“Laney, wait! Don’t sit down!” Adam held out a hand toward me, eyes wide, but it was too late. I was already in the seat.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Before he could answer, I felt it. Something wet and sticky was on my ass, seeping into my skirt.
“I only saw it when you were about to sit down,” Adam said. “It looked like a packet of sauce or something.”
Trina stood behind me as I slowly got to my feet. She groaned. “It’s corn syrup,” she said. “Fucking assholes.”
“Ew!” A girl shrieked from somewhere nearby. “She has her period and she’s just free-bleeding everywhere! That’s so gross.”
A chant of ‘Carrie’ started up almost immediately. I had a feeling that would be my nickname for the rest of the day. At least it was a real name, unlike ‘bitch’, ‘trash’, or ‘whore’.
As I looked around, almost unable to believe this shit was really happening, I spotted the Princes across the room. Most of them had their heads down, ignoring the situation in favor of their phones, but Hunter was looking right at me. When I caught his eye, a slow, serpentine smile spread across his face.
He did this.
He might not have physically planted the stupid fake blood packet himself, but it was still his fault. He blacklisted me for no reason. He made all these kids attack me relentlessly with his undeserved influence and power.
“Carrie! Carrie! Carrie!” The chant grew louder and louder, along with a few cries of ‘dirty bitch’, ‘stupid cunt’ and ‘ugly skank’.
Leaving my tray behind, I fled from the cafeteria and ran toward the nearest bathroom, lower lip wobbling as my face burned with humiliation.
I’d tried so hard to keep my head held high, but when a whole room of people were jeering at me and calling me a cunt, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
Trina and Adam followed me into the bathroom, trying their best to comfort me as I sank to the tiled floor.
“This is even worse than I thought it would be. They’re acting like fucking animals,” I heard Adam mutter in Trina’s ear as she wrapped her arms around me. By now I was openly crying, chest heaving painfully as broken sobs escaped my mouth.
“I can’t even eat,” I managed to get out. “They just won’t stop.”
“We can eat in your dorm from now on,” Adam suggested. “It’ll be fun! Like when you’re a kid and you want to have secret midnight feasts with your friends at a sleepover.”
Hiding out in my room like a fugitive wasn’t my idea of fun at all, but I forced a weak smile anyway. He was only trying to help.
“We’ll bring you food,” Trina added. “That way you won’t ever have to step foot in the cafeteria again. And we can keep the door locked, so no one can get in.”
I wiped my cheeks. “What about breakfast and dinner?”
“I’ll wake up extra early and bring you breakfast,” Trina said. “I’ll even bring you one of those amazing mochas I told you about. Every morning, I promise.”
“And I’ll stay late after school and bring you dinner from the cafeteria,” Adam said.
They were being so nice to me that it made me burst into a fresh set of tears, sobbing so loudly that I didn’t even hear the door open.
“Hey… Laney?”
I looked up to see three girls standing nearby. I recognized one of them from the hall earlier. Unlike the other students, she’d stayed quiet and left me alone, ducking her head and pursing her lips while the others smirked and mocked me.
She stepped over to me with a sympathetic half-smile. “I got you some vinegar from the cafeteria kitchen,” she said, holding out a small bottle in her hand. “It helps with the stains if you mix it with soap. I know because my brother played that stupid corn syrup prank on me once.” She paused, shook her head, and rolled her eyes. “As if periods are something we should be ashamed of. It’s so childish.”
Her friends silently wet some toilet paper at one of the sinks before adding a little soap.
“Why are you being nice to me?” I asked, letting out a sniffle.
“Because we can’t stand Hunter and his bullshit. I’m Talia, by the way. Talia Bartlett. And this is Leticia Giles and Grace McQueen,” she said, gesturing to her friends.
She poured some vinegar onto the soapy wet paper and handed it to Trina, who started scrubbing at the back of my skirt. “It’s working,” she said. “Thanks, Tal.”
“Aren’t you worried he’ll blacklist you?” I asked, still focusing on Talia.
She shrugged. “It’s not like they’re going to walk in here and see us. We locked the door.”
“Oh. So why don’t you like Hunter?” I asked, unsure if I could trust her. I didn’t trust anyone right now, apart from Trina and Adam. For all I knew, Talia was just pretending to be nice before dropping a bomb on me.
“We used to hook up. I did everything for him, and then he tossed me away like an old cum-rag for no reason,” she said with a grimace. “So fuck him and his stupid blacklisting shit. We’re sick of him thinking he can make the whole school do his bidding.”
Leticia spoke up. “Why aren’t you trying to stop him, Adam?” she asked, eyes flashing. “You’re his brother.”
Adam held up his palms. “I’ve tried. He won’t listen.”
“Well, try harder,” she replied. “We’re sick of the Princes expecting us to fall at their feet. The others might worship them, but we don’t.”
“I know. I’ll keep trying,” Adam said with a sigh.
Leticia turned her attention back to me. “You should come to the charity gala on Friday,” she said. “We organized the whole thing.”
Grace cut in. “We always do it on the first Friday of the school year. This year we’ve picked an elephant sanctuary in Africa to receive the donations.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I think I should avoid school events from now on, unless they’re compulsory,” I said.
Talia cocked an eyebrow. “It’s not an RFA event,” she said. “We invite people from school, obviously, but it’s our own thing, and it’s held at an outside venue.”
“Oh. Well… thanks again, but if people from school are invited, I should probably still stay away,” I said, looking down at the floor.
Her face softened. “I get it,” she said. “But just so you know, Hunter and his crew aren’t invited, and they would never show up at a charity event anyway. Also, I’m pretty sure everyone else will leave you alone. They’re only acting like this on his orders, so if he’s not there to threaten them, they’ll be civil.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said reluctantly.
She patted my arm. “Just think about it, okay?” she said. “I totally understand if you can’t come. I just thought it might be fun for you seeing as you’re new in town. And obviously Trina and Adam are invited too.”
I gave her a small smile. “Okay. I’ll think about it.”
“Awesome! You can let me know by the end of the week.” Her gaze flicked over to Trina. “You have my number, right?”
Trina nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Cool. You can pass it on,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll see you guys later. Hope your day gets better, Laney.”
The three girls exited the bathroom. I blew my nose with a tissue and looked over at Trina and Adam. “What do you think?” I asked. “Is this invitation some sort of trap?”
“I doubt it,” Adam said. “She wasn’t lying about the charity gala. She and her friends host one every year. Also, she really did get dumped by Hunter not that long ago. At one point she was even texting me to find out what was going on because he stopped replying to her.”
“Typical fuckboy,” Trina muttered, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, I don’t think this is a set-up. Talia can be pretty ditzy, but she’s always seemed pretty cool to me.”
“So… you think I should go?”
“I think it could be a good way to take your mind off everything that’s happening here,” Adam said, nodding slowly.
“But it’s up to you,” Trina added. “If you don’t want to go, we’ll do something else on Friday instead.”
I chewed on my bottom lip. “Do you really think Talia is right about the others leaving me alone off-campus?”
“I think so. It makes sense. If the Princes aren’t there to scare them into bullying you, and then they see Talia and her friends being nice to you, they’ll probably do the same.”
“Yeah. Even if just a few people are nice at first, the others will eventually follow suit. It’s like a herd mentality,” Adam said.
I looked in the mirror, taking in my puffy, red-rimmed eyes and tearstained cheeks. They were right. I needed something to take my mind off the horrible time I was having at school. I also loved animals, so the fact that this charity event was for elephants was another selling point.
“I’ll go,” I finally said.
“Are you sure?” Trina asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. Fuck Hunter. He might be able to mess with me here, but he can’t stop me from having fun outside,” I said. “So I’m going.”
Trina grinned and slung an arm around me. “Awesome! I can’t wait!”
She started chattering about all the boutiques she was going to take me to after school to help me find an outfit for the gala. As she spoke, I managed my first real smile since this morning.
Hunter might’ve turned most of the school against me in just one day, but that didn’t change the fact that I’d already made some real friends here. For the first time in years, I felt like I truly belonged somewhere, even if it was just a cozy little safe space with two others.
No matter what Hunter did, he couldn’t take that away from me.
5
Laney
“Ready?”
Trina looked at me, eyes expectantly wide.
I took one last look at myself in the mirror and smoothed my dress down. Then I smiled. “Yes. Let’s go.”
We grabbed our purses and hurried outside to meet Adam. He was waiting in the Blair Hall parking lot by the party limousine he’d booked to take us all to the charity gala.
He and Trina had really gone all out to make sure I enjoyed the evening. He’d arranged the awesome ride and lent me some heavy gold and amethyst earrings from his mother’s jewelry collection, and Trina had done my hair and makeup so well that I looked like a movie star.
The three of us had also gone into the Royal Falls town center on Wednesday afternoon in search of an appropriate dress, bag, and shoes for me, and thanks to Trina’s keen eye, we wound up finding the perfect glamorous outfit in a high-end department store along the main avenue.
My dress was made by a pricey designer brand, but it was marked at 90% off due to a little makeup stain from a customer who’d previously tried it on and decided against it. I knew how to get makeup stains out, though, thanks to a quick Google search, so it was an easy fix. Plus, for $90 compared to the original $900, it was an absolute steal.
It made me feel like a princess, too. It was a full-length pure silk georgette gown with an empire waist and a beaded metallic high-necked bodice which sparkled like stars on the ocean. Breathtakingly beautiful.
I found some matching metallic shoes on the discount rack, along with a sparkly purse. All in all, my outfit only cost a little over $130. Pretty good considering most of the women in town walked around decked out in outfits worth thousands.
“This is amazing,” I said, feeling giddy as I looked around the limousine’s interior. It was lit with a hot pink glow, and the seats were made of butter-soft leather. A bottle of champagne sat in a bucket on one side, along with three champagne flutes. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“Drink?” Adam asked as he opened the champagne with a loud pop.
I shook my head. “None for me, thanks. I don’t drink.”
He handed me a little bottle of sparkling water instead, and Trina took the champagne flute. She clinked it against the side of my bottle. “Cheers to you,” she said. “You look incredible, and we’re totally gonna have the best night ever!”
My cheeks warmed. “Half the reason I look this nice is because you’re so amazing at doing makeup!” I said. I turned to Adam. “Seriously, Adam, look at my eyes. She made them look huge!”
“Trina’s always loved doing makeup,” Adam replied with a grin. He jostled her knee with his. “Remember when we were kids and you decided you wanted to be a movie makeup artist? And then you made all of us wear that zombie makeup?” He turned to me. “Laney, you should’ve seen it. It was literally just corn syrup for blood and talcum powder to make us look pale. We looked so fucking bad.”
Trina laughed and playfully hit his leg. “Seeing as we’re telling Laney embarrassing childhood stories… remember when you tried to impress everyone by making your own fireworks?”
Adam groaned. “Don’t remind me,” he said, putting his face in his hands.
“What happened?” I asked, already grinning at the thought of Adam getting involved in firework-related mishaps.
Trina leaned forward. “We were eleven or twelve, I think, and we were having a sleepover. All three Connery siblings were there for some reason, and Adam decided he wanted to impress us all by setting off some fireworks he made from some sort of kit he got online. He said they were supposed to make a star pattern in the sky.”
Adam was chuckling softly now. “I thought I was so smart and cool.”
“Long story short, he set the hedge maze on fire,” Trina went on.
“Oh, no...”
“In his defense, the fireworks did work! Until they set everything on fire, that is.”
Adam held up his palms. “Hey, one good thing came out of it! It made me realize I was interested in engineering, remember?”
“That’s right,” Trina said, rolling her eyes upward. “And now you’re going to be studying it after we graduate. None of us will ever be safe again...”
She erupted into a fit of giggles, and I did the same. Adam followed suit a few seconds later.
After the seemingly-endless week I’d just endured at RFA, it felt good to laugh and let everything go for a while.
The bullying hadn’t let up at all. People still broke into my locker all the time, leaving nasty notes or rotten bits of shrimp—to make it smell like the trash I was, according to Jessica Fitzgerald—and I was still receiving a ton of abusive texts as well.
The worst one so far was a message sent to me by some girl called Jenna Langford. I’d never even met her, but for some reason she felt it was appropriate to send me a text saying ‘No one would care if you killed yourself’ in the middle of the night on Wednesday.
Because of that, I was nervous about tonight’s gala, figuring there was still a chance that someone would do something to me there, but Trina, Adam, Talia, Leticia and Grace had promised me that they’d watch out for me. They all seemed to think it would be fine, and for the most part, I agreed with them. It was off-campus, where the blacklist stuff apparently didn’t apply, and like Adam said a few days ago, once the guests saw others being nice to me, they’d probably do the same thing.
Still, that tiny malignant thought that the bullying would follow me never left my mind.
I even had a nightmare last night where I went to the gala only to discover that the whole thing was a Carrie-style setup, and as soon as I realized this, someone pulled on a rope to dump a bucket of pig’s blood all over me. I woke up in a cold sweat around four o’clock in the morning, haunted by the foggy remnants of the nightmare, and I hadn’t slept at all since.
Trina seemed to know what I was thinking about, because her laughter dried up, and her expression turned sympathetic. She reached over and squeezed my knee. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine tonight. The Princes won’t be there.”
I smiled faintly. “I know.”
The limo pulled up outside the hotel that Talia and her friends had hired for the gala. The eye-popping Beaux-Arts-style building was built by the edge of Royal Lake, the town’s largest na
tural body of water, and its warm golden lights made the inky expanse glitter like someone had filled it with priceless jewels.
The ballroom inside the hotel was just as gorgeous. Marble floors, tall windows draped with thick gold-threaded curtains, and stunning embellishments on the walls and entry archways. Rich and beautiful, like everything else in this town.
On the far side of the room, a stage had been set up with a microphone and photo exhibits from the elephant sanctuary. Below that, the scent of perfume, cologne, and wine drifted through the air along with the murmur of many voices. It was unbelievably elegant and refined; a far cry from the teen parties in Silvercreek, which involved a couple of cheap kegs and a stack of red plastic cups in the abandoned quarry outside the town.
Once upon a time, I would’ve felt wildly out of place at an event like this, but right now in my shimmering gown, I felt like I belonged here. Like a princess.
As we headed through the room, my worries melted away. Everyone was in a good mood, smiling and laughing in their little groups, and several people actually turned and smiled right at me as I passed. A few even said hello.
The most surprising thing that happened was over by the drinks table, when Trina and I went to get some champagne for her and a virgin cocktail for me. The guy who called me a ‘dirty, feral-looking slut’ in the hallway last Tuesday approached me with a hang-dog look on his face, and he awkwardly patted me on the shoulder.
“Hey, Laney. I… uh… I just wanted to say I’m sorry for the other day,” he said. “That shit I said wasn’t cool.”
I pursed my lips as he spoke. I didn’t feel ready to forgive him yet, but it was still nice that he was apologizing. “Thanks,” I said.
“It’s just hard, you know? Usually the Princes tell us why we’re blacklisting someone, and it’s always a good reason. Like that rapey asshole from last term. But this time they didn’t say why. We’re all just meant to go along with it without questioning anything,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “But I dunno… you seem pretty cool to me.”
Savage Prince: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Royal Falls Elite Book 1) Page 8