“Tru!” I gasp, tossing my tablet aside so I can rush to his rescue.
He starts laughing before I can even push to my feet. “Gotcha!”
As he stands up straight—and sure-footed—my tablet slides quickly down the sloped roof. I scramble for it, but it darts out of my reach. I watch, helpless, as it picks up speed.
Tru bends down and snatches it right before it sails over the edge.
My heart is pounding, and I don’t know if I want to kill Tru or kiss him.
His mouth kicks into a cocky smile.
I hold out my hand as he treads back up the roof. He holds out my tablet, but as I reach for it, he pulls it out of my grasp.
Kill him. Definitely kill him.
“Tru…” I say, hoping my voice sounds like the deadly warning that it is.
He holds the tablet out to the side.
“I think,” he says, “that my daring rescue deserves a reward.”
I choke out a stunned laugh. “A daring rescue that you caused.”
“Hmmm.” He waggles my tablet menacingly.
“Okay, okay,” I relent. “What reward?”
Honest to God, if he asks for a kiss I’m pushing him off the roof. I don’t care if Mom has a conniption or I go to jail for life. It will have been worth it.
“All I ask for”—he steps closer—“is a smile.”
“A smile?” I echo. “You’ve got to be—”
He lifts his brows.
“Fine,” I say, forcing the corners of my mouth up into an imitation of a smile. I point at my face. “See, I’m smiling.”
He immediately hands over my tablet. “Nice to meet you, Sloane Whitaker.”
Then he turns, jogs back down the roof, and jumps off. I gasp and scramble as close to the edge as I can without following him over. I watch in horror as he walks up to the back door and knocks.
“What are you doing?” I hiss.
A second later, Mom opens the door. “Hello, Tru.”
Her voice is taut, and I can just picture the disapproving look on her face. One that would be multiplied by a thousand if she knew he’d just been up here on the roof with me.
“Hi, Mrs. Whitaker,” he says to her, “my mom wanted me to ask you and Sloane over for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Oh, okay,” she says, sounding stunned at the very polite invitation. “What time?”
“Seven.”
“Sounds great. We’ll be there.”
He smiles and nods, then turns to walk away. I hear the door shut as I follow his every step. I’m not sure if I should be impressed or enraged.
As he reaches the fence, he turns to look up at me.
“Welcome to Texas,” he says, before vaulting back over into his yard.
Enraged. Definitely enraged.
Tru landed on the grass in his backyard with a satisfying crunch.
When his mom asked him to go next door and invite the Whitakers to dinner, he had totally planned to ring the doorbell. But then he thought, Why go to the front door when you can climb over the fence?
Knowing his father would hate the idea made it all the more appealing.
He was glad he’d had that brilliant idea. When he looked up and saw the girl sitting on the roof, all alone with the light from the window behind her casting an atmospheric glow around her, the pull had been instantaneous. She looked as alone as he felt.
And she hadn’t disappointed.
As he slipped quietly across the yard, he smiled at the memory of their feisty exchange. She was a prickly one. Small but feisty. He liked that in a girl. Liked that she said what she meant and stood up for herself.
There was a fire in her, one she was trying desperately to keep under control. He hadn’t missed the way her green eyes flashed beneath arched brows a shade darker than her chestnut hair, even when she was trying to pull off the don’t-give-a-shit attitude.
It made teasing her more fun, more of a challenge. He would have to work harder to earn a true smile from her, but when he did, it would be worth all the effort.
There weren’t enough people like Sloane Whitaker in the world.
When he reached the back porch, his footsteps automatically softened. He padded across the perfectly stained and sealed boards, carefully avoiding the one halfway across that creaked like a dying goat.
At the door, he squeezed the handle and turned it slowly, careful not to let metal scrape against metal. Once it was open, he slipped inside and closed it again just as quietly.
His body went on autopilot, treading softly past the kitchen toward the stairs.
His foot had just touched the first step when he heard his father’s angry voice.
“He should be in military school.”
Tru couldn’t hear his mother’s response.
Then his father barked, “Oh no, you couldn’t subject your sweet, artistic son to a system of rigorous discipline. Arlington Military Academy is exactly what he needs.”
Tru didn’t need to hear the rest of the conversation. If they could even call it a conversation. His father barked, his mother simpered.
It was a miracle she had saved Tru from being shipped off to military school for this long.
No, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t his mother’s intervention that kept him at home. Despite all the threats, his father didn’t want him out of reach. If he was away at AMA, who would his father berate to feel better about himself? Who would he beat to feel more powerful?
No, his mother might protest the exile, and his father might blame her for preventing it, but Tru knew that military school was an empty threat. Otherwise he would have been sent away years ago.
Tru continued up the stairs, slipping quietly into his room and closing the door behind him. Safe in his personal cave, he dropped into his desk chair and woke up his computer. He had been in the middle of color correcting a scene from the short film he’d worked on over the summer when his mom had asked him to go next door.
He had just gotten back into the file when there was a soft rap on his door. He didn’t answer, knowing she would enter anyway.
Less than a second later, the door cracked open.
“Truman?” his mother’s soft voice asked.
He rolled his shoulders. “Yeah.”
She took his response as an invitation and opened the door the rest of the way. “I didn’t hear you come back.”
“Yeah, well, you were in the middle of a conversation.”
The silence was all too predictable.
They didn’t talk about it, never talked about it. As if by some unspoken agreement they had decided not to.
Tru didn’t remember ever agreeing to that.
“Are they coming to dinner?” she asked.
He added a filter to the scene, making the blues brighter and softening the reds and yellows. It instantly made the entire image more vivid. He played the preview, just to make sure it worked throughout the scene.
“Truman?” She fidgeted in the doorway. “Tru?”
“Yes,” he said absently. “They’ll be here.”
To witness the freak show firsthand.
He had to keep that in mind. No matter how much Sloane intrigued him, no matter how much he wanted to draw her out, draw her in, he had to keep her at a safe distance. Seeing the freak show was one thing. Getting caught in it was a whole different mess.
When his mother didn’t leave after getting her answer, Tru’s gut knotted. The longer she waited, the tenser he became. Shoulders stiff, neck tight, breathing shallow.
The longer she took to tell him, the worse it was going to be.
The panic shamed him the most. He knew what was coming. He always survived it. And still, he couldn’t control the fear.
That was, he often thought, his father’s greatest power.
Finally, after waiting long enough that Tru started to worry he might actually throw up, she said, “Your father wants to see you.”
Chapter Two
I choose my first-day-in-hell outfit
carefully. Black skinny jeans, a black I <3 NY tank, black combat boots, and a black knit beanie. I accessorize with a stack of black and silver bracelets on my left wrist and silver spikes dangling from my ears. And I pull everything together with a thick ring of black eyeliner and extra coats of mascara.
If I have to spend any part of my senior year stuck in Nowheresville, I want anyone who sees me to know I’m doing it under protest.
When I walk downstairs, Mom is waiting.
She glances up from her phone, takes one look at my mourning blacks, and asks, “You’re not wearing that?”
I say asks because I choose to interpret it as a question. I’m pretty sure she meant it as a statement. Or maybe an order.
Considering I’m about to start my senior year half a country away from my friends and my home, she can cut me some slack on the “appropriate dress” debate.
“Yes,” I say, daring her to make this an issue.
She looks like she wants to argue, and part of me hopes she does. I feel like I have this huge supply of tension bubbling just under the surface. It would feel really good to release it in a huge fight with Mom. Unless she wants to physically drag me upstairs and force me into more colorful clothes, I’m sticking to my mourning blacks.
She relents, shakes her head, and returns her attention to her phone.
My entire body relaxes. Sure, the fight would have eased my tension. For a minute, anyway. Then it would have only made things worse.
Mom and I never used to fight. As far as moms and teenage daughters went, I thought we were doing pretty great. I could talk to her about almost anything. But then The Incident happened, and all that changed. What few conversations we’ve had since have been arguments.
Without a word, she turns and walks out the front door, expecting me to follow. I do—begrudgingly—wishing I could think of anything that might stop this freight train that is senior year in Austin from plowing right over me. But if I haven’t been able to come up with an alternative in the two weeks since she and Dad sprung this plan on me, I’m probably not going to think of one in the twenty-seven steps it takes me to get from our front door to the passenger side of the car.
I resign myself to my fate. For now.
Mom and I have had our awkward silences in recent months, but the one on the way to Austin NextGen is epic. Her lips form a thin white line, her shoulders rigid and hands gripping the wheel like it’s a life preserver.
For the first time, I really wish I had my driver’s license. Anything to avoid this unending awkwardness.
I open the map app on my phone and pull up directions to the school. The distance from the blue dot to the red pin is fifteen miles. Great.
To pass the time, I turn to stare out the window.
It’s weird to be going to school in a car. I’ve been taking public transport since the second grade. Buses in elementary school and junior high. Subways since I started at SODA. And now…car. This is definitely a step down.
I have always loved studying the crush of people on the morning commute. Too-cool-for-eye-contact businessmen reading the Wall Street Journal. Secretaries and personal assistants wearing utilitarian sneakers, their impractical pumps stowed in handbags the size of a hot dog cart. Janitors and cleaning ladies on their way home from the overnight shift. Public school kids joking and shouting way louder than the adults can stand.
This is like traveling in a bubble.
We go down a couple of suburban streets and then, when we’re out of our neighborhood, merge onto a major-looking freeway.
The traffic is insane. What should geographically be a twenty minute drive has taken forty-eight already, and we’re still two miles from our exit.
If the cars were people, this is what rush hour on the subway feels like. But there’s no sense of human connection, no interaction. Everyone isolated in their own little bubble, singing along with the radio or talking on their phones. Way too many are trying to text and drive, nearly running other cars off the road as they swerve by.
It’s so…empty.
Yay Austin.
Mom’s knuckles tighten on the steering wheel even more as a jerk in a Beemer nearly takes off the front of our car in his rush to get to the fast lane. I know she drives when we travel and when she goes away on business trips, but she’s lived in New York for more than two decades. What if she can’t handle this kind of driving anymore?
She darts to the right, taking advantage of the opening the Beemer left, then dives onto the off-ramp. Maybe driving in madness like this isn’t something you forget how to do.
After we take a right at the light, the traffic eases up and Mom relaxes. I check the progress on my phone. We’re only a few blocks away from the school.
I let my head fall against the window of our new car. We’ve only been here three days and already we have a house full of unfamiliar furniture, a kitchen full of pricey dishes and silverware, and a shiny new Toyota in the garage. At least the car is only a lease. I would have been fine sleeping on an air mattress and eating takeout, but Mom says it’s more economical this way.
I think she just wanted a shopping spree.
The flashing blue dot on my map moves closer and closer to the red pin. Closer to my nightmare. T-minus three minutes. Two minutes. One minute.
We turn a corner, and we have arrived at our destination.
I don’t know what I expected the school to look like, but this image would never have entered my mind. All shiny glass and angular steel. Geometric shapes and colorful panels in primary colors. Like a Mondrian painting. All modern, new, and contemporary.
How is anyone supposed to feel creative in such a clean, soulless building?
When Mom pulls into the visitor parking by the front entrance, I reach for the handle, ready to jump out while the car is still rolling to a stop. But the door is locked and before I can find the unlock button, Mom has the car in park and places a hand on my shoulder to stop me.
“Sloane.” She closes her eyes, like she’s composing herself. “Honey, I know this isn’t how you planned to spend your senior year.”
Really? I want to shout, This is as far from how I should be spending my senior year as I am from home right now!
I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of starting a shouting match, so I bite my lower lip to keep from screaming.
“But after the stunt you pulled, your father and I agreed that you needed some time away from New York,” she said, as if deciding my entire future had been no big deal.
There were fights. All summer there were fights. Huge, endless arguments between him and Mom, them and me, even, at one point, between Dylan and me. But of anyone in this family, my brother is the least to blame.
The fights had been pointless. At least from my side, anyway. No one listened to anything I had to say. I made one bad decision, and suddenly my opinion didn’t matter anymore. They figured it out for themselves and then presented me with the result. And a one-way ticket to Austin.
I cross my arms over my chest.
“Look at it this way,” she continues. “You always say that art is inspired by experience. Think of this as a whole new experience for you to draw from. Your art will benefit.”
“My art,” I say, carefully keeping my tone even, “is inspired by the city.”
She smiles. “Maybe you will find new inspiration here.”
As if. As. If.
“I know this is hard for you.” She starts to reach for me but drops her hand back into her lap. “But I want you to give it a real shot. Go in with an open mind. Just…try.”
“Why?”
“Why?” she parrots.
I turn to face her. “What’s in it for me? I go in with an open mind, give it a shot… And what do I get? To go home? To get back to my friends and the school I love?”
I’ll tell you what: zilch. My prize will be to continue my punishment indefinitely.
The parents, on the other hand, can pat themselves on the back for making the right dec
ision, Dad gets me out of his hair for a while, and Mom is able to spend quality time reliving the college days with Mrs. Dorsey. They’re the winners. But what about the kids? Dylan has to spend an entire year without his big sister to back him up, and I have to stay spread out on the rock with an eagle pecking away at my liver every single day. Awesome for them, not so great for us. No thank you.
Mom stares at her hands.
I reach for my backpack and the door handle.
“Okay,” she says, “we’ll make a deal.”
Great. A deal. That’s what she’s best at. Litigation attorneys are paid big bucks to negotiate huge deals for their clients. Settlements, accidents, wrongful death… She’s one of the best in the world at getting big payouts for whomever is covering her fee.
Too bad in this case I’m her opposing counsel.
“If you give Austin NextGen a real chance,” she offers. “A real chance. Make it through the first quarter with decent grades and no trouble with your teachers or the administration, and we can revisit the idea of you going back to New York to finish out your school year.”
I don’t blink, don’t breathe, don’t dare do anything that might make her take it back. This is it. This is exactly what I want. Exactly what I have been fighting for ever since I learned about The Plan.
It takes me a second to get my racing hope under control.
“Do you mean it?” I ask.
Mom is an attorney and a litigator. Twisting the truth is practically a job requirement.
She nods. “Of course.”
I look up at her, knowing that I’ll be able to tell if she’s lying. “Promise?”
She hesitates only the merest fraction of a second before saying, “Promise.”
I hold her gaze for a beat longer, daring her to look away and expose a lie. My heart thundering, my lungs fighting the control I’m forcing over my breathing. My entire body is dying to celebrate, but I don’t want to show any weakness.
Mom’s olive green eyes meet mine without flinching.
Finally, she asks, “Do we have a deal?”
“We have a deal.” Oh God yes, we have a deal.
Ten Things Sloane Hates About Tru (Creative HeArts) Page 2