Sway

by M. F. Lorson

“My why?”

  He stroked the little bit of salt and pepper beard that covered his chin.

  “I know why Lydia Musgrove organized this stunt. I know why Christopher and Henrietta participated. What I don’t understand is why you, Anne Bennet, third-year Shelfbrooke student, never in my office aside from orientation, chose to pen a letter for the Cassius Society objecting to a long term policy. Or why you joined them in destroying your own uniform. Or why you aided in the distraction this morning that made the destruction of nearly two hundred student uniforms possible.

  I took in a sharp breath. Two hundred was so much more than I had imagined. At eighty dollars a piece, two hundred uniforms amounted to sixteen thousand dollars worth of damage. My Dad was going to explode if I was responsible for even a portion of that.

  “Judging by your reaction, I’ll wager that Lydia was telling the truth when she said you did not know about the fiasco in the laundry room.”

  I nodded my head, grateful that Lydia was willing to leave me that grace. “So let’s hear it, then,” continued Dean Thomas. “Why do you hate representing your school?”

  I could feel a tremble rising from my toes up into my core. Hate Shelfbrooke? That was not me. I loved it here. From the first time I set foot on the ground, I felt nothing but belonging here.

  “I don’t,” I started. “I don’t hate it here. I just felt like I needed to prove something. It seems stupid now,” I admitted. “But I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  The dean pivoted from the window to face me, cocking his head to the side with interest.

  “Who did you need to prove yourself to?”

  I almost laughed at the question. Who could have guessed I would be sitting in the dean’s office explaining my boy-getting strategy? Looking back on everything, it was no wonder I was still single.

  The whole story seemed silly when you said it out loud, but Dean Thomas asked for my why, and at this point, I had nothing to lose. Either I would be suspended, put on work duty or expelled like Lydia. I might as well go out with a bang, so I started at the beginning with the summer after my mom died. The boy on the ferry. Our perfectly delicious summer of forgetting everything but shared moments and I told him about coming here, about finding a new family, about my stupid choice and how much I regretted it.

  By the time I got to Christopher coming to Shelfbrooke, Dean Thomas was leaning against the windowsill, deeply enraptured. I finished with the weekend at Rachel’s lake house, pausing just long enough to wipe the tears that had formed at the corner of my eyes as I described my last failed attempt to make Christopher see I had changed.

  The dean scratched his head. “It is always a boy,” he laughed. “Or a girl. Depends on who is in trouble. But more suspensions than not come to be out of matters of the heart.”

  I grimaced at the word suspension.

  Dean Thomas chuckled at my response. “You can relax, Anne. I won’t be suspending you. Although you will be donating some of your precious extra-curricular time to working in the laundry.”

  I immediately felt some of the weight lift off my chest. Not all of it though. I wasn’t out of the woods yet. Christopher was still on the chopping block.

  “And Christopher?” I asked, hopeful that he would be as lenient with him as he was with me.

  The dean’s face grew serious. “That depends on his why and whether or not he, like yourself, shows any remorse.” And just like that, the weight resettled.

  As well as I thought I knew Christopher, I had no idea what his why would be. I didn’t know if he would show remorse or use this as an opportunity to bail on a place he hadn’t fallen in love with yet.

  Nodding, I gathered my things and exited the office. With Christopher on my mind, I stepped into the hallway, nearly tripping over a pair of outstretched legs. My breath caught in my throat as my eyes locked with Christopher’s. He was sitting exactly where I had been. He had heard everything I said. For a moment, I was mortified, but the feeling quickly left. So what if he heard it? I meant everything I said in there. I searched his eyes for a sign that any of it mattered, but his guard was up. Without a word, Christopher walked past me and closed the office door.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It had been twenty-four hours since Lydia was expelled and Christopher and I both met with Dean Thomas. If Ashley knew what came of their meeting, she was keeping it a secret. Maybe she was avoiding me, or maybe it was just a coincidence, but I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her since our last conversation.

  I bounced a tennis ball against our dorm room wall for the seven zillionth time in the last half hour. Only this time Rachel snagged it before it could bounce back to me. She glared at me from her side of the room.

  “Enough! Driving your dorm mates crazy isn’t going to improve Christopher’s chances of staying.”

  “She’s right,” yelled Violet, whose room shared a common wall with ours. Her voice was clear as day, causing me to realize that this girl whom I had talked to one time in Senior Leadership probably knew as much about me as Rachel. I should have picked ‘soundproof the walls’ as a Cassius Society goal. Maybe if I had, we wouldn’t be in any of this trouble.

  Unable to keep still, I began pacing back and forth between Rachel’s twin bed and mine. Rachel was an accommodating roommate. She never called me out on my snoring or asked me to turn the light off when she went to bed before me, but based on the exaggerated sigh she had just shot in my direction, she was getting pretty close to smother you in your sleep territory.

  “I think I’ll go for a run,” I said. Sensing her desire to be rid of me, I grabbed my sneakers from their spot beneath the bed.

  “Great idea!” said Rachel. “No offense, but it is kind of hard to write a paper with you having a mini-mental breakdown over there.” She had been staring at a blank cursor on her computer screen for at least fifteen minutes.

  I laughed, but my heart wasn’t in it. The statement was too close to accurate.

  Not knowing Christopher’s fate had me second guessing everything about Shelfbrooke. Even thinking about living here without him felt lonely.

  I was one mile into my out and back when I saw it. Tacked to a tree near the edge of the path was a heavy cream envelope, the Shelfbrooke seal embossed in wax across the opening. We all had stationary and the little wax stamp that came with it, but I had only ever used mine to write home to Mary my first year, and of course the letter to Christopher.

  Was the author of this letter harkening back to the days of Mr. Darcy and Heathcliff, when people still sent one another love letters? Probably not, because my name was scrawled across the front in heavy black sharpie. Still, I was careful not to tear the thick envelope as I slid my finger along the backside of the seal. Inside, the author had scratched out the Shelfbrooke logo and replaced it with an adorable cartoon of a boy and a girl reaching for the same cup of coffee. I took a deep breath. Christopher.

  All those times I caught him doodling on his notebook, he hadn’t been screwing off, after all. He was making art, and he was good at it. I could tell right away that the girl was me, even though she was illustrated in that fancy Japanese style that filled all the cartoons on Ashley’s bulletin board.

  It was him all along, filling the empty spaces on her wall. I smiled, remembering the girl with the messy hair in her concert T-shirt. That was why Ashley was so sure he still liked me. He had been adding to that wall all term. I was just too dense to recognize the artist or the fact that the girl was supposed to be me. I wanted to fold the letter up tight and run back to the dorm where I could inspect each drawing, but I couldn’t—not just yet. Beneath the illustration were four neatly printed paragraphs I was afraid to read. The last time the two of us had corresponded in print, it was me sending a Dear John letter. What if he was expelled, and this was his way of saying goodbye? I deserved that. It would only be fair, but I hoped against hope otherwise.

  With a shaky hand, I held the letter up close enough to read.

  Dear Anne
,

  I shouldn’t be writing you. Writing you is exactly what I came here not to do. The thing is, I’ve been trying to forget about you nearly as long as I’ve known you. When the opportunity to attend Shelfbrooke came, I weighed my options. Risk seeing you and let old feelings well up or resolve to keep my distance.

  I chose distance, and it felt right until that kiss in the potting shed. Until we started running together and I caught myself falling ever so slightly into the same old patterns. Ashley said I should give you another chance. My mother said (that’s right. I talk to my mother about this sort of thing) I should let it go and move on. My mind agrees with Mom, but my heart leans more toward Ashley.

  I was going to let my mind win this one. I thought I could confess to knowing about the uniforms being destroyed and head back to public school where I belong. At least then I wouldn’t have to see you every day and fight the urge to lean in every time the two of us are close enough to touch. I went to Dean Thomas’s office with a plan to put you and I behind me once and for all. But then I heard your voice on the other side of the door. I heard everything you said — your regret, how you tried to make things better, how you counted yourself a failure. I heard you tell him I was your why and I realized what you had to say right now was a thousand times more important than anything you wrote in a letter three years ago.

  But mostly, I heard you tell him that nothing has changed. If you can admit that you feel today how you felt that last morning on the ferry then, it’s time for me to admit I feel it too. Anne Bennet, I don’t want to start over with someone new. I’d rather fix what’s broken with you.

  I’ll be waiting outside Stratford Hall every evening until you find this letter. Please don’t take too long. It’s New England in March. I’m most likely freezing my butt off.

  Love, Christopher.

  Happy tears slid down my cheeks as I folded the letter up and tucked it into the pocket of my running pants. We had three years to make up for, and I didn’t want to wait a second longer to get started.

  It wasn’t sexy, me running full speed across campus. I was huffing and puffing like a prize pig, my hair sticking out in every which direction as droplets of sweat pooled over my eyebrows. I didn’t look good sprinting out of the woods and into the quad, but I didn’t care either.

  As promised, Christopher stood post outside of Stratford Hall. He wore his Shelfbrooke uniform, so at least I knew he hadn’t been suspended. I slowed to a stop in front of him, my breath coming fast.

  “I got your letter,” I gasped, clutching at my side as I caught my breath.

  Christopher’s lips curved into a smile. He rubbed his gloved hands together in front of him to keep from freezing. “On the first night too. You know, I only put it up this afternoon.”

  I grinned, looking down at my hot pink running shoes. The only bit of color added to my Shelfbrooke approved workout attire.

  “I had to get out of my room,” I admitted. “Waiting to hear if you were suspended was driving me batty.”

  Christopher’s face grew serious. “I’m glad you did. I thought long and hard about how I would talk to you, and in the end, I couldn’t figure out how to talk to you at all. I hope you don’t mind the cop-out,” said Christopher, tilting my chin up to meet his eyes. “You dumped me in a letter, so it only seemed fitting to ask you to take me back that way as well.”

  My heart was soaring. Take him back? That was so much more than I had hoped for. I wanted to say yes and immediately pull his body closer to mine, but it all seemed too good to be true. I was not the girl who first came to Shelfbrooke. I would never again let anyone tell me what I could or couldn’t have. But I wasn’t the girl from the ferry anymore either, and I needed him to know that.

  “I do want that,” I said, my eyes locked on the calm blue center of his. “But I can’t pretend the way I feel about you now is the same as our last day in Boston Harbor.”

  Christopher’s face fell.

  “I think I like you a lot,” I continued. “But I want to know you, really know you, this you, all grown up.” I laughed. “I hope how you feel about me has changed too.”

  The smile returned to Christopher’s lips. “How do you propose we get to know each other?” He asked, a devilish grin making the blood pumping to my heart feel louder than the ferry horn. He took a step toward me, pulling me closer by the small of my back. The warmth of his gloved hand pressed through my athletic shirt, and I thought how impossible it was that we could be both freezing and warm at the same time.

  “There is always kissing,” I dared, my voice barely above a whisper. “Although, I feel like we have that part down pretty well.”

  “Sure,” said Christopher, cupping my face with his free hand and inclining his head toward mine, “But you may have noticed, I do best with a little reminding.”

  I opened my lips to respond, but my words were quickly swallowed by the warmth of his mouth, pressing tight to mine. This was not the potting shed with four spectators. I was not afraid to lean in, and he was not shy when he pressed his body to mine.

  We stood there with the snow piled around us, our lips moving to a rhythm that was both familiar and completely new until the bell rang in the tower across campus and the lights began to dim in the windows above us.

  Finally, I pulled back and let reality set in.

  “What about next year?” I asked, searching his eyes for the happily ever after I had been craving.

  “Oh, you mean the different colleges thing?” asked Christopher. I nodded, afraid to hear his answer and desperate to hear it all in one.

  A very serious expression overtook his face as he contemplated the question.

  “Break up for sure.” he finally answered.

  My stomach plummeted.

  “I can’t go to college with a girlfriend from high school.” he continued, pulling me back in for a kiss, “Just think what that would do to my social status.”

  Epilogue

  It didn’t take long for Shelfbrooke to catch wind of the fact that Christopher and I were a couple. I suppose all of the mushy gushy hand holding and deep sighs gave us away, not to mention the fact that we were rarely ever separated.

  I thought that the rift between Will and Christopher would grow with our pairing, but as it turned out, Will couldn’t care less what was going on with us because he was seeing someone of his own. Will wouldn’t confirm her identity, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was someone who was not allowed on campus and owed me a snowglobe.

  My final semester at Shelfbrooke was the busiest one I’d had yet. It wasn’t the classes that absorbed my time. It was the extra-curriculars. Both Christopher and I had been sentenced to hard labor in the laundry department. We didn’t mind however, because each shift reminded us that the path back to one another was too long and complicated to take for granted.

  I never thought I would say this, but I was relieved when Dean Thomas agreed to allow Cassius Society to continue. The truth was, I had started to enjoy it. Without Lydia leading the revolution, it had actually sort of transitioned into a well-organized club. The faculty was even considering our proposal to create a funding pool for the newly formed girls rugby team.

  With graduation just around the corner, none of us knew what the future held. Rachel and I would be on separate sides of the country for the first time. Christopher hadn’t decided what he wanted to do yet, and Ashley still had an entire year at Shelfbrooke. What we did know was that we had three months of time left together, and we intended to spend every second of it loving the place we were in and the people we were with.

  Thanks for reading!

  If you loved Sway, please take a minute to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews are essential to an author’s success.

  And make sure to check out the next installment of the Shelfbrooke Academy series!

  Sophia Brass has it all—money, freedom, and a total life of luxury. When Sophia’s parents go abroad, she’s sent to the prestigious boarding school of
Shelfbrooke Academy. Here she shares a dorm with her estranged cousin, Belle, whose extreme social anxiety hasn’t let her leave the room in three years. Thanks to her reputation as a stuck-up brat, Sophia isn’t really friends with anyone. Especially not Declan Moss, the popular senior who is too smart, too cute, and too annoying for his own good.

  The boarding school’s gardens become her refuge where she can do her school work in solace, away from the mocking and unfriendly students. One day she finds a hidden door in the gardens that she’s positive leads somewhere special. Somewhere she could truly hide out from everything. Maybe it could even get her cousin to finally leave her room.

  This hidden garden could fix everything. Only the door is locked.

  And she’s pretty sure the key belongs to Declan.

  About the Author

  M.F. Lorson lives and works in Eastern Oregon as a Youth Services Librarian. She enjoys reading, writing, and copious amounts of Football! She also loves to hear from readers so please send her a message via her website or Facebook.

  Special thanks to Jessica Bucher for editing this title and to Jessica Pierce for making the cover.

  www.mflorson.com

  Also by M. F. Lorson

  Delinquent

  The Hunter’s Daughter

  Stage Kiss

  The Exchange

  Off Center

  Sway

  Stage Kiss

  Available now

  Prologue

  If I had known on September 5th, 1990 that a Care Bears backpack would determine who my friends were for the next 12 years, I could have opted to pick my own bag instead of begging for my sister’s hand me downs. Then maybe I wouldn’t be a friendless, boyfriend less loser today.