The Blackstone Prep Academy Duet

by M. E. Clayton

  “Apparently, not devoted enough for Rochelle’s satisfaction.”

  We reached London’s locker first. “I forgot to tell you,” she began as she opened her locker to get her textbook out. “I’ve got detention for a week.”

  I choked out a laugh. “For what?” It was practically unheard of for teachers to give out detention here. They were so terrified of rich, angry parents storming the school, demanding retribution, they hardly bothered.

  “Sean Nichols thought it’d be a good idea to grab my ass as we were walking out of AP Chemistry Friday, and I showed him just how bad of an idea that had been.”

  I laughed. “Oh, God. What’d you do?”

  London closed the door to her locker and shrugged a shoulder. “I elbowed him in the nose, then kneed him in his junk, before dropping another elbow on his back. Professor Allen took exception.”

  “Yeah, I kind of imagine he would,” I laughed.

  She rolled her eyes. “He said violence was never the answer. To which I said, I’d be sure to pass his message along to the many sexual assault survivors who had mistaking fought back against their attackers.” I grimaced. “And I’m pretty sure that was the reason I got detention for a week.”

  We reached my locker when the first bell for class rang. I was turning the combination to my locker when I said, “Go on ahead to class. I have to make a pit stop at the office first.” She gave me a quick nod, a peace sign, and strolled off.

  And I went to the office, hoping to avoid first period altogether.

  Chapter 2

  Styx~

  One more year.

  That’s all I had left of Blackstone and thank fuck for that. The pretentiousness of the place was enough to make you feel like you were suffocating on freshly minted money and gold bars. Or, maybe, I should say rhodium. After all, rhodium was more expensive that gold or even platinum.

  Blackstone Prep Academy was everything you’d envision the One Percent to send their children to school at. The huge stone citadel boasted of money, power, and connections. It was where money sent their children, so they could continue in their parents’ footsteps of ruling the world and whatnot.

  But it was also a place where mere mortals could also attend if they could score a scholarship or scrape up the money to pay for the tuition. And I do mean scrape. The cost of going to Blackstone was up there with buying a house, except, you couldn’t pay Blackstone off in payments. Blackstone Prep wanted their money upfront and in full. However, it was also a place that could set you up for the rest of your life if you could get in and take advantage of all its perks.

  My father, Logan Reinhart, was a cop and my mother, Della Reinhart, was a city clerk. They were a far cry from wealthy or even well off. We were a middle-class family that, normally, could not afford a place like Blackstone. We didn’t live in Wakefield Community, but rather the regular area of Dayton, California. My younger sister, Temperance, was in the eighth grade, and with a family of four, we weren’t going to Disneyland every weekend.

  But at around the age of six, people had started taking notice of my intelligence, and it was soon discovered that I had quite the I.Q. My parents, being forward thinking people, had begun saving money early on, in hopes of getting me into Blackstone. Everyone in the country knew what kind of futures Blackstone could award people, so when my I.Q. had been confirmed, my parents had started saving as much as they could to get me there.

  At first, they had made great progress, but when my sister had come along, so had additional expenses. My father had gone to working nights because the night shift for Dayton police officers came with a differential in their paychecks. It wasn’t until recently that my father had gone back to days. With me graduating soon, he wanted to make sure he was home at night and there were enough officers in the DPD that had been eager to switch shifts with my dad for the differential. And I had gotten a job as soon as the law had allowed me to, and I worked as a mechanic after school for a local auto body shop.

  All in all, we had been able to swing three years at Blackstone, instead of the preferred four. But with my I.Q. as high as it was, I hadn’t fallen behind or struggled to keep up. And I had chosen working my ass off to pay for the tuition in lieu of applying for scholarships and loans because I wanted to save that for college. With my grades being what they were, I knew I’d have my choice of colleges, but money would still be an issue. Even if I got a free ride with school, I would still have to find a way to support myself wherever I went. I couldn’t eat textbooks, so to be able to leave BPA debt-free was a real advantage.

  One of the many downsides to Blackstone was the sheer number of entitled pricks that attended, though. Even if you put all the scholarship kids and working-class kids together, we were still outnumbered ten to one. It was like fighting against the power of quicksand, only instead of grains of sand threatening to pull you under, you were drowning in narcissistic fuckwads.

  They were goddamn everywhere.

  Luckily, I’d manage to make friends with enough people that they were able to distract me from all the bullshit around me.

  Davion Morrison, a scholarship kid, had ended up becoming one of my closest friends and my best friend at Blackstone. Where I had brown hair and brown eyes, Davion had dark blonde hair and classic blue eyes that made him look like he belonged here. Of course, not all wealthy people were blonde-haired/blue-eyed, but that just seemed to be the coloring associated with the wealthy and elite. I had him by two inches in height, but his presence always mattered in a group setting.

  And even though Blackstone Prep was a huge part of my life, my life didn’t revolve around it. School was my first priority, and I worked at the auto shop four days a week, sometimes on the weekend if they were shorthanded, but I still carved out time for my family and friends. I hadn’t walked away from my childhood friends once I started attending Blackstone, nor did I begin to ignore my sister since she was so much younger than I was.

  And as for girls, I had learned the hard way that I needed to stick with my own. Oh, there’ve been plenty of girls at Blackstone who have offered to wet my dick for me, because rich chicks really did love to go slumming, but I was smarted than my hard-ons.

  While I couldn’t or wouldn’t deny that pussy was the best thing ever created for man, it still wasn’t worth my entire future. I didn’t need some angry father storming the castle of Blackstone, demanding my head, because I sullied his precious, pristine daughter. I didn’t need to get kicked out of a school my parents sacrificed for just for momentary satisfaction. Plus, there were plenty of girls in Dayton who weren’t saving it for their future husbands. If I needed to get laid, I had ‘friends’ for that.

  But even with the suffocating feeling of attending Blackstone Prep Academy, it’s done a great job of making sure I never turn into an asshole. I was surrounded with too much of exactly what I never wanted to become. I knew that, no matter what I go on to do in life, I will do it knowing how to treat people right. The plan was law school, but if that didn’t pan out, I had other backup plans in place. But, again, no matter where my life takes me, it’ll be as a decent human being.

  My sophomore year, also my first year at Blackstone, I had been handed my first lesson in trusting the people who went here. It had been a hard kick in the teeth to see how fake and uncaring these people really were. But not just to me, but to each other as well. Human emotion was a foreign thing to these spoiled rich kids. They all had one god and it was money. And its archangels were power and status. The Lord, Michael, and Gabriel had been replaced with money, power, and status. And the Devil? He was their confessor. He was the one that kept telling them it was okay to be horrible human beings to one another as long as it begot them more money, power, or status.

  I wish I could say it had been just a simple case of having your heart broken, because most everyone gets over a teenage heartbreak, but it had been more than that. Coming from a good life with a good family and friends, I’d never experienced blatant cruelty before. Sure
, growing up I saw kids get picked on, but I’d never experienced straight-faced nastiness. And while I hadn’t been naïve even at that young of an age, I just hadn’t expected the harsh reminder of how important social classes were to these people.

  I’d had more than my heart broken; I’d had been disillusioned in the most unforgiving way. It had changed me. I had gone from a kid who had always given people a chance to a guy who made people earn his trust now.

  It was fucked-up.

  And even though I was surrounded by the upper class on a daily basis, I ignored them. I was able to see right through them and only focus on school and my real friends. It’d taken only four months, or so, of being at Blackstone before I’d finally been able to walk through the hallways without registering a single one of them. If you asked me anything about anyone who went here that wasn’t on scholarship or working-class, I couldn’t tell you a thing about them.

  Self-preservation.

  I was all about self-preservation.

  It had also only taken three fights before these stuck-up assholes had finally learned not to fuck with me. Even though most BPA students stuck with their own, there’d still be a few assholes who got off on making our lives hell for daring to be better. However, my father had always been big on protecting ourselves and others. He made sure I could swing my fists if I ever needed to defend myself, my sister, or my mother. I knew what I was doing when I fought. I didn’t fight wild. I didn’t fight undisciplined. I fought like a fighter, and that was something a few of these dicks had learned the hard way.

  “Dude, you look like you’re about to tear someone apart.” I turned and saw Davion strolling into the music room. “I thought music was supposed to soothe the wild beast?”

  I laughed. I’d been sitting at the piano for a bit, but nothing had been feeling right. Along with a high I.Q., I had a gift for music. The piano was my favorite, and Davion was right; music usually did soothe my demons, but today I was missing the mark.

  “What are you doing?”

  He grimaced. “Hiding,” he admitted, and I shook my head. “What?” he asked all wide-eyed.

  “I told you not to fuck with these rich bitches.”

  Davion sighed. “I know, I know. But…my dick’s weak, man.”

  I huffed. “So, are you hiding again because she wants more, or are you hiding because now she’s regretful?”

  He sat down on the piano bench facing the opposite direction. “She wants seconds,” he grumbled.

  I laughed.

  Davion and his dick were going to land him in so much trouble one day.

  Chapter 3

  Grace~

  School’s only been in session about a couple of months, but with football already in season, the parties every weekend were going down like clockwork. Blackstone Prep Academy, surprisingly, had one hell of a vicious football team. They were the players other teams never saw coming. Because Blackstone was made up of mostly nothing but trust fund entitled assholes, other schools assumed the guys at Blackstone were soft, weak, and pampered.

  Newsflash: They weren’t.

  Even the few scholarship students and middle-class kids that had been able to get through the prestigious doors of Blackstone hadn’t mattered. Because they were there on scholarships or unimaginable debt, those kids focused on their academic path, rather than indulge in sports or the arts.

  And, without fail, every Friday night after our home games, there was a party or two happening in the community of Wakefield. Someone’s parents were always out of town, and the local cops of Dayton no longer bothered with us Wakefield kids. They learned long ago that it wasn’t worth going up against our parents’ money and connections to bust us for partying.

  The door to my bedroom opened, and I looked up from laptop to see Sterling taking up the entire door frame. At six-foot-two-inches, Sterling was a big kid. He was committed to baseball, but he has spent most of his life switching between baseball, football, basketball, and soccer. It hadn’t been until we had gotten older that he finally had to choose one, and he had chosen baseball. But all those years of playing sports had honed him into a well-oiled machine.

  The dude was hard to miss.

  “Staying home again?”

  I let out quiet sigh. “Yep.”

  Sterling’s gaze held mine in a piercing stare that scared the shit out of most people who found themselves on the receiving end of it. “Grace-”

  “Don’t, Sterling,” I begged. “I don’t want to argue with you.”

  He took that as his cue to walk into my room and sit down. One thing Sterling was not afraid of, and that was an argument or an outright bloody fight.

  I wasn’t sure Sterling feared anything, though.

  “How much longer are you going to punish yourself for something you didn’t do?” he asked for the hundredth time. “You had nothing to do with that shit, Grace.”

  “Yes, I did,” I argued. “We all did, Sterling. How can you not see that?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Grace,” he snapped. “We weren’t even there that night. If the rumors are true, we weren’t there any of those nights.”

  “So?” I snapped back. “That doesn’t make us innocent in all this.” My brother wasn’t a bad person, but sometimes his Teflon exterior was hard for even me to get through, and I was his twin, for Pete’s sake. “Christ. How can it not keep you up at night, Sterling? It sure as hell keeps me awake.”

  “Because weak people are not our responsibility, Grace,” he countered. “Hell, no one is. The only people I’m responsible for is you and myself.” Sterling was six minutes older than I was, and he took those six minutes very seriously. “How the fuck were we supposed to know that Leah Moffet was going to do what she did?”

  I looked into my brother’s emerald green eyes-the same color as mine-and saw no wavering. “That’s not what I’m referring to,” I told him. “I’m talking about the toxic environment we helped create, Sterling.”

  “That’s bullshit, Grace,” he bit out. “That toxic environment existed well before we ever got into Blackstone.”

  “That may be, but we kept it alive,” I argued. “We…encouraged and nurtured that horrible who’s-who bullshit. We played into the hierarchy and elitist entitlement. Hell, we’re the top of the goddamn food chain at Blackstone. We’ve spent the last three years buying into…all of that bullshit. If we hadn’t been assholes, maybe Leah Moffet wouldn’t have felt she needed to try so hard to fit in and belong. Maybe if we’d been kind and treated everyone the same, she wouldn’t have felt like she…had been less than.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Grace,” Sterling spat. “Do you hear yourself? I’m not denying that we could be better human beings, because you’re right, we’ve been entitled assholes lots of times in our lives. But you’re defending a girl who was fucking your boyfriend behind your back. I wouldn’t be sizing her for a cross just yet, if I were you.”

  I bark out a dark laugh. “You’re such a fucking dick, Sterling.”

  He cocked his head and his black hair-again, the exact same shade as mine-dipped a couple of strands across his left eyebrow. “Look, Grace,” he let out a sigh, “I know you think I don’t hear you, but I do. I understand the point you’re trying to make. But you are shouldering this entire thing like it’s your fault, and it’s not. I fail to see how Leah fucking Seth and getting pregnant is your fault. You didn’t tell her to sleep with your boyfriend. You didn’t tell them not to use protection. You didn’t encourage her to agree to his fucked-up sexapades. And you sure as hell didn’t tell him to dump her or blackmail her into thinking she had no other options.”

  The day I had overheard Leah and Seth’s exchange, I had gone home a mess. I had forgotten my notebook in AP Chemistry, and had been going back for it when I had stumbled upon Leah and Seth tucked away in corner. The encounter had looked intimate and intense, so I had crept over until I heard enough to regret having ever eavesdropped.

  As soon has Sterling had gotten wind that I had gon
e home sick, he had left school to go home and check on me. Our parents were hardly ever home, so Sterling had grown up making sure he took care of me when it was needed.

  When he had gotten home, I had been an emotional wreck and I had blurted out what I had overheard between Leah and Seth. I had only been dating Seth for about eight months, so the pain had been more from shock and disappointment than from a broken heart. I had felt duped and humiliated, but nowhere near as torn up as the way Leah had sounded as Seth shattered her heart into pieces.

  Sterling had stayed with me the rest of the day, but the next day at school, he had beaten Seth so badly, Seth had been out of school for over a week. The surprising thing about it had been that Sterling had never told Seth why he had beaten him up, and Seth had never asked. I suspected that Seth had already known why because Sterling had made it clear to Seth that he and I were broken up as he had delivered the final blow, knocking Seth out.

  Or, at least, that’s how everyone had told the story when it had gotten back to me.

  And then, a week later, Leah Moffet slit her wrists in her bathtub, leaving her family a heartbreaking suicide note and a forevermore shattered existence.

  And all because she had wanted to belong to the popular crowd.

  “I’m just over it, Sterling,” I told him. “I…I don’t want to be around shallow people anymore. I don’t want to be around…people who put money and popularity above being kind and decent.”

  My brother set my laptop aside and scooted across my bed until he had his arms wrapped around me. “You’re Grace Hale,” he said. “You’re always going to be revered at Blackstone. Now, maybe, once we get to college and it’s a new world with new people, you might be able to blend in with the masses, but I doubt it.” Sterling squeezed my shoulders. “You stand out even if you don’t want to, Grace. You’re trying to force out seventeen years of breeding, refinement, and class in a matter of weeks, and it just can’t be done that quickly. Give yourself time.”