back to his first wife with his tail between his legs when it all went wrong. She took him back but roasted him, or so legend says, for being so weak as to let the second wife take the fucking heirloom house.”
“Is he going to make life difficult for me because of who I live with?”
“Who knows,” Clare said, her eyes gleaming. “Won’t it be fun to find out?”
Jared laughed and roughed his hair up with the palm of his hand. “If that’s how y’all get your kicks, then all right. I think I like Biggie’s brand of fun a little better, though.”
“Yeah, baby,” Chris crowed, and the subject once again turned back to the party on Saturday night. While the others threw themselves into a discussion on dress codes, Jared rocked on the legs of his chair, observing and wondering.
Chapter 4
If Jared had been impressed by Chris’s palatial family home, he wasn’t quite sure how to gauge Adam’s. It was easily twice the size of the white mansion, and sat up on top of the hill, surrounded by lush green forest, and had a spectacular view out over the bay.
In comparison, Chris’s place looked crude. Like what a seventeen-year-old millionaire would pick to live in: big, brash, ostentatious.
The Hemlock house was pure class.
The front was a jumbling mixture of glass, wood, chrome, and brick, opening the house to the nature surrounding it on several levels. There wasn’t a fountain in the middle of the drive, nor was there a drive at all, really. The house was tucked away into the landscape like it belonged there; the epitome of modern construction.
The lack of parking space was being handled by what looked like an underclassman, who was directing cars between the trees or around the back of the house where there was a wide field. Jared laughed humorlessly, awed at the sheer arrogance of Adam Hemlock, who was apparently getting the lowlier kids to do his dirty work.
When he was waved around the side of the house, Jared shook his head and parked at a deliberately awkward angle in fro
nt of an honest-to-God candy-pink Cadillac.
“You can’t park there,” the kid whined as Jared hopped out of his truck with his bottle of Jack.
Jared grinned and walked on up to the house.
Since it was the weekend, it looked like the party was a little wilder than Chris’s, which was saying something. Instead of scouting the place like he usually would, Jared walked through to where the music was blasting and sat on the arm of Chris’s large leather armchair.
“You one of my bitches now, homie?”
Jared grinned. “Sure. Where’s the party boy?”
“He hasn’t turned up yet.”
“But he lives here!”
Chris shook his head. “You got a lot to learn yet, new boy. Adam won’t turn up until the action really gets started. He’s down in Seattle right now getting his dick sucked. Trust me, that’s the best thing for everyone. He’ll be in a much better mood when he gets back.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Look around,” Chris suggested. “Don’t go upstairs, though, or Hemlock will rip your balls off.”
“Good to know,” Jared said drily. “You want a drink?” He held up the bottle of whiskey.
“Gin and juice.”
“Should have known. I’ll be back.”
The house didn’t follow any conventional layout, so it took Jared a while to figure out he needed to go downstairs to find the kitchen. It was full of girls, no guys, strangely, and the music down here was definitely more pop-orientated, as opposed to the R&B playing upstairs.
Two of the three witches were manning a punchbowl full of a sickly-looking pink liquid. Since he was now determined to play the game with these girls, Jared crossed and kissed Ryder, then Clare, on the cheek.
“Ladies,” he murmured, “you look delightful this evening.”
“Jared,” Clare said. “I hope you’re not coming over to the dark side.”
He laughed at that. “I don’t think so, sweetheart. Biggie wants a gin and juice.”
Giving her Chris’s drink order was an experiment. He still wasn’t sure what was going on between the two of them, and there was something strange about Clare’s unusual insistence on calling Chris by his given name, where mostly everyone else called him Biggie or Wallace. Her gaze hardened for a moment; then she turned to fix the drink.
