Chapter One
It was close to 3am by the time I made it home from work. Only the blaring of the television overshadowed the snores coming from the sofa. The neighbours would probably complain again. I turned off the telly and gazed at my mother, waiting to see if she would wake. She didn’t, not even when I brushed her grey-speckled fringe out of her eyes. I covered her with a blanket, set the timer on the heating so I could shower early in the morning, and headed straight into my room to fall into bed, ignoring the state of the kitchen. Cleaning up her mess would have to wait. My feet ached too much to do anything but lay down.
My makeup could stay on and give me spots for all I cared; work had been crazy, and I was worn out. An unpredictably busy Thursday in the bar with a predictably sleazy bartender who slapped my arse every time the manager wasn’t looking wasn’t exactly a recipe for a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed version of me.
Despite my exhaustion, I didn’t fall asleep for an hour. Too many calculations in my head. What loan could I chip away at with my tips? What bill would be cleared for another month with my wage? Eventually, I dozed off, but three hours sleep just didn’t cut it anymore.
Back up at seven, with a fuzzy head and a mouth tasting like sour milk, I jumped into the shower before facing the mess and the prospect of another day at school. I savoured the hot water for about thirty seconds before it went ice cold.
“Mam!” I screamed, knowing I wouldn’t get a reply. I showered as quickly as humanly possible, cursing the thickness of my hair under the icy blast of water. After my shower, I got ready quickly, deciding my mop of a hairstyle could air dry, and headed into the sitting room.
Still snoring on the sofa, Mam lay there with her mouth wide open, a particularly unladylike glob of drool glistening on her chin. I checked the kitchen taps, finding the hot one running. As freaking always.
“Unbelievable,” I muttered, deciding breakfast was a no-go when I saw what was actually in the sink. I didn’t know what the hell she had been trying to make, but the way globs of black, congealed… mess had stuck to every single pot and pan we owned, we were obviously lucky she hadn’t set the house on fire.
I threw my hair up into a messy bun, grabbed my bag, and kissed Mam on the forehead before I left, but she didn’t stir. Not that I expected her to. I had already spotted the empty bottle in the bin. She would be out until late afternoon, if I was lucky. Less time for her to try and cook.
But as I prepared to close the door behind me, a softly spoken voice made me turn back.
“Dev?”
“Need something, Mam?”
“No, I… I made a mess, Devlin.”
“It’s fine. I’ll sort it out after school.”
“You’re a great girl.”
“Go back to sleep,” I said softly, leaning over to brush her fringe out of her eyes again. She ran the back of her hand across her chin to wipe away the drool. She gave me a rare childlike smile before conking back out again, and all of the grumpy morning anger I felt toward her dissipated. I could never stay mad at her. I loved her too fiercely.
I walked to school to save the bus fare for an energy drink and a breakfast bar. If I was going to skip lunch, I needed something to keep me going throughout the day. The late shifts in the bar were worth it for the tips, but they had led to an unholy addiction to energy drinks just to keep my eyes open in class.
I was one of the first into school, but I planned it that way. I had learned the hard way that the only time I could get any homework done was in school before anyone else turned up. Sitting in front of my locker, I made the most of the peace and quiet and scrambled to get as much done as possible. All of the classrooms were still locked, and a couple of bemused teachers nodded at me as they passed me by on their way to the staffroom.
As usual, the only other early bird in student form showed up and stared at me as he made the maximum amount of noise for the minimum amount of reason while opening his locker.
“Seriously, Base. Are you doing that on purpose?” I snapped, still trying to make sense of the equation blurring on the page in front of me.
“I get to open my locker, okay? You don’t own everything.”
I stared up at him, so not in the mood for an attitude. He held my gaze for a couple of seconds, and I got lost in his dark brown eyes. Clearing my throat, I looked back at my homework, but then he went and slammed his locker shut louder than I thought possible. I threw my book to the floor and jumped to my feet. “Are you freaking kidding me?”
“Oh, shut up, Queen Bitch. I’m moving along now.” He slung his bag over his shoulder and headed away, but I couldn’t resist throwing my pen at his head.
He turned around, his palm rubbing the back of his head while an irritatingly adorable grin lit up his face. “Ouchy,” he said mockingly.
“Get lost, Brian!”
I sat back down to finish off my homework, but it was no use. Anger made it hard to think, and of everyone in the world, Brian Gilligan, aka Base, was the one person who pushed my buttons just by existing.
I ended up sitting there, fuming, until my friends arrived. Shauna pursed her lips as she studied the frizzy wisps of hair floating freely from my damp bun, but she didn’t say a word. She checked out her own perfectly straight, glossy red hair in a compact mirror before ignoring the rest of us to text rapidly on her phone.
Maisy sat on the floor next to me while the boys got their books out of their lockers.
“Early again,” she said, rubbing the dents on either side of the bridge of her nose.
“Contacts again,” I teased, and she shrugged.
“Shauna’s strict instructions.” She rolled her eyes in Shauna’s direction.
“Next you’ll be losing these.” I tugged at her light brown curls.
She grinned. “Funny you should say that…”
“I can hear you,” Shauna muttered.
“Yeah, yeah,” Maisy said. “Ugh, how can you sit on this floor, Dev? My backside is killing me. Let’s get our seats before I go completely numb.”
The classrooms had been opened with five minutes to spare so we strolled into our first class together, me glaring at Base who pretended not to notice.
My kinda sorta boyfriend, Deco, tried to kiss me as he sat next to me, but I turned so his lips landed on my cheek. I wasn’t into public displays of affection, not that I was into private ones very much either. Kissing was overrated.
Shrugging, Deco settled for wrapping his arm around my shoulder. I let him because I noticed Base watching. Not that he would care. Not that I cared if he would care. Not that… Seriously, what was wrong with me?
“Coming to the party tonight?” Shauna asked me, checking out her eyeliner in the mirror she carried everywhere with her.
“Nah, busy,” I said as nonchalantly as possible.
“Oh, come on,” she said, pouting. “It’s Bobby’s eighteenth. It’ll be fun.”
“I barely know Bobby. Besides, I’ve got stuff to do.” Like a job. But I didn’t need anyone knowing all of my business. So I acted as though the party would be boring instead.
“Yeah, maybe I won’t go either,” Shauna said after a minute. Baa.
By the time I realised I was supposed to hand in a non-existent English essay during first class, it was too late to come up with an effort, so I bluffed.
“Well, where is it?” Ms. Jackson asked, her forehead creasing into a frown.
“Wasn’t in the mood,” I said. My friends all chuckled around me, but inside I was panicking. I hated not finishing something, hated giving anyone an excuse to gape at me, all of them waiting to see what I would say or do next.
“Got a staring problem?” I snapped at the blonde sitting next to Base. Her doe eyes hadn’t left my face, and I had to transfer the attention to someone else. She snapped her head back around, her cheeks flushing red. My conscience bit at me, but I had to stay on top of the food chain. I had to be the strongest one.
“Get a grip,” Base said, his eyes hot with fury.
/> I hadn’t realised he was going out with Aoife, although they had spent a lot of time with each other over the last couple of years.
“Mind your own business, you idiot.”
“Now, now. That’s enough. Everyone. Eyes on your books. And you, Little Miss I Don’t Care, have that essay on my desk first thing Monday.”
That might be a problem. I had full shifts all weekend. In fact, I didn’t know why my friends called themselves my friends when they rarely saw me outside of school.
As we left the classroom after the bell rang, Deco shouldered Base, who bristled but backed down when Aoife laid her hand on his arm.
“What did you do that for?” I murmured as we walked away.
Deco glanced back at Base. “Because he was bothering you,” he said in an overly loud voice.
“I can fight my own battles.” I managed to sound a lot more irritated than I felt, and Deco frowned back at me, apparently incapable of understanding anything I had to say.
“I have to take care of you,” he said after a couple of seconds.
“No. You really don’t. I get it. You don’t like Base. Or maybe your pride is hurt if anyone has the balls to answer me back or something. But don’t make out like I need saving. I can take care of myself. Okay?”
I linked Maisy’s arm and stalked away from Deco before I said something I regretted. Or maybe something I wouldn’t.
“Paradise not so trouble-free after all?” Maisy asked.
“I’m not a child. Not his property either. I don’t need anyone else getting involved in the crap I start.”
She grinned at me, her eyes seeming to sparkle. “You feel ba-ad,” she said in a sing-song voice.
I was about to tell her to shut up when Shauna broke through our arms and linked both of us.
“That was mean,” she said. “I think you hurt his feelings.”
“Whose feelings?” I demanded.
“Deco’s? Obviously.” She frowned at me.
“Oh. Wait, what are you, my conscience? He’ll get over it. He always does.”
But I didn’t like the look on her face when I said it.
I struggled to stay awake throughout the day. I had to run to the bathroom between classes to splash my face with water. My life, the way we were living, wasn’t working out so well. We couldn’t survive on disability benefits. Well, I could have, but my mother either let pathetic excuses for men take her money or squandered it on drink and junk whenever she was feeling low.
The heady days of a new relationship were high on the drama, but alone, she lost the will to survive, and that was something I was determined would never happen to me. She was the weak one; I had to be strong. And that was partly why Deco bothered me when he behaved as though I were some child who needed their hand held. I couldn’t let anyone take away my strength.
Besides, I was too busy working hard to be weak. I had to be the one to pick up the slack, to make a dent in the debt that just kept climbing higher no matter how much I money I put into wiping the slate clean. Going to school was kind of pointless considering I would end up taking my part-time job into full-time, and leaving school would have made more immediate financial sense, but some part of me refused to give up.
Aoife walked in as I dried my face. And immediately backed up out of there. That hit me hard. All I wanted was to keep people at arm’s length. I didn’t want anyone to fear me. I had seen fear. I had felt fear. That wasn’t what I wanted for anyone.
So I followed her, calling her name and hoping nobody would see.
“Aoife, wait a second.”
Reluctantly, she turned around, and I made a show of re-pinning my dark hair off my face to stall for time. I wasn’t used to apologising.
“Listen. I’m, well, I’m sorry about snapping before. You don’t have to run out of the bathroom because I’m in there, okay?”
A pink flush spread from her neck, up past her cheeks, and across her ears. “It’s okay,” she said shakily, fidgeting as though she were about to spring into flight.
“It’s not. Don’t listen to me when I’m tired, all right?” I smiled, and she automatically smiled back, her entire face brightening. “Well, see you.”
I turned around to get to class, feeling as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, but I practically bounced off Base who had been standing way too close.
“What are you doing, stalking me?” I pushed him out of my way, making sure to wink back at Aoife, leaving Base stuttering in confusion.
“Hey, babe. He giving you trouble again?” Deco appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and grabbed my hand to lead me away from Base.
I shrugged him off. “We just talked about that, Declan. And don’t call me babe. Wait, where are you taking me?”
“Outside to have my way with you,” he said, grinning. “Just kidding, Dev. The word is there’s a fire drill scheduled in a couple of minutes. Wanna beat the traffic?”
Shrugging, I followed him. Anything that kept me out of one more soul destroying class was fine by me. Most of our friends were already outside, sitting on the patchy grass next to the badly maintained flowerbeds. I had to control my sigh and remind myself it was still better than class. Even if the grass was a little damp.
“Here, sit on my coat,” Deco said, quite nobly, so Shauna, Maisy, and I all squeezed together on his jacket, much to his chagrin. He probably imagined him and me squeezing together instead, but I preferred to avoid his overly eager hands as much as possible.
The fire alarm sounded for the scheduled drill, and I was immediately thankful I hadn’t been inside while countless chairs simultaneously screeched across the floor. Crowds of students pushed out of the school, a beating mass of people haphazardly making their way to anywhere they could find a space to sit. It wasn’t exactly coordinated. Then again, not much about our school worked well.
I leaned back, not caring that my elbows rested on soggy grass, and stared up at the sky as a plane flew by. I would have given anything to be on it. Anything to have a reason to do something other than clean up vomit at home and at work. I closed my eyes and let the cool early summer breeze caress my skin. If I blocked out all of the chatter, I could imagine being somewhere peaceful. Somewhere safe.
“Oh, my days. Who is that?” Maisy squealed in my ear. Resisting the urge to smack her jaw for severely damaging my eardrums, I sat up and followed her gaze. Right outside the school gates was, predictably, a boy. A boy who apparently took the whole Edward Cullen thing way too far. Dressed in black, with his blond hair fashionably messy, he seemed to stare right at us, but his sunglasses covered his eyes so I couldn’t tell for sure. Sadly, the sunglasses didn’t cover his ridiculous duck-lipped pout.
“He. Is. Hot.” Shauna said, but as I gazed at him, I couldn’t see the attraction. Again. Maybe there was something wrong with me. I had never even felt goose bumps in the presence of Deco, and when we had first gotten together, Shauna had gone into great detail as to why I was so lucky he had been interested in me. He was fair-haired, sporty, blue-eyed, popular—all things that the other girls went crazy for. But not me. Of course, I wasn’t exactly interested in losing my head over a boy, so maybe I was just sensible. Maybe.
Shauna and Maisy continued to chatter like birds about the apparition in the distance. And apparition was a great word for him. He was almost translucent pale. Kind of weedy looking. And even at a distance I could see an incredibly annoying smirk cross his face, probably because he saw my crowd staring at him like open-mouthed goldfish. He got into a flash car across the road, revved up the engine unnecessarily, and rumbled away like the showboat he obviously was.
“What a creep,” I couldn’t help muttering.
Sadly, Maisy and Shauna didn’t hear me because discussion over the phantom boy lasted until lunchtime. And they wondered why I rarely spent time with them outside of school.
“Who do you think he was staring at?”
Shauna giggled at Maisy’s question. “Me, of course.”
“It was Devlin,” Deco said coldly.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, right. Who cares, anyway? He’s just some rich tit checking out the poor kids’ school so he can show off his new toy to make up for whatever’s lacking in his life.”
Maisy giggled. “Aw, don’t try to put me off him. He was cute.”
“You’re mixing up cute and weird. Do we really need to have this talk again? Weirdos are the ones who stare at people inappropriately. I mean, look at Base,” I said loudly, knowing Base was close enough to hear me and wanting to tease him to get my mind off my friends’ incessant chatter about boys whose names we didn’t know.
“Yeah,” he said just as loudly in a pissed off voice. “Because you’re so fucking awesome nobody can help, like, think you’re totes amaze.”
I felt my heat rise. “Still mad I turned you down?” I said cattily, instantly regretting it. I wanted to forget about that day. Forever.
Once upon a time, a girl like me moved to a different school and developed a crush on a boy like Base. Except her new best friend warned her he already knew, and he was going to make her think he liked her, too, all to win a bet between the boys about who got into the new girl’s knickers first. So when he asked her out in front of everyone, she turned him down just as publicly, and they had been arch enemies ever since. The worst bit was the way she couldn’t truly hate him, even when she tried.
Base was silenced, but the look in his eyes made me feel terrible. He left the lunchroom amidst cruel laughter.
“Oh, shut up, you lot,” I snapped. Again. The laughter died away as everyone exchanged uncomfortable stares, but I brooded for the rest of lunch, barely noticing Aoife staring at me. I had worked hard to be this person, but sometimes, even I didn’t like myself very much.