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CHAPTERONE
Holly Garrison
“Hi, Holly,” my best friend, Lyla Perry, says as her face, framed by her long red hair, appears on the screen of my phone. “You know, every time you call, it feels like you’re just rubbing my face in the fact that you’ve graduated, and I’m still stuck here at school.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her with a heartfelt wince. “But just remember that while you were coasting through your junior and senior year of high school, I was busting my ass taking classes while also working as a waitress to pay my tuition.”
She nods slowly, then pushes her glasses up her nose. “Right. I remember now. I will try my best not to hold the fact that you’re two years older than me against you again.”
Lyla and I grew up in the same hometown. We went to the same high school. Most likely sat in the same classrooms, just not at the same time, since I was two years ahead of her. Our paths rarely crossed back then. We didn’t hang out with the same friend group. I had no idea the quiet redhead was so cool until we ended up living in the same dorm at Lenox University.
Thanks to my wonderfully rich but unsupportive parents, who refused to pay my tuition for an early childhood education degree, I had to take out loans, work part-time jobs, and live in the dorms all four years of college.
Not that I think that parents should pay every penny for their children’s education or anything. It’s just that my mom and dad have more money than god and withheld it from me, specifically to break my will. They thought that a little thing like being poor would grind me down until I caved and agreed to go to law school or medical school or danced along any other scene they planned out for me.
I didn’t break, and I haven’t spoken to those jerks in almost five years.
It’s not like I’m missing out on much. Dinner parties where I would have been required to prance around and mingle with their rich friends who would be shoving their entitled, prickish bastard children down my throat.
I wanted to get up every morning and go to a job I loved. I wanted to marry for love, not for social standing or whatever else is important to my parents or my father’s political ambitions.
It’s not like they ever gave a crap about what I wanted, though. They shipped me off to boarding school as soon as I could walk.
It was for my own good, in order to learn to be independent, they said.
And yes, I did learn to be independent. So much so that I no longer needed them or their money. They could not withhold their love, as they had never really given it to me so much as occasionally let me glance at it as they passed.
“Sorry to bother you, Ly. I wouldn’t have called, except this is an emergency.”
“An emergency?” she repeats with one red eyebrow arched.
“I have a date tonight, and I don’t know what to wear.”
“A date? Finally?”
“Yes, finally. I needed time to recover from frat boys and horny professors.”
“Obviously. Now, tell me about him so I can help you choose an outfit.”
“Okay, so we met in, like, real life.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. I was just standing there, pumping gas as one does.”
“Right,” Lyla says, resting her chin on her closed fist. “Go on.”
“He came over and said he liked my car.”
Okay, so technically, it’s my parents’ car, a white BMW M4 they bought for my high school graduation present. Since I didn’t have two pennies to rub together, I packed it up and rode off to college in it. I should’ve thrown the keys in their face, but that was when I was weak and still wasn’t sure if I could actually make it on my own.
“What was he driving?” Lyla asks.
“Uh, I’m not sure. I think he had a black car? No clue what kind.”
“Okay. So, he gave your car a compliment, and now you’re trying to decide if you’re going to sleep with him tonight?”
“Lyla Perry! I am a lady!”
