Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
More Titles
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Cover Art:
Deborah Melanie
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are the work of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is coincidental.
Solstice Publishing - www.solsticepublishing.com
Copyright 2014 Margo Bond Collins
Fairy, Texas
by
Margo Bond Collins
Dedication
In memory of Nate Cripps
1994 – 2013
Chapter One
Of all the things that frightened me about starting a new school, finding a dead guy on day one didn’t even make it into my top hundred. I guess it should have.
But I didn’t know that when I got up early that first morning and went for a run.
The best part of running is that it keeps me from crying. It doesn’t matter how bad I feel, timing the beat of my footfalls and the pace of my breathing to the music coming through my headphones always helps.
As I rounded the last bend of the caliche road that wound through the ranch, I could taste the dust in the back of my throat.
Better than tears, anyway.
I slowed down, breathing hard, and walked toward the front porch of the long, low house I now had to call home. I ducked past the living room and scurried down the hall, anxious to be alone. But instead, I ran almost smack into one of the ranch hands.
“Please, please be careful with that,” I begged the enormous man who had just tossed another cardboard box onto the top of the growing pile in my bedroom—or at least, the room that was going to be my bedroom for the foreseeable future.
He just shook his head. “I ain’t broke nothing yet,” he muttered as he left for another load.
“Haven’t broken anything,” I corrected his grammar, not quite loudly enough for him to hear me.
Mom stuck her head around the door-frame, her disheveled brown curls appearing first, followed by her blue eyes. “Laney, you be nice to Bruce. He took the whole day off from work just to help us out.” She eyed my running gear. “You’re not wearing that to school, are you? Hurry up and get ready.”
“Okay, Mom.” I used my most agreeable voice, but it took every ounce of self-control I had. I’d been working really hard to get along with Mom since we’d started the move, but it hadn’t been easy. Leaving Atlanta for the middle of nowhere, Texas, was not, in my opinion, her best idea ever.
I didn’t want my mom to be an idiot. I mean, no one does, right? But I guess it’s kind of part of the whole being-a-parent thing, at least to some degree. It’s just that Mom tried so hard to be the cool parent. Not the buying-me-alcohol-and-letting-me-have-wild-parties kind of “cool”—that’s lame. She wanted to be the kind of Mom who knows all the latest music and slang, who tried to be as much my friend as my mother. Which was fine most of the time, even if she did make me want to die every time she turned on the radio and started singing along to Christina Aguilera. (I hated to tell her that “used to be Top 20” doesn’t equal “cool.”)
But then she got back in touch with her high school sweetheart.
For as long as I could remember, it had just been Mom and me. My dad took off before I was born—I saw him a couple of times when I was younger and Mom was on a kick about me needing a male role model, but then he got remarried and had another family. Not that he’d ever had all that much interest in me to begin with. And what kind of role model would that have been, anyway?
And it wasn’t like Mom hadn’t dated along the way. There was Greg, a doctor she’d met through her job as a rep for a pharmaceutical company. Jimmy was a high-school science teacher. Matt owned a gym. And for one reason or another, each of them was “not right.”
Never in a million years would I have thought that some rancher back in Mom’s hometown in Texas would be The One.
I still wasn’t convinced. Now I kind of wished I hadn’t done my level best to get her not to join a dating site. If I hadn’t told her over and over how dangerous the internet could be for a single woman, that there were all sorts of creeps out there just waiting to prey on someone who was emotionally vulnerable, maybe she wouldn’t have decided to contact someone she already knew.
Once she started emailing John Hamilton, I relaxed a little bit. No way would Mom give up her life in Atlanta—her job, her friends—for some random guy who lived a thousand miles away in a town Mom hadn’t been back to since she left when she was eighteen, right before she had me.
I should have paid more attention. I should have tried to talk her out of seeing him when he came to Atlanta to visit. It might not have done any good, but at least then I would know I had done everything I could to save our lives.
And maybe it would have worked.
Instead, though, here I was. Moving into my new bedroom in my new stepfather’s house, while Bruce the ranch hand manhandled all my stuff.
In Fairy, Texas.
That’s right. I moved from the greater metropolitan Atlanta area to a ranch in central Texas just outside of a tiny town that was actually named “Fairy.”
And from what I’d seen so far, I wasn’t going to like it. John had taken me on a tour of the ranch the day before, and had pointed out disgusting things on the ground like cow pies and buzzard vomit. And he’d shown me the body of a dead coyote hanging from a fence. He said it kept other coyotes away from the ranch, but I’d heard a bunch of them howling when I went to bed that night. Clearly they weren’t that scared.
“That’s not your desk,” Kayla’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “It was my mom’s. And that makes it mine, not yours.”
I sighed. “Your dad said I could use it.”
“Still not yours.” She leaned against the door frame and surveyed the boxes stacked up in my new room. “You really going to unpack all that crap?” she drawled.
“That’s the plan.” I tried to ignore her as I opened another box labeled “school supplies” and emptied pencils, pens, and rulers into the desk that wasn’t really mine. I pulled out a notebook and slipped it into my backpack.
“You might as well not bother,” Kayla said, flipping her long blonde hair over her shoulder and sliding into her own room across the hall. “You’re not staying long, you know.” She slammed the door behind her.
I shut my own door and leaned my forehead against it. Bad enough my mother had married Old Flame Rancher Guy. Worse that she had moved me to Fairy. I hoped that the worst was that I had a new stepsister who was turning out to be a bitch.
I was wrong, of course.
* * * *
I was about to start FHS.
> Fairy High School.
When I told my best friend Leah where I was going, she had laughed. Stephen and James had joined in. “Home of the Fightin’ Fairies!” James howled. “And their drill team, The Tinkerbells!” Leah added. It had gone downhill from there.
It had also seemed a lot funnier in Atlanta, where all my friends lived. But now I was about to go take a bunch of classes with all those Fightin’ Fairies. I felt sick to my stomach.
At least Mom was here this week. She managed to get transferred when she decided to marry John, but she would be spending a lot of time on the road. Apparently not many people in her company actually want to be pharmaceutical reps in rural Texas. Go figure. Anyway, after I’d showered and changed, she offered to drive me to school.
I rolled my eyes. Riding to school with Mom on day one. Social suicide—before I had a social life to kill, even.
“Or maybe you could ride with Kayla,” she said, her voice too bright to sound normal. She turned to pour herself another cup of coffee. Kayla made a face at her back.
“Maybe I could take your car?” I asked hopefully. “Since you’re going to be at home all day unpacking, you won’t really need it.” I slid in next to her and grabbed my own coffee cup from the cabinet.
“Aren’t you a little young for coffee?” John asked, as he walked into the room and gave Mom a kiss on the cheek.
Mom looked surprised and a little thoughtful.
“Never mind, Mom,” I said. “I’ll just catch a ride in with Kayla after all.” Better to distract her with the hope that Kayla and I might bond than let John convince her to ban coffee.
Kayla snarled at me while our parents weren’t looking, but her voice was pleasant enough when she spoke. “Okay. I’m leaving in fifteen minutes.”
Once we were in the car, her tone changed. “Don’t think that just because your mother married Dad means that we’re going to be all BFF or anything.”
“Yeah. I’d kind of figured that out already.”
“And don’t talk to any of my friends once we get to school.”
I stared out the window. “Wouldn’t dream of it, princess,” I muttered.
“What did you say?” Kayla’s voice dropped an octave—not quite to a growl, but almost.
“Nothing. I got it. We’re not friends. Fine.”
We didn’t speak for the rest of the drive. I stared out the window and watched the scenery—such as it was—slide by. I missed Georgia’s graceful trees lining the highway, the way their shadows rippled across my skin as I passed them. Here, the sky stretched out into forever and the shadows were like the Texas trees: scrubby and low to the ground. I felt exposed.
I crossed my arms and shivered in the air-conditioning of Kayla’s car.
* * * *
Fairy High could have fit into one wing of my old school. The three-story, red brick building looked like it had been around for at least a century—it actually had carvings over two of the doorways that read “Men’s Entrance” and “Women’s Entrance.” I was glad to see that none of the kids paid any attention to those instructions. Kayla called out to a group of girls standing off to one side of the path under a huge oak tree, and took off without a word to me.
“Counselor’s office,” I muttered to myself. At least I wasn’t starting in the middle of a term—though given the fact that there were fewer than 500 students in the entire high school, I didn’t think I was going to be able to go unnoticed, even in the general bustle of the first day back from summer vacation.
I was almost wishing I had taken Mom up on her offer to come with me. Or had at least insisted on coming in and scoping out the territory before classes started. But I’d been too busy trying to ignore the fact that I’d been ripped away from everything I knew and dumped into a life that wasn’t mine.
Well, I couldn’t ignore it now.
I walked through the door marked “Men’s Entrance,” just be contrary, and faced a long hallway lined with heavy wooden doors. The spaces in between the doors were filled with lockers, and marble staircases with ornate hand-rails flanked each end of the long hallway. Students poured in behind me, calling out greetings to each other and jostling me off to the side while I tried to get my bearings. None of the doors obviously led to a main office; I was going to have to walk the entire length of the hallway. And people were already starting to stare and whisper.
God, I hated being the new kid.
I took a deep breath and stepped forward. I made it halfway down the hall without seeing anything informative—all the doors had numbers over them and many of them had name plaques, but neither of those things did me any good since I didn’t know the name or office number for the counselor. I was almost getting desperate enough to ask Kayla, but of course she was nowhere to be seen.
I turned back from scanning the halls for her and caught sight of the first adult I’d seen—and almost screamed. As it was, I gasped loudly enough for a guy walking past me to do a double take. The man standing in the open doorway was tall, over six feet, and way skinny—so emaciated that it looked like you ought to be able to see his ribs through his shirt, if his shirt didn’t hang so loosely on him. He had white hair that stuck out in tufts, thin lips, a sharp nose, and pale blue eyes that narrowed as he watched the kids walk past—and all the kids gave him a wide berth without even seeming to notice that they did so. He stood in an empty circle while students streamed around him in the crowded hallway.
But none of that was what made me almost scream.
For a moment, just as I’d turned toward him, I could have sworn that I’d seen the shadow of two huge, black, leathery wings stretched out behind him.
The guy who had done the double-take watched me for a moment. “So Bartlef creeps you out, too?” he asked quietly.
I stared back at the man. The wings—the imaginary wings that had to have been all in my head and not on the man’s back at all—were gone. Of course.
“Bartlef?” I asked.
“Yeah,” the guy said. “He’s the counselor.”
I closed my eyes and groaned. “Of course he is.”
“You’re Laney Harris, right?” the guy asked. He laughed when I looked surprised. “Small town. Small school. Not much happens without everyone knowing about it. Your mom married Kayla Hamilton’s dad this summer, right?”
I nodded.
“I’m Andrew,” he said. “We’ll probably be in the same homeroom: Mrs. Davis, room 133.” He pointed to a closed wooden door. “I’ll save you a seat. Good luck with Bartlef. And don’t get too close—I think something died in his mouth about ten years ago, and is still rotting away in there.” He grinned and headed down the hall.
Bartlef had disappeared back into his office, but the door was still open. I leaned my head in.
“Hi,” I said tentatively. “I think I’m supposed to see you?”
“Ah, yes. Miss Harris, is it? Please come in and have a seat. I’m Roger Bartlef, the school counselor.” His voice was higher than I’d expected but rough at the same time, like it kept getting caught up on something on its way out. Just listening to him, I found myself wanting to clear my own throat.
I eased myself down into the chair he pointed toward. Bartlef pulled a file folder out from the bottom of a stack on his desk and flipped through it. I waited in uncomfortable silence while he tapped his fingers lightly on the desk in front of him.
“From Atlanta, I see,” he finally said.
“Um. Yeah.” It took him that long to figure it out? We were going to be here all day.
“Your grades are fair.”
“Yes.” Mom might be a bit of an air-head sometimes, and surprisingly prone to running off and marrying random ranchers from her past, but she’d always insisted I get A’s. Well, and some B’s. Algebra hadn’t been my best subject.
“Hm.” He scowled, as if my good grades were somehow offensive to him. “Extra-curricular activities?”
I suspected from the way he stared at the papers in my file that he alre
ady knew the answer to that one.
“I was the photographer for the school newspaper,” I said. “And I sometimes did a little proofreading for the editor.”
“We don’t have a school newspaper here.” His narrow-eyed stare seemed to dare me to contradict him.
“Okay,” I said slowly. What could he possibly expect me to say to that, anyway?
“Humph,” he said, and snapped the file shut on his desk. He turned to his computer, punched a few keys, and took a sheet of paper from the printer. “Here’s your schedule.” He leaned forward and handed the printout to me. As he spoke, his breath blew into my face and I almost gagged. Andrew hadn’t been exaggerating about not getting too close. I held my breath as Bartlef continued. “You’re in Mrs. Davis’s homeroom. Report there first.” He turned his back as soon as I took the sheet of paper. Clearly, I was dismissed. Hallelujah.
* * * *
Mrs. Davis’s homeroom class was full of students talking to one another while she flipped through paperwork at the front of the classroom. I slid into the seat Andrew had saved for me.
“How did you know I’d be in this class?” I asked.
“There are only four sophomore homeroom classes, all alphabetical.” He pointed to me—“Harris”—and then to himself—“Harvey. Not much deductive reasoning required. Or is that inductive? Anyway, it wasn’t hard to figure out.” He shrugged and grinned, and I couldn’t help but smile back.
“So what’s the deal with Bartlef?”
Andrew shook his head. “Guy’s completely screevy. He’s been the counselor here for like a thousand years.”
Yep. Screevy. I nodded.
“And there’s all kinds of rumors about him,” Andrew continued, his voice dropping almost to a whisper.
“Like what?”
Andrew leaned closer.
“Okay, everyone!” Mrs. Davis said. “Let’s get this day started. You know the drill.” She began calling roll.
Andrew leaned back into his seat. “I’ll tell you at lunch,” he said.
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