Mimi apologizes to me continuously while helping me pack my things. By helping, I mean delaying. Everything I do she undoes until Ms. Braunschott calls her on it. Eventually, I’m packed up and Brawny walks me through the Convent to the far end of the building.
She knocks gently on a wooden door similar to mine.
“Come in,” a demure voice says.
When the door swings open, I see Azzie sitting on the edge of her bed in a long nightgown.
Not her. Please no.
Brawny says, “Miss Morgan-Hearst, I trust you can show Miss Angerman how a proper lady behaves.”
“Yes, Ms. Braunschott,” Azzie nods deferentially. “Mary, I made your bed for you as soon as Ms. B told me we’d be roommates.”
“Thanks.” I force a smile.
Brawny helps me carry my things inside and set them on my new bed and desk.
“Good night, you two,” Brawny says and closes the door behind her as she leaves.
Azzie beams a bright smile and clasps her hands together in front of her chest. “I guess we’re roomies now?”
“I guess,” I say sourly.
“You’re my first!” she gushes.
I hate to think why, but I already have a few ideas. Like, no one wants to live with a lying gaslighter.
The next morning, things go from Azzie to ass-tampon. Are you surprised? At Castle Hill Academy, fun is verboten. Just ask Ms. Braunschott.
<(—)>
“It’s your fucking fault, peon,” Duke growls in my ear, ambushing me that morning as I make my way alone from the science building where I was vacuuming classrooms and heading over to the Convent so I can change out of my maid outfit before PE. Duke is wearing a traditional navy and burgundy striped rugby uniform short-sleeve shirt with the Castle Hill Academy crest on the breast pocket, and white shorts. His muscled arms and muscled thighs are visible and straining with thick veins.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I lie, knowing exactly what he’s talking about. “And don’t call me that.”
“I can call you anything I want, peon,” Duke grunts, cornering me on an isolated terrace walkway shaded from the rising sun by palm trees and shrubs, and hitting me hard with his familiar fragrant mix of cedar and ambergris as he forces me to back into the stuccoed wall. This man smells like money. He looks it too, a young mogul who wields his wealth and power like a hammer that hits my heart as hard as his striking good looks.
I don’t want to be attracted to him, but I am.
Duke is everything every woman wants.
“Get away from me, Duke,” I sneer, “or whatever your name is.” I push my palm against his granite chest but he doesn’t move.
“Jacob Pierpont Montforte. You can call me master.” He means it.
“Keep dreaming,” I snort. Then I remember something. “Wait. Montforte? I know that name.” I’m trying to distract him with the truth because I’m more than a little bit scared. I’m genuinely worried Duke is on the verge of murdering me with his bare hands.
Bristling with deadly danger, he growls, “Of course you remember, peon. They found you at the Constance Q. Montforte Juvenile Detention Center. My grandmother paid for that place. I make one phone call and they’ll take you back.”
“No they won’t,” I smirk. “I was going to adult jail, dumbass.”
“What did you call me?” His black eyes crackle with fury and he stabs me with a truly hateful look.
“You heard me, dumbass,” I mutter half-heartedly. My entire body tingles with adrenalin. I can’t decide if I want to run or let Duke do anything he—
“If you call me that one more time, I will end you.” His voice is so low, so predatory, there is no doubt he means end me in the most horrid way possible. This man is cruelty incarnate.
I swallow hard and nod minutely, but somehow manage not to blather how sorry I am, even though I probably should, I’m that frightened by what he might do if I say the wrong thing. He’s a bomb ready to go off.
“Now you’re going to fix this shit with Victoria that you caused, or I am going to make your life more miserable than you can possibly imagine. Are you hearing me, peon? Or do I need to carve it into your skin?” He reaches up with a thumb and grazes the scabs on my right cheek that are finally starting to fleck and fade after two weeks. “Looks like someone else already carved you.”
Somehow, what should come across as a taunt is startlingly tender. I don’t know if it’s his change in tone or the careful hardness of his thumb, but he went from crazed to concerned in the blink of his dark eyes, which are no longer crackling. They’re seeking something, I don’t know what. Not hunting, seeking. It’s a subtle difference. I can’t explain it. One is terrible, the other is tender. His eyes shine with the latter. My head is telling me that’s ridiculous, his only desire is to kill me, but my heart is hinting otherwise.
“Who did this?” he asks, brushing my other scabbed cheek.
“Stop,” I whisper not because it hurts. Because it does the opposite.
He lowers his hand but doesn’t pull away, leaning one muscled arm against the stuccoed wall over my head. His heat presses against me with a noticeable weight, trapping me inches away from his big rugby body. He asks, “Did someone do this in juvi?”
“No, it was— what do you care?” I glare at him.
His eyes die and he spits, “I don’t care.” He straightens stiffly and backs up a step, clenching his fists and flexing his arms. They ripple with corded muscle and the veins surge with rage. “You fucked things up with Victoria.”
“I did?! She was the one who—” I cut myself off. I swore I wouldn’t get involved.
“Who what?”
“Ask her,” I grumble and fold my arms across my breasts, not protectively, but in irritation. “Don’t drag me into your drama.”
“You need to fix this!”
“No! You fix it! She’s your girlfriend!”
“She’s my fiancée.”
“Sucks to be you,” I smirk.
His eyes flash black and his jaw ticks.
“Wait, you’re engaged?”
He nods.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Don’t you have to be eighteen?”
“Not with parental consent.”
“You want to marry her?”
He glares at me.
“Sorry,” I say. “That came out wrong. I mean, why are you guys engaged so young?”
He barks, “Stop asking questions, peon. Fix this shit you fucked up. Everything was fine until you came along!”
“It was?” I huff. I’m about to tell him what I saw Victoria doing with Red, erm, Skill outside drama class the other day.
“Yeah it fucking was,” Duke says.
I don’t want to argue because the truth hurts and he doesn’t want to hear it. So I change the subject and grab the first topic that comes to mind. “Is your name even Duke? I thought you said it was Jacob.”
“It’s a nickname,” he grimaces. “My dad gave it to me.”
“Well, Duke, I don’t know what to tell you. This thing between you and Victoria is between you and Victoria. I can’t fix your break up. You have to do that.” Is it weird part of me doesn’t want to help him patch things up with her?
“How?”
“I don’t know! I’m not a therapist or whatever. You’ve got money. Go pay a good one to tell you what to do.”
Duke’s face sours and he glares at me, “Money doesn’t fix everything, peon.”
“I wouldn’t know, Rich Boy.”
“Fuck you, peon.”
“Fuck you too, Fundy.” I can tell Duke has gone from on the verge of murder to confusion and irritation. With my life no longer hanging in the balance, I’m not letting him talk to me like that without paying for it.
Grunting, he spins around and walks away saying, “If I can’t fix this, you’re outta here, peon.”
“Then you better go fix it!” Now I’m mad.
He growls dismissively and turns the corner at the end of the terrace, leaving me to enjoy the view, which I’m in no mood to enjoy.
Do I like knowing my presence here at Castle Hill balances on the knife edge of his shaky relationship? No way! The strange thing is, I really don’t want to see him getting back together with Victoria. Not because of me, because that Fundy slut is totally two-timing him! Nobody deserves that, not even Duke.
Maybe what I need to do is tell Skill to knock it the F off.
First I have to find him.
Chapter 20
Mimi tells me where to find Skill but not when.
I keep thinking of him as Red, but literally everyone else calls him Skill (is that even his real name?) for obvious reasons, so maybe I should switch over. Either way, since I never see him on campus, my plan is to track him down where he works in Castle Hill’s IT department. According to Mimi, he’s some kind of computer genius.
Originally, Mimi says Skill was working laundry when she got here a year ago. Then the Academy got hit with a ransomware thing. Yes, this place uses computers for all kinds of stuff behind the scenes, like computer programming, for one. Ms. Skelter’s preference for paper and fountain pens only pertains to students and teaching faculty. Pretty much everything else in the academy’s infrastructure (and the Fundy dorms) is modernized. You wouldn’t know it from the architecture outside, but inside it’s obvious.
Anyway, when the school got hit with ransomware, the hackers wanted a million dollars or something exorbitant like that. Mimi says Skill heard about it and convinced the faculty to let him take a crack at it. They stood over his shoulder as he rooted out the malware code or whatever, and told the ransomeware hackers to F the F off. Problem solved.
He’s been working in IT ever since.
It takes a week before I actually find him. In the meantime, the Fundy girls add “homewrecker” to their list of insulting nicknames for me. Some of them spit at me after saying it, like some kind of cryptic ritual. If I wasn’t so quick on my feet, I might’ve gotten hit by their spit more than I did. Sadly, you can’t dodge when they spit at the back of your head. The first time it happened I didn’t know what it was and wiped it away with my fingers and looked at, thinking it might be bird poop or I don’t know what. It was definitely slimy and disgusting. I figured it out when they spit again.
I keep telling myself it’s better than them picking up rocks to stone me the old fashioned way. Or tie me to the nearest post or flagpole and burn me at the stake.
At least it’s just spit. But seriously, can I tell you how annoying and demoralizing it is having people actually spit at you like it’s okay? I start getting jumpy whenever I see a Fundy. Now I try to avoid them. Doesn’t always work. One time, a bunch of freshman Fundy girls chased me into a corner and the group of them spit on me. Evil little vicious witches is what they are. They’re the ones who need burning at the stake. I swear, they’re possessed.
I keep telling myself this place is better than prison, but I’m starting to think I’m blowing smoke up my own ass. Whenever that thought crosses my mind, I think about Queen LaQueefa. She was literally going to blind me with that toothbrush shank. I wince at the memory of her heavy hate weighing down on me when she sat on my chest and threatened to stab my eyes out.
You know I’d be crazy to go back to prison.
Being spit on every single day isn’t so bad, is it? Being the most hated social pariah in the entire school isn’t the worst way to live, is it?
Is it?
I’m not crying. I’m not. Sniff.
That night after cleaning the West Wing, I skip dinner and go crying back to Mimi’s room, planning to spend the night sleeping there, no matter what Ms. Braunschott says. Meems and I whisper until lights out, thinking we’ve fooled Brawny until she comes knocking.
Guess who was worried I was missing?
Azzie.
Total tattle tale.
She acts all innocent when I go back to her room.
I know better.
Such a gaslighter.
At least Meems made me feel better, however briefly.
<(—)>
One lunch hour, which is obviously only forty-five minutes, obviously, duh, I skip food at the Convent Commissary and head over to the IT building. It’s locked by one of those keycard thingies. I press the buzzer button and wait until some nerdy middle-aged IT guy who isn’t Skill answers the door.
“Yes?” he asks, pushing up his eyeglasses while holding the door open a crack. He’s wearing a Castle Hill polo shirt, random slacks, and running shoes, and he’s shaped like a potato, but he has a wrinkled peanut face.
“So, um, yeah. Last night in the West Wing? A bunch of the shower sound systems weren’t working?” I’m totally lying.
Peanut Face frowns, “We didn’t get any complaints about that.”
“It’s off and on. Someone said I should tell Skill? He’ll know what to do? Is he here?” I stand on my tiptoes, trying to look through the crack over Peanut Face’s shoulder.
“Yes, he’s here,” he huffs.
“Can I see him?”
Annoyed, he says, “I can pass the message along for you.”
“It’s, um, complicated.”
Peanut Face frowns, “How is a malfunctioning sound system complicated? If it is non-functional, we’ll check the data logs and run diagnostics until we determine the problem. Then we’ll implement a firmware solution. If it is a hardware issue, we’ll replace any damaged parts with new ones. Simple as that. Nothing complicated about it at all.”
“Can I just talk to Skill?” I wish I was wearing my French maid outfit, but I’m wearing my gray work-study uniform, which isn’t nearly as flirty. “Please? It’s really important.”
Peanut Face rolls his eyes like they weigh a ton each and sighs like he’s out of breath from rolling them, “Fine. But don’t touch anything.”
“I won’t,” I grin.
He opens the doors and leads me inside. There’s a second door where he swipes his badge. The sensor bleeps and he pushes inside. The loud sound of fans is nearly overwhelming in the big room. Row upon row of computer stacks are lined up like library bookshelves, except it’s all black boxes and flashing lights into the distance.
“This way,” Peanut Face says and leads me along a wall of windowed offices. People sit inside at computers doing computer stuff. Several doors down, we stop and P.F. says, “Skill? You have a visitor.”
Skill is sitting in an office chair typing away at a keyboard. When he sees me, he spins around and his scarlet hair whips out of his eyes. He smirks, “War Paint,” he drawls affectionately. “What’re you doing here?”
Believe it or not, I’m actually happy to see him. I glance at Peanut Face, waiting for him to leave. Instead, he walks into the office and sits at a desk opposite Skill. I notice a placard in the window with two names on it.
Arthur Hovarth.
William Rose.
I point at Skill and whisper, “You must be Arthur?”
“I’m Arthur,” Peanut Face says without looking away from his computer, his voice annoyed. “Your lady friend says the shower sound system is non-functional and only you can fix it.” He’s obviously talking to Skill.
“She’s probably right,” Skill says with smarmy confidence.
Arthur heaves a weighty grumble, pushes up his glasses, and clicks away at his keyboard with his potato fingers.
I try not to laugh.
Skill says, “What’s the problem, War Paint? No playback? System lockout?” He’s actually talking about the radios.
“It’s, erm, complicated.”
Arthur grumbles, “Whatever the problem is, miss, I will have to oversee whatever actions Mr. Rose is required to perform for security purposes. You may as well explain yourself while I’m present. Otherwise, Mr. Rose will merely have to convey your information in a lossy process that will waste his time and mine.”
Skill mimes holding a gun to his he
ad and shooting himself.
I laugh.
“Why is that so funny?” Arthur demands without looking away from his monitor.
“It’s—” I sigh because I’m getting nowhere here. Frustrated, I blurt, “Okay! There’s nothing wrong with the stupid shower sound, Arthur! I need dating advice!” I’m lying, but I’m hoping talking about boys will frighten off Arthur.
He turns to face me and smiles from behind his thick eyeglasses, “Why didn’t you say so, miss? I would be more than happy to provide you with whatever information you desire. Is it about a boy?”
“No, it’s—”
“A girl?”
“No! It’s! Can I just talk to Skill in private?”
“I don’t see the need, miss. What is your name?”
“Mary.”
“Miss Mary, I am a married man.” He holds up his hand and shows his wedding band. “I have a wife and four teenage daughters. You will find I am very experienced in the art of love.”
I cringe because I so don’t want to know.
Skill’s face is as red as his hair because he’s trying so hard not to laugh.
“It’s about Skill!” I snap. “Me and him! He and I! We need to talk! About us!”
Arthur’s peanut face wrinkles into a smile. “Why didn’t you say so, Miss Mary?” He winks at Skill, “Another one of your young ladies, eh, Skill? I know about what you do.”
Okay, that is super pervy.
“We’ll talk outside,” Skill grunts guiltily and shoots out of his chair. He guides me past the windowed offices and the stacks of blinking computers to the other end of the loud room.
I glance over my shoulder and see Arthur leaning out of his office. “Why is he staring at us?” I mutter.
“Arthur has to keep an eye on me,” Skill says in a normal voice. “Don’t worry. He can’t hear you over the server fans.”
“Is that what these are?” I motion at the stacks of black computer boxes.
Rich Boys vs. Poor Boys (The Cruel Kings of Castle Hill Academy, Book 1) by Devon Hartford kd103 Page 16