Chapter One
I hadn’t realised how much I was missing my car until I was on my way to reclaim it from Rob’s repair place that afternoon. I was practically dancing up the street, the sun on my face feeling about ten times as warm as it was normally supposed to. I was already imagining how the weight of my key would feel in my hand once again.
It had been a long road since some idiot had plowed into the side of my car while pulling out of a parking spot—with me inside at the time—and roared off, never to be seen again. I had the special good fortune of parking in one of the few locations in the city where no security camera had captured the fleeing driver sufficiently well enough to identify him. They’d never found him. I still cowered whenever someone slammed a door anywhere near me.
Contrary to what the save-the-planet mob wanted to put out there, public transport was not the promised saviour. It added time to my journeys I hadn’t been able to afford while working overtime to pay the excess on the damn car repairs, and every other day I was waiting at a bus stop, some guy would hit on me under the pretext of noticing I ‘looked worried’.
Damn right I looked worried when that sleazy nonsense was the least of the terrors ahead of me. At worst, if it happened to be the day all the low-lifes were out to withdraw their welfare bucks, I could look forward to being squashed into a quarter of a two-person seat with some asshole in trackpants talking loudly on the phone about the crimes the cops hadn’t managed to pin on him while trying to jam his knee up my nose. Now I was about to have my car back, I was never going to let anyone convince me to get on one of those nightmares again.
“Calista? Is that you?”
Speaking of nightmares…
I turned my head enough to acknowledge Ashleigh Tanner, who had come up from behind me with an entourage in tow, all of them trailing down the street at a distance of a few feet apart as if they all had the right to claim that much space for themselves, fuck anyone else who got caught in the midst of them. Exactly what I would have expected of people who hung around with Ashleigh, in fact.
I had been going to school with Ashleigh since we were four-year-olds in kindergarten, but in all that time Ashleigh had hardly talked to me. I didn’t blame Ashleigh that much; it was clear from that far back that the two of us did not really exist in the same world. Even as a four-year-old Ashleigh had a future already mapped out for her. She’d stood up in front of the class and told all the other little kindergarteners she was going to be a lawyer when she was older, with a set of offices that had her name printed on the front (last, not first) and six male assistants. She’d somewhat uncertainly explained that her office would have a glass ceiling that she was going to smash through, something to do with being the only girl there. This was what her parents had told her.
My parents had told me I should probably finish high school, because you never knew when that thing could turn out to be useful.
So I didn’t like Ashleigh at all, but that was hardly Ashleigh’s fault. I tried to achieve at least minimum politeness. “What can I do for you, Ashleigh?”
“You live around here, right?”
Apparently she’d managed to pick up one detail about me, even if she hadn’t noticed it had been Callie and never Calista since I was seven.
“Yeah,” I said. “Somewhere around here.”
“Don’t suppose you know how to find a car repair place that’s somewhere in this neighbourhood? I don’t know the name.”
“Rob’s? I’m heading over there right now to pick up my own car,” I said before thinking.
“Great!” Ashleigh said. “Lucas needs to get his car as well. We can go together.”
No, I told myself, don’t— But my head did an anxious little quarter-turn backwards anyway, and as advertised, there was bloody Lucas Starling at the back of Ashleigh’s little queue of ducklings, but weaving his way forward to come to the head of the pack.
I was not surprised that Lucas Starling was a part of Ashleigh Tanner’s crowd. More to the point, that Ashleigh Tanner was a part of Lucas Starling’s crowd.
“Hi, Callie,” said Lucas, and edged in next to me so that Ashleigh was forced to drop back. “Picking your car up too, you said?”
I did not want to have to collect my car with Lucas watching. I didn’t want to give him and his friends a chance to see what I drove up close, especially when his car was undoubtedly some shiny monstrosity that cost five figures new—and I bet he did get it new, too. And there was no reason I should humiliate myself in front of someone who would go back to not giving me a second of his time once this encounter was over.
I couldn’t exactly say that, though. That was the thing about dealing with that end of the social scene: we all knew exactly how it worked, but we weren’t allowed to draw attention to the fact that things were a certain way. It just made it embarrassing for everyone. I was supposed to pretend I enjoyed the crumbs of attention the likes of Lucas Starling would give me… and then, when they weren’t interested in offering them, stay silent on a shelf out of the way until they had a use for me again. Like some doll from the last season.
No thanks.
I wasn’t going to make more trouble for myself than I needed to, though. “Yes,” I said, “that’s right.”