Page 31 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

I was fourteen when the scholarship letter arrived.

My mother cried when she read it. Happy tears, she insisted, wiping her face with the hem of her apron. “My boy. My brilliant boy.”

We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in South Boston then, the two of us crammed into eight hundred square feet that always smelled like her cooking and the lavender sachets she tucked into every drawer. My father had been dead for six years, a construction accident that left us with nothing but medical bills and a Social Security check that barely covered rent.

But I was good at school. Better than good. Eventually, the teachers noticed, and somehow, miraculously, Ashford Academy noticed as well.

Full scholarship. Four years at one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country, a place that fed directly into the Ivy League. A place where a kid like me could actually become someone.

“You’ll be different there,” my mother warned me as she packed my single suitcase. “The other boys, they won’t understand where you come from.”

She was right.

Ashford was old money and older traditions, full of boys who’d never worked a day in their lives. I stuck out like a sore thumb with my secondhand blazer and my rough accent.

The first few weeks were hell, and it only got worse.

And then I met Max Cavill.

He found me in the library, which was where I spent most of my time, partly because I loved the books, but mostly because it was the one place I could hide from the casual cruelty of boys who’d identified me as prey.

“You’re in my seat.”

I looked up from my chemistry textbook to find a dark-haired boy glaring down at me. He had a sharp jaw and cold green eyes, and everything about him radiated entitlement, from his perfectly pressed uniform to the way he held himself like the world owed him space.

“I don’t see your name on it,” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “Do you know who I am?”

“Should I?”

For a moment, he just stared at me. No one talked to Max Cavill like that, I’d later learn. His family owned half the buildings on campus and his father sat on the board of trustees.

But I didn’t know any of that. I just saw another rich kid trying to push me around.

“Move,” he said flatly.

“No.”

The standoff might have lasted all night if Finn Preston hadn’t wandered by with his usual impeccable timing.

“Max!” He dropped into the chair across from us, completely oblivious to the tension. “There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere.” He glanced at me, his face breaking into a sunny grin. “Oh, hey. You’re the scholarship kid, right? Ethan? I’m Finn.”

“I know who you are.”

“Do you? Excellent.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Listen, can you help me with the chem homework? I’m absolutely dying and Max refuses because he says struggling builds character.”

“It does,” Max muttered.

“It builds anxiety, is what it builds.” Finn turned those guileless blue eyes on me. “Please? I’ll owe you one.”

I should have said no. Should have kept my head down, focused on my grades, kept myself away from people who would only complicate things.

Instead, I found myself explaining chemical bonds to a boy who was genuinely, spectacularly terrible at science.

By the end of the hour, Max had stopped glaring and started listening. By the end of the week, he’d grudgingly admitted I was “not completely useless.” By the end of the month, the three of us were eating lunch together every day.

“Why do you hate me?” I asked Max one night, late in October, when we were supposed to be studying but were actually arguing about evolutionary biology.