by Rachel Hanna
Table of Contents
Title Page
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Wrecked
Book 1
By Rachel Hanna
Author’s Note
This is book 1 in the Wrecked series. There will be 5 books in this series, so if you don’t want to miss the release of book 2 in a couple of weeks, CLICK HERE to be added to the notification list!
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Chapter 1
I leaned back into my seat, unable to focus on the droning of the professor. I had been doing good in most of my classes, sitting in the very front and paying close attention, but English Lit has always been easy, especially when dealing with contemporary authors. So I indulged a little. I picked a seat in the very back, towards the door. It looked down over about thirty rows of students, a mixture of eager beavers and half asleep freshmen.
The only reason I wasn’t one of those half asleep freshmen was that I had opted out of taking this class last year. I knew it would be a breeze—and also possibly the only class to screw me if I wasn’t careful and stopped paying attention—so I thought I could put it off.
But Kass insisted and now here we were.
Well, here I was. Kass was almost twenty minutes late. Not entirely unusual for her. She was pretty good about being on time to the classes we shared, but I knew that was more about keeping me off her back than anything else. I was quick to remind my friends of the importance of both attendance and being on time.
She was pretty tired of the lecture by now.
Tracing my pen across the paper, I doodled little squigglies and stars, trying to pass the time until I was free. Well, not for the day, but we had about an hour before our next classes—I had Economics and she had Theory of Ethics. That hour served as our lunch period today and we were lucky enough that most of our friends shared the same free time.
Of course, if Kass never showed up…
Just as I was about to give up all hope for her even attending that day, the door squeaked open slowly, a little light streaming in, and a head of brassy waves poked in. Kass’ brown eyes glanced furtively left and then right, spotting me and darting in as though some kind of ninja.
Really, she hadn’t fooled anyone as far as sneaking in was concerned. People knew she had come to class late and were either choosing to ignore it or simply didn’t care.
When she plopped down into the chair beside me, I gave her a look. The bright grin on her face didn’t falter in the least. I folded my arms across my ample chest and narrowed my eyes, studying her closely. Her eyes were bloodshot and clearly tired. Though her make-up was perfect as always, she definitely didn’t look like her usual, sparkly self.
In fact, that smile was the only thing chipper about her…
Pulling out a notebook and a pen, she scribbled something quickly across the page and pushed it back to me.
What did I miss?
Letting out a sigh, I rolled my eyes. I wanted nothing more than to scold her and tell her that she had missed something incredibly important, but even I couldn’t come up with a reason, other than the principal of the thing, to be on time. Writing just below her own scrawl, I answered, Nothing. It’s English Lit. Where have you been and what have you been doing?
I passed the note back to her.
She read through it and her grin widened, which I didn’t think was possible. I was almost worried that her mouth was going to split her face in half, her expression was so happy. Excitedly, she scribbled a note that was long, detailed, and sloppy with enthusiasm. When she passed it back to me, I almost laughed out loud. The note was filled with hearts and smiley faces and looked like a middle schooler had written it.
James and I were up half the night studying for that French test today, even though I’d already studied all weekend and felt pretty solid about it. And at the end of the night when we were packing up all of our books he leaned over and kissed me and told me that he’d wanted to do that for a while! He’s going to call me today! OMG!
Eyebrows raising, I glanced over at Kass. She was beaming, and suddenly her entire appearance was explained. I smiled at her and gave her a thumbs up, then wrote a quick note back.
That’s great! It’s about time he made a move. You’ve only been mooning over him for like a year now.
She read it and gave my shoulder a playful nudge in response. James and Kass had been dancing around the possibility of being more than friends since the end of our first fall semester. I had about given up all hope for them, because both of them seemed too chicken to do anything, but it looked like James finally manned up.
I kept the smile on my face until Kass finally turned to the front of the class, watching the projector, that goofy grin still on her face.
When she was clearly focused on the projector, I let my smile drop.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want my friend and roommate to be happy. If anything, I thought it was great, because not only was she happy, but now I didn’t have to hear about her sigh and whine about James not noticing her “like a man notices a woman.”
I could go the rest of my life without hearing that phrase again.
But seeing Kass happy like this… well, it was hard. Since arriving at UMass, I hadn’t really found anyone like that. It was a conflict of interest on my part. On the one hand, I knew exactly who I wanted. But those were exactly the ones I couldn’t go after. Because on the other hand were the ones I needed.
I just hadn’t worked out how to make myself like them enough to try dating one of those acceptable boys.
Old habits die hard, I thought to myself.
Twenty minutes later, I had to nudge Kass awake. She came to with a start, looking around with wild eyes. “I’m awake!” she told me, insistent and maybe trying to convince herself more than me. Calming down a little and waking up more, she looked over to me. “What did I miss?”
I let out a sigh, rolling my eyes at her. “Class is over. It’s time to go.”
Kass groaned as she gathered up her notebooks and pens, shoving them into her bag. “I missed the whole thing.”
A small smile quirked at the edges of my mouth. “Not the whole thing,” I corrected. “Just about ninety-five percent of it.”
She groaned again. We got up and I lead the way to the door, following several other students out. “Not helping,” she told me.
I shrugged. “I’m not the one who told you to stay up all night making goo-goo eyes at some boy over a French test that you’ve been prepared for since last week.”
She shot me a withering glare. “I was going for creating a casual situation in which the two of us were alone so that he could decide whether or not I was a viable mating choice.”
Laughing, I shook my head at her. “Making it sound scientific doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.”
We walked together down towards the dining hall. Lots of other students, some from our class, were headed there, too, but we wouldn’t have to worry about running into the whole school at least. Classes were staggered enough that people didn’t all have the same lunch period. And a lot of students went off campus for food anyway.
Staring down at the plate of mushy snow peas and something that might have been crusty turnips, I was beginning to think that maybe they had the right idea.
Kass wasn’t paying attention to her plate. She was just scooping up random things from the buffet and plopping them down somewhe
re on her tray, too busy rambling on and on about how wonderful James was to really care about the food.
I let her talk as we paid for the food and moved towards the table we usually sat at. It was available today, so we would take full advantage of the table by the window, looking out onto the quad where orange leaves were beginning to fall.
I placed my tray down and folded my skirt beneath me as I sat.
“He’s just so amazing,” she finished in that dreamy voice, her eyes full of stars and hearts.
I rolled my eyes at her. “Amazing or not, your academics should always come first. You can’t let some boy ruin it just because he finally pulled his head out of the sand and realized you’ve been sitting right in front of him—literally—for almost a year.”
Pouting, Kass folded her arms across her chest and said, “We can’t all be so focused as you, Miss Academia. Some of us are busy trying to get the full college experience.”
I rolled my eyes at her. The full college experience, as Kass liked to call it, revolved around parties, booze, the annual panty run and finding the perfect guy.
It sounded a lot more like high school than college, in my opinion, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. Instead, I huffed and said, “You’re here to learn, not to dabble in the wading pool of boys who haven’t figured out how to be men yet.”
Kass just waved me off. We’d had this argument dozens of times since becoming roommates last year as freshmen. She had this whole glamorous movie idea of what college would be and was supposed to be, and it was very clearly different from mine.
I was working off of a roadmap drawn very carefully from a childhood dream and I wouldn’t alter that dream for anyone.
“James is a man,” Kass said defensively. She grabbed her fork defiantly and shoved it into what might have been some kind of gooey corn bread. She took a bite without even looking at the food, chewing for several moment before abruptly stopping and making a face.
I held back my laughter as best I could as she managed to choke down the bite.
“Gross!” she said, finally looking down at her tray. “This stuff is terrible.”
“The food isn’t terrible every day,” I defended. I let several of the sloppy peas slip off my fork. “Today just happens to be one of the days where it is, that’s all.”
Kass made a face, shoving the plate away from her. “Why do we eat here?”
A tall young woman with thick dark blonde hair, a fading summer’s tan, and dark blue eyes dropped down into the table next to us. Danny was dressed in her workout clothing which consisted of black booty shorts with UMass stamped across the bottom of one of the legs and a worn through, gray cut out t-shirt that had seen better days. She had a sports bra underneath and had thrown her sweatshirt over the back of her chair before sitting.
“We eat here because it is the traditional gathering place for UMass’s students in order to create a controlled, yet organic development of intersocial connections that will ultimately serve to facilitate the bonding necessary for the proper college experience.”
Kass and I stared at Danny for several long moments as she bit into her apple. She was unconcerned with our staring and added, “And if you would choose the healthier options,” she gestured to her apple, “instead of the cooked stuff, you wouldn’t hate the food so much.”
Gesturing with her hands towards our mutual friend, as though she were the prime evidence for any and all arguments she could possibly make, Kass said, “This is what we get when we have friends in the anthropology department.” Turning to Danny she added. “And here I was hoping that you would just be a dumb jock.”
Making a face at her, Danny filched a squishy pea off my plate and flicked it in Kass’s direction.
“Ew!” she squealed and the two spent the next few minutes bantering back and forth.
Danny glanced at her watch, frowning when she realized the time. She rose from her seat as she said, “I’m gotta go, ladies. Practice in ten.”
We waved her off as she half jogged out the dining hall towards the gym where the girls’ volleyball team would be practicing hard for the upcoming game. As she left, a group of girls giggling and gossiping entered through the same door.
“I can’t believe it!” one of them said, a petite bottle blonde with green eyes that looked like contacts. “He’s back!”
“No way!” another of them said. “Logan’s back? That’s not possible!”
A third added, “Yeah, he was suspended for fighting. They don’t just let people back in for that.”
Miss Bottle Blonde shrugged her skeletally thin shoulders and flipped her hair. “I heard they made an exception for extenuating circumstances…”
I didn’t get to hear what those circumstances were, because they walked into a crowd of rowdy boys who were throwing a ball around in the dining hall. Their voices became a cacophony of sounds, distorted further by squeaking shoes and clicking heels.
Kass’s voice demanded my attention by then anyway. “Can I copy your notes from class?” she asked, slowly trying to pick through the food on her plate for the best edible bits. “I really had expected more from a good University, you know?”
I just shrugged. “You can have my notes,” I answered, pulling out my notebook. “But they’re mostly doodles. I wasn’t kidding when I said that nothing happens in that class. I could sleep through it and get an A.”
Kass laughed. “Well, for those of us not quite so genius, fork them over!”
I gladly gave them to her. She flipped through a few pages, her expression becoming crestfallen. Finally, she slammed the book shut and looked up at me ruefully.
“Five pages, and only two of them even have notes on them!” she whined, clearly having hoped for more from me.
I waved off her complaint. “I told you. What’s there is important, but there’s not much else you can do for that class besides read the damn books.”
Sighing, Kass shook her head and reluctantly opened the notebook once more. She pulled out one of her own, too, and began to copy down my scant notes, searching through all the random doodles to find them. She muttered in annoyance when she found little bits and pieces that were off to the side or written in the corners, while the majority of the page was filled to the brim with curling designs.
I just shook my head. “Next time, just stay awake for class.”
Chapter 2
It was fifteen after six and I had just gotten out of my last class. I yawned. Ethics and Law was not one of my favorite classes. The combination of being my last class of the day and being incredibly boring was enough to make me exhausted every time I got out. It took all I had to make it through the class with diligent notes and a decent comprehension of what the homework would require of me.
I was waiting for Kass to get out of her art class—which was purely for fun and might as well have been basket weaving for all it was going to do for her degree. Glancing at my watch, I cursed Kass for being late.
Rolling up on the balls of my feet and back down again, I shoved both of my hands deeply into my coat pockets to get warm. Although I had been here for a year—even staying in the summer to take classes—I still hadn’t gotten used to the cold weather. It was a far cry from California, that was for sure. It hit so early and got steadily colder as the months wore on. We were only in late October and I was already dressing in one of my warmer coats.
Kass, however, came bounding up in little more than a chunky sweater and a cute hat that was more about appearances than any practical reasoning. She was a Massachusetts native and reveled in the cold.
Putting on my best annoyed expression, I demanded, “What took you so long? You’re usually here like ten minutes before I am!”
She had a grin on her face and her cheeks were rosy from something other than the cold. I groaned just as she answered, “I met up with James.”
That boy was already ruining my life and they had only just started the honeymoon phase of courtship.
“Is he going t
o become a pain in the butt for me?” I asked as we turned down the street towards Haverly. It was an off campus student housing project that was similar to a sorority house, minus the sorority. We had two of the rooms, one for each of us, and a bathroom to split between us, but the rest of the house was divided up to several different people. We hardly ever saw them, so it was almost like having our own place.
It was already dark outside, so we stuck to the sidewalk and dipped in and out of the yellow street lamps.
Kass shrugged, still grinning broadly. “I wouldn’t say a pain,” she hedged. “Just more of an addition to our group, that’s all.”
I rolled my eyes, snuggling closer into my jacket as the wind plucked at my dark hair. I hoped it wasn’t going to rain that night. The last thing I needed was to wake up early so that I had to straighten my hair again.
“I think our group’s just fine without an addition,” I muttered into my scarf.
Puffing out a breath that I could see as misty fog, Kass answered, “Oh, stop being such a spoiled sport. He’s great. And he’s all about the studying, just like you. You two get along fine. You like James, remember?”
“Sure,” I replied, softening a little. I was being a little hard on her, but I was reluctant to have our dynamic change. Kass and I had gotten close over the year and a half we’d known each other and I didn’t want to have to give her up to some goof-ball sophomore who took a year to work up the courage to make a move on her. Plus, I thought he was a little boring, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. “I just don’t want you guys to get so preoccupied with each other that you forget about all the important things. I worry about you, you know?”
Kass smiled at me, sentimentality definitely winning her over, and looped her arm through mine, snuggling close to offer me some warmth.
I was extremely grateful for it and wondered not for the first time how I was going to survive the Massachusetts winter.