While Rafael grows quiet, his brow furrowing as he restarts the whole inner process again, I take the opportunity to look around the room.
This is one of the only spaces in Bleakwood that doesn’t have tall windows overlooking some scenic view or other. It has arching beams overhead and a small, raised platform off to the side that’s currently being used to house leafy potted plants nearly as tall as I am. Like the entirety of the student body, they look imported from some far-off place. Also, like the rest of the students here, they look like they’re worth a fortune.
One glance around the room at the boys filtering in around us, I see how Rafael singled me out at once. These boys here … they’re not like my brothers. While I was raised with four boys who cut their own hair, wrestled in the backyard after school, and considered hand-me-downs a rite of passage—these boys look like they stepped out of a “rich boys monthly” magazine.
Expertly coiffed hair abounds. Uniforms, though received just this morning and worn all day since they didn’t hike tragically up the mountain all afternoon, are still perfectly pressed. Sure, their nails might not exactly be manicured—but they’re somehow chewed to the quick, like the rest of them, in the most purposefully casual way.
Though these boys are in the midst of the same raging hormone tornado that I am, there’s nary a zit in sight. In fact, the more I look at them closely, the more I wonder if I might have inadvertently walked onto the set of a face wash commercial.
“So, what’s the deal with them?” I ask, jerking my head in the direction of the boys who’ve gotten me entangled into some weird fraternity shit on my very first day. “I mean, how do you even know them? Isn’t everyone here from different schools?”
“Sure,” he says, nodding, “but most of us have families that have been coming here for decades. Some of us, over a century. That sort of thing goes on long enough and it isn’t the only tradition that ends up being passed down. To those three, The Brotherhood is practically a birthright.”
“I thought this was a merit-based school?” I say, knowing it sounds stupid beforehand and saying it anyway.
“Yeah, well, you heard the dean next door … somehow merit has a lot to do with your last name at places like this.”
“Meaning?”
“Any place that has to claim its applications are merit-based.”
“Right.” I glance down at the table in front of me and wish dinner had been served already so I at least had something to push anxiously around a plate. I wonder how many bites Rafael is going to let me take before he smacks the food out of my hand this time. “So, about this Brotherhood … .”
“Actually, I’d like to hear about that too.”
The voice belongs to a boy so tiny I don’t even realize he’s standing over my shoulder until he repeats himself a second time … though that might have something to do with the way I’ve been scouring the faces around me for any sign of imperfections that might convince me one of these boys is somehow still human.
The one now standing beside me points to the seat next to me with a shaking finger. “This seat taken?”
When I don’t claim it right away, the boy lets out a sigh of relief and scurries into the empty seat like a squirrel. As soon as he sits down, I see Rafael calculating him, trying to decide what his addition to our table means for his future social position.
From the way the boy now squirming beside me keeps glancing around him like he’s just waiting for the inevitable avalanche that’s coming, I’m sorry to say it doesn’t bode well.
“Sorry,” the boys says when he catches me staring. “I’m just a little nervous.”
“First time?” Rafael asks, slumping forward with his elbows on the table—clearly resigned to his lot in life. Guess he decided he wouldn’t be lumping in with the cool crowd the moment he made the mistake of helping me.
The boy nods a little too vigorously. His glasses side further down towards the end of his nose with each bob of his head.
“I’m Neville,” he chirps.
“And I’m—”
“Alex, right?”
I don’t get the chance to introduce myself before a deep voice behind me does it for me.
Even though I haven’t heard his voice up close, I know who it is. Even if he hadn’t spoken, I would have been able to sense the presence from the way those around me have suddenly gone so silent.
Neville shrinks back in his chair looking terrified while Rafael just tries his best to look completely nonchalant.
Seems like Rafael didn’t have to explain the order of things to me after all. I get to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. And in this case, the horse has a square jaw, full lips, and eyes that should not be allowed to be that shade of blue.
Jasper, the ringleader.
The two other boys flank his sides, each one standing almost uncomfortably close. It’s like they move as a single unit, a single-minded body.
Right now that mind, that gaze, is on me.