“I think I’ll stick with George. Why’d you hide when those two girls came in?”
George dips her head. “You probably don’t want to be seen talking to me. Especially not by Daphne and Brandy. It’ll get back to Cleo.”
“Why would I care what Cleo thinks?”
She rolls her eyes as if she’s explaining something to a child. “Because you’re Mackenzie Malloy, duh. You belong with the popular kids. You should be sitting at their table in the dining hall, braiding Cleo’s hair or arm-wrestling Noah or whatever.”
I stuck out my tongue and made a gagging noise. “No thanks. Those guys are dicks.”
“Not Elias Hart,” George says, her cheeks flushing with color. She gulps. “I just mean… I don’t talk to him, obviously, but he seems nicer than the others.”
“Mmmhmmm.” I may be completely messed up and out-of-touch with the world, but I know a crush when I see it. I stare down at the stains on my shirt and for a moment, I’m not looking at jus but blood – my mother’s blood splattered across my reflection. I shake my head and start dabbing. “So, George. Is this your usual lunch spot?”
She peels off her sweater and holds it under the tap. “I swear, when I offered you that fork, I had no idea you were, well, you.”
“And if you did, you wouldn’t have given me a fork?”
George bites her lip so hard I’m worried she’ll draw blood. “I don’t know. We went to lower prep together before, well… before you disappeared. You probably don’t remember me. I looked quite different back then.”
“You seem pretty memorable to me.”
“You and Cleo sure thought so.” A note of bitterness creeps into her voice.
I can read between the lines here – I did something shit to this girl. If I was friends with Cleo back then, that’s not surprising. Fuck, I wish I’d known all this before I opened my mouth.
I sigh. “Look, you want to go eat somewhere that doesn’t smell like urine?”
“With you?” George studies my face.
I glance around the empty bathroom. “I don’t see anyone else offering.”
I can see the torment in George’s eyes as she weighs that Mackenzie Malloy was eating her lunch in a toilet stall against her past tormentor. Finally, she nods, although her shoulders are tense. “Sure. Let’s go.”
George and I stop by a vending machine to load up on snacks, then take our loot out to the bleachers, where the stoners hang out. She looks nervous as we climb up to the top corner and lay out our bounty. Out on the track is a lone runner – Noah. He’s shirtless because the gods have to be kind to me sometimes. Sweat glistens on his naked skin, and I notice a single tattoo of a four-leaf clover, its leaves curling and crumpling at the edges, over his heart. His gym shorts pull across his muscled thighs, and my throat dries as I think about exactly what’s inside those shorts. That boy is damn fine. Hatred looks good on him.
I rip open the wrapper on a no-gluten, no-sugar, no-taste dark-chocolate kelp bar (the school’s snack choices suck), which I have no appetite for any longer. Why am I wasting precious brainpower thinking about a guy who loathes me, a guy so obviously and completely off-limits?
I tear my eyes from Noah and focus on George, who is nervously fiddling with the edge of a bag of dried mango slices and watching a group of guys gathered around an acoustic guitar a few rows over. “I thought these would be your kind of people.” I nod at her hair.
She runs her hand through her rainbow hair. “Oh… I don’t know. I’ve always been too scared to talk to guys like that. They’ll think I’m a freak.”
“I don’t think you’ve looked at yourself in a mirror recently. You’re putting out total hot freaky rocker chick vibes. That guy with the Metallica bandana down there is totally checking you out.”
George glances down at the guys, then back at me, and I see a million questions burning in her eyes. “Who are you, and what have you done with the real Mackenzie Malloy?”
I smile. “I’m holding her hostage so I can steal her life, obviously. Gross, who thought kelp and chocolate go together?” I toss the bar down the bleachers. It bounces across the grass just as Noah steaks by and hits him in the chest, exploding crumbs of kelp all over him. He turns with a snarl and locks eyes with mine. Fuck, if looks could kill I’d be back in that coffin with Noah dancing on the lid.
George is giggling into her arm. “I can’t believe you just hit Noah Marlowe. He doesn’t look happy… are you going to eat that?”
For a moment I think she’s talking about Noah, but then I see her eyeing up a cookie. I slide it over. “All yours.”
“Thanks.” George tears it open and takes a huge bite. She talks about school clubs and bands I’ve never heard of for the rest of the lunch hour. It’s like I turned a faucet on inside her and unleashed a stream of word vomit. It should annoy the fuck out of me, but actually, it’s nice, hearing something other than the shadows dancing around inside my head.
When the bell rings, startling her mid-sentence, George pushes her glasses up her nose and peers up at me. Something changes in her expression, her features falling one by one, like a house of cards crumbling. A minute ago she’d been glowing, tucking her hair behind her ears as she bobbed her head along with the guys’ music. Now, she looks terrified.
Weird.
“I guess we should go in?” I stand up.
Her legs shake as she drags herself after me.
“I had fun. Let’s do this again.”
George nods. We descend the bleachers and start to cross the field, when suddenly her face goes pales and she runs off ahead of me. I call out, but she’s already pushing her way through the crowds heading back inside. She’s so short I lose sight of her in moments.
What’s up with her? For the briefest moment, I thought I might have made a friend. But it seems that not even George the class freak wants to be seen with Mackenzie Malloy.
14
Mackenzie
“In the week you’ve been at that school, you’ve managed to break a teen actor’s nose, fall for the British rock god, get on the bad side of the head jock, discover some secret childhood friend you don’t remember, piss off the head bitch and make friends with the school freak?” Antony’s laugh bubbles up inside him. “So much for keeping a low profile.”
I moan into the receiver. He’s right, damn him. Being a student at Stonehurst is everything like one of those teen films I studied, and yet, all my studying didn’t prepare me for shit. Every day I walk down that hall between throngs of friends laughing and hugging each other, every time Noah’s eyes stare daggers into my back or Eli tries to talk to me or Gabriel flashes me that megawatt smile, I get this desperate churn in the pit of my stomach. I’ve lived alone for so long I had no idea how much I longed for friendship, for connection. I teased myself with daydreams of what I can never have. Cleo’s words haunt me, running over and over in my head.
You don’t belong.
No shit, Sherlock. It’s senior year, the last year of high school, and I never got to have a normal life with friends and parties and drama. What I wouldn’t give to worry about grades and apply to colleges and think about normal teenage things. I never had a first kiss, or got dressed up with my girlfriends for a school dance, or cheered from the stands at a school sports event. Instead, the only memories I take with me into adulthood are blood and loneliness and betrayal.
At least I’ll have my fucking house.
Every brick. Every tile. Every triple-glazed window and gaudy column and faux Roman statue. It’s mine, and I’d fight any asshole who stands in the way of making Malloy Manor my own.
Queen Boudica leaps onto my lap, batting at my phone. I’m lying on the chaise lounge in the ballroom – one of my favorite rooms in the house and one where the French doors face the back garden, so the press at the gate can’t see inside. I pull one of her toys from between the cushions and toss it across the room. She skids on the marble floor, tiny black limbs flailing everywhere as she tries to beat t
he fuzzy mouse into submission.
“Gabriel keeps asking me to hang out with him,” I tell Antony.
“So do it. Go ‘hang out,’ which you need to learn is teenager talk for ‘fucking each other’s brains out.’ I won’t stop you. I think you should have some fun, Claws. It’s your senior year. You’re almost all grown up—”
“Don’t be a dick.”
Antony chuckles. “I know, you’ve been grown up since you were born. All I’m saying is, if you want to jump up and down on that posh prick’s cock, it’s not going to screw up our plan. The world already knows Mackenzie Malloy is back. It might even work in our favor, give the press a new story to chew on.”
I rub my temple. What if it does, though? There’s so much at stake, and not just for me. This is Antony’s life, too. Queen Boudica drops the mouse onto my chest, and I toss it for her again. As she claws her way around the bottom of the curtains, I notice a shape moving along the top of the garden wall. “Shit.”
“What?”
“Some bastard paparazzi has climbed the wall.” I can see him precariously perched on the narrow ledge, using wire clippers to cut away the barbed wire coiled around the top. Bastard. He’s the first one of those slimy snails to try to climb the wall – so far the rest of them had settled for peering through the gates and snapping photographs of me as I entered school. Stonehurst employs a security team to keep them away from students, but they still hang around. This cheeky shit is trying to get the scoop on me, and for that, he will pay.
“I’ll send someone to sort it out—”
“No. I’ll take care of it. I have to go.” I drop my phone on the sofa and back away from the windows. It’s too late to turn out the ballroom lights – he’s seen me lying around in booty shorts and my Octavia’s Ruin shirt, tossing fuzzy mice for my cat. Page ten, have I got a scoop for you.
I won’t have him out there, staring at me, polluting my house. I don’t like being watched. It reminds me too much of… other things. Times in the past when eyes have followed me with ill intent. I’m not supposed to feel unsafe here. This is my house, my castle. How dare he sit on the parapets like he’s earned the right to my presence?
My jaw clenching with determination, I storm up the staircase to the third floor. I hardly ever come up here – it houses the master suite and a strange turret thing with a hot tub and a small balcony and windows overlooking the hills and sprawling city below.
I turned the circuit breakers off in this section of the house years ago to save on power bills, so I creep across the room in the dark to the bar area, where crates of wine had been piled in the small walk-in. My parents – rich assholes that they were – kept barely any actual food in the house, but the four wine cellars (WTF) are stocked to last at least three apocalypses (what’s the plural of apocalypse? Apocalyii? I guess there doesn't need to be a plural as there’s only going to be one…)
Anyway… I stacked the bottles by the window months ago for… just this reason. I yank a couple of bottles out of a crate, fling open the window, and toss them at the pap.
“Fuck!”
He leaps off the wall just as one of the bottles smashes into the stone right where he’d been sitting. The second bottle flies wide, sailing over the wall and smashing on the other side. Great, now the guy’s stuck on this side of the wall. He steps forward into the square of light cast from the ballroom windows, and I gasp as I recognize him.
It’s Eli.
“I’m covered in sticky wine now,” he shouts up at me.
In response, I lean out the window and flip him the finger.
“Mackenzie, I want to talk to you.”
“We don’t always get what we want.” I hold up another bottle of wine. “If you don’t get off my property in ten seconds, I’m shoving this one somewhere unpleasant. I’m counting. One.”
“I don’t think I can climb over the wall from this side,” he points out, a little petulantly. “And if I open the front gate you’re going to be swarming with reporters.”
“Two. Hope you’ve lubed up your asshole.”
Eli throws up his hands. “You run away from me at school, you ignore my texts. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Three.” He’s Jace. That’s the only explanation. Which means that for some reason, thirteen-year-old me didn’t want anyone who might pick up my phone to know I was talking to Eli. I want to ask him about that, but I can’t, and that pisses me off.
“I thought you were dead.” His voice cracks on the words, and the pain on his face is open and raw. “All these years I’ve tried to find out what happened to you, but you just vanished. I couldn’t even grieve for you because my fucking parents would figure it out. And then you just show up and act like you don’t know me. Why, Mackenzie?”
No. no no no no no. This can’t be true. Eli’s talking like we used to be an item. But that was four years ago. Eli has girls falling all over him now. Why does he give a fuck about a girl he knew when he was thirteen? The way his face twists – he has feelings for me. Or, at least, for the old Mackenzie. For the Mackenzie who’d never been buried alive in her own coffin, who had her life stolen and her memories tainted forever.
I checked every last corner of my room. There was no mention of a guy, no loose ends I needed to tie up. I had to be sure of that or Antony and I never would have risked me attending Stonehurst. Yet somehow we missed both Noah and Eli.
I watch Eli’s face twisting with pain, and it hits me.
I know.
I know why Eli seems familiar to me, even though there’s no way I’d remember him from before.
The realization punches me in the gut, and I stagger back under the shock of it.
He’s one of the faces I’ve seen peering through the gate, staring up at the windows of my old bedroom. He’s been here several times over the years. I thought he was another thrill-seeking ghost-hunter. But he’s not. He’s been looking for me.
“Mackenzie?” Eli pleads. “I promise, I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want. But can’t you just tell me if you’re okay? Are you in danger? Is it your dad? Is that why you won’t talk to me?”
I want to tell him everything. And it’s that wanting that gives me pause. Because I don’t know this guy, but he feels so familiar to me, so safe. I want to trust Eli, and that’s dangerous.
“Go away.” I slam the window shut, palming the bottle as I head back downstairs. I am going to need it.
15
Mackenzie
I watch from the ballroom window as Eli pushes lawn furniture against the wall and clambers up. His shoulder muscles heave with the effort of pulling himself over, and he’s not the only one hot and bothered by the end of it. I contemplate going out there and offering him a drink just as he disappears over the other side.
Instead, I chug the entire bottle of New Zealand’s finest vintage while I tear my old room apart. I rip the heads off all the creepy dolls and poke around inside their stuffing. I stab at the wooden cupboards with the knife Antony gave me for my tenth birthday, looking for hidden compartments. Finally, I take the knife to the expensive mattress, tearing away strips of foam and sending springs flying in all directions.
Finally, I find it.
I’d hidden it well, shoved into the bunting on my headboard through a cut I hid behind a fold of fabric. No wonder I missed it during my last search. I wrap my hands around the tiny notebook and tug it free, holding it under the light as I inspect the cover.
It’s pretty nondescript as far as notebooks go – the cover decorated with watercolor flowers, a dent across the corner, and several pages crinkled from being constantly handled. I grasp it in shaking hands, knowing without knowing that I’m holding the key to unlocking the secrets of my life before, of memories that don’t feel like they belong to me.
I crack the front page and begin to read:
Happy eighth birthday to me! Eli got me this diary. He slipped it into my bookbag when no one else was looking. His note says I should use i
t to tell the truth, because I never get to tell the truth any other time. I think it’s dumb because no one will ever read this. I have to keep it secret or Daddy will be upset with me. But maybe Eli will read it. Maybe I’ll say nice things about him here, just in case.
Mommy and Daddy gave me a new doll for my birthday. She has a porcelain face and beautiful long fingers and a dress with pink ribbons. They took me out to a fancy dinner at an Italian place on the boardwalk. I accidentally knocked over my glass, so Daddy refused to let me order a meal. I watched him and Mommy eat and drink and enjoy slices of pink birthday cake all to themselves.
The next entry starts with:
Some workers came to empty the pool and repair the tiles today. Mommy caught me talking to one of them. He was just asking me about my dolls, but Mommy made me sit on the bottom of the pool while she sprayed me with the hose. She made me stay down there until it was dark. My fingers are so cold I keep dropping the pen.
Fuck. That’s dark.
I turn the page. With every word I read, a ball of bile forms in my stomach and rises into my mouth. What I describe in my childish scribble is pages and pages of neglect and torture. My father burning my elbows on the stovetop because I didn’t keep them off the table during dinner. My mother forcing me to eat rotting, rancid meat in my sandwiches because she said my fancy school cost them so much money. And all of it recorded in my halting, eight-year-old hand, just lists of things that happened, like it’s completely normal for parents to burn your fucking elbows.
I rub my elbows as I read this litany of horrors with a strange detachment. It doesn’t feel real. These things happened to someone else. Not me. Someone else.
Daddy says I’m too soft, he says I need to be tough if I’m to survive in his world as his heir. He says for my own good I’m not allowed to sleep in my bed no more. All that Egyptian cotton and imported silk makes me soft. Last night I slept in my closet, but I didn’t sleep much.
My Stolen Life: a high school bully romance (Stonehurst Prep Book 1) Page 8