by Bella King
“Stop laughing,” I demanded, pushing him.
Daniel’s eyes popped open in panic as he lost balance and began falling back off the ledge. In a second, he saw his entire life flash right before his eyes before his hand found the steady grip of cold metal on the edge of the ventilation shaft.
“Jesus Christ! Are you trying to kill me?” He shouted.
I shrunk down against the wall. I hadn’t meant to push him that hard, but he had pissed me off. “No,” I said softly.
He grabbed me by my shirt and pulled me from stuff comfort of the stone wall, bringing me toward the ledge. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t toss you off,” he growled, his eyes lit up with fury.
Daniel, like Andrew, was apparently quick to anger. I should have known better than to test him. Although he looked more innocent than the others, he could be just as cruel. I had to remember that there was probably a good reason why he was part of the gang. Andrew didn’t bring on weaklings.
My throat felt like it was closing up as Daniel’s sharp eyes pierced into mine. “I didn’t mean to push you that hard,” I managed to say.
He shook his head, his hand still firmly scrunched up against my shirt. “Maybe Andrew thinks that you’re good enough to be on the team, but I don’t feel the same way.”
“It’s not for you to decide,” I said, trying to pull his hand off my shirt.
“I could say it was an accident,” Daniel said, his eyes gleaming with evil intent. He seemed excited about potentially throwing me off the ledge and watching me fall to my death.
“I don’t think they would believe you,” I replied.
Daniel squinted his eyes at me. “Watch your step, Rose. This isn’t a game,” he said before letting go of my shirt.
I stepped away from the edge of the ledge, smoothing out the wrinkles in my shirt with one hand while bracing myself against the solid stone of the building with the other. I was relieved that I hadn’t been tossed over, but rightfully pissed that he would even consider it. I thought Daniel was nicer of the bunch, but perhaps I was wrong.
“I guess I’ll go now,” I said, starting to walk toward the ventilation shaft.
“Wait,” Daniel said, grabbing my wrist.
I twirled around to find him standing an inch away from me, his face dangerously close to mine. I gasped at the sudden advance, but I knew what he was doing. Like Andrew and the others, he was into me. I didn’t think threatening to toss me off a building was a great way of showing that, but he was a bit fucked up. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was his way of flirting.
“I’d watch yourself at the party tonight,” he said in a deep voice.
“And why is that?” I challenged, tilting my head and pouting my lips.
“The guys get rowdy when they’re having fun. You know how that goes,” he said, lifting a finger and tracing it along my jawline.
I shuddered at his touch. Daniel was going hot and cold on me. One second he was pushing me out of a window, and the next, he was hinting that he and his gang were going to screw my brains out tonight if I teased them enough. I knew this game, and I liked it.
“Maybe you should learn to control yourselves,” I suggested with a small shrug.
Daniel cracked a smile. “I’m not very good at that, as you can see.”
“No, I guess not,” I said, crinkling my nose at him in the cutest manner I could muster.
Daniel leaned in a little more. “I’m serious about you being careful. Natasha couldn’t handle us,” he said.
“I’m not Natasha,” I replied sharply.
He leaned back an inch in response, his smile widening. “I was hoping you might say that. Natasha was no fun anyway. Too much of a prude,” he said dismissively.
“I’m not a plaything for you and your boys either,” I said, standing my ground.
Daniel pressed a finger against my lips to hush me. I could feel his pulse through his finger against my hot lips. He had control over me, but this wasn’t how I wanted it to be. I was my own woman. Even if I belonged to their gang, I didn’t belong to them.
“We’ll see about that,” Daniel said, then backed away.
I licked my lips, tasting the finger that he had withdrawn. I had a stirring in my lower belly that was unmistakable. I was horny from his words alone, and that could very well spell trouble for me tonight at the party. Who knew what those men were planning to do with me now that I had joined them?
I shuddered, but I couldn’t tell if it was from a stiff breeze or in anticipation of what was to come. I crossed my arms, keeping myself warm as I turned around and went to the ventilation shaft to return to the women’s dormitory.
Chapter 11
“Two hits, and you’re sky-high. Believe me. This stuff will melt your goddamn brain,” Andrew said, handing a tightly rolled blunt wrapped in cigar paper to Troy.
“Two hits? I doubt it. You can’t get anything good around here,” Troy said, taking the blunt.
“We have a new supplier from outside. Anything is possible now,” Andrew said with a confident flash of his pearly whites.
I walked up to the two men with Daniel close beside me. I had taken a while to find the right thing to wear to a party, since I wasn’t planning on attending any this year. I had settled on a simple red dress that was cut right above my knees. It looked considerably classier than anything anyone else was wearing, but it was what I had.
I thought that a strict boarding school for delinquents meant that there would be no parties, but I was wrong like I had been about nearly everything at Ridgeview. Apparently, the students threw parties every weekend.
School administration was light on the weekend, and the ones that were here were on damage control mode. They would grab anyone who wasn’t acting up, and parties mostly went unmonitored as long as no fights broke out. Even rival gangs generally got along so that the parties didn’t get busted.
One of the several parties around the school was being held in the courtyard around the back of the school building. It was a hot evening, but the tall castle-like structure behind us cast a long shadow over the party venue, ensuring that it didn’t get too hot. It would have even been a good idea to bring a light jacket, but it was too late for that now.
“Oh hey, little Rose,” Andrew said when he spotted me. He seemed in a better mood since he had left me in the dormitory after I nearly got killed by Laney.
I shook my head at his nickname but smiled anyway. It was nice to see him in a cheerful state. I was a bit afraid of him when he got angry. “Just how wild do these partied get?” I asked, eyeing the blunt that was in Troy’s large hand.
“Pretty nuts,” Andrew replied with a wink.
Oh yes, Daniel was right. I did need to be careful around these guys. I knew even better than he did that it wouldn’t take much for me to get naked in front of them. I had done it before, and I could do it again.
“Rose,” a female voice said from behind me.
I turned to see Eden walking toward me, a drink clenched in her small fist. She completely ignored the men around me as she began talking. “I totally wasn’t expecting you to be here. Usually new people don’t attend parties because they don’t know about them, but you know. I have info about that sort of thing.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I was told as well.”
Eden looked up at Daniel, who was still standing beside me. “What your step, thief,” she said with a hiss.
“Woah,” I said, holding up a hand. “Daniel is chill.”
Daniel held his hands out with the palms up in a gesture of innocence. “I’m chill,” he repeated, almost seeming to tease Eden.
She glared at him. “I doubt that very much.”
“You’re going to have to go easy around these guys,” I said, motioning to the entire group who had now turned their attention to her.
Eden looked around, realizing that I was rolling with a gang of huge tattooed studs. She looked a few of the guys up and down, which made me feel a pang of jealousy.
There was no reason to feel jealous about it. I couldn’t have all of them… Or could I?
Eden licked her lips, changing her tone the moment she realized how attractive the men I was with were. “Um, how about we get a drink,” she suggested to me.
I looked at the full glass in her hand. “Don’t you already have one?” I asked, somewhat amused.
“I think maybe you want one,” she said, gritting her teeth to show that she had something else in mind.
I sighed, then turned to Daniel. “I’ll be back.”
He gave me a smile and a nod, and I rushed off with Eden.
The moment we were out of earshot from the guys, Eden grabbed my arm and gave it a shake. “Why didn’t you tell me you joined a gang full of the fucking hottest guys in the whole fucking school?” She asked, her eyes popping from her head.
I laughed. “You warned me about getting involved so I was trying to keep it a secret.”
“Fuck,” she exclaimed, looking back at Andrew and his gang. “You’re going to have to get me in on this.”
“No way,” I said. “It’s dangerous.”
“Yeah, you could drown in their cum,” she joked.
“Jesus, it’s not like that,” I said with a laugh, but I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t. In fact, I was pretty sure that it was.
Eden walked up to a group of girls who were all sipping on colorful drinks by an open cooler. The cooler was overflowing with crushed ice, and there were bottles of fruity alcohol shoved into it. Eden pointed to one nodded at one of the girls, who picked it up and opened it with a bottle opener that she kept in her hand. She handed the drink to Eden, who then handed it to me.
“Drink up,” Eden said.
I threw the drink back, chugging down two-thirds of it in one go before lowering the cold glass from my lips. “Good stuff,” I noted, looking at the bottle. It had no label on it.
“The girls brew it themselves,” Eden said. “But you should be careful. It’s a lot stronger than It seems.”
I knew what a strong drink was. My ex-boyfriend used to get moonshine from a friend of his that would make the strongest stuff imaginable. It tasted like cherries and would leave you wasted after just a few shots. I had a lot of wild nights one that stuff.
I placed a hand on Eden’s shoulder. “I can handle my booze,” I said.
“That’s they all say until they’re naked in the men’s shower room,” Eden said, taking a sip of her drink.
I didn’t want to tell her that I had already been running around the school naked without a drop of alcohol in me. People seemed to think I was a lot more innocent than I actually was, but that was because they didn’t know about my experiences. I wasn’t a bad person, but I had known plenty. They rub off on you after a while, whether you like it or not.
I laughed with Eden, but I knew that nothing was out of the question at this point. What had started as a wild ride had turned even wilder. I had faced death multiple times already and I was still only in the first week of school. What was to come, only God knew. Him, or maybe it was Satan who knew.
“Let’s get back to your sexy friends,” Eden suggested.
I grinned at her. “They’re all mine. Don’t touch them.”
“Aw, come on. Let me have one,” she said.
I thought about Daniel’s attempt to push me off the building. “You know what? You can have Daniel, the pretty one.”
“Just my type,” she said, raising her glass to me.
I took a sip of my drink in response, and we began walking back to our group.
When we arrived, Troy and Martin were standing together with silly grins on their faces and eyes as red as blood. Whatever they had been smoking was strong, because they didn’t even acknowledge my or Eden’s existence when we came up.
“I want to show you something,” Andrew said, looking me dead in the eyes.
His look was so strong that Eden took a step back, wanting to leave us together. She turned to Daniel and started talking to him in the most flirtatious tone she could manage. I wanted to laugh at her antics, but I was too distracted by Andrew’s intensity.
“What do you want to show me?” I asked him, taking a sip from my bottle to calm my racing heart. It was always like this around Andrew. It was like every word he said was a powerful stimulant, working its way into my bloodstream. There wasn’t much I could do to stop it.
“You’ll see,” Andrew said, a smirk flickering across his face.
I studied his expression for a moment before nodding. He looked innocent enough, but these guys never were. I guess I had to trust him if I was going to be a complete member of the gang.
“There is a garden that’s no longer maintained down the hill. The administration doesn’t like us going down there, but they’re not watching anyone right now,” he said beginning to walk away from the group.
I followed, flashing a smile to Eden as I left. She was too involved in her conversation with Daniel to notice me at all.
“Very romantic of you, bringing me to the garden,” I said in a joking tone as I caught up with Andrew.
The ever-present smirk on his face grew a sliver larger, as though he were amused by my innocence. “The garden can be whatever you want it to be, but for me, it’s a place to reflect.”
“What are we reflecting on?” I asked him.
“You ask too many questions. Perhaps you should learn to listen,” he replied, but showed no signs of irritation.
I huffed, crossing my arms and walking beside him in silence as we left the party. We walked together far enough away from the building to be basked in the yellow glow of the evening sun. My skin seemed to rise up at the feeling of the natural warmth. It was a welcome change to the stuffy heat that occupied the school during the day. I hadn’t realized how little I had actually been outside until today.
The odd thing about Ridgeview was that the regular sound of birds chirping and squirrels racing up trees with their little claws was absent. The only thing that could be heard outside was the breeze rustling the leaves on the old twisted trees that were sporadically placed around the school property.
Eden had told me that the reason why nobody could hear the birds was that there was poison in the air to keep the students crazy, but I doubted that very much. She always had a conspiracy theory to throw out when asked about anything around here.
My guess was that we were in an area were the birds didn’t want to go. Perhaps the surrounding walls were too high. Maybe the trees didn’t have any fruit for them to eat. Perhaps the barbed wired that lined the tops of the concrete walls snagged too many of them and they decided it wasn’t worth it to come here anymore. It was entirely possible that the students had hunted them all into extinction after growing sick of the slop they served us in the cafeteria. Whatever the reason, there were no animals at Ridgeview.
I was surprised we even had a garden, but when we finally got to it, it began to make sense. The garden barely looked like a garden. There were crumbling walls with thorny weeds growing up the sides of them. Dry bramble and tall grass guarded the entrance, but Andrew pushed past it as though he came here every day.
“They built this before Ridgeview was a school,” Andrew explained as we entered the old garden. “This used to be government property for rehabilitation until it was sold to a private corporation to run. Then, it became the shithole that it is now.”
“I always that companies did a better job than the government did,” I said, remembering past experiences with underfunding government facilities during my arrest and subsequent trial.
“You’d be surprised how low the standards get when the government turns over stuff like this to those companies, though. They’re not selling a product, so they’re not concerned about quality,” he said smartly.
“My older brother used to go here before it went bad,” he said.
I was surprised. I thought Eden was the only one with a family member who had gone here. Then again, if he was the leader
of a notorious gang here, then it shouldn’t have been a surprise that he had roots deeper than others.
“How long have you been here?” I asked as we walked deeper into the overgrown garden.
“About two years. I’m twenty,” he replied.
Most of the students at this school were on the older side of things. It was difficult to graduate and move on with your life when you were caught up in the legal system. Court dates and holding cells didn’t allow too much time for school, so we were all behind.
“Are you close to graduating?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “I should be out by the end of this year.”
“Me too. What are your plans when you get out?” I asked, letting my mouth run again. I couldn’t help it. I was curious about Andrew.
He chuckled. “I have no clue. My bother works on some oil rig in Alaska, freezing his ass off. I might join him.”
“Sounds miserable.”
“It is, but it can’t be worse than here,” he replied.
We came upon a clearing in the garden at the center. There was a large, shallow fountain in the middle that had since been turned off, but I could tell that it would have been stunning when it still functioned. Rainwater occupied the fungus-ridden bottom, turning it into a black pool of reflective splendor. The fountain alone made the trip worthwhile.
We stopped by the fountain, looking into the darkness of the water. There was no sunlight here because of how tall the surrounding bushes and trees were. We were in the cool shade, but I felt comfortable in my red dress.
“I’m running the gang until I get out, and after that it’s being handed over to Martin and Troy. They still have a year or two left.” Andrew said, running his hand along a cropping of tall dandelions next to the fountain.
“Did you inherit it from someone?” I asked.
“No, I formed it during my first few months here, and made the mistake of bringing Natasha into it. Big mistake.”
“I think she wanted me to join her when I first got here,” I said.