Page 8 of Outcast

“Are you in the upper-sixth?”

He grinned. “Thank you for the compliment, but I only turned seventeen a few days ago. If you’d like to give me a belated birthday kiss, I’ll accept it with humble thanks.”

My hand shot up to my mouth to hide a giggle. Blake was charming and funny, along with ridiculously handsome. A girl could fall for a rogue like him and probably not even regret it when he moved onto the next conquest. There was only one way to deal with such a flirt, and that was to never give him what he wanted until he swore off other women and meant it.

A smile curved my lips. All my knowledge of men was theoretical. During the times between divorces, Mom and I could get really close, and she would dish out nuggets of advice that I never thought I’d need… until now.

“Right.” Blake furrowed his brows. “You’ll be rooming with Rita Yelverton.”

“Why did you say her name like that?”

He blinked. “I don’t follow.”

“You said her name as though there was a nasty smell under your nose.”

“She’s a scholarship student.” He raised a shoulder. “Music and academics.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing at all,” he said too quickly to be true.

I narrowed my eyes. Either Rita was an innocent girl whose studious habits and scholarship offended him, or she was an unholy bitch who made Charlotte seem as cheerful and loving as Mary Poppins.

I placed my key in the lock and turned it, revealing a huge room, larger than my previous dorm in Park Prep. On the far left, four narrow windows streamed their light on two single beds arranged in a pair of alcoves. A fire burned in a stone fireplace, whose contents crackled and popped and spread dry warmth throughout the room. The side of the room farthest from the wall had posters of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, two of my favorite jazz musicians, and smaller pictures of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald.

I stepped into the room and exhaled a sigh of relief. No one who liked such great music could be a bad person. When Noelle got dumped, she and I had spent hours singing along with Billie Holiday’s songs of heartache. A person who really understood those words couldn’t ever inflict pain on others.

“There’s something you’re not telling me about my roommate.” I turned and narrowed my eyes at Blake, who lounged against the doorjamb like he was a jazz singer. “What is it?”

He raised his palms. “There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s just… unpopular.”

“Why?”

Blake stepped back into the hallway. “It’s nothing I can place my finger on. Rita isn’t just not very sociable.”

I shrugged. “Antisocial I can deal with.”

He clicked his heels in the parody of a devoted soldier and bowed with a flourish. “Then I will leave you to acquaint yourself with your new home.”

Blake strode down the hallway, leaving me to study my side of the room. The white wall and white comforter on the wooden bed made for extremely dull accommodation. I’d have to buy a quilt or ask Mom to send something over from our storage unit.

With Rudolph’s help, she had sold the Parkside apartment from the settlement she received from my previous stepfather, a man I’d barely met because I’d been sent away to school. Very few had bothered to ask why I didn’t just walk the twenty minutes it would have taken each morning. But then I supposed a lot of us at Park Prep were in similar situations with parents too preoccupied or apathetic to care for their own kids.

My monogrammed, Louis Vuitton cases lay at the foot of the bed. They were Mom’s way of apologizing for letting Rudolph send me halfway across the world. I shook my head. Did she think meaningless luggage could replace a mother?

I pulled out my smartphone and texted Mom, then Dad, then Noelle, to tell them I’d made it to my new school. Dad lived all the way in La Jolla, California, with his wife and young family, and couldn’t afford to take care of a teen who would need college tuition and other equally as significant expenses.

After tying back my hair with one of the bands I kept around my wrist, I shut the door of my room and picked up the first case. I’d missed two weeks from the start of term. That was an eternity for someone who needed to take exams in a foreign country with foreign spelling and foreign study methods.

A knock sounded on the door, and the knob turned. Before I could straighten, Charlotte stepped in with a pair of girls wearing headbands the same shade of burgundy as their blazers. Each stood with their chests thrust out, looking like they were in the middle of a boob-enhancement exercise. I imagined they were trying to appear as well-endowed as Charlotte, but they just looked pathetic. If I called them clones, it would suggest that Charlotte had a sense of style worth copying. The girls were more ghastly apparitions of Charlotte, or better still, doppelgängers.

“The British public school system is far more advanced than anything you’ve experienced,” said Charlotte. “Go back to America.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “I thought this was a private school.”

Charlotte rolled her eyes, glanced back to her pair of doppelgängers for reassurance, before turning back to me. “In Great Britain, public schools are the most elite.”

“Much like the British cabinet,” I said with a smirk.