by Ivy Fox
“Where is Princess, anyway? Shouldn’t she be doing the babysitting?”
“Her dad’s in a coma. She’s going to be out of school until the doctors tell her he’s stable,” Chad informs Saint, drooping back on his chair. I watch confused as Saint’s expression turns to stone as he places the hamburger back on Chad’s plate and cleans his hands aggressively on a napkin.
“Yeah? How come I’m only hearing about this shit now?”
“You’ve been MIA all weekend. Not the kind of thing you send out in a text,” Chad replies coolly, unaffected by his friend’s sudden, hostile demeanor.
“Whatever,” he growls, sliding his chair back with brute force, apparently done with eating Chad’s lunch.
“Where you going?” Chad questions, his own jaw locked in place.
All morning long, I could count on Chad’s bubbly attitude to lighten the mood around me. This side of him though, not only has me baffled, but also has my hackles rising. Maybe I’m not the only one who is playing pretend today. Maybe Chad needed me as a distraction as much as I needed him.
“Class. What else? It’s not like I can sit here and look at your pretty mug all day, now can I?” Saint rebukes, and a cold smile begins to trace his lips.
“Not so fast. You need to do something for me.”
“What?” Saint huffs out, gripping the back of the chair with both hands as he stares down at a stoic Chad.
“You’re going to take Holland to her classes at Blythe House. I’m at Avery House for the next two hours, so I can’t do it.”
“Why? She can sort herself out,” he counters, looking me up and down in distaste.
“Saint, just do it,” Chad orders arctically.
“Fine, get your ass up. I got shit to do,” Saint cusses under his breath.
“Hey, be nice. She’s one of the good ones. Don’t break her, okay?” Chad adds with a lighter tone than he used before.
Too late for that. Saint might be just another Pembroke bully, but he isn’t capable of doing me any more harm than what has already been done to me.
“I’ll try,” he quips back sarcastically.
I want to tell Chad that I’m good on my own, but something tells me he won’t take no for an answer.
I get up from my seat and follow the brooding, bad boy out of the cafeteria. Saint is already two feet ahead of me, and at least I’m thankful that he doesn’t seem eager for mindless chit-chat. I pick up my pace until I’m at his side, but don’t dare say anything to the tattooed beast. Not even in khakis and a tie does this guy look remotely approachable.
I remember reading in the Pembroke manual that piercings and tattoos weren’t allowed in this school, but it looks like Saint didn’t get the memo. Or better yet, doesn’t care if he gets a citation or not. A guy like this probably spends his afternoons in detention anyway.
His friendship with Chad is a conundrum to me since they seem like oil and water; so different from each other that I can’t see what the two have in common to talk about, let alone be best friends. Maybe his badass persona is just that—a mask he puts on.
I saw how badly he treated Elle back at the party, the animosity clear as day. However, when Chad told him about Judge Grayson’s condition, he looked angry for not knowing. If he hates Elle—as he obviously wants her to believe by the awful way he treats her—then why care so much? Whatever his deal is, Chad seems to know how to handle him with an iron grip. One thing I took out of our uncomfortable lunch is that Chad isn’t intimidated by his friend. Actually, if I had to put money on it, I’d say it’s Chad who ruffles Saint’s feathers.
Thoughts play out in my head, focusing their earlier weird interaction, has Saint and me arriving at Blythe house sooner than I anticipated. This morning my presence in all my classes had gone unnoticed, but after watching that damned video, something tells me this afternoon won’t be as easy on me. There might have been a few glances my way before—a side effect of being the new girl in school—but while this morning I may have been a mystery to some, this afternoon everyone knows my business. Or at least they think they do.
“Which room?” Saint groans beside me.
I look at the schedule and tell him that I have AP English on the second floor; room 12 B. He gives me a noncommittal nod and doesn’t open his mouth again before we reach our destination.
“When the bell rings, stay here. I’ll come and grab you.”
“It’s fine. You don’t need to. It’s Spanish, which is on the first floor, close to my locker. I can get there fine enough on my own.”
He looks at the heavens as if he’s counting down from ten, and then turns back to me with a stern look on his face.
“Stay here,” he repeats menacingly. “I’ll take you to your class. Got it?”
“Whatever,” I rebuke with one of his favorite comebacks.
“Good girl. If you play nice, I play nice. It’s that simple,” he adds forebodingly and leaves me standing by the door, stewing from his arrogance.
I hoped Saint’s interaction with me would be the low point of my afternoon, but unfortunately, it wasn’t. Everyone sitting inside my English class takes one look at me when I arrive and instantly begin to heckle me. Dirty insinuations, ill-mannered jokes, and coughing vile remarks like ‘whore’ and ‘trash’ are the background noise of this class.
The teacher up front seems clueless as to what has her students all riled up, but she makes little effort to control their ugly outbursts. I’m unsure if she’s used to them taking over her classroom, or if she doesn’t want to piss them off, afraid what repercussions she might face from their affluent parents. I mean, they are the ones who pay her salary, and no one likes to bite the hand that feeds them.
But I fall under a different scenario, don’t I? I’m just the girl whose father is responsible for previous students being kicked out of Pembroke. Maybe even ones she taught and cared for. Yeah, if the student body has no love for me, then I’m sure the faculty doesn’t bear any sympathy for me either.
By the time the bell rings, I’m so over this place that I don’t even hear Saint calling out to me under the classroom door’s threshold. I hurry up and pack my books, trying hard to keep the protective shield around me and not let their mean words penetrate through it.
“You deaf, or something? You’re going to be late for class and make me late because of it.”
“Sorry, my head was somewhere else,” I mumble beside him, castigating myself for letting even one of their taunts get to me.
“Yeah, I heard,” he chimes in. “Tough break. These motherfuckers love playing with their new toys. It will die out eventually. Call it a rite of passage,” he relents unfazed, playing it off as a normal high-school occurrence.
“Rite of passage?! Did they make a video portraying you as a slut, and outing that your father was a criminal?” I blurt out, pissed that anyone can be so aloof to this type of harassment.
“Not the slut part, just the criminal end of it. And it wasn’t a video. They spray painted my car.” He shrugs like it was no biggie. My eyes go wide with his confession.
“Oh.”
“Whatever you do, don’t let these fuckers see they got to you. That’s how they get their kicks. If they play dirty, then you just got to play ugly.” He slants his eyes at me, playing with his tongue piercing, enhancing his villainous grin.
“Is that what you did to whoever sprayed your car?” I can’t help but ask, honestly curious at how he dealt with such cruelty.
“Yeah. They might have graffitied over my car, but by the time I had finished with theirs, it was scrap metal fit for the junkyard. Plus, I fucked their girlfriends, took pics, and taped them to the assholes’ lockers. It got my message across for them not to fuck with me again.”
“Oh. Not sure I can do the same. I think I’ll just ignore it until it passes.” I sigh, thinking that sleeping around or going full hulk won’t do me any favors.
“Your call. But remember,
they can smell blood in the water. Try not to bleed, yeah?” Saint warns, and I take his advice to heart. He might not be a good guy, but right now, his candor stiffens my spine.
It seems that Pembroke High has a reputation for revealing our dark sides. I won’t give them the satisfaction. Mostly because the skeletons I have in my closet will ruin me if they ever get out.
“Chad is going to pick you up. It’s been real, London,” he says once we reach my next class.
“It’s Holland, actually.”
“Whatever.” He shrugs, but this time I’m not as offended with his aloof attitude as I had been at lunch. Saint keeps everyone at arm’s length, and from his previous admission, his past might be as bleak as my own, making it hard to trust people off the bat.
Seeing as I’m already here before the bell, I go inside for the last class of the day. I take one of the back seats, hoping my presence will go unnoticed. Unfortunately, just like in AP English, this class has the same smirks, same people looking me up and down, and same taunts hurled my way. What’s worse is that now, here in the back of the room, I’ve made myself easy prey. In English, they at least pretended to conceal their slanderous statements with fake coughs or vague innuendos. Here, though, they aren’t as subtle.
I watch as some students replay the video on their phones instead of paying attention to the teacher, who is even less of an authoritative presence than the last one. The two guys sitting at the desks beside me have thrown stuff on the floor, just to tell me to open my legs so they can take a peek at what I’m offering. A girl in front of me even goes so far as to turn around in her seat, placing a note onto my desk, ordering me to get my white trash ass out of Pembroke before I’m gang-raped. My nails pierce my own palms just so I don’t get up from my seat and make her eat the piece of paper.
If this is the high school experience I’ve been missing out on, then I’m officially over it.
When the last bell rings, I stand up from my seat, ready to get out of this place and go home. And when I say home, I mean Brookhaven. But to my chagrin, I know that day hasn’t arrived yet, so on to the Grayson Manor I go. I don’t even wait for Chad, as Saint told me to, and go to my locker, wanting to put as much distance as I can from this place.
But like everything in my life lately, getting to my locker is easier said than done. There is a large crowd gathered in the hall. Kids in their pristine, white shirts, khakis, and plaid-checkered skirts sound like hyenas, depicting the wild animals that they are. They are all laughing away at something that has finally pulled their interest off of me and on to something else.
Of course, when I get through the rowdy multitude and see they are all gawking at what someone wrote in black marker on my locker, I see that the joke is still on me.
Scum
Liar
Ugly
Thief
They made an acronym of the word slut. Geniuses, the lot of them. With all eyes on me, I go to my locker, my head held high as if I don’t have a care in the world. If they think they can break me this easily, they have another thing coming. All they have been able to accomplish is earning my ire. And taking a page out of Saint’s book, I will not let them see me bleed.
When I close my locker, a familiar, tall, raven beauty is leaning at my side, putting on blood-red lipstick and making a seductive pout when she’s done.
“Hope you had a great first day here, Holland. I didn’t want you to feel excluded,” Addison coos, batting her long eyelashes at me.
“I should have known this was your handiwork.” I give her my own version of a cynical smile.
“Oh, honey. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
“How fun. Writing on lockers, posting videos online. Very original. Can’t wait to see what that pea-sized brain of yours comes up with next,” I reply sarcastically.
“What, that? That was just an appetizer. Wait until you get the full course,” she sing-songs proudly.
“Bring it, bitch!” I seethe, looking her dead in the eyes.
“Oh, I will. And you won’t even see it coming.”
What else is new?
Chapter 7
Oliver
I’m so fucking tired.
Actually, scratch that. I’m way past my limit of exhaustion. I am dangerously close to falling off this narrow tightrope I’ve been on. Maybe I should just yell ‘fuck it’ and jump, landing on the not-giving-a-shit safety net.
These last couple of days have taken everything out of me—my energy, my will, and my fucking sanity.
Being stuck in a damned hospital, hoping my father wakes up—and also dreading it with the power of a thousand suns—is not how I want to spend my time. If I had it my way, I’d let the fucker rot in the hospital bed, and tell every reporter outside just what kind of monster he truly is.
I’m just thankful Rome sent me home tonight to get a few hours of sleep, away from the charade he has us participating in. Every sympathy and well-wish that we get makes me nauseous. Worst of all, I have to put on a plastic smile and thank them for their prayers that my father comes out of this unscathed.
This evening, Dr. Nasir told us that they are prepping everything to take him into surgery first thing in the morning. They can’t hold it off any longer, and they believe the swelling of my father’s brain has reduced enough for it to be safe to operate. Apparently, having a large hole in your cranium for too long is life-threatening.
How about the hole he carved in my heart, Doc?
In Snow’s?
Think we’ll make it? Or can we get an easy-fucking-patch job, too, like the one you’re going to give the asshole?
That’s what I was ready to scream in Dr. Nasir’s optimistic face before Rome kicked my ass out and sent me home to take a long nap. As if my sleep deprivation is the cause of my belligerence. I know Rome is still pissed at me. He hasn’t been very subtle about it either, taking every jab in the book that he can get away with without raising too much suspicion. I know it was a low blow manipulating him the way I did, but I couldn’t let the fucker just die like that.
Not that I hold any love for my father. In fact, I hate the bastard and will probably kill him myself if he dares open his eyes. What he tried to do to Snow deserves a torturous death. Involving pliers and fingernails; or better yet, a blow torch to his dick and a bunch of razor-sharp knives to his scrotum.
See, when you’re left unoccupied for so many hours in a hospital room, your mind becomes a macabre, dark place. You’re pretending to care for a man lying comatose on a bed, acting like you’re waiting for good news on his condition when in reality all you can think about is how his heinous, immoral hands were on the one girl you love more than life itself. But if my mind is a bloody chamber, then I can only imagine how gruesome Ash’s must be. He’s always had a more active imagination. Whatever morbid nightmare is flashing in my twin’s mind, I wish I could inflict it all onto our father as he deserves. He can die for all we care. His life means nothing to us. The minute he stepped inside that music room, he forfeited the right to live.
So, it was not for his benefit that I blackmailed Rome into calling an ambulance.
The one reason… Fuck. My only reason for anything in my life since the day I met her, has always been Snow.
I know her.
I might have forgotten I did because of my own insecurities before—going as far as shunning her out of my life—but it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve always known the kind of person Snow is. She has a heart as big as this city. She couldn’t live with herself if she were responsible for ending a life, even one as grotesque as my father’s.
Funny thing is, I always fantasized about seeing my father this pathetically feeble. That one day he’d be given a death sentence by contracting a fatal disease or some kind of illness that could inflict unbearable amounts of pain in him. But never in my wildest fantasies did it involve my girl having to defend herself against his advances. I could have killed him with my own hand
s for what he attempted to do and not feel an ounce of remorse.
But Snow?
She wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, knowing she was the cause of someone’s death. And to her, it wouldn’t matter if that person was a vile or repulsive one. It’s just not how she’s built. And although it is a splinter in my backside, as well as for my brothers, I can’t help but love her more for it.
The worst part of this whole mess is that I haven’t been able to be at her side like I want to. I’ve sent her text message after text message, left voicemail upon voicemail, but had zero replies. Instead, I pass my time watching the hands of a clock on the hospital wall tick-tock by, as I sit next to the one man on this earth who doesn’t merit my presence or concern. But Rome wants us all to be good, little boys and girls, and play along as loving children, sitting on pins and needles praying for our father’s recovery.
What a bunch of bullshit!
I’ve caught myself plenty of times eating my own hateful words, abhorring myself for not being able to tell the truth. The paparazzi outside the hospital haven’t made it any easier, either. Some going as far as dressing up as doctors or nurses to get close to us and get a statement or a compromising photo. I wouldn’t care so much if it didn’t remind us of the nightmare we all endured after our mother died. How, when she was hit by that taxi, we were hounded by journalists left and right, who wouldn’t leave us alone until they got what they wanted.
Ash and I were only twelve, but from there on out, we stopped being boys and had to man up fast. And boy did that time teach us a lot about the world we Graysons live in. You realize that anyone can be bought for a price.
A beloved teacher selling a story for a lousy twenty-thousand dollars, about catching you and your twin huddled together in a stall of the boys’ bathroom, crying over your dead mother.
