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We walked to her locker, which was closer to the main entrance to the school, in the front hall where the office was. “On a scale of one to ten, how different is Eastcreek High from your old school?” Erin asked.
I let my eyes take in her outfit: an oversized sweater with holey jeans, neither of which were name-brand. Her red hair was a little frizzy, pulled back in a loose ponytail. No makeup on her face, none that I could see.
Honestly, no girl from my old school would’ve been caught dead looking like that, but I didn’t mind the more natural look.
“Ten being the same or different?” I asked.
“Ten being different.”
“Then that’s easy: ten out of ten.”
We made it to her locker, and she let out a skeptical sound. “Oof. Is that a good or a bad thing? I’m guessing bad, since you don’t want everyone to call you a Montgomery.” She opened her locker and shoved her bookbag in.
Shrugging, I muttered, “I’m just used to my old school. It was a lot bigger than this, and a lot newer.” I wanted to mention the smell the majority of this school had, but I didn’t know if she’d consider that insulting, so I kept it to myself.
“It’s really not so bad here. Might be a culture shock to someone who’s used to bigger and better things, but it’s really not bad.” Erin didn’t exactly say it with her whole chest; it was like she knew she had to say it, because I was a new student, a Montgomery, so she had to make this place sound better than what it was.
As she got out her books and her notebooks for what must be her first few classes, I glanced down at my schedule, taking it in for the first time. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t have any art classes on my roster—I wasn’t sure if I should ask to switch up my schedule to get in one or not. I doubted anything here was mind-blowing. I might be better off keeping my fourth-period study hall.
Erin shut her locker. “Come on.”
And that was how I shadowed Erin on my first day.
My classes were pretty bland and uninteresting. Being such a small school, all of their textbooks were old and falling apart. All of my teachers introduced me to the class as Brianna Montgomery. The first few times it happened, I corrected them, but as the day wore on, I let it go.
I could repeat the fact that I was Brianna Dent, not Brianna Montgomery, until I was red in the face, and it still wouldn’t sink in to any of these people. Not the faculty, not the other students, nobody. It was like I was instantly revered as someone cool, someone untouchable, someone the other students stared at with a mixture of awe and suspicion, the girls and guys for different reasons.
In the hall, quite a few guys tried introducing themselves to me, but I paid them no attention, following Erin around like a duckling tailing after its mother, desperately trying to keep up. Erin had warned me the guys would try hard to get with me, not only because I was the new girl but also because of the family I was now a part of.
The Montgomery family was obviously the wealthiest family in Eastcreek by a longshot. No one else even came close. I wondered, as the day wore on, how many of these students depended on Alistair and all of his investments and his businesses. The way everyone talked, the entirety of Eastcreek now belonged to him.
Which was just ridiculous. You couldn’t buy an entire town, no matter how rich you were.
I think.
Lunch rolled around, and Erin told me I could sit with her and her friends if I wanted. I was in no mood to try to play musical tables with anyone else here, so I accepted her offer. I hadn’t packed a lunch, nor did I want to eat whatever it was they were serving in the kitchen. Normally, I skipped lunch during school, anyway.
By the time Erin and I got to her chosen table in the cafeteria—a place that smelled a bit musty and actually had some deer heads mounted on the walls, around pictures of student athletes from previous years that had broken school records—her friends were already there.
All girls, and all of them looked to be marching to the beat of their own drum.
One had bright pink hair, and the moment she saw me sit down across from her, her eyes widened. “Oh, my God. I love your hair,” she gushed. “Did you get it done somewhere, or did you do it yourself?” When Erin threw her a look, she quickly added, “I’m Angelina, by the way.”
“Angelina loves talking about hair,” Erin whispered to me. “She also dyes her hair different colors every week.”
“Hey! It’s not every week. More like every other.” When Angelina said that, the other girls laughed. “Seriously, though. Your hair. Tell me all your secrets please.” She leaned forward on the table, lacing her fingers through each other, and set her chin on her hands, waiting.
“I did it myself,” I told her, and if it wasn’t for her hands beneath her jaw, I think it would’ve dropped to the floor.
“Damn. Can you do my hair next? I’d love to do something like that, but the colors always bleed—”
The girl beside Angelina cut in, “Ignore her. Get her talking about her hair and she won’t take a breath until lunch is over. I’m Kaity.” She gave me a smile as she pushed up the thick glasses on her nose. Her brown hair was perhaps the curliest hair I’d ever seen, and she had it pulled back into a ponytail—but even that couldn’t contain her curls. She bumped shoulders with the girl on her left. “This is Cherith.”
Cherith was perhaps the most unassuming of the group, with long, thick, dirty blond hair and a small piercing in her nose. She said not a word, but she did smile at me. She then turned her head down to her lap, where her phone sat.
“Also ignore her,” Kaity went on, covering for Cherith. “She’s always too busy reading smutty fanfic to, you know, talk.”
Ah, so Cherith was just as weird as everyone else here. Wonderful. But, you know what? It was kind of refreshing, meeting a group of girls who weren’t afraid of doing what they wanted or looking how they wanted. A switch from my old school, one hundred and ten percent.
