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“She’s the sidekick of Crimson’s most repellent Upper. What else am I supposed to assume?” he asked, glaring at me.
He was too gorgeous to carry such dark thoughts. When they flickered across his golden good looks, it made his face fill with shadow. I wanted to prove to him that I wasn’t the Willow he knew last year. I wasn’t even the Willow he even knew ten minutes ago. My personality was evolving by the minute as this entire new world unfolded before me inch by inch.
“You mean Victoria? I can’t stand her. Why do you think I’m in here?” I said. “I don’t know if I was attached to her hip last year or something, but the coma must have knocked some sense into me.”
“Coma girl,” he said with a sharp laugh. “I forgot about that.”
“I haven’t,” I said. “Everything feels so strange for me right now. I don’t think I belong anywhere, let alone this place. I’m sorry if I did anything to you last year that might have hurt your feelings. Both of you.”
“Not me,” Luke said, “but you did hurt someone that I love.”
“Who was it?” I asked, but his face darkened into shadow even more, and he looked over me as if I didn’t belong, as if I wasn’t even there.
I frantically turned to Harlow, and she widened her eyes before she said, “His sister Marianne. Victoria bullied her horribly last year, so much that she ran away. She’s still missing.”
I turned to Luke to protest, to tell him it wasn’t me, that it was all Victoria, but a loud alarm went off at that moment, and Harlow cursed under her breath. “Fuck, I was hoping they’d let us have the last class off. Sometimes they let us off easy on Friday afternoons.”
I dabbed my cigarette out on the bench and slipped the half-finished end into my crossbody bag. Harlow and I pushed through the hedge on our side of the clearing, and Luke pushed through into the maze on their side of the courtyard. I looked back as I left, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, and I found him looking at me again.
This time there wasn’t disgust in his eyes. There was something else. A curiosity, as if I wasn’t who he expected me to be.
And he was right. I really wasn’t.
I didn’t know who I was anymore.
* * *
Thankfully,the final class of the whole week was swordplay at last. The week had been a strange journey of me being bounced from one person to the next, or one event to the next, not feeling connected to any of them.
I had already been elevated to the next level two in swordplay the previous year, so I was expected to dive into our forms and sparring with full knowledge of it all. Of course, I knew nothing. There was a big empty space in my head where my learning should have been, and the first time I picked up my assigned sword, nothing clicked.
“I might have to start over,” I told our instructor, Henri, as he insisted we call him. “This doesn’t feel natural.”
“You just need training,” he said with an arrogant French accent. He wasn’t tall, but he was thin, whip strong, and his forearms were all corded muscle. Like a greyhound dog, he could out-fight you with one arm behind his back. “You haven’t had enough practice. Once you feel the sword in your hand again, it will all come back.”
I was doubtful, but he insisted. He thrust a long, thin blade into my hand and began to position his feet to attack me.
I was clumsy and fell when I tried to back away. The class laughed uproariously at me, and from what I could tell, I probably deserved it. I had a reputation for being kind of a dick about my skill, and the way my classmates treated me told me I wasn’t shy about bragging every chance I got.
Seeing me fail was probably a sweet victory. I didn’t mind any of them taking pleasure in my failure. Still, the way Victoria looked at me with triumph in her eyes seriously pissed me off.
Somebody had to take her down a few pegs, and I had the sneaking suspicion it would eventually be me. I didn’t want to go head to head with her, but something inside told me I could do it. That it would feel good to see her fear.
“You’re terrible, coma girl,” Henri said in his snobby accent. “Go stand with the Lowers. That’s where you belong now.”
Victoria sneered at me as I walked past her and her crew, tittered, and stepped forward.
“Henri, I have been excelling at my private lessons lately,” she announced loudly. “Could I please show you some of the things I’ve learned?”
“Yes, my dear,” Henri said, pride warming his voice. “Please, show the class the things they might excel at if they can obtain a tenth of your skill.”
“Or her money,” Harlow quipped to me at the back of the group. “I know you’re rich, so ignore my simmering anger towards the Uppers in our society. They do not include you. But most of you are utterly insufferable. The absolute worst.”
“We truly are,” I agree. “I don’t know why. It must be some sort of poison. Like the more money you have, the more idiocy leeches into the system.”
“Like coins? The lead from them?” she asked. “Or do you mean something else?”
“Just the general malaise surrounding the pursuit of money,” I pondered. “The levels of sociopathy they must aspire to destroy the lives of Lowers taints their very souls.”
