Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 131789 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 527(@250wpm)___ 439(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131789 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 527(@250wpm)___ 439(@300wpm)
“I met a chick out there the other day,” I tell Fenn.
Confused, he follows my gaze to the woods. “Were you out there building a fort or something?”
“I was wandering around and followed the path to find a place to smoke. This girl comes running up and basically told me next time I’d be shot on sight.”
Fenn pushes open the door to the building. “Ah, yeah. That trail’s off limits. Leads to Sloane’s house.” He glances at me over his shoulder. “Best to keep your distance.”
“She was hot, though. Like in a step-on-your-balls-and-make-you-call-her-mistress kind of way.”
He snorts a laugh. “You poor dumb bastard.”
“Why, who is she?”
“Sloane Tresscott. She’s the headmaster’s daughter.” He’s still chuckling to himself as he strides forward. “As in the one person on this campus you actually can’t fuck with.”
Chapter 10
Sloane
The first day of school sucked. I walked out of St. Vincent’s after the last bell ready to chalk it up to jitters, a bad mood, or not enough sleep. Call it a fluke and try again. Only today isn’t looking much better. The teachers run this place like a Russian gymnastics camp. Get caught breathing too loudly in class and it’s fifteen lashes and a day in the stockade. I thought all those cliches about Catholic school were only true on TV, but it turns out they take all this saints and angels stuff super seriously.
Which wouldn’t be so awful if the other girls were at least tolerable. But they’re not. Everyone I’ve met so far is either infatuated with their own reflection, too good for the room, a straight-up raging cunt-monster, or the reincarnated soul of a forty-year-old virgin pilgrim searching for sluts to hang. I made the apparently heinous sin of putting on a little makeup and wearing my skirt above the knee, so just walking the halls I’m catching daggers from the judgey swamp creatures who lurk here.
I don’t know why I thought an all-girls school would be a good idea. It’s like taking all the catty bullshit from a co-ed high school and distilling it into an estrogen-supercharged toxic cocktail of bitchiness. But maybe it’s just me.
Not like there were a lot of options after Dad pulled us out of Ballard. Casey’s accident freaked him out so badly that he didn’t want her within a hundred yards of that campus ever again. St. Vincent’s is the last private school within a commutable distance to Sandover, and since Dad would rather force his own faculty to homeschool us than send us to public school, here we are.
After class, I stop by my locker to see a couple girls with flat hair watching me. Like they’ve been waiting. It gets my back up right away, and I’m reminding myself to take my rings off if I have to start swinging.
“I heard,” the first one says too loudly, eyeing me over the other girl’s shoulder, “her sister went crazy.”
“It’s true,” the other says, and turns around to look me dead in the eyes. Her name’s Nikki. She was in my first period, and I knew the second she watched me walk into the room that she was going to make me kick her ass.
I suppose it was wishful thinking to hope the rumors wouldn’t make it all the way to St. Vincent’s. At Ballard, it was impossible to shut them down—God knows I tried. But despite my best efforts, the most traumatic event of my sister’s life turned into the second most traumatic event of her life. Sympathy from her peers? Yeah, right. Casey didn’t get any of that once the rumor mill got to work. She became the crazy, drugged-up sophomore who tried to drown herself for attention. As if Casey would ever be capable of something like that.
“My cousin goes to Ballard and said the crazy bitch drove her car into a lake at prom,” Nikki says gleefully. “Like how fucking extra can you get?”
My hand drops from my locker as I give Nikki an overly sweet smile. The Ballard assholes drove Casey out of school, but I’ll be damned if I let the St. Vincent’s assholes do the same. “Sounds like your cousin’s a stupid bitch who should learn to keep my sister’s name out of her mouth.”
She smiles back, smug and self-satisfied in her cruelty. “But it’s true, right? She, like, had a psychotic break.”
“Did she?” I say softly, closing the distance between us to speak just to her, despite eyes lingering on us as others pause to witness. “What if it was the other sister who plunged her car in the lake? What would make her do such a strange thing? Someone like that would be unhinged. Utterly unpredictable. Capable of anything, really. Even sudden bouts of blind rage and intense violence. Without proper medication and treatment, I certainly wouldn’t want to provoke someone like that, you know, become the thing that sets them off again.” My smile widens. “Who knows what they’d be capable of, right?”