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“I already told you.” Iris rises from her prone position on her bed, her dark blonde hair in the perfect messy bun I can never, ever duplicate, no matter how hard I try. “You leave for a year and everything changes.”
She loves to remind me of this.
“Oh, I know.” I turn away from the mirror, glaring at her like I’m mad, even though I don’t mean it. She’s not only my cousin, but she also happens to be my very best friend. “But we used to start in August.”
“And now we start in September.” Iris shrugs her slender shoulders, the strap of her tank top slipping. She shoves it back into place and plops backward onto the unmade and downright chaotic bed. Total symbolism for the complete disarray that is her mind and life. “Only fifteen minutes was added to our school day, but that’s enough to allow us to start school later and end it sooner. Doesn’t Westscott have the best ideas?”
My face turns into a grimace. I can feel it, and from the look on Iris’s face, she can see it. Even though she’s lying down and staring at the ceiling. “I haven’t even met this mythical new headmaster and he’s all you can talk about.”
“That’s not true. I don’t talk about him all the time.” She rises up into a sitting position as if she’s rising from the dead. Even points an accusatory finger at me. “You’re just mad because you’ve been gone and so much at Lancaster Prep is different now. Face it. You don’t like change.”
I return my focus to the mirror and start patting the highlighter into my skin with my fingertips. “You’re right. I hate change.”
“Well, then you’re going to hate your senior year because everything is different.” Iris sounds almost gleeful. I think she’s enjoying this—torturing me over how things are all switched up at school. She’d never admit it, but she was a little jealous, a lot sad and plenty angry with me for abandoning her during our junior year of high school. That’s the word she always uses-abandoned. Like I’m her deadbeat mom and I dropped her off on an orphanage doorstep. “You might freak out and feel like you’re at a different school, but you’ll be fine.” She pauses. “Hopefully.”
My cousin/bestie has always had a flare for the dramatic.
“Iris.” I jump to my feet and whirl around to face her, resting my hands on my hips. “You have to stop holding my leaving you against me. I went to Italy. I was gone for almost a year and I missed you terribly, but now I’m back and we’re together again. Please stop being angry with me over it.”
The best thing about my relationship with Iris is how loyal we are to each other, yet we also can fight like sisters and make each other cry. I think we act like this because we’re the same age and there are hardly any girl cousins in the family. The few that exist are a solid five years younger than us and we have nothing in common. As in, we can barely tolerate hanging out with them because they’re so young and annoying.
Once we started at Lancaster Prep our freshman year and were in the same grade, Iris and I clung to each other and eventually became inseparable. No one talked about us in a singular way—it was always Iris and Willow. Or Willow and Iris. Until I applied for a foreign exchange program our sophomore year and surprisingly enough, got accepted. Oh, she was so mad at me.
I think she might still be.
“You know I love to hold a grudge.” She’s staring at the ceiling again, stretching her long, enviable body across the mattress. She’s tall and lithe while I’m short with too big boobs. “Mom reminds me all the time that I’m just like my father and we all know how he is.”
Grumpy. Quick to judge—but always willing to admit when he’s wrong. Fiercely loyal and protective but once you wrong him, you’re dead to him. Whit Lancaster is a man most don’t want to cross. His children are basically the same way—all three of them.
“But my father always says Mom knows how to hold a grudge like no other so I’m doomed.” Iris sighs. “I come from a grudgeholding, revenge-seeking set of parents. Whoever wants to tangle with me, they better watch out.”
“Revenge seeking. Give me a break.” I march over to my bed—we’ve shared a room at Iris’s house since I was little—and grab a pillow, tossing it at her. It bounces off her forehead, making her laugh. She can never stay in a bad mood for long. “Come on already. Get dressed so we can go downstairs.”
“Get dressed? I am dressed.” She slides off the bed, effortlessly chic in a cropped white tank that shows off her tan and dark brown leggings that showcase how long her legs are. She slides her feet into a pair of furry Louis Vuitton slides and throws her arms out. “Dressed and ready to go!”
I sort of hate her.
No, that’s a lie. I absolutely adore her. These are my own insecurities rising up and threatening to choke me.
We leave Iris’s bedroom, her slides slapping against the sleek white marble floors extra loud as we head for the staircase. The sound echoes throughout the cavernous corridor and I’m surprised her mother isn’t screaming at her to walk properly. I know I’m tempted to tell her just that.
“I’m starving,” I murmur, thinking of all the yummy breakfast food Marta will have prepared. She’s their housekeeper and we all adore her. She’s been with the family so long that we consider her an honorary member and she acts like one too.
Always bossing us around and telling us what to do. We all roll our eyes and most of the boys talk back to her, but we all end up doing exactly what she wants.
“I ate an orange earlier.” My side-eye is strong and aimed right in her direction, making her shrug almost helplessly. “What? I woke up at seven and couldn’t go back to sleep. The light was so bright since you forgot to close the drapes last night.”
“You have hands too, you know.”
“I guess I was too excited to sleep any longer.” Iris shrugs, shooting in front of me as she calls, “Race ya to the bottom of the stairs.”
We run down the endless steps, but Iris shot ahead of me at the top, which means she’s going to win. If my mother could see us now, she’d be furious. These are the very stairs where Sylvia Lancaster tumbled to her death—she was Iris’s grandmother and her funeral was held on the day Iris was born so we didn’t even know her. I’ve heard the family stories though. She was awful and abusive toward her daughter Sylvie, but no one really talks about her.
Typical. Iris and I are always griping about the family secrets and how no one will share them with us.
“You seem off this morning. Are you about to start your period?” Iris jumps from the second to the last step, her slides slapping the floor and echoing throughout the entire foyer. “We used to be synced up. One more thing we lost.”
Her winsome tone is as good as any actor I’ve heard.
