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“You do notsoundfine.” Yvette sniffed. “You could finish your degree quickly online, then we could do just about anything else. Or if you really want the “school experience,” we can choose a different one without all the baggage.”
I sighed. “We could,” I said, earning me a startled look from Aubrey. “Although I like this school—even with the stupid stuff.” I coughed, then took another drink of water to clear my throat. “Archie used to go here. There’s a Grayson building for Frankie’s family. I know they aren't here now…”
“But it feels like them.” Aubrey groaned then shoved off the sofa when a knock sounded at the door. She left me with the phone.
“I’m worried about you,” Yvette said. “Those stupid letters and notes. The emails. Now a fire?”
“The Forever Fan stuff is getting picked up by management.” Those letters increased over the summer. They seemed to come from a lot of different locations. Too many. The threats varied from creepy to just weird. “Why would they burn down our dorm?”
It didn’t even make sense. Aubrey returned with a rolling table loaded with our food. “Maybe because he kept bitching that we weren’t touring.”
“Yeah, a fire is gonna hurry me right back into a recording studio.”
“Not right now,” Yvette said. “And stop trying to talk. You’re making my throat hurt.”
I smiled at her.
“How about you guys just come up here for a few days while school is sorting things out? Come stay with me.”
I would love to, but we had so much to do. Clothes to buy, supplies to replace, and my books… fuck.
Slumping back on the sofa, I made a face.
“What?” Aubrey asked, worry in her eyes.
“My laptop,” I said. “I can’t remember if I saved that paper to the cloud and all our books.” The school liked to give us summer assignments to warm us up for the year.
Her grimace matched my own.
“I’ll order your books,” Yvette said. “It will give me something to do. You’re going to need uniforms and regular clothes. You left stuff here. Want me to send it down?”
That led to a debate about what we needed and when we needed it. Eventually, they made me shut up entirely and write things down.
By the time we finished the call, we had a plan…and it was almost time for Dix to get there. While I normally just liked Dix, right now, I was aching to see him. I just wanted to have a little calm and certainty back.
That would help. Course, we still had to sort out where we would be rooming. More clothes shopping, uniforms, books, electronics…
I glanced at the running clothes.
More douchebags.
Eleven
JONAS
Three days. Three days after the fire, I caught sight of blue hair ahead of me in the hall. I forgot to breathe for a full minute until she turned and I could verify it was her.
She was back, and she was okay. She and her bandmate were both in uniforms, so they’d gotten those sorted. That was good. I followed along with the steady flow of students into the auditorium. This was the largest of the three on campus. I doubted we needed this much space, except they’d summoned the entirety of the junior and senior classes.
KC’s dorm housed maybe a hundred and fifty girls… did we really need a meeting of both full years? When the object of my study settled on the far left side of the auditorium toward the back, I slid into the row a couple behind theirs.
I considered sitting right behind them, but I wasn’t sure what to say to her about the fire. All Ramsey had said was she would be fine. I hadn’t asked Lachlan, and I was pretty sure I didn’t care what he thought.
The hum of conversation rose and fell as people shared distraught stories about the fire, what they lost, or how much they’d “freaked” out when they heard about how bad it was. What happened to…?
Yeah, I didn’t care about those people. Tuning them out, I kept my attention riveted on KC as she gathered up her length of blue hair and pulled it into a ponytail. Unlike everyone else, KC and her bestie said nothing.
It was one of the things I noticed about her during that first semester. Well, I’d actually clocked the behavior, the lack of verbal reactions during that first semester. Even in my limited interactions with her, she didn’t say much. I thought it had to do with her attitude toward us and toward “peons.”
