by Eva Ashwood
But they couldn’t be that bad, could they? How could they hate me more than everyone else here did?
Since the lunchroom was off limits—my own decision, I decided to say, pretending that it had less to do with the people giving me disgusted looks and more to do with my personal desire to be left alone—I went outside. There weren’t any formal sitting areas outside, but it didn’t matter, since it wasn’t like teachers were watching to stop anyone from slipping out either.
I found a spot near the outside wall of the cafeteria, away from the doors so I wouldn’t be seen, but not too far away. Despite how horrible the day was turning out to be, despite my impulse to be alone, I didn’t want to stray too far from the crowded lunchroom. Who knew when the redhead girl from earlier would decide she wanted to come at me for a second round.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I glanced down at my tray. My stomach pitched again. Out here, I didn’t have to worry about stares or snickers or people throwing harsh words my way. Instead, I had another problem to contend with.
The food.
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be eating. One pile of mush, another pile of slightly more palatable-looking mush, a carton of milk that I’d only just realized was already opened, or the fruit cup? The fruit cup was the one thing I thought I could stomach, until it occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten a spoon.
My stomach rumbled; the breakfast I’d had this morning clearly wasn’t going to last me all day, but I wasn’t nearly desperate enough to eat this—especially not with my hands. And going back into the lunchroom to look for a spoon was out of the question.
I sighed and glanced around, spotting a trash can near the corner of the building. A few flies buzzed around it, as if they were just waiting for the chance to attack my ill-fated lunch. I’d have to remember to pack something to eat tomorrow.
As I dumped my food, tray and all, I heard a laugh. The sound sent a shiver up my spine—it was deep and velvety, but there was a hard edge to it too.
“What’s the matter? Food not good enough for you, princess?”
I looked up, instantly on edge. I hadn’t noticed there was someone around the corner. Three someones, to be specific—and I recognized all of them. They were the boys from my block, the ones who’d stared at me on my first day in the new house.
They leaned against the wall, looking every bit as dangerous and darkly beautiful as they had the first day I’d seen them. The shaggy haired one stood in the middle, his arms folded over his chest. The blond and the dark-haired one flanked him. I was instantly reminded of the girls in the locker room, the way they’d stood in the same formation before they’d attacked me.
I’d barely stood a chance against three vicious girls, and these three boys were all tall and muscled, each well over six feet. I was a petite 5’4”, and even standing several feet away from them, I had to crane my neck a little to meet their gazes.
The boy with messy brown hair had asked me a question, but it felt like a bad idea to answer. I was positive there was no right answer anyway.
I took two steps backward, then turned on my heel and started toward the side door I’d come out of. Maybe I’d take my chances in the cafeteria after all.
But the boys were fast.
Two of them reached me before I could even make it around the corner. Large hands closed around my arms, rough and warm, their grip tight.
God, no.
My heart raced, and I struggled against their hold. No one could say the rich bitch wasn’t a fighter, even if she was punching above her weight. I dug my feet in, but all it did was slow our movements slightly as the blond boy and the one with caramel skin and dark hair brought me back to stand before the boy with enigmatic hazel eyes. He had yet to even move, standing just where I’d left him like a king surveying his domain.
I hated that he was gorgeous. Hated that they all were.
Maybe it would’ve been easier to despise them if they hadn’t had a wild, almost feral beauty that attracted me as much as it terrified me.
I tried, though. I stared the boy in front of me down, refusing to look away or cower. He jerked his chin slightly, and his buddies let me go. I didn’t try to run though; I knew better than that. I’d learned my lesson the first time, and I knew without a doubt that if I ran, they’d chase me—and they would catch me.
So this staring contest, this battle of wills, whatever you wanted to call it, would have to do.
We all stood in silence for several long beats. I could feel the other two boys at my sides and smell a faint hint of cloves and sage. It tickled my nostrils, and I breathed more shallowly, not wanting to take in any part of them.
“You didn’t like lunch,” the shaggy-haired boy said finally. “Not gourmet enough? Maybe it shoulda been served to you on a silver platter?”
I flushed angrily.
For the entire first half of the day, I’d put up with whispers and glares. I’d tried to keep my head down and ignore it all. But despite the fact that everyone here seemed to think they had me all figure out, these people didn’t know me.
“It’s not like that,” I gritted out. “I didn’t have a spoon… or a fork.”
“You couldn’t just go back inside and get one?”
“I didn’t want to cut the line.”
“Huh. Princess has manners.”
His smirk lit a fire inside me. Heavy emotion flooded me, and I couldn’t tell if it was fear, anger, or something more dangerous and forbidden. I clenched my jaw against the flush of heat spreading through me.
“It’s not like that,” I repeated.
The boy in front of me laughed. He looked to my left, where the dark-haired boy stood.
“What do you think, Misael?”
“I think princess thinks she’s too good for what everyone else eats.”
“Too bad. Rest of us have to deal with the cafeteria slop. Why don’t you?” The one on the right, the blond, spoke up.
He was the biggest one, and I faltered when he nudged me. I glared at him, eyes narrowed. He smirked down at me. The muscles in his arm flexed as he folded them; a huge sleeve tattoo in the likeness of a snake caught my eye before I looked back to the boy leaning against the wall.
“What do you want?” I asked, trying to inject more confidence into my voice than I felt. “If you’re here to whine to me about something my father did, or try to scare me with stories about the Lost Boys or whatever—”
“Oh, word travels fast. So you’ve heard of us already.”
“Jesus Christ. That fuckin’ nickname.” The dark-haired boy to my left chuckled.
My stomach dropped.
I was sure my face had gone pale, but the boy in front of me didn’t skip a beat as he dipped his head in a mock-formal greeting. “My name’s Bishop. Bish to my friends, which you are not. Then Misael”—he nodded to the dark-haired Latino boy—“and Kace,” he said of the blonde. “We call him Reaper. I don’t think I need to explain why.”
No, he didn’t. With how built the boy was, and how violence seemed to radiate from his very pores, I didn’t need to ask either.
“And why should I care?” I said, lifting my chin and giving a nonchalant shrug, even as my heart slammed against my ribs.
“Because,” Bishop said. “We run this school. We own this school. So in effect, Princess, we own you too.”
There was a dangerous truth in his voice when he said it. Silky smooth, no room for question or argument. Whatever snide comeback I might’ve made stayed planted on the tip of my tongue, unwilling to voice itself under the finality of Bishop’s statement.
I was lucky—I didn’t have to force myself to speak because a few seconds later, the bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. Bishop didn’t take his eyes off me, and for several long seconds, I remained stock still, frozen in place.
Finally, I backed away from the three boys and walked toward the school entrance as fast as I could, my skin tingling as I braced myself for their touch.
This time, the
y didn’t stop me, but I wasn’t stupid.
I knew this wouldn’t be my last encounter with the Lost Boys.
Six
The rest of the day passed by in a daze. I didn’t have any more encounters like the ones with the Lost Boys or the redhead girl—whose named I’d learned was Serena—but it didn’t mean I wasn’t ogled, sneered at, or shoved whenever the opportunity hit.
Not even my locker was immune from the awful treatment. I went to gather my books after my final class let out, and my stomach dropped as I noticed a group of people gathered around it, laughing loudly. When they parted to let me through, I saw that someone had written the words “Rich Skank” in red letters across the chipped paint of the locker door.
I didn’t even bother to get a teacher, or to complain about it to anyone. Something told me tattling on my new classmates would end up being worse for me than just dealing with the tagging for the rest of the year.
It was a relief to finally slip into my car and pull out of the parking lot, blessedly alone for the first time all day. I wasn’t sure I’d ever experienced a longer eight hours in my life.
I needed to do some kind of damage control.
First—figure out what the hell everyone was talking about when they said my father had destroyed their neighborhoods by flipping their homes and their businesses. I hadn’t known anything about that, and I wasn’t even sure it was true.
Second—do something to blend in a little more. If I could make people realize that Dad wasn’t the person they thought he was, and maybe… look a little more like everyone else at my school, people might leave me alone. Or at the very least, maybe the redhead and the Lost Boys would stay off my back.
I didn’t even want to think about the implications of them owning the school and therefore owning me. I didn’t want to be owned by anyone, least of all by three boys who terrified and attracted me in equal measure—three boys who lived on my street and could literally watch my every move if they chose to.
No, thanks. Better to do what I could to become invisible at Slateview, to pass through my senior year like a ghost, than to attract the wrong kind of attention.
With fresh determination, I walked into the rental house, setting my bag on the kitchen table. The place was still and quiet.
“Mom?”
A muffled sound came from her room. I frowned and made my way back, opening the door a few inches and peering inside.
She was curled up on the bed, snuggled deep down under the blankets. The small television in her room was on, some reality TV show playing, but I didn’t think Mom was really paying attention. My stomach clenched, a new kind of tension filling me. All day at school, I’d been too busy dealing with the bullying and cruelty to think about what waited for me back at home.
I honestly wasn’t sure which was worse.
Slipping inside the bedroom, I walked over and sat beside her. She didn’t move or even turn her head to look at me.
“Hey… have you gotten out of bed today?” I asked awkwardly. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about this catatonia that my mother seemed to be in more often than not lately. She’d always been quiet, perfectly reserved and demure, but I’d never seen her retreat inside herself like this. As if she had lost a part of herself.
Well. I guess that’s probably what it feels like when your husband is taken from you and your entire life crumbles around you.
I saw her shrug beneath the blankets. She didn’t answer.
Okay. Guess we aren’t going to talk about that then. Besides, I was pretty sure I knew the answer. She might’ve gotten up to eat while I was at school, but I was guessing that was the only time she’d left this room.
“Did you have a good day?” I pressed, hating everything about this. I hated the fact that I didn’t know how to help her, and I hated the fact that she was so locked up inside herself, in her own grief, that she couldn’t help me.
“It was okay,” she murmured dully.
“Do you need to talk?”
“No.”
I sighed. Fair enough. We’d never really talked much before all of this happened anyway. I decided to move on with what I had come in here for in the first place.
“I wanted to ask you something,” I said, a little louder than my previous questions, so I would actually get her attention. “About Dad.”
That finally jolted her out of her daze a bit. She actually looked at me.
“A lot of kids at school were saying things today,” I continued. “Bad things, about Dad’s work.”
Mom averted her eyes, pulling the covers closer around her. “You know I didn’t bother your father about his work, Cora.”
“Yes, but maybe you knew some of the things that he was doing? People were saying awful things… that he was the reason a lot of them lost their homes, or their families lost their businesses—”
“I don’t know anything about your father’s work,” she repeated sharply. “Stop asking me. This is giving me a headache, Cordelia. Don’t you care? I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t know anything.”
I deflated. Ugh, I should’ve known better than to try to talk to her when she was like this. I just wanted to know the truth. I’d stood by my father after his arrest, and I was still waiting patiently for him to be proved innocent—for this all to be dismissed as a horrible mistake. But I didn’t like being kept in the dark.
Tugging my bottom lip between my teeth, I stared down at the lump under the covers that was my mother as silence stretched between us.
Thoughts and questions, doubts and fears, pressed at the edges of my mind. There were so many things I wanted to say, and I wished like hell I could say them to her. I wanted to tell her about my day at school and have her actually listen, maybe even give me advice.
But when had I ever talked to my mother about my bad days, or my good days, or my days at all?
Knowing that any more attempt at conversation would be talking to a wall, I left the TV playing and slipped out of the room, leaving my mom to her self-pitying stupor. I was on my own in this new world, and I needed to move on to phase two of my post-first-day damage control.
My clothes.
There was no way I’d be able to buy new clothes, even non-designer clothes, just to try to fit in with everyone else at Slateview. But I’d found a pair of scissors in the kitchen. If I could ruin the designer clothes in my closet enough, distress them and rip them up a little, then maybe I could at least make myself a little more incognito than I currently was.
I laid my jeans out on the bed alongside several expensive tops, then picked up the scissors. I hesitated just a moment, opening and closing the blades. Every piece of clothing before me was a reminder of a life I no longer had, a world I no longer lived in. One defined by excess, privilege, and wealth. In that life, I could’ve destroyed every item in my closet, and Dad would’ve replaced it all without batting an eye.
Now? This was all I had. The last of my father’s money had bought these clothes, and I was about to deface them.
For survival. It was worth it. There was no point in nice clothes if I was going to have to suffer for it.
I attacked the jeans first, ripping and tearing into the fabric. I added holes to a few pairs and cut others into shorts.
Each cut felt like carving out a piece of myself, separating the new me from the old me, and I tried not to think about how pathetic that might have seemed to someone else as I moved on to the tops. I continued like that, altering the way my clothing looked until I was satisfied that the previous designer shine was no longer there.
I may have been a van Rensselaer, but I didn’t have to look the part. I didn’t have to give the other students any more reasons to look at me like a target. To hate me for what I’d once had. To associate me with my father in any way.
Because the truth was, I wasn’t any better off than anyone else at that school now. I wasn’t just trying to make myself look like them. I was one of them.
God, I hope this w
orks. I can’t make it through an entire year of days like today.
After playing fashion designer, I put my clothes away. Since I was trying new things, I decided to attempt to make a decent dinner for Mom and me. Maybe a warm meal would make her feel a little better, although I doubted it.
I decided to go for one of the boxed meals. It had everything in there to make a dinner—some sort of quick bake. The directions were easy. Open the can of meat and sauce, put it in a pan, sprinkle the topping over it, bake it. It was a no-brainer, and I followed the instructions to the T as I sat down to do my homework.
But time must’ve gotten away from me. I finished my geometry assignment and was just beginning to draft a US history essay when I caught the scent of something burning.
“What the—”
Shit.
I stood quickly, darting frantically into the kitchen. It was smoky and hazy—why the hell wasn’t the fire alarm working? I searched around for a pair of potholders, but couldn’t find them, possibly because we didn’t own any. I dashed to my room, got my bath towel, and used that to pull dinner out of the oven.
It was a crispy, unappetizing mess. My eyes watered and burned from the smoke that rose up from the pan. Shame bubbled in my gut. If I couldn’t make something as simple as a boxed meal with directions, how was I supposed to make anything that was actually appetizing? Anything we could actually eat that wasn’t out of a bag, a frozen box, or take-out?
Dejected, I threw the mess into the trash and decided to settle for cereal for the night. I’d try again tomorrow; maybe I’d have more luck then.
I’d spent enough time on my homework that the sun was already going down. Grabbing the garbage bag and tying it off, I headed out to the curb, not wanting to wait until it was fully dark. This neighborhood still creeped me out at night.