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It feels wrong. Dumb. Awkward.
I try not to feel too self-conscious as I walk to the high school’s entrance for the first time. Alone.
I don’t have friends in the Academy. A couple of outliers like me—scholarship kids and geeks—don’t mind eating with me or doing school projects together when we need to pair up, but we don’t tend to exchange phone numbers. How pathetic is it that I only have my parents on my phone, while my sister’s is always buzzing with a new message?
I’m wallowing in my general unsuitability, unpopularity, and isolation, when I enter the dark, marbled hall with exposed beams and an impressive domed ceiling with painted angels.
I don’t look at the spectacular decor, so much fancier than the middle school’s. I can’t. My eyes are glued on the couple making out right in the middle of the hall for all to see.
Some girl whose name I don’t know—blonde, and tall, and buxom, and everything I am not—is sucking faces with a gorgeous golden prince with dark gray eyes and messy hair.
The boy I thought was mine.
EIGHT
Ivy
It made sense, really. He wasn’t going to not kiss girls just because his dad told him he had to marry me someday. And he wasn’t going to kiss me either. I was a little kid on her first day of high school, and he was starting his senior year.
It made perfect sense. If I’d stopped to think one single moment, I would have expected that he’d have girlfriends. Maybe if I hadn’t been a complete social pariah, I would have had boyfriends, too, before then.
The first day of school was the first time I saw Alessandro with his lips glued to some girl’s, but it certainly wasn’t the last. Turns out, he was a bit of a player. Which again, makes sense. Aren’t all pretty boys?
I told myself it had nothing to do with me, and maybe I could have believed it, too, if everyone didn’t constantly mock me about the fact that my own fiancé preferred just about every other girl to me.
School had always been about learning, attending the lessons, getting good grades, and I focused on that, isolating myself further, becoming a staple in the huge, ancient library—so much so, the equally huge, ancient head librarian ended up asking me to shelve some books when she could tell I wasn’t really working.
I think I might have fallen in love with literature right there, in that circular room worthy of any fairy tale, the wall covered in hundreds, thousands of books. Dusty volumes, some of them unique first editions no one could touch except for assignments and only with written authorization, but also new novels. The librarian made a point of ordering modern books every month. By December, she asked me what books I thought she should order.
By the time my birthday came around, I was placing the orders myself, while she made us hot cocoa and told me to go out with my friends.
* * *
“You’re my only friend, Mrs. Bellerive,” I retort.
“Say that again and I’ll ban you from this place, young lady. You’re fifteen, not fifteen hundred, like me.”
She is joking. I think. Though she’s wrinkled enough to look like she’d been here as long as the Jane Austen first editions.
“Sixteen, actually,” I say with a huge grin. “It’s my birthday!”
I’m excited. Mom’s taking me to pick a car after school, and she and Dad promised they’d teach me to drive soon. That’s the best present I’ve ever had.
Mrs. Bellerive purses her lips, clearly put out. “Get out of here.”
At first, I think she’s joking. Especially since it’s actually April Fool’s. She always says I should get out more.
“But then who will order the next Riordan?”
“I will!” she huffs. “And you, missy, are going out to have lunch in the courtyard. It’s a lovely, sunny day, and it’s your birthday! Go.”
She actually seems quite indignant. I try to change tactics. “Lunch hour is almost over anyway.”
“I know you have a free period right after. Spend it under the sun, around people your age. You’re a gorgeous, clever little thing. You can’t isolate yourself like this forever.”
I don’t tell her I’m not the one who’s isolated myself; people did it for me.
To placate her, before she decides I need a true intervention and bans me from my only safe haven in the school, I decide to go. Besides, she’s right; it’s sunny. It won’t hurt to enjoy the return of spring for a little while. And although I avoid the courtyard at lunch time, it’s not so bad during my free period when most of the students are in class anyway.
