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I was poor. Had been my whole life. I didn’t belong here. Every bit of money that’d been spent on my tuition, every bit of privilege I had at the moment, was a gift from grandparents who felt like strangers.
But they were wrong about one thing.
I wasn’t fucking trash.
Huffing a weak laugh, I patted the side of my backpack where’d I’d stuffed my little wallet with the shiny black card Jacqueline had given me.
“I just got a platinum credit card, so… I’m good.”
Leah’s lips pursed into an O. “Damn! All right then, girl, we’re definitely taking that thing out for a test drive. Here, let me give you my number.”
We exchanged numbers at the door before I watched her bounce away. She really was glass-half-full about everything—something that probably should have irritated me but didn’t. I liked her optimistic attitude. It made me feel a little less pessimistic about life at the moment.
Besides, she was pretty much my only friend in the whole school at the moment.
Once she was out of sight, I trudged up the stairs to my dorm room. It only took me about twenty minutes to unpack everything, and when I was done, the closet still looked woefully bare. It actually made me a little excited about shopping with Leah. I hadn’t enjoyed clothes shopping in forever, since it usually meant agonizing over every decision, weighing whether whatever I wanted to buy was worth more than food or other household necessities—and more often than not, returning half of what I’d bought a week later.
So maybe it would be fun to go shopping with someone else’s money, to buy whatever I wanted knowing it wasn’t a trade-off for something I needed.
I dumped my textbooks on the desk in my bedroom and put the picture of my mom off to one side before I glanced out of the window. The Princes strolled across the lawn toward their dorm in the distance, moving with such confident purpose that people simply melted out of the way for
them. They were like sharks, I realized, cutting through the water with a feral grace, threatening to rip the limbs off anyone who got in their way.
Unable to help myself, I leaned closer to the window, resting my hands on the sill and peering through the glass. It was hard to believe they were real, and I found my gaze tracking them as if I might catch their forms wavering, see them vanish like mirages.
All four of them were astonishingly beautiful and equally terrifying. I watched as they talked intensely, their expressions tight as if they were in deep conversation.
Did it have to do with the argument in the stairwell? What the hell had that been about, anyway?
I almost wished I’d slipped through the door earlier so I could’ve heard more of what they were arguing about. If Mason was going to assume I’d eavesdropped anyway, it would’ve been nice to get a clearer picture of what had pissed him off.
Elijah, with his dark bronze hair and regal features, glanced up at my dorm. I froze, my breath seizing in my throat. They were a good distance away, separated by a wide expanse of lawn. But I swore he could see me. His gaze lingered on my window for several more heartbeats before he turned and continued his conversation.
I let the air leave my lungs in a whoosh before I yanked out my desk chair and plopped into it.
Come on, Talia. Be smart.
These guys all affected me way too much for my own sanity. Part of it was the dangerous attraction I had to them that made my heart beat faster. The other part was the roiling disgust at their behavior, their status, their way of life.
Shaking my head firmly, I opened my chemistry textbook, deciding to tackle my worst subject first. If I threw myself into the massive pile of homework I’d been given, maybe it would take my mind off the Princes and the rest of the insanity that was Oak Park Prep for a little while.
After all, today was just my first day.
I still had to survive two more years in this place.
Chapter 6
The next week came and went in a stressed-out blur. Back at Sand Valley, I’d always gotten decent grades. They weren’t the best, not straight A’s or anything, but the lowest I’d received was a C—and that was between working two jobs and taking care of Dad.
If I’d expected Oak Park to be easier without all of the extra stress of running a household and working nights and weekends, I was dead wrong.
The courses weren’t on the same level.
At all.
Oak Park set a bar and set it high. The instructions were sink or swim, and every teacher shoved my ass off a pier then sat back and watched to see how it would go. They seemed only half interested in me—just enough not to piss my grandparents off if I said anything, but not enough to actually help me with anything for more than five minutes at a time.
It was frustrating as fuck, and part of me wondered why such a prestigious, expensive school didn’t do a little more handholding to assist their students. Then it occurred to me that maybe the wealthy families who sent their kids here wanted them to be put through the ringer. Maybe they considered it preparation for the cutthroat real world they’d be entering eventually.
