And each one of them only served to make me progressively angrier and angrier.
I looked over at Harlow to where she was seated a couple of rows down. She looked back at me, and our eyes met in mutual disgust and disbelief. I shook my head and mouthed “What the fuck” to her as she laughed silently.
I looked down to Victoria and a few of her crew and to the empty seat beside her where I had been expected to sit. Victoria was enthralled by the lecture. She was ever the dutiful girl, the queen of Crimson Academy, the shining example for us all.
And she hated me. I could see it in the dark glares she threw my way every chance. I had snubbed her by taking a seat at the back of the lecture theaters and snubbing her insistence that she held the seat just for me.
“The one thing that separates us Uppers from the Lowers is the fact that we adhere to a strict code of conduct,” Matron Baker droned on. “Lowers are given to all manners of vulgarity and straying from society’s path. Those who are blessed to be Uppers from day one have been taught to stay in the light and resist the dark.”
Again with the dark. Why was the dark coming up around me all the time? Why was I constantly feeling the tug of the dark when I relaxed my guard? Was I simply feeling the pull of some Lower ancestor trying to get me to stray? Maybe there was some secret in our family that I didn’t know about.
Not that I knew anything about them. Mother and Father hadn’t bothered to call me to check-in, and nobody had reached out to ask if I was taking my medication. I had expected somebody who cared to monitor me, but nobody was doing either.
I zoned out for the rest of the class and barely paid attention for the rest of the day. Lunch was a strange affair where the female students had to serve the male students sandwiches and ice-cold juice while we ate the crusts that had been cut off. I wasn’t sure of the messaging there, but I resented the hell out of it.
Somehow, I got through the rest of the first week. It was boring at times, frightening at times, and almost always strange and disconnected. I felt like I was treading in dangerous waters, utterly oblivious to the horrors that lurked just below the surface. Many of them watching me, waiting to make their move to drag me down into darkness where I’d drown.
For a college, things were severely structured. It was stifling and felt more like high school. I wasn’t sure how I handled it last year with the way it made me feel. Like my clothes were too small like the fabric was too itchy. Like I wanted to tear them off and run through the campus laughing like a wild woman.
“Hey,” somebody called me as I strode to the Women’s Arts building for the final class of the week. “Hey, Willow, wait up!”
I stopped and turned around, looked across the grass, and saw trimmed hedges rustling and shaking just before Harlow’s head popped out. “Come here,” she said and gestured towards me. “Quick, before anybody sees you.”
I looked around, laughed, and dove into the hedge after her. It took a moment of squeezing through some prickly branches, but the reward was more than worth it. Inside the center of the hedge was an open space with two small benches facing each other across the square. It had grown over above, shielding us from any prying eyes in the Upper residences and giving the whole area an otherworldly, underwater green glow.
“This is amazing,” I said, looking around. “How did you find this place?”
“Lowers share it with each other,” she said, taking a seat. “Those of us who like to skip class and smoke or just get away from the relentless pressure of the program. It’s actually a secret room in one corner of the maze. You can’t see it from above, or else that would make cheating the maze too easy.”
A hedge maze. How completely on the nose for this gothic, overbearing boarding school. Now we just needed an ax-wielding crazy author and a snowstorm to complete the bizarre aesthetic.
“It pays to ditch the bitch,” I said with a grin. “Now, where are the smokes? I’ve been dying for one all day. Can you believe the weird stuff they’re making us learn? What the hell was that all about?”
“Oh, it gets worse,” she said with a barking laugh. She ran her hand along the shaved part of her skull and handed me the pack with her other hand.
I took a cigarette and lit it, sucked in the acrid smoke, and handed the pack back to her. She slipped it into a pocket inside her jacket and took the lighter from the bench where I’d set it.
It was becoming a ritual, one that I was craving more and more now that I had a taste. That was a danger of addiction. Once you got a taste, it became all you thought about.
I didn’t get the sense that nicotine consumed my every thought, but the thrill it sent zapping through my body was definitely something I longed for in the still moments of my mind.
“How could it possibly get worse than that?” I asked and blew out a long stream of smoke.
“Well, there’s the punishment room,” Harlow said. “They call it the Pit. You want to avoid that particular hell hole. It’s truly insane in there.”
“The Pit?” I exclaimed. Could this place get any worse? How could I have been happy here, even with a fiancé that everybody else was apparently dying for?
“Yes, the Pit,” a male voice responded, and Luke Lancaster pushed through to join us. He flopped onto the bench next to Harlow, reached over and grabbed her cigarette, took a long drag, and handed it back. “Don’t worry about that,Upper. It’s just for Lowers like us. Nobody would want to hurt precious future heads of industry and state… or theirwives.”
And something in his eyes made me recoil inside. I fought the bile that rose in my throat and threatened to explode from within as if my nerves were about to splinter.
Luke Lancaster hated me. He despised me. His lip curled in disgust as he raked his eyes up and down my body, and when they reached my gaze, my heart sank.
I couldn’t live in a world where Luke saw me as the enemy.
CHAPTER7
“Yeah,I forgot to mention that because I always forget you’re one of them,” Harlow said. “She’s not like them, though. You can calm down, Lukey.”