“It was meant to,” I said. I knew I’d overreacted, I just didn’t know why. But it was too late to go back now. Xander Keen didn’t do apologies.
“I thought you had her whipped,” Kent said. “Not the other way around.”
“Xander’s in lo-ove,” Chelsea mocked.
“Are you jealous?” I said, snagging her cigarette. “I’ll give you a ride later, for old time’s sake.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Doug said, putting an arm around her.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s ditch this sad pile of bricks before they make us actually go to class.”
I couldn’t shake the picture of Gwen’s sweet little dismayed face in my mind, though. I almost wanted to go to class just to walk by her classroom and make sure she’d gotten there okay. That was definitely not a Xander move.
Chapter Nineteen
Gwen
So Xander was a pig. No surprise there. If the fading bruise on his cheek and the fact that he was home the day we’d arrived while everyone else was at school hadn’t convinced me that he was trouble, that was my mistake. Just because he’d gotten a thrill out of going fast on his bike, that didn’t mean we were cool.
As I approached the building, students stepped back to let me enter, but to my relief, I didn’t get any nasty comments. Just curious looks as the other students measured up the new girl. I realized too late that I was still wearing Xander’s backpack, but I didn’t want to turn around and bring it to him. If he couldn’t be bothered to get it, I’d just have to walk in with it. I did my best to smile mysteriously, though I wasn’t sure what that looked like, so I probably looked like I had a toothache. No one knew me, so I’d just have to hope I was a mystery to them.
Why was the new girl starting in the middle of October?
I could make up a cool backstory, since crazy mother wasn’t very high up the list of mysterious pasts. Maybe I’d gotten kicked out of my last school for having an affair with a teacher. But if that was the case, I’d probably need to hang out with Xander’s crowd, so I moved on to other possibilities.
Genius who had a mental breakdown?
Too close to a sensitive topic.
Girl in the witness protection program?
Too close to the truth.
Girl whose parents won the lottery and bought a house on the Cape?
Also close to the truth, which wasn’t bad in this case, but too easily disproven.
The next thing I knew, I was stepping through the doors into the school. I’d made it. A smile formed on my lips as relief flooded through me. Automatically, I turned to my left, something pulling me like gravity toward…the men’s restroom?
Okay, this is a little weird.
I stopped outside the door just as it swung open and Eliot stepped out. “Gwen,” he said, looking surprised but pleased. “You made it. Awesome. Let me help you get your schedule. I’ll walk you to your classes before first period so you know where they all are.”
I almost threw my arms around him with gratitude. “Thanks,” I said instead, hooking my fingers through the straps of Xander’s backpack and trying to play it cool. I’d made the mistake of showing my feelings to Xander, and it had backfired, so I wasn’t going to do that again. At least not yet.
“Where’s Xander?” Eliot asked, resting his fingers lightly on my back and guiding me down the hall toward the entrance.
“In the parking lot,” I said with a shrug. “He says he’s too smart for school.”
“Sounds like Xander,” Eliot said with a shake of his head.
Just then a cute stranger intercepted our path. He was medium height and build, with a fringe of blonde hair falling across one eye. “Whassup, playa?” he asked, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners as he held up a hand to high-five Eliot. And then, as if performing some sort of ritual, he stuck out the longest, pointiest tongue I’d ever seen in my life, unfurling it like a flag. I recoiled from the obscenity of the thing.
Eliot shot me a slightly embarrassed look, then reluctantly held up a hand and let the guy slap it. “Hey, Joaquin.”
“And what do we have here?” Joaquin said, fixing his sloppy grin on me. He pulled back and made a big show of examining me from my feet to my face. Then he leaned in until his nose grazed my shoulder and made a slinky movement, drawing his nose up my neck to my ear.
I leaned away, laughing uneasily. “Did you just smell me?”
“Yeah, baby,” he said, sniffing loudly. “And you smell like…fresh meat.”
“Come on, man, step off,” Eliot said, putting a palm on Joaquin’s chest and pushing him away. He maneuvered himself between me and Joaquin, but Joaquin just bounded around him, bouncing on his toes.
“I’ll see you later, you delicious dish,” he said to me, pointing both index fingers at me and clicking his tongue.
“Wow,” I said when he’d bounded off down the hall, calling to someone else he knew. “Just…wow.”
“Yeah, you really don’t want to get mixed up with guys like that,” Eliot said, opening the door to the office.
“There are more guys like that?” I asked, glancing back over my shoulder.
Inside the office, we got my schedule without a problem, though my head was spinning after listening to my list of classes. I didn’t know how I’d keep them all straight and remember where they were all located. But Eliot didn’t seem concerned. He held the door open for me, and I ducked out under his arm, resisting the urge to curl up against him and let him take care of me.
You wanted to be here, I reminded myself.
The hallway was teaming with students when we stepped out of the office. A loud, shrill buzzing went off above us. My first school bell!
We could barely move in the crowd of students, most of whom were pushing to go the same way we were, away from the office. One person was trying to go toward the office, being jostled by the crowd. My tension melted when I saw his familiar face.
“It’s like swimming upstream,” Zeke said, finally reaching us. “How you doing, Gwen? Eliot treating you okay?”
“It’s not me you should be worried about,” Eliot said, putting a protective arm around my shoulders. I leaned into him, thankful for the support.
“You’re the one I’m most worried about, bro,” Zeke said, taking his place on my other side and slipping an arm around my waist. “Come on, let’s get you to class before the giants show up.”
“Who?”
He gave me a blank look and then laughed. “I meant the douchebags,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know why I said giants. I must have been thinking about football.”
I nodded, pretending that made sense. I was too distracted by the day ahead to worry about football teams, or the fact that my mom’s hallucinations might be spreading.
“This school is tiny, so it should be pretty easy to learn your way around,” Eliot said, looking at my schedule and pointing to my first period class.
It didn’t feel tiny to me, but I nodded anyway. The whole thing was overwhelming, and by the time they showed me my last class, I’d forgotten where my first class was. Zeke smiled and slapped hands with just about every guy we saw, saying hello and calling everyone by name, guys and girls. When we finally arrived back at my first class, the halls were nearly empty.
“Gwen,” Peyton yelled, bouncing out of the room and throwing her arms around me. “I was hoping we’d get some classes together. Come on, I’ll show you where to sit.”
Turning back, I mouthed “thank you” to the guys before Peyton led me to a seat on one side of the classroom about halfway back. The school had been anxious to get me into classes and had put me in regular classes right away, though they said I’d have to test and probably do a lot of extra tutoring to get caught up, since I’d missed the last nine years of school.
Classes went okay all morning. Peyton walked me to second period art, which I didn’t have with any of the Keens. Finn had art third period, though, and when he saw me walking out, he walked me
to my next class. I barely made it to my next class before the bell, only to find the room empty except for a teacher eating a sandwich and reading a paperback.
“It’s time for your lunch,” he said without looking up.
Lunch. Shit. I’d forgotten all about lunch, and apparently so had my mom. Of course she had. She’d been busy worrying about the world going up in flames, and I’d been busy worrying about her. As usual I didn’t have any money, and the rest of the Keens were probably so used to having money that they’d never thought someone wouldn’t have pocket change. But the teacher didn’t invite me to sit in his room, so I couldn’t just hang around.
Besides, this was my chance to see the social order I’d read about in books. My chance to find a place in it, to blend in and be one of them. My heart pounded with excitement as I headed in the direction of loud voices and smells. In the entranceway, I froze. The tables were crowded with a sea of faces I didn’t recognize. I’d gotten some questions from other students in my earlier periods, mostly where I was from and why I was there, but I hadn’t made any friends.
Still, I wouldn’t let that stop me. School was the dream I’d never dared to hope could come true, and here it was, laid out in front of me. This was the real test. I knew from the books I’d read that the cafeteria would make or break me. There, I would be judged and either found worthy, or…decimated by social stigmas. Usually, cafeterias had cool but foreboding nicknames, like the gauntlet or hell.
I slipped in at a table near the door and pulled out my schedule to see if I still remembered how to get to my remaining classes. A minute later, someone slid in beside me, and I looked up to see Finn. Today, his hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, and his green eyes caught mine and held on for a second.
My heart fluttered.
“Hey,” he said, giving me a shy smile.
“Hi,” I said.
“You’re not eating?”
“I forgot my lunch,” I admitted. “But I’m not really hungry. What about you? Where do you normally sit?”
“I usually eat in the art room,” he said. “I just came down here to…I don’t know why, actually. I just wanted to, I guess.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said.
“Let me get you something,” he said, digging in the pocket of his light-washed jeans. They had a slit on his thigh, and I found myself staring at the strip of exposed skin. I swallowed and pulled my eyes away. “What do you want?”
Not to find all four of my stepbrothers so damn attractive?
I glanced around, my eyes catching on the next table, where Joaquin was chomping into a burger. He caught my eye and gave me an exaggerated wink.
“Fries would be good,” I said, my stomach knotting with hunger when I saw the untouched pile of fries on his tray.
“Fries it is,” Finn said, heading for the food line at the front of the cafeteria.
While he was gone, I studied the room. People were still trickling in or arriving in small groups, finding their friends, and squeezing in beside them at the long, grey tables. I wanted to see how it all worked, so I was content to sit on the outskirts and observe. I was especially curious about my siblings’ places in all of it. I already knew Zeke and Peyton were part of the in crowd.
“Hey, baby,” Joaquin called from the next table, his voice edged with taunting. “You look lonely. Why don’t you come over here and sit? I got a seat with your name all over it.” He scooted back and gestured at his lap, wiggling his eyebrows at me.
I shook my head, biting back a smile at just how ridiculous he was. Did that actually work for him?
He shook his floppy, blonde surfer hair out of his eyes and tried again. “I got the motion of the ocean,” he coaxed, lifting his hips and gyrating in the air. After a few seconds, he got a little carried away, thrusting his hips against the edge of the table. A carton of milk toppled over, splashing across his tray.
Stifling my laughter, I turned away, covering my mouth so he wouldn’t see me cracking up at his antics. My gaze landed on Zeke, sitting at a table in the middle of the room. The moment I spotted him, his eyes swept across the entire cafeteria and landed on me. A huge smile broke across his face, and he waved, motioning for me to join him.
I lifted my hand just above the edge of the table and gave him a tiny shake of my head. I might want to brave that table tomorrow, when I’d dressed nicer. Maybe I’d be popular, too. In books and movies, that was the goal of high school, even more important than graduating. I knew popularity must be something wonderful. Today, though, I didn’t want the pressure of meeting all those people and trying to figure out exactly what popularity was. I just wanted to watch.
I spotted Peyton standing on the other side of Zeke’s table, her back toward me, leaning her hip against a girl’s shoulder while she talked. The girl had her arm around Peyton’s legs, and it sunk in that she’d mentioned having a girlfriend a few times. With all the new information I’d had to absorb, I’d glossed over her comment. I hadn’t realized she meant she had a girlfriend, the kind that was more than a friend.
My thoughts were interrupted when Zeke stood and ambled over to my table, carrying his lunch. He slid in beside me. “Hey, Gwen,” he said. “Why are you over here by yourself?”
“Just, uh, getting the lay of the land.”
“Cool,” he said, chomping into his burger. “Let me be your tour guide?”
I smiled and nodded, feeling my face warm slightly when I noticed half his table looking at us, leaning in to talk to each other.
“I guess that’s the popular table,” I said.
“Yup.” Not a trace of humbleness entered his words. I appreciated his straightforwardness. I needed it. I wasn’t the best at reading subtext.
“I don’t see Eliot,” I said. “Does he eat in the library or computer lab or something?”
Zeke sat up straight and surveyed the cafeteria. “There,” he said, pointing with a French fry. To my surprise, Eliot wasn’t sitting at the nerd table at all. There were no scrawny dorks with glasses and bad skin at his table, no overweight guys with greasy hair and Superhero shirts clutching Mountain Dew bottles in one hand and monster cards in the other. His laptop was nowhere in sight, and his nose wasn’t buried in a book. In fact, he was buried in…girls.
A girl with long blond hair was draped over him, so close she was halfway on his lap, and she looked like she was intent on making it all the way on before lunch was over. A brunette was kneeling in the chair opposite him with her butt in the air so she could lean across the table and share a pair of hot pink earbuds with him. A black girl was seated on his other side, gripping his bicep and whispering in his other ear.
“What’s going on there?” I asked. “I figured he’d never talked to a girl in his life.”
Zeke laughed at that. “Are you kidding? Dude is a total chick magnet. He gets more action than me.”
“Really?”
With a guilty look, Zeke swallowed a mouthful of burger. “I mean, not that I get a lot of action. I’m not a player or anything. I totally respect chicks.”
I laughed and shook my head. Again, I’d assumed and gotten it all wrong. I had to stop doing that. It was just that books were all I had to go on. I had to make sense of these people somehow or I’d get so overwhelmed with trying to figure them all out at once that I’d curl into a ball and never come out. Or go all zombie-eyed and disappear inside myself like Mom after her major episodes.
I swallowed my confusion, trying to make sense of this new Eliot. For some reason, I felt slightly betrayed by his failure to conform to my image of him, as if he’d misled me. He’d told me he’d been on a date, not that he had three at once every day.
Finn walked by his table, and though he didn’t say a word to his brother, Eliot’s eyes zoomed in on Finn’s target with laser focus. Our eyes met, and a wave of tingles swept across me, raising goosebumps all over my body. I stared back at him, refusing to be embarrassed. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Neither i
s he, a little voice inside reminded me. But I still felt like he was.
He must have thought so, too, because he sat bolt upright and his face went bright red. Without a word to his fan club, he plucked the earbud out, detangled himself from several pairs of arms, and followed Finn.
Finn plopped down across from me with a heaping plate of steaming fries, and I almost moaned in relief. I felt better just seeing them, and his presence was as reassuring as the food. “I got enough for everyone,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind sharing.”
“Not at all,” I said. “Thanks.”
Eliot slid in at my empty side. “Sorry about that,” he said, looking shame-faced.
“About what?” I asked, reaching for a fry while Finn emptied ketchup packets into a pool at one edge of the plate.
“Those girls,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to sit with me.”
Yes, you do, I told him silently.
“I don’t?” He glanced around at the others, confusion creasing his brow.
“You could always sit at a table across the cafeteria and make a scene by staring intently at me.”
My stepbrothers blinked at me in unison, like synchronized owls.
“That’s what always happens to the new girl in books,” I said, stifling a giggle. A mysterious charge had built inside me, almost unbearable. I thought I might actually lose it, Mom-style, in the middle of the cafeteria.
“I want to sit with you,” Eliot said gently, his hand brushing my thigh under the table. “If that’s okay.”
I almost gasped out loud at the pull of his touch, as if he’d pinched me instead of barely brushing my leg. But the overwhelming buzz inside me dissipated with his touch, as if I’d passed some of the energy to him.
“Are you okay?” Finn asked, looking up from the plate.
“Yeah,” I said, reaching for another fry. My fingers brushed his, and an involuntary twitch went through them. It was all I could do to grab a fry instead of his hand. As Zeke and Eliot reached in for a fry at the same moment, all our fingers brushed together, pausing instead of pulling back. None of us spoke, as if afraid to break the spell of this intimate moment between us.
Emerge: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance Page 13