by Vi Lily
broken
Book 1 in the
Athole Academy Series
by Vi Lily
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental, except in the mention of public figures such as celebrities, bands, authors, et al.
© 2019 Vi Lily, Library of Congress Registry Pending.
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Table of Contents
ME
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
HE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
ME AGAIN
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
HE AGAIN
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
WE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
ME
Chapter 1
I NEVER MEANT to fall in love with the most popular guy at Athole Academy. I mean, that was a pretty stupid thing to do, even for someone like me who doesn’t always make the best decisions. But Ben Penn moved his cute little tight butt right into my heart and made himself at home the first time I talked to him.
That was our first day at the Academy. My brother and I were transfers from another school, in another state, coming from another life. We weren’t just school transfers; we were society transfers. New money trying to pretend we belonged with those who’d had generations of the amazing lifestyle we were now shocked to be living.
My mom won the lottery. Not the actual lottery, but even better, because Dad said our money won’t be taxed. Thanks to my great-grandfather leaving Mom all his money, we now had like a hundred million, give or take a few mil.
One day we’re living in the crappy part of the burbs in SoCal; the next, we’re moving across country to start a new life as the “nouveau riche.”
Baby millionaires.
No one even knew my GG Rodney was rich. The old man lived on a freaking houseboat, for eff’s sake. Not a yacht, either, but a twenty-eight-foot houseboat with two little cabins and a galley so small you couldn’t make toast without hitting the counter behind you with your butt.
But GG had invested in some startup computer businesses back in the seventies… and never touched a dime from those investments. He lived like a floating hermit, and a poor one at that.
Mom was the only one of GG’s relatives who gave a damn about him. She made sure to call him at least once a week and we always made the four-hour drive to see GG every few months, with Mom being sure she took groceries to him that we couldn’t really afford to give away.
She was convinced that he was destitute and needed the food more than we did.
Dad sometimes griped about that, saying that we would be stuck eating turkey hotdogs and navy beans for a week after giving GG all our “good stuff.” Which wasn’t an exaggeration — with his job as a prison guard and Mom working part-time as a lunch lady at an elementary school, there wasn’t a lot of money in the budget for food to feed our family of four.
But we always made do. Maybe it had something to do with her profession of cooking with cheap, crappy, government-regulated ingredients, but Mom could make the best pseudo-gourmet meals out of stuff like ramen or beans.
When we’d visit GG, Mom would splurge to buy the ingredients for his favorite Banana Split Pie to make for him when we got there so the graham cracker crust wouldn’t get soggy. GG said Mom spoiled him, and Mom always told him that he was worth spoiling.
I was always a bit jealous of GG. Mom never spoiled me like that.
And when he died, he made sure Mom was good and spoiled for the rest of her life. And ours. I think GG gave Mom all his money just because of that dessert that’s so sweet it makes your jaw hurt.
The rest of the family was seriously ticked off over that inheritance, especially my grandmother Matty, my mom’s mom, GG’s daughter. She still isn’t talking to us.
Just goes to show you that being nice to someone never hurts, and sometimes karma will come back and kiss you. Might even buy you dinner first.
It’s pretty surreal, going from not having enough money to get a pizza on Friday night to having enough to buy several hundred pizza franchises.
The family — my parents, my younger brother, and me — had no idea what to do with the money. At first, we did nothing. Well, except we got pizza on Friday nights and Mom started buying real beef hotdogs.
After about a month Dad brought up the idea that we should move to Ireland or England, somewhere that my brother, Rod — named after GG Rodney — could “do something” with his soccer skills.
I fought against that idea. Yeah, Rod is an awesome soccer player and super fast — he’s nicknamed “Hot Rod” Hanson for a reason — but seriously, uproot the entire family and move us across the globe just so Rod could kick a ball around? Seemed kinda extreme to me. I wasn’t happy with the idea, to say the least.
I was relieved when Mom said no way was she moving out of the country.
Dad then suggested a prep school on the East Coast that was known for graduating top soccer stars, those who went on to play for the best colleges, with a bunch getting recruited to top teams around the world.
I didn’t like that idea, either, until Dad pointed out that, with the prep school on my record, it would be a lot easier to get into Harvard. It was a dangly carrot in front of a starving jackass, let me tell you.
When I was in fourth grade, I won the Student Storyteller contest, beating out even middle schoolers with my story about a poor girl who finds a treasure and has to decide what to do with her new wealth.
Looking back, that story was kinda ironic.
After that contest, I knew I wanted to be a writer. And to be a really, really great writer, I got it in my head that I need to graduate from Harvard, the Ivy League university that has graduated more Pulitzer Prize winners than any other.
I’ve spent the past six years studying my butt off to make sure I’m always at least in the top five percent of my class. A lot of the time I’ve been at the very top. But even then, and with a full-ride scholarship which is nearly impossible to get, I still needed to have a lot of dead presidents in hand to make Harvard happen.
In between studying said butt off, I worked to save money. I babysat, dog-walked, trimmed rose bushes — still have scars from that adventure — and worked in concessions at the movie theater weekend nights. I rarely spent a dime of any money I earned over the years, and I still only had a little over a t
housand saved.
Harvard was looking like a pie-in-the-sky dream until Mom got the inheritance. Sky pie dream made possible thanks to Banana Split Pie.
So, the Harvard-is-now-possible idea was how Dad was able to cajole me into jumping onboard the “Hot Rod” train and ride along to the East Coast where all our dreams could be had.
Realistically, I knew that I really didn’t have a choice; I’m a minor, so if Mom and Dad said “we’re moving,” I had like zero to say about it. But my dad is cool and never really forces us to do stuff we don’t want to. Might be a byproduct of growing up in California, but he’s real laid-back.
Mom’s another story altogether, at least when it comes to me. I get the “because I said so” treatment from her. She lets Rod get away with murder though. Which really sucks, cuz I’m the good kid who always tries to do the right thing, stays on the honor roll every single semester, sits at the top of my class, and never argues about anything.
My brother is another story. He argues all the time, totally disrespectful. Barely passes his classes and ditches all the time, to the point he nearly got expelled. Which is stupid, if you ask me; a kid skips school and so for punishment, they kick him out of school? Yeah, morons ran our schools in Cali.
The only good thing Rod does is run fast and use his feet to aim a ball into a net. Whoopee. But it’s enough to make my parents take notice of him.
Dad looked online and found the school where I met the love of my life the very first day. It was touted as having one of the best soccer programs in the nation and claimed to have graduated “dozens of players who went on to lucrative careers playing European football.”
But lucky for me, it’s a prep school, meaning I’ll graduate from a top school after taking college preparatory classes. That is going to seriously help the Harvard resume.
East Coast, here we come.
Since it was the middle of the school year, Rod and I wouldn’t just be the new kids; we’d be the “new kids who stick out like sore thumbs.” Rod was over-the-top excited to go; me, not so much. I mean, yeah, I was excited to have a chance to go to a top prep school and the idea of a complete change wasn’t exactly unappealing, plus we’d be living somewhere that actually got snow and had seasons other than drought, rain, more rain, wind.
But the fear of the unknown freaked me out a bit. For one thing, it was a completely different culture. Californians are laidback and embrace weirdness, so if I wanted to wear my panda hat and steampunk goggles to school — which I did one day last spring — no one even bats an eye.
My first day of school Freshman year, I wore a Batman cape I’d gotten at Magic Mountain and Converse with pictures of pizza slices on them.
And yeah… eyes were batted.
I’m a little worried about not fitting in at the new school, even though I was popular at my old school. I had friends from all the cliques and fit in with all of them. I obviously could hang with the populars and brains; but I also hung with the jocks thanks to Rod. My friend Sheila is an amazing artist who mostly draws anime, so I even fit in with the fine-arts, anime and emo/goths. The only group I really didn’t hang with was the stoners, but I had friends who liked to get high, so I would even hang out with them occasionally.
Basically, I was a floater, which is sorta a clique in itself.
But now… new school, new kids, new house, new cars, new life. Scary.
I wanted to wait until the end of the semester to move for obvious reasons, and thankfully Rod went along with it. Even though he was a year younger than me, he pretty much got what he wanted. All. The. Freaking. Time.
Mom was really excited at a chance to have a white Christmas, which definitely wasn’t a possibility where we were on the left side of the States. But she agreed that it was a good idea to wait, too, because she wanted to give her school a chance to find a replacement for her.
Yeah, even though she was now a multi-millionaire, Mom still kept her cafeteria lady job, I think mostly because she had friends at the school. She’s pretty nice to almost everyone. I think she’s more about appearances than anything though.
Finding a replacement took an extra week, which meant we didn’t move until the end of December. Since the new school started the first week of January, we didn’t have a lot of time to settle in and unpack before starting a whole new routine. I would have liked to have had at least a few weeks to get my bearings, but I’m just one voice. One that’s usually ignored.
Mom insisted we buy the smallest house we could find in the ritzy neighborhood where all the other rich people lived. The only reason she agreed to move to that ‘hood was because it was secure... like, had security officers that patrolled and everything. After living in Cali and with the occasional gunshot and drug buys on street corners, Mom was all about the safety.
All the houses in the new neighborhood were mansions. Huge freaking mansions. The “smallest” place we found was six bedrooms. It honestly looked small compared to the others on the block too, which is hilarious.
Mom has always been pretty down-to-earth, which I guess is why she didn’t want such a big place. She’d said, “The bigger it is, the more I have to clean.” Of course, Dad pointed out that she could hire a maid service or even get a live-in, but Mom freaked, saying there was no way she was going to have strangers clean up after her family.
Mom doesn’t make a very good millionaire. I secretly call her Granny Clampett, but if you don’t watch old television reruns like me, you won’t get that.
Even though the house is “small” by millionaire standards, it’s cool. It has an indoor pool; an entertainment room complete with a mini movie theater; a basement that is like a whole house all by itself; and the kitchen is like something you’d see on a chef show, with stainless steel everywhere. Since I love to cook and usually make most of the family meals when I can, I planned to spend as much time in there as possible.
Mom said that I should see about getting a job as a cafeteria lady at the Academy. Not sure if she was kidding or not.
There wasn’t any reason for Rod and me to unpack our room stuff since Dad insisted we buy new crap, which Mom finally agreed to after a minor argument. I swear, she might be down-to-earth, but she’s also seriously cheap.
We all went clothes shopping too. Dad once again insisted on that, telling Mom that we didn’t need to look like a bunch of rich hillbillies — again, the Clampett reference. Mom pointed out that we’d moved from Cali to the hills, so that reference kinda didn’t work in our case. But she finally agreed.
Rod and I have to wear uniforms at school, so we didn’t need much, but we still got a lot of clothes. Mom almost fainted when she totaled up the receipts when we got home. I swear, the woman seems to think we still need to stick to a budget. Some old habits die an agonizingly slow death, I guess.
Still, I guess fifteen thousand is a lot to spend on clothes for just four people. But the mall in Bearing, our new town, only has upscale stores, the kind where people greet you at the door with pastries and lattes. The cheapest price I saw all day was two hundred and fifty bucks, and that was for a freaking scarf.
Bearing doesn’t even have a Target. We’re so out of our element.
Even though we’re required to wear uniforms, our footwear isn’t regulated. Seemed there was some controversy about some kid who had to wear special shoes and the school-assigned footwear didn’t work for him. He got suspended for wearing his prescribed shoes, but since his dad was some hotshot lawyer and threatened lawsuits, the school finally just changed the rules for everyone.
Of course, Rod got five pairs of some top-of-the-line sneakers that all the major athletes wear. The damn things were like twelve hundred each. Mom didn’t even say anything about that, cuz… Rod.
Rolling my eyes here.
I’m still wearing my old favorite, Converse. At least I got a dozen new pairs. Had to order them online, though, since the stores here couldn’t lower themselves to sell my favorite brand, I guess because they didn’t cost a
s much as a car payment. And even then, my mom had actually balked at the cost of overnight shipping, but she finally agreed when Dad pointed out all my shoes together cost less than what Rod had spent on just one pair, even with my new limited edition JW Anderson Glitters.
After our few days of free time — mostly spent enjoying the snow that we’d only seen on television — Mom and Dad drove us the forty-five minutes it took to get to our school, nestled in an evergreen forest. It was an area that people from all over flocked to for hiking, fishing, hunting. From my research I’d done online before we moved, I know that a good portion of the people in the area were serious outdoorsmen.
Not me. I might go to the beach occasionally, but that was about the extent of my desire for sun and fresh air. I’m more a stay at home and read a book type of girl.
The pictures I’d found online of Athole Academy absolutely did not do it justice. My first thought when I saw it up on a hill as we rounded a bend was that it looked like a castle in the middle of a thick pine forest with its white rock against all that green.
The main building was four stories tall, with smaller buildings surrounding it. And by smaller, I mean they were only three stories and probably half the size of the big building in the center. They were bigger than most apartment complexes.
It looked like the least number of trees possible had been cleared to build the school, but I knew that the structure had been there since the eighteen hundreds, so the forest was probably trying to encroach on the school. It was kind of ominous, like the trees were trying to overtake the place. It definitely had a Stephen King vibe going on.
Redrum. Redrum.
I’d shaken off the feeling of my pending doom and forced myself to remember why I was there: Harvard University, here I come.
Dad had pulled our brand-new Mercedes SUV into a parking place near the front entrance. Since I had my driver’s license, I would be driving Rod and me to school, because the Academy didn’t have bus service. Apparently, rich kids can’t lower themselves to use public transportation.