next to June’s so hard the metal rattled. She nearly groaned when she
peeked around her open door and saw Arabella Ferguson there.
If people thought their Mondays were rough, they should try one at
Fairfield Upper Academy. The private high school catered to Cincinnati’s
elite. The tuition for a year cost more than most people paid for college
admission. The chances of getting into a good college were increased by
attending a good high school like Fairfield, and June’s parents had urged
her to take all her brightness and bundle it into applying for a scholarship.
It was rough, going to a new school for her last year. She didn’t know
anyone when she’d started and all the rich, spoiled, entitled kids knew she
was both fresh meat and hadn’t grown up in the same gated communities
and mansions with freaking pools in the backyard and sports cars in the
driveway.
Arabella turned to her group of friends, four other girls who were all
various shades of blonde. None of them were as pretty as Arabella. They
didn’t dare upstage her, and all of them, including Arabella, were on the
cheer team.
She held her nose in June’s direction and pretended to gag. “Ugh, it
smells like old trash. Rotting garbage. That’s it. Right. Poverty. The stench
of little miss ‘call on me in class all day because I’m so smart that I got a
scholarship to be here’.” Arabella laughed obnoxiously and Christine,
Charlene, Aberdeen, and Savannah joined in, their forced giggles feeding
Arabella’s mean-girl giggles.
“I heard your dad’s a mechanic. He spends all day working on the cars
he’ll never be able to afford. Must be hard, wanting something so badly,
knowing that you’ll never have it. Oh, I have an idea. Maybe I could talk to
my dad, and he could come work for us. My dad is always complaining
about how his cars need tuning this and fine tuning that and whatnot. Oh,
wait. I’m sure he doesn’t work on things like that. Probably just the regular
junk the rest of the world drives. But if your family needs the help, I could