A lot has changed since before we started sophomore year. More if we count the week before freshman year started.
Things happened that I never thought would happen to me, but they did. I don’t care about a lot of things anymore, including where the latest party is or who will be there or how to be the most popular girl in school, besting even the current seniors.
I just don’t care anymore. I can’t afford to.
“There’s no need to be all bitchy, I was just trying to talk to you,” he says behind me, trying to laugh it off.
I turn back around to look at him. His face is red with embarrassment and anger, but I don’t give a damn if this is the first time a jock like him has been told off by me in front of the entire class of nosy students that will spread the word about this.
“About what, Brantley?” I’m beyond angry, and empty now. “The fact that you can’t get it up for longer than two minutes?”
I know I’m being a bitch, but I’ve been trying to keep it together for the past half hour of the class, and in that time, he’s been whispering behind me and Dante was helping by throwing balled up papers at me, annoying the hell out of me.
I watch with flat eyes as his eyes widen, my words finally registering with him.
“I don’t…that’s not…” he stutters. I almost feel bad for him. Almost.
“Say no more, B.” I drop my voice to a sympathetic loud whisper. “I wasn’t the one to spill the beans by writing your little, tiny, barely there secret in the girls locker room.”
I stare pointedly at Brantley’s recent ex, Shelly. Recent as in, they broke up at the door of this very class.
Brantley sucks in a breath, practically burning holes into the side of Shelly’s head but the poor, disorganized, and badly coordinated girl with a terrible fashion sense ignores him, a secret smile on her face.
She can hear everything, and he knows it.
“Girls are devious little things, aren’t they?” I wink at Brantley, feeling like I want to run away, but I can’t stop myself from being this vindictive bitch. From being my father’s daughter.
“Miss Montague,” Mrs. Henry calls from the front of the class, a pissed off expression on her face. “Do you mind telling us the answer to the question?”
All eyes turn to look at me. Again.
I’ve practically been out of it today, listening in class should be the last thing on my mind. I glance at Roxy, and she stares at me, a smirk on her face, waiting for what I have to say.
She and everyone else in this damn class expects me to fail, but that’s just not me. In my haze and the mess in my head, I actually heard every single thing Mrs. Henry said, like background noise.
“Well…” I sit up straight in my seat, a smile on my face, pretending like everything is perfect with me. “It seems to me like Pip was just a fool who refused to see the truth that was right in front of him for a long time.”
Mrs. Henry raises an eyebrow that clearly needs major help. A little trim won’t help that bush. She needs hedge clippers for that mess. “Why do you say that?”
“Estella, the cold-hearted, Miss Havisham incarnated,” I start, looking at Roxy as I say that. “—never loved Pip. And for a boy who Dickens claims to be smart and observant, helping the convict and all that Mother Teresa mess, Pip should have seen immediately that the girl didn’t love him at all.”
“Interesting,” Mrs. Henry says, folding her arms. “Have you considered that maybe his blindness to Estella’s indifference is because of his background, or his ambitions of wanting to be a better man. To do better and have beautiful things in life?”
We all want beautiful things in life, but that shouldn’t make us stupid and blind.
“Yes, that might be so, but when someone doesn’t love you, it’s really obvious. Right, Roxy?” I glance at the blonde queen bitch. She watches me right back. What’s one more Friday afternoon bit of gossip to keep people off my back and digging into my personal life?
“I’m actually with you on that one, Mia,” she starts, her voice soft and airy. She flips her long, shiny locks over her shoulder, her shirt tightening, making the swell of her tits tighter. I notice the looks of lust she receives from the male population of our class, and to be honest, it’s been like that with Roxanne Bishop since kindergarten.
She’s bewitched every single boy that she meets. She’s the head cheerleader. Everyone wants to be her friend, but since she’s the queen bitch of our school, apparently, she has an exclusive friend list.
She’s every cliché imaginable. Well, except that she was actually smarter than people realize. She’s the perfect distraction.
“You are?” I question.
“Yes,” Roxy starts, ignoring the shocked looks we’re both getting.
“Please explain, Miss Bishop,” Mrs. Henry prompts, a shocked look on her face that Roxy and I actually agree on something.
It’s high school, even teachers hear about student gossip.
People like to think Roxy, her crew, and I hate each other. Which is far from the truth. The thing is, Roxy and her besties, have never been enemies of mine.
The R.A.C.K and I have never been openly hateful toward each other, hell, Charlotte and Roxy attended the same ballet class as me when we were kids, until they dropped out like little punks when things got harder. But not me. I’m the daughter of the great Nancy Montague, there’s no quitting for me. EVER.
“Well, we all know that Estella was cold. She was a user, a bad person, raised by Miss Havisham and all that jazz,” Roxy starts, her voice captivating enough to shut down the room. “But Pip was the bigger fool in this story. When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them. Not try to mold them into something they’re not.”
Well then.
“Exactly.” I say, giving Roxy a slight nod that I’m sure everyone doesn’t notice. “Pip’s ambitions made him dig his own grave, and as a reader, I don’t sympathize with him.”
“Are you saying then that all of Pip’s work to be a better man, was all in vain?” Mrs. Henry questions, her eyes lighting up. “Or are you saying that having hope and wanting love are vain?”
I blink slowly, taken aback by the question.
Love is vain…
For a split second, I can clearly see my mother smiling, then laughing at something my father would have whispered in her ear. The sound was so delightful, the look on their faces making me feel so at home, loved and safe. And in the next, my mother is breaking apart, then vomiting at the same time.
Love is vain…
“Miss Montague?”
I shiver, pain shooting through my chest with an intensity that catches my breath. It’s a kind of pain that I’ve been trying to suppress with everything in me. But, just like everything shitty in life, it still pops up like the pimples on Dante’s face.
“Miss Montague?” Mrs. Henry calls again.
“You’re right Mrs. H, love is indeed vain,” Roxy starts before I can say anything. The beautiful, bombshell blonde is nothing if not cunning and smart, always wants the limelight on her, but right now, she just saved me from answering that question. “Love is a meaningless emotion, felt by meaningless people with nowhere meaningful to go.”
Whoa, that’s cold. Even for me.
So says the girl who breaks hearts left, right, and center. Everything she touches somehow seems to crumble and die, including the heart of a certain boy that transferred schools all because of her—which inevitably made an already lethal rivalry, bloodier than ever before.
But, that’s just rumors.
“That’s quite a cynical view on love, Miss Bishop.” Mrs. Henry shakes her head, looking between the both of us.
“I choose to see it as smart and careful,” Roxy says, blinking slowly, captivating her male audience further. “Love breeds fools and cowards that can’t even see what’s real and what’s not. But lust on the other hand—,”
The guys cheer and the girls giggle at that, imaginations running wild in o
ne clear direction.
“Do you agree, Miss Montague?” Mrs. Henry questions, and again, all eyes turn to me and then to Roxy. All the eager shitheads with nothing else to do, staring, waiting on bated breath for drama to unfold between the popular girls of Clintwood Academy. Roxy shoots me a seemingly cold smile that I know to actually be real.
“Oh, she totally agrees, Mrs. Henry,” Roxy chimes in again, her voice sultry as always. “After all, cold-hearted girls speak the same language.”
Cold-hearted? Is that me?
The bell rings right then, effectively ending the class. I quickly stand up, catching Roxy’s wink as she picks up her Gucci bag (Have I mentioned that she’s doesn’t repeat the same purse in a month? Commitment issues, definitely. Or maybe she’s just filthy rich.). I shake my head then grab my notepad, stuffing it in my purse.
Just four more weeks and it’ll be summer. Junior year will finally be over, and I’ll have more time to nail my routine. But I need to go to the drug store and fill Mom’s various prescriptions and…
“Mia,” Mrs. Henry calls before I can leave. “A word, please.”
I sigh, glancing at the quickly emptying class, then down at my silver wristwatch. “Can we talk about this next week? I really need to go.”
I notice Kristine, my best friend lingering in the hallway, an excited look on her face. Great, she knows what happened in here with Brantley and then with the girl she’s obsessed with, even though she isn’t in my class.
“It won’t take long.”
The last of the students stream out and I walk toward her desk. She takes out an envelope from her desk drawer and flips it over. I notice the seal first and my heart starts pumping even faster. Sweat dots my brow, irritating me even further.
“Mrs. Henry, with all due respect, I told you not to do that.” I make sure to keep my voice low, glancing at the door to make sure Kristine isn’t listening in.
Mrs. Henry’s eyes widen, the smile that was on her face disappearing.
“But Mia, you and I both know that your intellect is wasted in high school. You don’t need the extra year; your GPA is a perfect 4.9. You’re a geni—,””
“Please don’t say that,” I cut her off, not meaning to be so harsh.
“Mia,” she starts, pushing the thick envelope my way. “I know you’re scared, and I know you think you can’t do this, but you took the finals with the seniors and you did extremely well. Hell, you aced each one. You can graduate with the seniors.”
“I only took those finals because I wanted to get you and the rest of the teachers off my back.”
“Really?” She raises that brow again and I almost roll my eyes in front of her, but I don’t. I have manners and sense enough to do it when she can’t see me do it.
“Okay, I did it to test myself, but I never told you to send out those college applications,” I say, my stomach flipping.
“You didn’t, yes, but you filled them in.”
I filled them in and added the essays that I write when I’m feeling anxious and that night, I felt like I needed an escape. I desperately needed an out, feeling like the walls of my castle were crumbling and now we live in ruins.
“And it’s not the only one that came back,” she says with a big smile, turning to open the other drawer. She takes out another thick envelope, this one from NYU, then another from Notre Dame, then UCLA and that’s only adding to the one she gave me first, the one I filled in with a passion only because my father went there, Stanford University.
“This is crazy,” I whisper, my eyes wide with awe. “What if they’re all rejection letters?”
“Big schools don’t waste paper on sending denials this thick, Mia. Besides, you and I both know that you can get into any school you want.”
Yeah, except the school that actually matters to my mother. I’m failing miserably at that. What does it say that when it comes to the one parent that I don’t give a damn about, the one who broke my heart, I’ve been accepted to his alma mater.
“Mrs. Henry,” I start, trying my hardest not to burst into tears right now. I compose myself. “I really do have to go.”
She watches me carefully. I don’t know what she’s searching for, but I look away.
“Alright. Take these with you.” I glance at the envelopes warily. “Maybe you’ll look at them when you have a moment.”
“Well, I think I won’t have a moment, you know, with summer coming up, there’ll be so many parties, some fun in the sun.” I smile my best spoiled brat smile, feeling empty inside, but she doesn’t buy it.
“Sure. I guess it’s at those parties that you sneak in an entire college biology textbook, huh?”
I sigh, not knowing what to say to that. The truth is, I haven’t been to a house party in over a year and I certainly haven’t actually had the time to read anything for the hell of it. Yes, I read college textbooks for fun. It’s much more fun to be an intelligent ice queen than a dumb one.
“Mia, listen to me,” Mrs. Henry starts, her voice soft and maybe a bit sympathetic. I shift on my feet, uncomfortable. “Life is scary, and the truth is, we don’t have any certainty when it comes to this life thing. But, don’t let that fear drive your future.”
When I don’t say anything, she stacks the thick, college envelopes, then places them in my hands. Feeling their weight in my arms, I start to panic, images of my mother flashing before my eyes. Not knowing what to do, and feeling Kristine’s eyes on my back, I quickly stuff the thick envelopes in my bag, breathing hard and fast.
“Just breathe, Mia,” Mrs. Henry says, watching me with sympathy in her eyes. She’s one of the teachers that picked up on how smart I was, even when I tried to downplay it so hard just for status. I hate it when some of the teachers call me a genius. If I was, my mother would still…
“Thank you,” I hurriedly say, and then turn on my six-inch heels that match my bag, and leave.
But before I can leave the room, she calls out after me. I glance back and she’s now standing, her arms folded.
“What’s going on, Mia?” Her voice is low, her posture relaxed. That in itself immediately puts me in defense mode. I straighten my spine, making sure my head is held up high, eyes wide with faux innocence, looking every bit the picture of a perfect girl with a perfect life that I knew so many were jealous of. I was that bitch. Well, I used to be.
“Oh, the ‘star’ football boys are sour about their last loss, even if it was ages ago. Oh, and there was a cat fight between Jill the thick girl with a strong uppercut and…”
Mrs. Henry shakes her head, still eyeing me. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
I suck in a breath, but keep the charade going. “Nothing’s going on.”
“Mia, whatever it is, I’m sure I can help.”
Can you make my mother feel better?
“That’s awfully amazing of you, Mrs. Henry, but like I said, there’s nothing wrong with me or anything that’s connected to me.” I smile radiantly. It’s never been easy to get this woman off my back, but she’s being pushy today.
“Mia…”
“Again, thank you for your concern, but nothing’s going on. Everything is fine and I really do have to go.”
And with that, I turn on my heel, feeling like I’m rotting from within, my heart thundering in my chest so hard, my blood is boiling.
The lies just keep coming and my armor is starting to take the blows and hard hits coming at me. I just hope now with Aunt Nicky at the doctors with Mom, there’ll be some good news when I get home.
6
“Hey, girl,” Kristine starts when I leave class. “What was that all about?”
“It’s nothing,” I say, quickly walking toward my locker, glancing at my watch again.
“That didn’t look like nothing.” She presses but the curiosity in her eyes isn’t of concern. It’s to try and squeeze information that I know she’ll uses to gossip about me. The fact that I’m aware of this and still call her my friend… God, give me s
trength.
“I used colorful language in my last paper that Mrs. Henry obviously couldn’t handle reading. And boy was she pissed.” The lie flies out of my mouth with an ease that almost shocks me. I almost never lie but when it comes to Kristine, it just happens for some reason. My guard comes up when she’s around.
“Oh, that’s so badass of you.” She laughs but it sounds forced. I roll my eyes, but she doesn’t notice. “It looks like you’re not taking any prisoners today! I heard that you told Brantley off. He’s super pissed at you.”
Oh yeah, that happened.
“Yeah, he can go cry me a salty ocean,” I say nonchalantly as I open my locker, taking out all the books I need for the weekend.
“You’re so funny,” Kristine gushes, her pink lip-gloss so shiny it’s blinding my eyes. “So, does this mean that the old Mia Montague, Queen of Clintwood Academy, is back?”
Back?
“What do you mean?” I glance at her from the corner of my eye, noticing the tight expression on her face.
With her unnatural blonde hair (she desperately wants to look like Roxy, by the way) her hazel eyes and the gum she’s been smacking all day, Kristine Marks is a beautiful girl. But she knows, just like everyone else in this school, that she tries too hard but doesn’t quite make it.
Her expression tightens now, her make-up looks blotched and desperately needs a retouch. I open my mouth to point that out but stop myself. There’s something about the way she’s scrutinizing me. When did it get this tense between us?
“Kristine, what?” I push again.
“Nothing. It’s just that, you know, you’ve just been acting so different these days. So…distant, preoccupied.” She watches me, peering closer, waiting for something but I don’t react. I’ve got my armor back on. “Is everything alright?”
If one more person asks me that damn question today…
“Yes.” I grab my Calc textbook, then my notebooks, shoving them in my bag. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t it, right?” Kristine murmurs.
Devious Kisses: A Bully Enemies -To-Lovers Romance (It's Just High School Book 1) Page 9