Chapter Seven
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kingswood doesn’t boast itself as a place that values religion, but the chapel would make you think otherwise. Half-hidden behind a cluster of trees, it’s one of the few buildings that isn’t consumed by ivy—adorned with glossy rosebushes instead. Despite the array of candles lining the entrance, the interior of the chapel is bathed in darkness, the stained glass windows painting macabre shadows on the brown tile floor. I close my fingers around the worn handle of the switchblade as I scan the crowd. Everyone’s too wrapped up in hugs and cheek kisses to notice the out-of-place girl huddled in the corner. Still, I search every face that glances my direction, looking for parted lips or the quirk of an eyebrow. A gasp, a scream, a lunge to knock me to the ground. Anything that’ll point me to who I’m looking for.
Before I can finish surveying the crowd, a shadow stretches over me.
“Look who’s still alive,” a boy with golden-tanned skin and equally golden hair says as he wraps an arm around my shoulder.
I jolt in his hold, resisting the urge to kick him in the groin and press the switchblade to his jugular. He’d obviously meant his greeting as a joke, but it doesn’t stop the words from ringing in my ears like a siren. There’s no fear etched across his face, not even a hint of surprise. Just a smile bright enough to light up the darkest corner of the room, warmth radiating from him as he pulls me close.
“Seriously, though,” he continues, his smile faltering as his brows furrow. “I texted you, like, six times.”
Reluctantly, I let go of the switchblade to pull my hand out of my pocket, laying my hand stiffly at my side. Still close enough to reach for it if I need to.
“S-sorry,” I choke out, covering my surprise behind a cough. I straighten up before he can notice the slump of my shoulders. Solina always blamed my back problems on my hunch, not the twelve-hour shifts I worked every other day. My spine cracks unsettlingly as I roll my shoulders back and tilt up my chin, a protest against my struggled impersonation of Solina’s perfect posture. I’ve been slouched since the day I was born, but she never had any problems holding her head high. “I, uh—”
Before I can finish, a voice calls out to us from across the chapel.
When the boy turns to look over his shoulder, I sneak a better look at him. Smooth, blemish-free skin, carefully coifed hair. He’s wearing the same uniform as the rest of us, but something about the cut of his blazer stands out. Like every thread was chosen with him in mind.
It’s not until he turns back to me with a smirk that it hits me: I’ve seen him before.
Solina never had any social media of her own, but that didn’t stop her from stalking her classmates. While home for break, she’d stay curled up on the couch bouncing from one platform to the other and back. By the time I got back from work, she’d found dozens of posts to show me. Girls in silk dresses sipping champagne beside the Eiffel Tower, boys in thousand-dollar sunglasses gambling in Dubai. The kind of shit you see on those HBO shows about teenagers. Fast cars, first class, designer drugs.
She’d shown me him—the blond boy with the sharp jawline—more than once. Enough for him to stand out in the blur of rich-kid posts. Hunter.
“So, when’s the wedding?” I teased after she showed me a TikTok of him in a helicopter flying over the Maldives.
It wasn’t the first “marry rich, retire young” joke I’d made since I realized how wealthy her classmates were, but she’d clammed up like I accused her of arson.
“I don’t—I mean, he doesn’t—h-he doesn’t even know my name,” she sputtered out in chopped breaths. “I-I mean, he does. He just calls me Stella instead. Because it’s easier.”
“Chill, it was just a joke.” I held my hands up in peaceful surrender, but she still curled in on herself, shielding her phone from my view.
She never showed me another one of Hunter’s posts but didn’t stop looking at them. I watched over her shoulder as she dwelled on pictures of him at a golf course and replayed clips of him manning a speedboat in Ibiza. For whatever reason, she decided to keep him to herself.
And I think I just figured out why.
Hunter’s hand moves from my shoulder to the small of my waist, the antique class ring on his finger digging into me as a girl comes rushing over to us, iced coffee in one hand and vape pen in the other.
“The service here sucks,” she says with a scowl before taking a drag from her pen. “What’s the point of paying tuition if we can only ever get half a bar?”
The girl tosses her glossy, pin-straight black hair over her shoulder. Like Hunter, her light brown skin is startlingly blemish free. The freckles across her pronounced cheekbones look almost painted on, each mark perfectly spaced and sized to make her eyes seem bigger, her cheeks thinner. Beneath her blazer is an upscale version of the uniform—her skirt hemmed to coast just above her knees and her white button-down paired with a robin’s-egg-blue V-neck sweater. The diamond studs in her ears glimmer when they catch the light, a perfect complement to the rose-gold hoop in her right nostril.
“It always craps out the first week back.” Hunter hunches over until he’s face-to-face with her, his hand never leaving my back. “And would it kill you to talk to your friends for more than five minutes?”
“Oh, please . Like you didn’t spend twenty minutes picking out a caption for your little thirst trap this morning.” The girl rolls her eyes to the back of her head and shoves Hunter with a ring-clad hand. My breath catches as the sleeve of her blazer pulls back enough for me to spot a set of initials monogrammed onto the cuff of her sweater.
PMW.
My heart pounds so hard and fast I don’t realize I’m trembling until Hunter turns to look at me.
“You good?” he asks, giving my shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
I nod blankly, unable to keep my eyes off the girl in front of us. Just like Hunter, there’s no flicker of shock or panic as she gives me a slow, searing once-over. If anything, all I can see is disdain.
“Sick of us already, huh?” she taunts, a cunning smirk tugging at the corner of her glossy lips.
Replies get caught in my throat as I struggle to find an answer to her impossible question. The holes in my plan appear all at once, and I’ve got about ten seconds before I let them drown me. All I have are glimpses of the life Solina had here—friends and crushes and inside jokes I’ll never understand. I can straighten my posture, wear the right clothes, smile for once, but that’ll only get me so far. Passing as her is one thing, being her is another.
“Maybe Stella’s living a double life,” Hunter teases, tightening his hold on my waist as he turns to look at me expectantly.
I stiffen in his grip.
Stella. He called me— her— Stella.
Solina never liked her name much. Neither did I, really. But our names were one of the few gifts from our parents that we got to keep, so we never complained. Even when teachers and doctors and social workers butchered Solina’s first name like a piece of raw meat. If I had a dollar for every mispronunciation, maybe we wouldn’t be here. But we loved the way our names fit together. Solina and Luna—the sun and the moon—always meant to be read together. Until we were torn apart.
And this guy can’t even bother to get it right. Hunter knows her real name but chooses to call her something else. Because it’s easier , she’d said, like it was an inconvenience. Swapped out for something that’s easier to spell, or remember, or pronounce. Scraping away who she is and slapping something new on top—but our names were never just labels. They were a story. Our story.
I shake myself off and snap back to reality. The girl and Hunter share a confused glance when I slap on a smile as quickly as flicking a light switch—something unsaid passing between them before they turn back to me, waiting for an answer.
“I slipped on some ice and broke my phone. Wiped all my contacts,” I explain, holding up my bandaged hand as proof. Tiffany had been smart enough to come up with an alibi for how I got so banged up. Injuries aren’t unusual for me, but they are for Solina, who couldn’t so much as lift a cardboard box without complaining.
The lower timbre of my voice betrays me. Solina’s voice was light, melodic like a spring breeze. Mine is as harsh as the wind howling past the chapel doors. “Sorry, cold,” I add, throwing in a cough hoping it’ll cover for the sudden raspy edge.
I reach into my pocket and hold up Tiffany’s parting gift—a brand-new iPhone in a hot-pink case—as proof. She’d insisted that I upgrade to the twenty-first century before leaving. No better way to call unnecessary attention to yourself than by walking around with a flip phone at a school for people who’re richer than God.
If the girl sees through my lie, she doesn’t let it show. With a sigh of vague annoyance, she swipes the phone out of my hand, holds it up to my face to unlock, and starts typing, all in one swift motion. “It’s about time you left the Stone Age.”
I swallow hard around a choked laugh. Shocker, Tiffany was right. Solina’s phone had only been a few generations behind the latest model. If I’d brought my real phone, they would’ve eaten me alive in seconds.
“You’re back in all the chats. You’re welcome.”
The girl—Poppy Washington, painted nails and sparkle emoji, according to the contact page she just created—hands me back my phone. A thrill runs through me—the letters were initials. I glance up at Poppy, expecting to see a girl so thoughtful she’d be willing to give away half her wardrobe to a friend. But as Hunter takes my hand in his, the look in her eyes is anything but friendly.
It was na ? ve of me to think Solina didn’t have friends, but she didn’t give me any impression that she did. All Tiffany’s prying for details about her “new hot rich friends” went unanswered the summer after her freshman year, usually with a shrug and a mumbled “I don’t really know them like that.” And that seemed to be true for the rest of her time at Kingswood. Name drops were reserved for teachers and the occasional reference to her roommate. The most she’d ever told me was that her classmates all seemed to know each other, despite coming from around the world. They’d met at conferences in Denver or competitions in New York, or spent their summers at the same college prep camp in the Poconos. The elite is a small circle. Everyone is bound to know each other, even from across the country.
Still, I can’t say this is the crowd I imagined she’d be part of. People who look more like wolves than friends.
“We’re gonna hit up the dining hall after this. You in?” Hunter asks me, squeezing our linked fingers.
Shaking off the heat of Poppy’s glare, I give Hunter a half-there smile and a nod. Before I can flinch, he catches my chin between his thumb and index finger, tilting it up as he leans down to kiss me. My body goes straight as a rod, awkward and stiff in his grip as he pulls me in. His fingers are rough against the waistband of my skirt, his lips even rougher as he holds me so tight I tip slightly. Which just makes him hold on tighter.
The color in my cheeks trickles down to my collarbone as the room becomes unbearably hot. My eyes don’t need to be open to know that everyone else’s are on us. I can hear the snickers and whispers and click of a camera shutter. A knot forms in my stomach at the thought of whoever hurt Solina watching this stranger kiss me hungrily—laughing, taking pictures, waiting to strike now that they’ve seen me. It could even be the boy kissing the breath out of me, holding me tight because he knows I shouldn’t be here at all. The urge to push Hunter off crawls up like bile, choking me until I can feel the world spinning beneath my feet.
A throat clearing finally breaks us apart. I sag against the marble pillar beside me, trembling with relief and heaving for breath as the room’s attention shifts to the pulpit.
“If everyone could take their seats and keep their hands to themselves, we can get started,” a balding man in a gray wool suit says into the pulpit microphone, eyeing us over his horn-rimmed glasses.
Hunter shoots the man an impish smile, one hand still on me as he waves back at him. “My bad, Mr. Hughes.”
“ Dean Hughes, Mr. Sinclair.”
Dean Hughes’s reply earns him a hushed “oooh” from the crowd, but Hunter doesn’t take the bait. He admits defeat with a dramatic bow before taking a seat in the nearest pew. He waits until Dean Hughes looks down at his notes to tug me down beside him, the lingering warmth of his touch stinging like an open wound.
“Get a room,” Poppy scoffs as she squeezes in beside us, trapping me between her and Hunter. The heat between us feels as stifling as the kiss had.
Hunter leans across the pew to flick the side of her head. “Get a life,” he whispers as Dean Hughes clears his throat again, then slings his arm across my shoulders.
“Seniors, it’s an honor to welcome you back for your final semester at Kingswood Academy.” Dean Hughes’s voice is loud enough to rattle the crucifix on the wall behind him. He pauses, blinking rapidly as he takes in the winces throughout the crowd before—thankfully—leaning away from the mic. “Your final weeks at Kingswood will be challenging, but I have no doubt that you’ll brave them in stride. You are lions.” He taps the lion at the center of the Kingswood crest pin on his lapel. “And you are capable of great and brilliant things.”
His expression hardens as he flips to a new page in the notes he’s keeping in front of him. “For anyone who may be tempted to seek out shortcuts throughout the semester”—the crowd breaks out into giggles at Dean Hughes’s word choice—“remember that such behavior is strictly prohibited. And punishments will not come down lightly.”
Despite his tone, Dean Hughes’s words don’t hold much weight, based on the snort Hunter lets out. Poppy doesn’t look fazed either, rolling her eyes before returning her attention to her phone.
While Dean Hughes drones on about class schedules and midterms, I peek over my shoulder at the pews behind us. An ocean of clean-cut blazers and bored, vacant stares. There’s something eerie about them. Maybe the lack of color in their cheeks—or the lack of color at all. With the exception of me and Poppy, everyone in our row is some gradient of a blond and blue-eyed mold.
Or maybe it’s because I know what one of them is really capable of.
Great, brilliant, heartless things.