This … is nothing at all like that.
There’s quiet chaos in the Vanguard kitchen area.
By that I mean, all of the children are present and accounted for, but even though the air is tense and there’s a flurry of activity, it’s dead-silent. Well, nearly dead-silent. Currently, Parrish is in progress with a hissed argument against his father about the loss of his car privileges.
“It doesn’t make any sense for you to drive me an hour out of the way,” Parrish is saying, his eyes flicking my way as soon as I come into the room. I stare at the spread of food on the kitchen island, but I don’t dare touch any of it. How the hell am I supposed to know if this, too, belongs to one of Paul’s business partners or Tess’ agents or something?
My bio mom saunters past me, heading straight for the twins at the eat-in kitchen table and making a huffing sound when she sees they’ve both eschewed breakfast in favor of Roblox on their iPads. I think about the envelope she gave me, and the fact that Delphine is probably in the process of dumping it into a garbage bag to take outside. Tess hasn’t asked about it, and I haven’t offered anything up on my end.
Today isn’t the day to worry about that.
“You’re being punished, Parrish,” Paul says, like that’s the final word on that. He’s clearly over the conversation already. “You and your”—Paul nods his head in my direction—“new sister.” My new stepfather does his best to smile at me, but I’m clearly not his favorite person in the world and it falls flat. Or else maybe he’s just always like this? It’s hard to say.
Parrish scowls at me, and I flip him off. That kiss at the party seems leagues away from this morning, a distant dream—or nightmare, maybe. Really though? Really? You want to lie to yourself like that Dakota?
Tess notices our exchange, but she’s too busy dealing with the twins to chastise me.
“Here,” Parrish snaps, shoving a plate of toast in my direction. “This time, you’re allowed to eat the food.”
He storms out of the kitchen, his shoulder brushing against mine with an electric charge as he heads down the hall toward the front door and then slams it behind him.
“We better go,” Paul says, checking his smart watch and then sighing dramatically. “I have surgery in two hours.”
He takes off after his son while I grab a dry piece of toast and resign myself to god only knows how many mornings like this one.
The ride to Whitehall is tense, the interior of the car filled with Paul’s constant phone calls. It’s never-ending with him. I hear him complain about his kids being on their phones all the time, but I have yet to see him without it. At the very least, Kimber follows in her father’s footsteps and can barely tear her eyes away from her phone screen—even when she gets out of the car and takes off like a bat outta hell.
Paul ends up dropping the three of us on a white gravel loop in front of the school. There’s basically nobody else there, and Parrish glowers like he’s been kicked and spit on. I get the feeling that it isn’t particularly good for either of our reputations to get dropped off out front like we’re still in elementary school.
“Why did you tell Tess about my period?” I ask as I struggle to keep up with Parrish’s long-legged strides. He takes off for the front doors of the academy like he owns it. Socially, at least, he very well might. There’s no way he’s the wealthiest person on campus, so all I can surmise is that his looks and his attitude play a big part in his social standing.
“Why don’t you decide how you’re going to handle dating both me and Lumen while the whole school watches?” he purrs back at me, leaning in far too close before turning away again and shoving through the front doors. I’m cursing him out as I struggle to keep up, but he doesn’t seem to give a shit.
“For real, why tell her about my period?” I repeat as Parrish turns suddenly and steps forward. Instinctively, I move to take a step back and slam into a row of lockers. The smile that takes over his lips is very clearly a weapon, one meant to draw blood. Looking at him, I can feel it, a wound opening up inside my chest.
“Maybe I was worried about you?” he breathes, leaning down close enough that we could kiss again. You know, if we were so inclined. “You seem so goddamn helpless; it was my job to step in.”
“Oh Parrish, pretty please, mansplain periods to me, so I can better understand them?” I quip back, batting my lashes. Swear to god, I have never reacted this way to another person in all my life. I’ve never been around someone who makes my blood boil and my hackles raise, my skin pebble in goose bumps, my heart race and my palms sweat.
“Look to your left first and if you’re lucky, I will,” he tells me, all saccharine sweet and smiling. Unfortunately, even though he’s clearly in ultra-dick mode, the gentle waviness of his hair makes it difficult to breathe. I look left.
Virtually everyone is staring at me. Us.
“Reap what you sow, Gamer Girl,” he tells me, pushing back from the locker as Chasm moves over to us.
“You’re really going along with this dating thing, huh?” he asks, just loud enough that only Parrish and I can hear. Parrish ignores us both, stalking down the hall like he just doesn’t give a shit.
Chas sneers at his friend’s back before turning to look at me.
“This isn’t going to turn out the way you want it to,” he tells me, and I raise both brows in question.
“Which part?” I ask as he scans me with those pretty amber eyes of his, shoving his lightning-bolt dyed hair off of his forehead.
“You and Parrish becoming a thing. Call it quits before he eviscerates you,” he warns me, but I just smile as I notice Lumen making her way through the crowd toward me. I’m starting to get the idea that Parrish is the king of the school; Lumen is the queen. I don’t need both of them to survive here—just one.
“Some people might say you were jealous,” I shoot back as Chasm lets out a grating laugh and reaches over to ruffle my green and black hair. I bat his hand away, but he remains unfazed.
“Keep dreaming, Little Sister,” he tells me, turning and sauntering off in the direction Parrish went. He makes sure to flip Lumen off as they pass each other, but she ignores him.
“Do you like the buzz I’ve generated for you?” she asks, reaching out and sweeping a tendril of hair back from my forehead. The move surprises me, but I don’t stop her. Everyone’s staring at us now, expecting some sort of a show. I’m not sure if giving them one—especially one that isn’t true—is the right thing to do, but my back feels bowed under the social pressure.
Ugh.
If invisibility were an option here, I’d probably take it. Back home, it was mostly just me, Sally, and Nevaeh. We went to the occasional party or sporting event or whatever, but there was none of this salivary expectation like I’m feeling now.
The students at Whitehall Prep do indeed enjoy a good show.
“So I looked you up last night,” Lumen continues, her blond ponytail curled in gentle waves and bouncing as she moves. Her makeup is flawless, her blazer ironed, the pleats in her skirt arranged just so. She barely looks human, but at least she’s smiling at me. I imagine that if she wanted to, she really could make my time here at Whitehall an even worse hell than it already is.
“Looked me up?” I repeat, still glaring at Chasm and Parrish’s retreating backs as they make their way down the wide hall. The walls are covered with this intricate wood paneling, and the floors are old but well-kempt, the stone covered in a thick layer of sealant or varnish or whatever. You can tell the building’s been here since the late eighteen-hundreds just by looking at it.
“You’re a superstar,” Lumen continues, giving me her elbow so we can loop arms. She’s a good three inches taller than me, but she seems like she’s a foot taller based on her presence alone. I hate to think it, but I’m sure Tess would be a hell of a lot happier with a daughter like Lumen instead of one like me. “The internet is in love with the story of your kidnapping.”
“It’s my defining feature, appare
ntly,” I add with a dry humor that I don’t particularly feel inside. I used to have an online presence based on my gaming merit. Not anymore.
“It gives you this enigma vibe,” Lumen says, looking me over appreciatively as she guides me down the hall like an escort. “Run with it. You could have a lot of fun here at Whitehall,” she continues, glancing down at me with pale brown eyes. For a minute there, I’m pretty sure she’s checking me out, but then she blinks and the moment’s gone.
It only takes about five minutes of walking by her side to see that she most definitely is the queen bee on campus. Parrish is the lazy prince, and Chasm is his overprotective knight. Everyone else is just background noise.
“What’s your schedule like?” Lumen asks as I slip my phone from my pocket and hand it over to her. She scans my itinerary for a moment and then nods. “Your first class is across the hall from mine. Follow me and I’ll show you how to get there; this campus is a fucking labyrinth.”
Frankly, I think my schedule looks like something out of a nightmare.
Period One: Introduction to Probability and Statistics
Period Two: Academic Composition
Break
Period Three: Technical Writing
Period Four: Computer Science 1
Lunch
Period Five: Beginning Japanese
Period Six: Software Tools: App Development
I wasn’t given my choice of classes, so I can only assume this is Tess’ doing. A warm anger spreads through me as my fingers clench tight around my phone.
“Are you going for a degree in computer science or programming or something?” Lumen asks me, glancing over at me. I give her a look that clearly communicates my distaste with the new schedule, and she laughs. “Right. My mom wants me to be a software developer; I feel your pain.”
“What would you rather be?” I ask, posing the same question to myself. I’m not sure I have the answer right now, but I know that computer science isn’t it.
Lumen looks up at the ceiling wistfully for a moment and then shrugs.
“An influencer, I guess?” she posits, and I hold back a sigh. Of course. Influencer, YouTube star, Instagram model, TikTok sensation, Twitch streamer. Pretty much everyone I know is desperate to find a lucrative career in one of those fields. They may as well buy a lottery ticket and hold their breath. “You?”
I shrug because I don’t even have a basic answer to give.
I thought I knew who I was, but after discovering the Banks weren’t my biological family, and that Tess Vanguard of all people was my bio mom, I have no idea.
“Enjoy your class and find me at lunch,” Lumen says with a wink, opening the door to my first class for me and holding out a hand to usher me in. There isn’t a single person in the hall or the classroom that misses that move, notes it, maybe even snaps a pic of it.
With a deep breath, I slip my phone back into the pocket on my blazer and dive in.
First day of school at Whitehall Preparatory Academy, a school for innovators, engineers, and world leaders. That’s it. That’s their slogan. There are no art classes, no music classes, and only one foreign language class because we don’t really need them, the software is there to make inter-language communication an easy feat.
The only—and I mean only—creative endeavor left at the school is the theater program, headed and funded by Danyella and her family.
“We were able to get committee approval by reminding the board that as technology improves, people seek more real-life ways to connect. Live performances are not dead. Live performances were dead in the early 2000s and during that covid pandemic thing. Live performances are now. They’re human.”
“I’m sort of a … closet theater lover,” I admit, sitting on the edge of the stage and bumping my heels against it while Danyella works on a paper on her laptop. She’s wearing a pair of rectangular glasses with a hot pink frame that are so damn cute, I want to borrow them and pop out the lenses for a day.
“You’re the school’s poly, bi-icon and you’re in the closet?” she asks, smiling, but keeping her attention on her screen. It’s lunchtime now, but I don’t have the energy to brave the cafeteria just now. Everyone wants to talk to me, and it’s exhausting. At CHS, lunches were spent under the old tree out front of the school. But here? We’re not allowed to leave the building during the day. The gilded cage feeling creeps over me again as I scroll through the disturbingly silent group text with my girls.
There are three messages from me and no reply from either of them.
Loneliness sweeps over me like a cloak, but I shake it off. I’ve got Danyella right in front of me, and Lumen’s standing invite for lunch. Plus, even if they dislike me, at least Parrish and Chasm are willing to game with me. And then, of course, there’s Maxx …
“What’s your paper about?” I blurt, adjusting the black blazer and the plaid tie that gets tucked underneath it. I hop down off the edge of the stage and make my way over to where Danyella’s sitting in her academy-issued slacks. Apparently at Whitehall, they don’t give a shit whether boys wear pants and girls wear skirts; it’s allowed either way. Good for them. Sex-role stereotypes are annoying as fuck.
“Sexual dimorphism in mammals,” she says, chewing on the edge of her phone case in thought as she leans back in her seat. “Like, how male peacocks have fancy feathered tails while the females have small brown and white tails. Humans are sexually dimorphic as well.”
“Sounds fascinating,” I say (even though it’s a bit boring), sitting beside her and looking up at the stained-glass mural on the ceiling above our heads. Ten minutes into my second class and I knew that I was in trouble; I had no idea what the teacher was talking about. To be fair Academic Composition here is equivalent to … basically nothing back home. I’m in a different league, and if I’m not careful, I’ll drown here. At my old school, all we had was plain old English. “Is that why boys are so much moodier than girls?”
Danyella flips her braids over one shoulder and then turns to give me a look.
“Actually, human males have hormonal cycles, just like girls do. Because of their higher levels of testosterone, they really can be moodier. Do you have a particular moody boy in mind?” She grins big at me, and I feel my boobs turning crimson again with a heated blush.
“You know Parrish and I aren’t really dating, right?” I ask and Danyella shrugs, closing her laptop and studying me with shrewd brown eyes.
“I figured as much. You and Lumen?”
I shake my head.
“But they both decided to go along with it for whatever reason.”
“I’d be careful if I were you,” Danyella begins, musing on the subject for a moment. “They could be using you in their war against each other. They’ve been playing this ‘will they, won’t they game’ for years.” My heart drops and my stomach roils with nausea. Is that what this is? Both Parrish and Lumen are using me in some sort of social chess match against one another? “Are you interested in either of them?”
“I’m not interested in anyone,” I lie, but I’m not exactly sure if I’m lying to Danyella or myself. Or both of us. Yeah, probably both of us. I spin in my seat to look at her, reaching out to take her hands in mine. She cocks a brow, but doesn’t pull away. “Is it creepy to be interested in your stepbrother?” I ask her, and she grins.
“Are you fetishizing his role as your stepbrother?” she asks me, and I balk. “Well then, why would it matter? If you like him, you like him.”
“I might also … hate him? Question mark?” Yep. I actually say question mark aloud. Like a twelve-year-old. Chasm had me nailed right through the heart. Maybe I’m a tad naïve for the craziness of Whitehall Prep. Danyella just keeps smiling at me, like she’s waiting for me to figure it out on my own. “Is this a lot for our first official day as friends?” I ask and she throws her head back with a wild laugh.
“Oh, I knew I liked you straight-off,” she says, standing up just as the bell rings, signaling the end of the lunch pe
riod. “Listen: come over to my place on Friday. We can stay up all night and discuss how the medial preoptic area of the brain processes sexual behavior and attraction.”
“The medial what?” I ask, standing up and scrambling to dig my phone out of my bag so I can check my schedule. Danyella just laughs at me and holds the door open to the hall.
“We’ll … go over all that,” she continues, gesturing me into the hallway.
And who do I run into?
Parrish himself.
Rather than avoiding me—like he’s been doing all day between classes—he comes right up to me.
“You’ve thrown in with the theater geeks?” he asks, the edge of his mouth curving up in distaste. “You worked so hard to improve your social standing in the school; why throw it all away now?” He rolls his eyes at me as Danyella comes up to stand at my side, crossing her arms over her chest.
“I didn’t think it was possible, but you’ve actually become even more of an asshole as of late,” she remarks as I narrow my eyes at my much-taller stepbrother. He looks stupid good in his uniform, like absurdly good. It’s sickening, the way the blazer clings to his strong shoulders and sturdy frame. His tattoos peek tantalizingly from the end of his sleeves, and I realize that I’m staring at his hands like they hold the key to … something.
“Don’t worry about him: he has serious unresolved mommy issues,” I blurt before I can stop myself. We made some sort of connection last night, didn’t we? So why are we doing this now, in front of everyone? And believe me: people are staring.
“Better that than spending all my time dreaming about a family that I don’t belong to or begging to be called by the name of somebody’s dead baby.”
He shoves past me, and I spin, clenching my hands into fists by my sides.
Stolen Crush Page 17