three
Royal Dolce
“Dude, she’s not here today,” Duke says, elbowing my arm and making me drop my sandwich, which falls all to pieces on my plate.
“What the fuck,” I say, pushing back from the table.
“Want me to get you another sandwich?” asks the freshman girl who brought my first one.
“Sure, whatever,” I say, barely sparing her a glance before she scurries off to serve me like I’m a fucking king. I don’t even remember her name. I never cared about any of them. Baron chooses the girls. I’m sure my brothers will fuck her if they haven’t already. She’s pretty and blond and wears no makeup, but I wouldn’t care if she was a fucking Kardashian.
I glower at the empty chair at the table where the nosy bitches sit. If she’s out talking to Colt under the bleachers again…
“You hitting that on the DL or what?” Cotton asks.
I turn to him, satisfied by the way he stiffens, even though he pretends he’s not afraid of me. “Who?”
“You’re not exactly being subtle,” Gloria says. “You’ve been glaring at her table like you want to murder the whole lot of them for the entire lunch break.”
Everyone else at the table stops to listen. I’m so fucking sick of them all watching, waiting, like they’re just here to see what I’ll do next. Waiting for me to snap. I’m sick of being the boy who was kidnapped, the boy who might castrate you if you cross him. The boy who killed his sister. Everyone has an opinion. Like Baron says, you can’t stop them from talking. You can only turn the conversation in your favor, if you’re clever.
“Well, where the fuck is she?” I demand of Lo, as if it’s her fault that Harper isn’t here. As if she’s the one who made sure Harper would never feel anything but hate for me again, and not the girl who went to check on her for me when I couldn’t do it without ruining everything.
“The real question is, why does it matter?” Baron asks.
“Yeah,” DeShaun says. “You do you, man, but don’t leave us in the dark.”
Right. They’re all looking to me, waiting for me to put in the final word on Harper. They’ve been waiting all week for their QB1 to call the play. If I say she’s off limits, no one will lay a finger on her. If I say she’s the enemy, they’ll destroy her. If I say she’s cancelled, no one will ever speak to her again.
It’s fucking ridiculous. Sometimes I want to tell them all to jump off the bridge just to see if they’re really a bunch of fucking lemmings.
But they’re my boys, and I’m being an asshole. I need to give them something.
I did what I did, and I can’t be sorry about it. If I didn’t make her hate me, I’d be tempted to do something I can never do, or never undo, I’m not sure which. Maybe both. When she’s in my head, nothing makes sense. All I know is that I had to get her out of there, and if I couldn’t, I had to make her hate me enough to take herself out of the picture.
“She’s done,” I say. “We’re done with her. She’s nothing.”
“Then you won’t care about this,” Lo says, sliding her phone across the table to me.
On the screen is one of the social media accounts of the meddling, Darling-worshipping bitch Dixie Powell. Not her blog, but Rumor Has It, one where she posts little gossipy tidbits throughout the day for vultures like the Waltons to pick up and spread like a disease. If Baron didn’t remind me on a regular basis of her usefulness as an instrument that helps us stay where we are, I would destroy her life with more enjoyment than I would a Darling. I fucking hate Dixie and everything she stands for.
Rumor Has It… a notorious loner boy and a girl who’s gained sudden notoriety this week were seen leaving campus together before school. Have these two lonely souls found a friend in each other, or is it something more?
My blood boils as I read the post. It was posted only two minutes ago, but I see people bent over their phones, eating up her gossip like it’s ice cream and not dog shit. I see her basking in the glow of admiration at her table, eating that shit up as eagerly as everyone around her is eating up her idiotic, uncreative words.
In a few weeks, no one will care what Harper’s doing. But this week, she’s in the spotlight, and Dixie’d be damned before she’d miss out on an opportunity to insert herself in the drama. She’s a master at grabbing the headlines, keeping her finger on the pulse of the school, and using it to her advantage. The only person better at it than Dixie Powell is my brother.
That’s not why I hate her, though. I hate her because she inserted herself into my family’s life, because she used her friendship with Crystal to her advantage. I hate her because she encouraged my sister to pursue things with a Darling, because she helped her sneak around, and then my sister ended up dead while Dixie played the grieving best friend. I hate her because she used the sympathy to build a platform for herself, because she is now popular by association with the tragedy that is my fucking family.
And I hate her because she’d sell out the guy she supposedly loves and the girl whose empty chair is two spots down at her own table just for five minutes of attention.
When she gets up to go to her Friday meeting, I follow. She’s scurrying down the hall when I step out of the café, but my stride is twice as long as hers, and it takes me no time to catch up to her. I grab her shoulder and spin her around, slamming her up against the lockers.
Her eyes widen, darting around as she licks her lips, and for a second, she looks like that freckly little freshman I dismissed as harmless back then. I should have seen her for the snake she is. “Hey, Royal,” she says, a tremor in her voice.
I brace my hands on the locker on either side of her, caging her in. “Where’d you get that bullshit you just posted?”
“It’s not bullshit,” she says. “And I can’t reveal my sources. People would stop coming to me with information if I ratted them out.”