by L V Chase
“Shush, Diana,” one of the girls says.
Diana backhands her so forcefully, the sound echoes throughout the room. Even the cooks stop scraping their stoves with their spatulas and slam their pans down.
Diana pulls on her hair, some of the strands ripping out. “God, it’s so fucking loud. It’s so loud. Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
The girl she smacked is sobbing, clutching the side of her face. She’s trying to hide under the table while one of her friends comforts her. Everybody else at the table seems paralyzed.
“Everything is so goddamn fake,” Diana mutters, gripping her hair again. “Aren’t you tired? I’m so fucking tired of being a puppet. I’m so fucking tired.
Eric and another one of the boys slowly stand up. Diana doesn’t notice as they move behind her.
The boy beside her tries to grab her again. She smacks his hand away.
“If one more person puts a hand on me, I’m going to hurt them,” she warns. She seems to be near tears. “Why? What’s the point of pretending? What’s wrong with all of you?”
Eric and the other boy lurch forward, grabbing her by the arms. As they pull her towards the entrance of the dining hall, she’s screams like she’s in physical pain, her whole body thrashing as she tries to get away. Right before she disappears out the doors, she manages to bite Eric’s arm. I hear flesh smacking against flesh, and the dining hall is left in silence.
I look back over at Grayson’s table. Unlike everyone else, he isn’t looking at where Diana disappeared. He’s looking directly at me. His usually passive face is tense with concern. For me.
The dining hall erupts into commotion as everyone rushes to make the best joke or spread the best gossip about Diana.
Grayson looks away from me. I leave the dining hall. Diana might have lost her mind, but she’s right. Everything is too loud, too fake, and I’m sick of pretending.
39
Cin
“I saw Diana earlier,” I say.
As Jay and I walk to my dorm, we pass under the street lamps. The distance between them is far enough that Jay spends a second in darkness before he’s drenched in the glow of the next light. It makes it difficult to keep eye contact with him, so I keep looking forward.
“She was walking with Aurora and her disciples. She looked happy, but after what happened this morning, somebody should be trying to get her help. They act like nothing happened.”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but people here aren’t leaking with empathy,” Jay says. “The only reason they wouldn’t kick Diana out of their group is because they want to keep up the lie that they’re perfect. If they pretend it never happened, everyone else will too.”
“This whole school is a cult,” I mutter. As we stop in front of my dorm building, I get out my card key. “Thanks, Jay. What do I owe you for all of these therapy sessions? A car? A private island?”
“A private island wouldn’t be bad,” he says. “I’d settle for an Audi.”
I laugh. “Alright. I’ll work on it. Could take a few lifetimes, but you’re the patient type.”
His eyes flicker down my body. “Sometimes.”
As his eyes meet mine, I see what he’s seeing. A flirtation. A flame. A future.
I just don’t feel it.
“Good night, Jay,” I say. His faint smile falters, but he forces it back on.
“Good night, Cin.”
As I unlock the doors and step inside, I see a glimmer of the school year I could have had if I hadn’t lost my mind and fallen for Jay instead of Grayson. Jay could have brought me happiness without bringing a storm with him. But now, I’d always compare him to Grayson, and we would always exist in the shadow of what Grayson and I could have been.
I open my room door. I flip on the light as the door swings closed. I toss my phone onto my bed and stretch. For a split second, I think one of my bones cracked, but the sound isn’t coming from me.
I spin around.
Diana is in her closet, her hanging clothes draped over her head and her shoes poking outside of the door. The least surprising part of her appearance is the vodka bottle in her hand. She takes a sip as we stare at each other.
“Hey,” I say, taking a step toward her. “Are you okay?”
“Fucking great,” she slurs. “I’m in a fucking closet.”
“I see that,” I say. I offer her my hand. “Do you need help getting out?”
She spits at my hand. Only a couple of droplets hit my skin, but I pull my hand back.
“Fuck you,” she snarls. “I know the truth now, Cinnamon. You like to run in, playing savior, but I know you’re Satan.”
“If this is about Grayson, it wasn’t anything,” I say.
She whips the vodka bottle at me. It bounces off my hip and lands on her bed. A trickle of vodka pours out onto the floor.
“It wasn’t anything?” She throws her head back as she forces out a laugh. When she looks back at me, her eyes are cold. Not a single ounce of mirth in them. “Aurora told me everything. It was supposed to be you. I was your replacement, but you just—you just fucking skipped out without giving a fuck about what might happen to the next girl.”
“Diana, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “Did Grayson do something to you? Should I call the police?”
She jerkily stands up. “Stop fucking playing stupid. You know what I’m talking about!”
“I don’t!” I say, showing her my empty hands.
As she tries to steady herself, she pulls some of her clothes off their hangers.
“Everything,” she mutters angrily, tossing her clothes onto the floor. “You’re all so fake. Just—fucking stop acting. Stop acting.”
“I’m not acting, Diana,” I say. “What do you mean you replaced me?”
She stumbles out of the closet, yanking one of her cardigans off of her arm. She stares at me, her eyes nearly slits.
“You,” she says, forcing me take a step backward as she stumbles forward towards me. “They wanted you.”
“Diana, nobody wanted me.”
When Diana puts her hand down on my nightstand, her right knee nearly buckles under her. I step closer to her, offering my hand again, hoping to help steady her.
She lunges at me. Two sharp jabs into the right side of my abdomen force me to stagger back, nearly falling into the edge of the alcove. Burning heat erupts under my skin. When she pulls away, I see that she grabbed my palette knife off of my nightstand. I can’t recall using so much excess red paint.
I look down. The heat is running down into my jeans along with a bright crimson wetness.
When she stabs me a third time, the pain flares. Her hand draws back, leaving the palette knife in me as she takes several steps away. My knees give out. She covers her face with her hands, whispering to herself. When her hands fall away from her face, the right side is painted with my blood.
“Diana,” I hiss.
She doesn’t seem to hear me. I reach for my pocket. My phone. Where’s my phone?
I had tossed it on my bed.
I try to pull myself up, but my arms feel like polymer clay, sculpted to look like arms but flattening under the smallest pressure.
Diana notices my focus. She picks up my phone, fumbling with it. She wipes the screen on her shirt. The blood must make it difficult for her to use the touchscreen.
“Diana,” I repeat. I grit my teeth as pain carves into me. “Talk to it. Call nine-one-one.”
She brings the phone up to her ear. She’s not even looking at me.
“I made a mess,” she blurts. “I messed up. I need help cleaning it up.”
A silence falls upon the room as she listens. I roll onto my back. I grimace as I press down on the wounds, but it only makes the blood push out faster.
Fuck.
“She came after me,” Diana mumbles, almost pouting. “It’s her fault. It wasn’t supposed to be me.”
“She’s crazy! She stabbed me!” I try to yell out, but it’s barely lo
uder than her.
“Shut up!” Diana screams, smashing the phone against the bedpost. She drops it onto the floor. The screen is destroyed. “You’re getting exactly what you deserve. This is what you would have gotten if you’d done what you were supposed to.”
A chill runs through my body. It starts to spread, a cold front traveling through my body. It should lessen the pain, but the pain only has sharper edges now.
Diana paces back and forth, creating faint shoe prints of blood on the hardwood. I rest my head on the floor, staring at the blood pattern. They remind me of red, watercolor poppies. I should have painted more with red. I’d been so consumed with painting trees and lakes that it was easy to miss poppies, cherries, fire, blood.
I try to push myself up again, but my palm slips on the blood.
I didn’t survive my father’s abandonment, living in a rotting, molding apartment with a narcissistic mother, a war zone of a school, Damian leaving without a word, and this fucked-up school, just to bleed out while begging for a broken girl’s help.
“Diana,” I say, gritting my teeth together. I get one knee under me. Warm blood seeps into my jeans. “Diana. Give me my phone.”
She shakes her head. “No. No. No.”
“Diana—"
“No! Shut up!”
“Diana, give—"
She turns as a noise at the door distracts her. I lunge forward, using every muscle in my body to collide against her. She stumbles, bumping against her bed, but she easily shoves me off her. The door hurls open as I slump to the floor.
Grayson charges through the door, grabbing Diana. Diana’s arm flings forward, trying to hit him. Grayson grabs her by the wrist, slamming it against the bed frame. The knife falls onto the floor. I try to reach for it, but my strength is gone.
Grayson slams his fist into Diana’s head. She collapses down beside me. She doesn’t move.
Looking up at Grayson, I see why everybody is terrified of him. His rage is a black hole, all-encompassing and inescapable. His presence is as terrifying as it is comforting.
He yanks off his shirt, kneeling down beside me. He presses it against my puncture wounds. I wince, pulling away.
“I know it hurts, but you need to apply pressure,” he says. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. I know you. You can take the pain.”
I press down on the shirt. I turn to look at Diana as he brings a phone up to his ear. She’s still breathing.
“I have a woman who’s been stabbed multiple times on the Roman Academy campus, Dawson Building, Room 1,” Grayson says. His face contorts with tension as he looks down at me. Then, his face blurs. “That’s irrelevant. If you have a fucking problem with that, ask my father, Lawrence Voss, but do it after you get a fucking ambulance here. Do your goddamn job, then be a nosy bitch.”
My hands relax over his shirt. The pain starts to fade.
“Cin, you need to—" Grayson drops his phone on the floor. He presses the shirt down on my abdomen, sending a burst of pain through me.
“Grayson,” I mumble.
“Don’t talk,” he says. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”
I hear the sirens approaching. I look up at him. He has red streaks of blood around his mouth. I had thought his eyes were icebergs, chilling me in their coldness, but it’s not ice. He’s the same blue that I use to add a softness to harsher color. If I took his eye color and added it to the tint of my blood, it would become a purple orchid. Exactly like one of those galaxies that glow violent.
I mean, violet.
I smile at him before letting the darkness pull me far away.
40
Cin
The hospital is a whirl of motion. At least it is for the doctors and the newly admitted patients rolling by in their beds. For me and the patients in the other rooms, we’re pools of lethargy wasting away. We need someone or something to push us forward, otherwise all we can do is change the TV channel or sample the hospital cuisine.
God, it’s only been a week and I’ve drawn every staff member here, but I still have an undying desire to run through these halls, screaming at the top of my lungs.
But I can’t. It turns out that after you’re stabbed, it fucks up the muscles, and every time I turn, pain finds me. It’s a sharp pain, traveling along the muscles like an electrical current.
Jay knocks on the door before he steps in. He’s carrying a paper bag.
“I got you a bacon and sausage breakfast sandwich,” he says. “It’s lucky there’s a cardiothoracic surgeon here.”
“Oh, you’re the best.”
He hands me the bag. I take it, pull out the sandwich, and take a big bite. It’s lukewarm, but the taste makes my taste buds nearly weep with joy.
“They keeping you loaded on painkillers?” he asks.
“Oh, definitely. If you want me to say anything insane, now is the time to do it. Though, Aurora’s already recorded me getting wrecked, so it’ll be old news. She must be happy I’m here.”
“Can’t be sure,” he says. “Everyone’s acting a little weird.”
He fiddles with the zipper on his jacket. He’s holding something back.
“What is it?” I ask.
He looks up at me. He grimaces.
“Well, Grayson isn’t at school,” he says. “He hasn’t been at school all week. I’ve heard people try to pry information out of Aurora. Or, Layla tried to, and Aurora kicked her out of the group. Nobody tried again.”
I wipe the edge of my mouth. “What about Diana? Is she in prison?”
“Well…” Jay runs his hand through his hair. “No. She’s not. She…Cin, she killed herself.”
My heart drops. I hadn’t been wishing her well, but this is worse than whatever justice I had imagined. She’d had a mental breakdown. She needed help. Preferably in a prison, but she still deserved to live.
“God,” I say. “I…I mean, she wasn’t my favorite person, but I know she wasn’t doing well. That’s horrible.”
“Mm.”
I stare at him. “You’re leaving something out. What? Did she say something about me before she died?”
“No…” He starts fidgeting with his zipper again. “There’s just some ugly rumors.”
“Jay, I swear if you don’t start talking, I’m going to jump out of this bed and pretend that I have the strength to pummel you.”
He takes a deep breath. “It’s just…some people are suspicious that she didn’t kill herself. The police have firmly stated that it’s a suicide, though.”
“Why? Why are people suspicious?”
“The circumstances...”
As I throw up my hands, pain shoots through me. I lower them again, glaring at him. He gives me an apologetic smile.
“She stabbed herself to death,” he says. “The police claim it was three times.”
“Oh.” I stare down at my sandwich. “So, people are suspicious because she stabbed herself? She was out of her mind, Jay.”
“Well, there’s that,” he says. “And she drew Voss News Network’s logo in her blood before she died. So, people are suspicious that Grayson’s involved.”
I’ll take care of everything. It was the last thing Grayson told me. And she was stabbed three times—the same amount of times I was stabbed.
“And of course, Aurora is pissed about these accusations against her step-brother,” Jay continues. “So, she’s been spreading her own rumors.”
I raise an eyebrow. He raises his shoulders, letting them drop slowly.
“She’s been saying…that you’re the one involved in Diana’s…death,” he says.
I shake my head. “How? When did it happen? I would have been here or bleeding out in my room.”
“She’s saying you had your buddies from your old school come around and retaliate against Diana.” He looks down at his zipper. It dangles awkwardly from his jacket. He broke it. “It’s insane, but I think some people might be starting to believe it. You know how dumb her friends are, and Aurora’s been saying
that she heard someone talk about killing for you the night of the…death.”
He fiddles with his zipper, trying to fix it. When someone knocks on the door, he relaxes, happy for the distraction. He opens the door.
An ache in my chest hopes it’s Grayson. I need to thank him. I need to look at his face and know he didn’t murder Diana.
The man who steps in certainly isn’t Grayson.
He’s slimmer than Grayson. Instead of Grayson’s wild dark hair, this man has light brown hair that’s buzzed close on the sides and longer on top. It reminds me of soccer players, but the suit he’s wearing screams of big money and a bigger ego. Like Grayson, he’s exactly the type of man girls would destroy themselves over to get his attention. But his body language and expression aren’t cold like Grayson’s. He’s a stranger, but everything about him exudes warmth.
Then, he smiles, and I recognize him.
“Oh, my God!” I sit up so suddenly, forgetting my injuries.
As I wince, he reaches towards me, putting his hand on my shoulder with a gentle, comforting touch. I grit my teeth through the pain, wrapping my arm around him and pulling him closer. “Holy shit, what are you doing here?”
“I just transferred to Roman Academy,” he says. “And everybody was talking about Cin Reeves, so I had to swing by.”
“You two know each other?” Jay asks.
I glance over at him. I’d completely forgotten he was here.
“I’m sorry, Jay,” I say. “Um, Jay Winters this is Damian White.”
Jay’s eyes widen. “Oh, shit. Damian White.”
“You’ve heard of me?” he asks with an amused smile. Heat rises into my face. Jay looks over at me.
“Just a little bit,” Jay says, standing a little taller. He offers his hand to Damian and they shake hands. “Cin and I know each other pretty well. We’ve talked quite a bit. I’d heard you left rather abruptly.”
“And now I’m back,” Damian says, a note of finality in his voice.
I know a testosterone-fueled cold war is about to break out, but all I can do is stare at Damian. He used to be cute, but now he’s all…grown up. Fuck. And things must have been going well for him, because he’s definitely not poor anymore.