The teacher, Madame Torture had me plieing until I could barely stagger out of class in my pale pink leotard. She pursed her blood red lips and called after me. “Miss Lane, be certain your hair is secured. Tomorrow you will be dancing with a partner, and I don’t want you to suffocate him.”
“Thanks, Madame.” I tried to curtsy and collapsed on the floor while Freshmen girls with their perfect little hair buns walked over me out the door. I laid there for a few breaths before I got it together and went out to the locker room to change back into my school uniform. I would need a more secure lock. It was amazing that no one had stuck my clothes in a shredder while I’d been in torture.
My next class was language, which turned out as a kind of foreign language class where we were immersed in a variety of languages and had to be conversant in all of them. The only language I spoke fluently was mean girl, which was a little bit like Canadian English, but not enough to get by.
There were different language sessions and the instructor, a serious woman in serious glasses and serious blazers to offset how young and pretty she was, walked through the groups and corrected accents and added to the conversations.
I stood under the Chinese sign and smiled stupidly at the brown-haired guy across from me who stared back, twisting his hands awkwardly. Was he nervous? Most guys in the class were ridiculously self-assured. I edged closer to him.
“I don’t even know basic greetings in Chinese, much less the necessary accusations.”
He gave me a half smile. “Aligato.” He bowed politely then straightened.
I copied him, bowing and greeting him like a genuine American who has no idea why she needs to learn another country’s language when English is already too hard for us.
After that I milled around until I found myself beneath the Spanish flag. I didn’t realize it was the Spanish flag until I heard someone mention it.
It was the guy from earlier, the very polite guy from Chinese.
I moved closer to him. “Buenos Dias. Me nobre es Penny Lane. E tu?”
“Buenos Dias. Me nobre esta Barry.”
I tried to smile demurely, but this was Spanish. “El gato esta gordo.” The cat is fat.
He cocked his head. “El gato estas muy gordo.” The cat is very fat.
I hesitated for a moment, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. “Señor.” I stepped forward and put my hand on his chest. I could feel his heart pound beneath my fingers and he smelled like pumpkin soup. Spanish was one real language I’d mastered. With the perfect quiver in my voice, I spoke from my Spanish heart. “¿Cómo pudiste dormer con mi hermana? ¿No sabe que estoy embarazada de tu hijo?” How could you sleep with my sister? Don’t you know that I’m pregnant with your child?
He got the most fascinating expression on his face before he stammered, “No sé de qué estas hablando.” I don’t know what you’re talking about.
I put the back of my hand on my forehead in a glorious sweeping movement. “Pero no, no lo harías porque tienes amnesia. Pensé que estabas muerto pero ahora deseo que lo estuviera yo!” But no, you have amnesia. I thought you were dead but now I wish I were!
I gripped his jacket and yanked him closer.
“Ahem. Miss Lane, excellent use of accent, but I think your conversation is a little more intimate than will be required for everyday use.”
I exhaled heavily as I let go of his jacket then turned to her and rallied my smile.
“Sorry, Madame…”
“It’s Miz.”
My smile was brittle and I fought not to roll my eyes, holding them wide. “Sorry Miz.
You mean more like, Donde esta el baño?”
She hmphed and walked off on her little heels, click clack, click clack.
Someone elbowed me and I glanced over. Zach was grinning at me. “Señorita Phillip needs to take a break to get the stick out of her…”
He was in my class? Oh. How had I not seen him? He’d definitely caught my scene with Barry. If he didn’t like tea parties, what were the odds he liked impromptu outbreaks of telenovelas? At the same time, he was talking to me and being funny.
I smiled brightly “Well, hopefully she finds it soon. I didn’t know you were in this class.”
He shrugged. “Where did you learn Spanish?”
I hesitated before I admitted the scandalous truth. “Our cook used to watch telenovelas all day. It stuck with me.”
“Spanish soap operas? That explains the amnesia.” A slow smile spread over his lips and I noticed them for the first time. I’d seen his lips, but hadn’t noticed that they looked soft and kind of pink before.
I stepped away from him even as I snickered. For the rest of the class I tried to not look like an idiot in French, German, Italian, or Japanese.
I was exhausted from listening with a polite smile on my mouth by the time class was over. Zach fell in beside me. “What’s your next class?”
I gave him a super sweet and delighted smile, not a smile that was about to crash and burn. “Math. What about you?”
“Dressage.”
I blinked at him. “How to get dressed or how to make dressers? That explains why everyone dresses so well.”
He smiled again, a slight smirk. “Horse riding. Everyone has dressage. It’s like ballet and fencing.”
I checked my schedule. There after lunch was dressage, like he’d said. I thought it was a typo. I did not have fencing. A knot tangled in my stomach. If it was anything like riding in cars… “I see. I’ve never ridden a horse.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Never?”
I shook my head and offered him a queasy smile. “How hard could it be?”
“What did you study in your homeschool?”
I thought about it for a long time before I admitted the shocking truth. “I learned how to make lollipops. I’m really good at most kinds of candy, anything you can do with a Bunsen burner, but no ovens. I learned how to speak Tolkien’s elven pretty fluently. I noticed that there is a shocking emphasis on human languages instead of mythical ones at this school which I find speciesist.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Wait, you made those tiramisu things? Viney loved them.
She was searching all over the internet for more.”
I smiled slightly and shrugged. How nice to talk about his not girlfriend. “I can give her more any time she wants some.”
He quirked an eyebrow, giving me a slightly mischievous smile. “She’ll be worried you poisoned it or something.”
I smiled widely. “You shouldn’t give me ideas. I think this is my math class. Have fun in dressage.”
I ducked into my class which was boring but at least I didn’t have to talk to anyone and smile idiotically. After that was lunch, and everyone was kind of focused on their assignments already, so much so that hardly anyone bothered me where I sat at the long table, enjoying every bite of the delectable clam chowder. Then it was out to the stables. Once more I was with the freshmen, and how awesome was that? Not very because the second I was on the back of this nice looking gray mare she started bucking and heaving like she was about to throw up.
I went up and came down in a pile of straw, but hit the hard flagstones with my knee.
The instructor was furious, but still kept his voice low as he soothed the horse, searching her until he found these miserable looking hooked balls under the saddle.
“Who did this?” He held up the nasty little things that must have dug into the poor animal as soon as it took my weight.
I was still on my back trying to breathe as a girl got shoved forward out of the group.
She swallowed hard and got pale while the instructor glowered, crossing his arms over his very fine physique.
“It was a joke. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that it would hurt Henrietta.”
Henrietta was apparently the horse, and it was much more humane to hurt people than animals. I stood up, brushing off straw. “I’m fine.” Like anyone cared. “Can we try this again?”
The instruct
or looked surprised before he nodded and held Henrietta still while I tried to mount. My heart pounded and my hands shook as I listened to all his instructions and poor Henrietta skittered across the stones with her head jerking, eyes rolling in spite of the instructor. It wasn’t as bad as cars, but my heart wasn’t pounding less when I finally slid off the horse and fell down when my legs wouldn’t hold me up.
The Freshmen tittered and the instructor sent me to my room to get cleaned up and changed because I’d sat down right in a lovely pile of manure.
The fragrant aroma filled the air as I walked to my room. What a lovely experience.
To imagine I’d put it off for three years. I changed back into my school uniform and made it to my next class with hardly any time to spare. Business management. When I walked in, I saw Drake immediately, like my eyes were pulled towards him where he sat at a desk typing on a laptop like he knew what he was doing. Not that I didn’t know how
to write on a laptop, but he just gave off that odious odor of competence and condescension.
I slid in to the seat furthest from him and pulled out my own laptop. The teacher slammed my lid closed as he walked briskly up to the board in his navy jacket and wrote in scrawling letters something I couldn’t decipher.
“Welcome to the world of business. You may think that you understand the basics of shares and funds, but…”
My face was frozen part smiling, part snarling while I tried not to kill him. The professor. Also Drake. Either one would work. Apparently, it was fine for Drake to have his laptop open, but not me. I had a business. I understood a lot about advertising, tax breaks, and even bookkeeping. I was not some dim-witted-gumball-for-brains student.
The first class that I thought had the possibility of being remotely relevant to my actual life, and the teacher was a complete…
I took a deep shaky breath and focused on smiling, breathing, not anything else. I didn’t even notice that Drake didn’t glance up for the rest of the class, his fingers moving as he shifted from one document to another, checking various graphs until the instructor dismissed us.
Drake had his laptop closed and in his briefcase before I could blink and then he was standing beside his desk, looking at me as if he’d just seen me. His expression was so
interesting. It went from something cold with icy fury barely held in check to an indifferent expression with a vague smile resting on his lips as he walked over. I slid my computer in my bag and felt like a weakling with my trembling everything next to him and his raw strength. He wouldn’t be bucked off a horse, a horse would be bucked off of him. Loser.
“How is your hand?”
I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about until I followed his gaze down to my bandage. “It’s fine. Thanks for asking.” I sounded too angry. I cocked my head and batted my eyelashes to make up for it.
His eyebrow twitched like he knew what I was doing, which he couldn’t possibly have known since I had no clue. “Since I’m responsible for it, do you need me to take you to the doctor? I’ll drive you after polo practice.”
I shook my head and edged away from him at the very idea of getting into a car with this beautiful monster. “It’s fine. It’s not the first time Señor Mort got a little too frisky.”
He raised his eyebrow high for a moment before it lowered as if on its own. Revere’s eyebrows did the same kind of thing, like a caterpillar crawling around on his face. If only Drake’s dark red eyebrows weren’t the sexiest caterpillars in the world. “If it’s bothering you tomorrow, we’ll have the doctor look at it while we’re at the hospital.”
“What?” I stared at him while he stared back. What hospital? Oh, no. He thought I was serious about doing community service. With him. “Um, the community service.
Right.” I smiled at him feeling like my mouth was numb from hanging onto that manic smile for the entire day. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think that classes would be so challenging. I already have more homework and reading than I have time to finish after only one day, so…”
He inclined his head slightly while his lips curled, amused by my stupid little brain that couldn’t keep up with all the other students. “Do you find yourself unequal to the task? Do you think that these other privileged and elite students are more capable than you are?” His voice mocked me along with his eyes.
I wanted to stuff his eyeballs down his throat and see how he sounded then, but instead I clenched my teeth as I laughed. “That must be it. Of course, community service is important but I probably shouldn’t flunk out of classes in the first week. Maybe next time.”
He shrugged as he walked with me to the door. “I’ll help you with business on the drive down and back. It’s more of an applied business class for me although sometimes professor Marsh helps me understand an obscure point of business law.”
Because he was so super smart and above me in every way, so I definitely couldn’t handle thinking tricky thoughts about profit margin and stocks. When he asked me what
my next subject was, I held up my schedule silently. I couldn’t open my mouth without screaming at him, or biting him. He still smelled ridiculously good and I was getting hungry. Very hungry. He walked with me to my class, smirked then disappeared around the corner. I stood in the doorway, trying to breathe and not scream while I checked the class number and found that it indeed was the right one. History.
The teacher didn’t waste any time, and honestly when someone dances around in an Elizabethan costume, it’s hard not to pay attention. The tension knotted in my shoulders loosened as I settled into my seat. Even Viney’s constant glare didn’t disturb the pleasure I got out of Professor Vale’s performance. On my way out of class, I heard some girls muttering about how the teacher, Professor Vale, had the nerve to have worked at some other school I’d never heard of, Blackheart or something. Ooo. School rivalry.
On my way out, a brunette with thick glasses and a wrinkled blouse focused on me like a hungry cougar. “Hi. You’re Penny. You seem to enjoy getting involved. Would you like to pass out some fliers for the Student Government club?”
I blinked at her. I’d rather light my hair on fire. “Sure. That sounds so fun!” I must be a masochist. That would explain so much about my life.
She dug into her backpack and gave them to me with an, “if you can get them handed out by Wednesday that would be great!”
Wouldn’t it? Finally, I was able to stumble across campus to my dorm, plug in the code on my alarm with my hand print and DNA check before I collapsed on my bed to the scent of drying manure.
I stared at the ceiling with the glorious forest scene, deer leaping over a stream while some figures in the shadows were maybe embracing, maybe strangling one another.
“I must have done something terrible in a past life. Señor Mort, my face hurts from smiling so much, and my knee is going to be bruised. I need to make something for it, but I can’t move.”
I closed my eyes and had almost drifted off when someone knocked on my door. I groaned and made the ugliest face I possibly could before I rolled off the bed and smoothed down my now wrinkled uniform.
“Hold on.”
I opened the door and Zach stood there awkwardly. I beamed at him even though I wanted to slam the door in his face.
“Hi. Viney and I were going to go over to polo practice and thought you might like to come.”
I blinked at him. Wow, an invitation from the boy I was going to marry, and I wanted to say no in a very loud voice along with some pretty boring expletives.
“That sounds so fun! I think I have a lot of homework though.”
He shrugged and gave me a slight smile, kind of bashful as he looked up at me beneath his dark lashes. “I can help you with linguistics if you’d like. We can work on things while watching the players.”
“Ooo, we could heckle in Chinese!”
He smiled broadly while his blue eyes twinkled. “I’m not sure how helpful that kind of lesson would be.”
I sigh
ed. “Apparently, I don’t quite understand the purpose of conversational anything. All right, I’ll go.”
“Aren’t you going to change first?”
“Change?” I looked down at my school uniform then noticed what Zach was wearing, which was a t-shirt and jeans. “Oh. Yeah. Give me a minute to put on something recreational.”
After I closed the door, I pulled on a short floral skirt and a pink blouse with a scalloped peter pan collar then touched up my makeup and put on a spritz of some fabulous scent. I opened the door and smiled out at Zach and Viney, anticipation of some kind on her face. I should have worn my armored helmet. Oh darn, left that at home.
“Your knee looks really bad. What happened?” Viney’s voice was only slightly sympathetic. She could have tried a little bit harder.
“I got thrown in dressage.” I sighed and smiled at Zach ruefully. “Apparently riding horses is slightly trickier than it looks.”
Viney sneered. “I heard that someone put cockles under Henrietta’s saddle.”
Zach looked suddenly concerned as he put a hand on my shoulder. “Is she okay?”
The horse. My smile tightened and I took that moment to unwrap a lollipop. “She seemed fine. Do you know her?”
He nodded soberly. “She’s got an excellent temperament for a creature that has to deal with the brats at Rosewood.”
I nodded like that made sense, which it did, but I was kind of limping and I really didn’t know how I was supposed to handle an entire year of torture. The bullying was annoying enough, but the whole thing where I had to go to classes and smile leaving me with no time to do what was important, namely make potions for my shop, was so frustrating. Also, this guy that I was going to marry was nice enough, but he didn’t seem to notice me at all. Maybe I should have stuck with the rodent skulls and found someone a little less nice than Zachary Stoneburrow. No. I could do nice. I could be a sweet little thing that needed a man like Zach.
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