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Boyd
Riley’s knee bounces in the leather armchair, her anxiety almost contagious as we wait for the headmaster of King’s Trace Prep to return to her office. She runs her hand over her blonde pigtails, twisting the ends between her fingers, and looks around the room silently for the fifth time since Dr. Yang excused herself.
“What’s wrong with you? Why are you so jittery?”
She glances at me, turning her head as if just remembering I’m sitting right beside her. “Nothing’s wrong with me, I just can’t believe you’re making me transfer schools at the end of the freaking year. It’s embarrassing.”
“You were expelled,” I snap, thinking about the call I received from the police while pulling up the email from the county school principal.
After learning she’d only been fined for the underage drinking, I’d climbed back in bed beside Fiona and hoped that was the end of it.
I’d been overseeing an account acquisition between our security systems and a top-of-the-line company’s newly-released encryption services when the email came through my computer, demanding my attention. Instead of finishing the meeting myself, doing my favorite part of the job and intimidating anyone into fucking with our business, I’d had to step out and let Craig close.
“Expelled for something fucking stupid,” she mutters, huffing and slamming her back against the seat.
I don’t respond, thumbing through the campus brochure I swipe from the table between our chairs; it’s dated last spring, and immediately I’m drawn to a picture of a redheaded girl on the quad, surrounded by a sea of backpacks and people, yet still somehow standing out like the North Star itself.
Reality slams into me, a freight train running off the tracks. Fiona was in high school a year ago, and I haven’t been in a decade. Most of the time I’m too busy wondering about how we’ll look to her brother or father to consider there’s another odd stacked against us—that she’s so much younger than me.
If she were a few years older, maybe out of college even, it wouldn’t be such an issue, but it’s hard to justify her ruin at my hands when I realize she has so much of her life left ahead of her.
Me, I’m already half dead. My soul died long ago, withered away with my despair and the sins I indulge in, but my body’s taking longer to catch up. King’s Trace might think I’m morally superior to my fellow residents, but I’m much, much worse.
Violently irredeemable. Uninterested in changing.
Dragging Fiona down with me when she’s almost the same age as my sister feels... wrong.
But even as my brain conjures that thought, it disappears, no concrete plans to extract myself from her forming in its place.
Truth is, I think I might be addicted to her—the sunshine that she works so hard at and the dark skies that lay beneath the golden surface, only shown when she’s alone or in my presence. The connection is strong, heady, always leaving me needing.
“You agree that it was stupid, right?” Riley asks, pulling her feet up so they’re in the chair with her, propping her scuffed red Converse up on the leather.
Dropping the brochure back in its slot on the wooden table, I reach out and shove her feet down, not wanting Dr. Yang to come back and think she’s being disrespectful.
“Doesn’t matter what I think, does it? Your school had an issue with it, and they terminated your enrollment. We’re really fucking lucky that KTP even agreed to see us, all things considered.”
She scoffs. “I’m sure they’re only seeing us because they know you’re a potential donor. A tattooed cash pinata for them to bleed dry.”
“Actually, they agreed because of your grades and community service.” I skim the email I got this morning from Dr. Yang’s secretary, recalling how I’d been surprised when they didn’t immediately ask for money, especially considering the private school’s seedy reputation. “Said they believe in second chances and not letting one mistake ruin a kid’s life.”
Grumbling something under her breath, she slumps down farther in her chair, blowing a strand of hair from her face.
Sighing, I stuff my phone back into my suit pocket, folding my hands over my lap and stroking the skull tattoo on the back of my hand with the opposite thumb. “I have a lot riding on this, though, Riley. Monetarily. It’d be great if you didn’t fuck it up, especially since I didn’t get back the deposit on the New York trip.”
Shooting upright, her mouth drops as if to protest, but I give her a long look and she settles back down, clamping her jaw closed.
It rolls as she grits her teeth, and I want to tell her to stop, to warn her that once you start clenching as a means of warding off your violent urges, to satisfy the thoughts of harming every person you care about, it never stops.
Not even if you give in, letting the barbarity consume you.
Instead, it adds to the repertoire of things you can’t control, until your entire existence seems to boil down to the broken pieces of you.
“Don’t worry, Boyd, I know how important your stupid reputation is.” She turns away from me completely, opening an app on her phone and once again scrolling through the pictures of that musician with the curly dark hair she was drooling over a few weeks ago.
I watch as she pulls up photos she’s already liked, double-tapping them as if out of habit, and then scrolls onto the next and repeats the process, and I can’t help but wonder if this is some new generation gimmick, a nobody’s attempt at garnering their idol’s attention, or if we have more in common than I’d hoped.
If her obsession for someone unattainable rules her life the way mine is currently.
