*
The next day, I walk into science and find Royal Dolce sitting at the table in the back corner where I’ve made my unobtrusive home all week. He doesn’t sprawl casually like some of the jocks, but just sits there, still and empty-eyed, staring into the middle distance. I walk back and stop when I reach the table.
“Is this some kind of joke?” I ask.
Royal takes his sweet time turning his attention to me. “All of high school is a joke,” he says. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
“So, what? You got transferred into this class just to fuck with me?”
He snorts. “I’ve been in this class, sweetheart. You’re the one who transferred in.”
“You weren’t here all week.”
“I’m a senior,” he says. “I work at my own pace.”
“Which is why you’re in a junior science class?”
“We don’t worry about grade levels here,” he says. “As long as you get everything done, you can take the classes whenever you want.”
“Lucky fucking me that we both took the same one this period.”
“You gonna stand there all day or sit down?” Royal asks with a smirk.
“I’d rather stand all day.”
“Don’t worry,” he says, pushing a chair my way. “I don’t bite… Hard.”
His eyes flit down me, and I feel my nipples harden inside my shirt. Ignoring the sensations in my body, I roll my eyes and take the seat, since I’m the last one standing and the irritated teacher is glaring at me. Royal scoots my seat in right next to him, though I would have preferred the end of the table. “You did my brother wrong yesterday,” he murmurs. “You’re going to pay for that, Harper Apple.”
“No, see, I think what happened is that he did me wrong,” I say. “And then he paid for it.”
He gives me a cool look. “That’s not how it works around here.”
“Maybe it is now.”
We stare at each other for a long moment. His eyes are dark and inscrutable. His forearms rest on the lab table in front of us, his sleeves rolled up to reveal olive skin over thick, corded muscle. I try to ignore the heat coming off him, caressing my skin, shimmering over me and making me want to squirm in my chair. Electricity crackles between us as we stare each other down.
His eyes are as dark as twin pools of obsidian, and they draw in everything around him like a black hole absorbing light and energy, sucking in everyone’s darkest hidden truth, the ones we won’t admit even to ourselves.
At the same time, they’re somehow empty, as if they destroy everything he absorbs, as if no matter how much he feeds that empty, insatiable pit inside him, it’s never enough. Nothing fills it. He’s perfectly, purely hollow. It makes me ache, makes some stupid, primal part of me want to reach out and touch him, wrap my arms around him, fill him with all he’s missing.
“You don’t make the call about how things are around here,” he says at last, his voice low and his eyes still sucking me in.
“Fine by me,” I say. “But you should thank me for bringing you a taste of the real world. One day you’re going to have to graduate, and there will be consequences to your actions out there. You can’t rely on your family’s money to get you a free pass to do whatever the fuck you want for the rest of your life. You can’t major in being an entitled prick, and you can’t get a job as a king.”
Royal just smirks and cocks his head. “Are you sure about that?”
I want to say I am, that in the real world, it’s each man for himself. That we all start from the bottom and claw our way up, that we are judged on our merits, our intelligence, our skill. But I’m not that naïve. There is no American dream where we’re all created equal, where we all have the same opportunities to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and become the next Bezos or Walton.
I’m the one who needs a reality check, not Royal or Duke. In the real world, some people start on the bottom of the heap, and everyone steps on them to climb. Some people aren’t just at the top, they have a fucking rocket waiting to launch them into space from the top of the heap. And somewhere up in space, on some other planet, is their world, while my world is down here in the gutter. In their world, people don’t face the consequences of their actions or pay for their crimes. The Dolces might as well be majoring in being entitled pricks because they’ll probably need that skill to survive life up there.
I’m the one living in a fantasy. In the real world, a name means something, and cash means even more. I’ll never be anything but a bad apple, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who got lucky and had one chance to drag herself up from there. I have to do what I have to do. Kissing feet, sucking dick, it’s all part of the climb. Girls like me, we do whatever’s asked if we want to get up, get out of the gutter. We can’t be picky or proud. We’re beggars. We don’t get to choose the cost of getting out.
And the Dolces, they’ll never be anything but what they already are—kings of the world. Guys who get away with anything in school and will get away with anything in business when they leave here. This is a taste of the real world, a hell of a lot more sobering and more accurate than the bullshit they tried to feed us at Faulkner, telling us we could be more, we could have as much.
The Dolces were born on thrones, with silver spoons in their mouths. I was born on a stained mattress with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Guys like them die as kings, laid to rest in their riches, with big obituaries on the national news to recount their glory. Girls like me die unnoticed somewhere, maybe in the weeds down by the tracks, and if we’re lucky, we get a line in the local paper.
This is reality. Slapping someone’s dick doesn’t change it. It just pisses off the people who can leave me in that ditch and walk away with a slap on the wrist at worst.