Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
Calling the Kingswood dining hall massive would be an understatement. The entryway alone is big enough to house hundreds. The hall itself could hold five times that. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of blazers, looking for blond hair and green eyes in a blond-hair-and-blue-eyes haystack.
Instead, Hunter finds me.
“Took you long enough,” he says as his hands find what I’m learning is his favorite spot—the small of my back. “Good stuff’s mostly gone, but we can grab you something.”
As much as his touch makes me squirm, it’s easier to navigate the room with him at my side. Crowds part like the sea for us as Hunter guides me to an alcove off the main dining area. Kingswood’s castle-esque glitz melts away as we enter the cafeteria portion of the room. No more polished wood tables and crystal chandeliers. It’s all mid-century modern, the type of black-and-gold marble countertops Solina would drool over on those mind-numbing home renovation shows. These aren’t cheap tack-on stickers or hasty get-it-done-before-production-wraps jobs, though. My reflection gawks back at me from platinum and steel surfaces—so clean they make the diner look about as sanitary as a landfill.
“Skip the sushi. They’re out of the bluefin tuna, not worth the line.” Hunter pushes a plate into my hands without looking at me, the porcelain so warm it stings my chilled palms. “Brisket was pretty decent today. Apparently the new head chef is some barbecue legend from Austin.”
Hunter’s voice fades away as I finally take in the spread. Polished trays sit on every surface, stuffed to the brim with more food than I’ve ever seen in one place. A casserole tray of scalloped potatoes; tins of pecan, apple, and blueberry pies; carving boards of pork and turkey; and stacks of simmering ribs. A sushi chef in the opposite corner. Ground beef, saut é ed veggies, and freshly pressed tortillas in another. Enough smells and pops and sizzles to make my knees weak. If this is considered slim pickings, a full spread must be enough to feed all of Luster two times over. No wonder Solina had the nerve to be picky whenever she was home. She’d gotten used to the luxury of options.
Hunter’s review of the quiche lorraine cuts off when I lunge at the nearest platter, piling fried chicken, greens, and corn on my plate before moving on to the “decent” brisket. My stomach rumbles as I take it all in. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, how hungry I always am, until now. He smirks, watching me grab another plate when the first one isn’t enough. He hovers beside me like a guard dog, finally giving up on keeping a hand on me as I dart from one end of the room to another. I’ve never gone hungry, but I’ve never had excess, and I don’t have enough pride to turn down my one chance at it.
Not when this could be my first and last night at Kingswood. Either because Solina’s killer finds me and slits my throat or because I cut theirs first.
“Geez,” Poppy exclaims when Hunter and I return to our table—me holding two plates, him holding the third I couldn’t juggle. “Did your mom forget to feed you?”
Poppy snorts around the rim of her mug of tea as we sit down opposite her. The look in her eyes should sting, tear me down a rung or two, but I’m long past giving a shit what other people think about me. Instead, my stomach drops—my appetite vanishing as I realize I’ve screwed up again already. Solina was a picky eater. She never would’ve piled her plates high with three different types of meat.
“I couldn’t keep much down when I was si—”
“Hey, Pops?” Hunter cuts me off, his voice light and teasing as he drapes his arm around my shoulders.
You could see the spark in Poppy’s eyes from the NASA space station. Her smug smirk turns sweet when she whips around to look at him, forgetting me like the untouched salad on her plate. “Yeah?”
Hunter leans in until he’s barely a breath away from her. It’d feel uncomfortably intimate if his arm wasn’t still on me, keeping me tethered to whatever game they’re playing.
“How about you shut the fuck up?”
This isn’t like the teasing in the chapel. It sucks the air right out of Poppy, her body deflating like a balloon. Her cheeks pale as she leans back in her seat. With one sentence Hunter bled her dry of all the confidence I saw a minute ago. From wearing it like perfume to hiding behind her hand from two people she should consider friends.
I don’t need to look at Hunter to know he’s glaring right through her. I can feel it in the heat radiating off him, in the way his arm tightens around me.
He can break people without even touching them.
“Sorry,” Poppy mumbles. It’s unclear whether the apology is for me or for him.
The silence doesn’t sit for long. Hunter nudges his hand against my shoulder, gesturing to my untouched feast. “Don’t let it get cold,” he says, the sharp edge of his tone betraying the sweetness of his smile.
Quickly, I take a bite of chicken despite my fading appetite. Before Hunter can decide I’m not following orders either.
The food is so rich it sends a fresh wave of shock through me. Shock that they get to eat like kings on the regular, that Solina never told me this was what her life was like here, and that I’m so easily distracted from what just happened.
“How is your mom?” Hunter asks, slipping back into the charming, friendly skin he wore when he first found me in the chapel. If he can go from pleasant to vicious in the blink of an eye, he’d have no problem hiding something like surprise at seeing the girl he left for dead show up on campus.
My mind whirrs with theories and possibilities, exerting so much effort trying to figure out how all these new pieces fit together that I don’t even realize what he’s just asked me.
“My … mom?”
Has been dead since I was eleven.
A wave of panic washes over me. What if it’s a threat, disguised as something well-meaning? A warning that he knows exactly who I am.
His smile doesn’t slip when he replies, “Yeah, wasn’t she dealing with that whole thing with the school board? About the lunch program?”
He says it with such casual sincerity. Either he’s on his way to an Academy Award or he’s not just doing this to screw with me.
Which means … Solina told him about her. Not our reality, but what we once were. Not quite the truth. Not quite a lie.
Mami was a teacher. A good one. The kind kids remembered years later. We only visited her classroom a few times, but I remember the art on the walls. Portraits of her by her students, calling her the nicest lady in all of Glendale Elementary. It seemed impossible for her heart to be big enough to love me and Solina and Papi and still have enough room left for all her students. But she did, remembering everyone’s birthday and favorite type of candy and what was bothering them that week and how to make them feel better. She kissed a hundred cuts and gave a thousand hugs, and I knew I couldn’t believe in God when someone as loved as her was taken away so soon.
The dinner table wasn’t a place for work, but Mami only broke that rule when it came to the school board. All ten years of her teaching career, she’d rallied to expand the county’s free lunch program. Thanks to budget cuts and bureaucratic bullshit, the bar for entry was so high hardly anyone qualified. She’d watched dozens of her students—almost all of them Black and brown—trade favors and dares for chicken nuggets and ham sandwiches. If she could’ve, she would have fed them all herself, with the same love and care that she fed us. With every lunch packed exactly the way we liked it: crusts cut off, with a kiss on a Post-it note in case we missed her.
I’d like to think that after she passed, after they saw Papi fade away and us disappear, that the school board finally made all those changes she rallied for year after year. But all the hope left in me was stamped out when Solina washed up dead on the riverbank.
“She got some signatures from other teachers in the county and backing from the principal, but it doesn’t look like the Board of Ed will budge,” I say, reciting from memory the last conversation we’d had with her about it. Two weeks before they found the tumors on her lungs. Three months before we lost her.
I’d be lying if I said I never wanted to pretend our lives were different, that we had parents waiting for us at home. Friends. Trips to the mall. Hobbies and interests instead of minimum wage jobs and bills to pay. But living in memories that feel like fantasy won’t get me through the day. The truth does, and it can’t be ignored.
I can’t blame Solina for wanting to pretend she was someone she wasn’t. Not when I’m wearing her clothes and sleeping in her bed. That doesn’t stop the truth from hurting like a bitch, though. Our lives were never perfect, but we always had each other. For me, that was enough.
For Solina, guess not.
“I’m sorry, babe.” Hunter takes the opportunity to give me a consolation kiss on the forehead. His hand finally loosens around my shoulder, running along the top of my arm instead. “That’s so fucked up.”
It is fucked up, it’s beyond fucked up. Tonight that barbecue legend from Austin will scrape whatever’s left into the trash, while people like Mami die fighting for a kid to get a sandwich worth less than a dollar. Tonight I’ll take off this uniform, this disguise, and go back to being a piece of the story Solina tried to hide.
Bitterness swells inside me. I spent three years working to give her the life she deserved just for her to make up a new one once she was here. I gave up my life, my story, only to be erased from hers. I risked everything to come here, put my goddamn life on the line, to prove to her that I did care, just to find out that she didn’t.
I shovel a forkful of potato into my mouth. It tastes like ash.
A boy with tangled brown hair and a scowl joins our table, throwing his bag onto the bench beside Poppy and stealing a cherry tomato off her plate without a word.
“Excuse you.” Poppy slaps his arm hard enough to make him drop the tomato back onto the plate. “Get your own.”
My heart stutters in my chest as the boy brushes his hair out of his face long enough for me to catch a glimpse of his eyes, still packing the same punch as when I saw them on the path back to Kincaid. If he notices me, he doesn’t show it. But he does look pissed as he shrugs out of his coffee-stained trench coat.
“Did you see how long the line is?” The boy gestures to the group of students snaking through the dining hall and out the door. The same line Hunter and I breezed past without protest.
Hunter shrugs, pulling Poppy’s plate toward him. “Just go to the front, no one gives a shit.” Poppy doesn’t say a word when he pops the abandoned tomato into his mouth.
The boy shoots Hunter a dirty look. Taking a closer look at him, it’s clear his hair isn’t the only thing that’s disheveled. Like Claudia, his uniform stands out in its messiness. And like me, it doesn’t fit quite right. From the too-long sleeves of his blazer to the stained collar of his button-down, he’s as worn as the dark circles beneath his eyes.
Unlike us, there’s a hint of luxury beneath the mess. A Cartier watch with a crack through the face. The name of an Italian designer etched across his leather messenger bag in delicate gold thread. Ice-blue eyes with a red-hot glare. Luxury so worn it looks secondhand. A boy made of contradictions.
Finally, he notices me. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tug at the corner of his lips—his already deep scowl twitching even lower.
Hunter holds up his hands in surrender, reining in the boy’s attention. “Right, my bad. I forgot Saint Gabe Hughes decided to have morals.”
My ears perk. What’re the odds Saint Hughes and Dean Hughes are related? At a place like this, probably high.
“Morals can get you places.” Gabe pulls a stack of textbooks from his bag and drops them on the table with a thud that echoes through the hall. “You should try them sometime.”
Poppy, who looks to be back to her usual self, wrinkles her nose at the cloud of dust that puffs off the stack. “What kind of scholarship is this?” She runs the tip of her acrylic index finger along the spine of a chemistry textbook. “The Einstein Reincarnate Foundation?”
Gabe rolls his eyes as he cracks the book at the top of the stack open. “I know this might be a foreign concept to you two, but you need to study to get scholarships.”
Hunter scoffs, flipping open one of Gabe’s notebooks and mindlessly thumbing through it. “Wasn’t the last Hightower Fellow the guy who ran his dad’s yacht into a restaurant?”
The mention of the Hightower grabs my attention. I lean in, practically on the edge of my seat. There’s no proof that Solina was top of the list for the fellowship, but with her grades she had to be on their radar. It could be a motive. Get rid of the competition.
“They’re doing things different this year,” Gabe mumbles, never taking his eyes off the chemistry textbook. “Actually basing it on merit and grades and shit like that.”
Solina didn’t have high hopes for the fellowship. According to her it usually went to kids whose dads rubbed elbows with Ed Hightower on the putting green instead of those with “exceptional academics” like their mission statement claimed. There’s no telling if she listened to all my nagging and filled out an application like I told her, but if Gabe’s right, I know it would’ve been hers.
“Gross,” Poppy exclaims, shoving the sleeve of Gabe’s coat away from her like it’s dripping toxic waste instead of overpriced bean water. “What is that?”
Gabe bristles at the sudden attention on his coat, my eyes immediately finding the rip in the seam just above the spill. Couple more wears and it’ll be leaking goose feathers or whatever posh people stuff their coats with.
“Someone bumped into me,” he says through gritted teeth, pointedly glaring at a spot over my shoulder.
Like Poppy moments earlier, I can feel myself going numb at the harshness of his tone, unnerved by the intensity in his eyes as he fixates on something meant to take my place. I chance a peek at Hunter out of the corner of my eye, watching him pick at my mostly untouched mashed potatoes. Does he have Gabe under his spell too? Slapping down anyone who dares to mess with me because I’m his to control? I don’t know much about Gabe beyond his bad attitude and worn-down clothes, but he doesn’t strike me as the type to let others tell him what to do.
And if Hunter does have that kind of power—what else could he convince people to do?
A rumble cuts through the silence. Gabe ducks his head sheepishly, one hand coming down to his growling stomach while refocusing his attention on the equations in front of him.
“Dude, just go get some food. The Hightowers aren’t going to blacklist you because you jumped the line to get a bagel,” Hunter says with a laugh, forcibly slamming Gabe’s textbook shut. Gabe only just manages to pull his hand out of the book in time not to get crushed, dust floating through the air like snow.
Gabe shakes his head and opens his mouth to protest, but stops himself when I nudge one of my three plates toward him. He glances down at the food for half a second before turning back to me with a perplexed look.
“There’s no way I’ll be able to finish. I should’ve paced myself instead of letting my stomach do the talking.”
Maybe I don’t know everything about my sister, but I know she hated when people didn’t like her. She could spend hours obsessing over why someone suddenly stopped talking to her, like another person’s brain is something you can puzzle through like a math problem. One of our biggest differences. I can’t remember a time when I cared whether people liked me.
As much as it makes me want to bite down until I scream, I play nice. I ask for forgiveness. I do what Solina would have done.
My nervous laugh dies in my throat when Gabe’s eyes darken from deep-sea blue to almost pitch-black—the color stark against his pale skin. Poppy bites her lip, nudging her knee against Gabe’s until it snaps him out of whatever trance my suggestion put him under.
I rack my brain for any times Solina may have mentioned a Gabe, or a rival, or anyone who even matches his description, but come up empty. When she stopped telling me about the few friends she did have, I assumed it was because they dropped out. But why didn’t I think to question it when she stopped? When she came home begging me not to make her go back? How could I go this long without realizing I barely knew anything about her life outside of Luster?
Kingswood Solina is a blank slate, but all the glimpses I’ve seen so far add up to a picture I can’t process. My sister was kind. Brilliant. Good in all the ways that mattered.
So why the hell do Poppy and Gabe look at her like they want to sink their claws into her?
Gabe pulls the plate over and mumbles a “Thanks” so quiet it’s almost lost in the dining hall chatter. Hunter bristles beside me, looking as though he’s going to say something, when Poppy speaks up first.
“Stella! Since when do you have a tattoo?” She tugs gently on my arm, leaving the inside of my wrist on display. The sunset stands out against the paler underside of my wrist, veins and healed-over scars from working at the diner twisting around the small, intimate design.
Another mistake. I should’ve thought of this earlier, covered it up before anyone could notice, and now it’s too late to pull my sleeve down over my wrist. Panic spikes, but it fades quickly as I realize Poppy’s surprise means they hadn’t already seen Solina’s. I got lucky this time.
“Oh. I-I got it with my sister over the summer.” My cheeks flush as if she caught me in a lie, but for once it’s the truth.
“Didn’t think you had it in you.” Poppy runs her thumb along my wrist with a smirk.
Hunter tightens his grip on me. “My girl’s full of surprises.”
Focusing on smiling helps me push away the thought of Solina hiding the piece of me she always had with her. Keeping the tattoo hidden behind a sleeve or a watch. It doesn’t hurt—not if I don’t let it. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to push pain down, swallow it whole, and keep moving forward.
“Speaking of your sister,” Poppy interrupts, leaning toward me. “Still think you can send her my UCLA essays?”
“Yeah, sure, totally.” My staccato replies are enough to satisfy Poppy and give me time to wonder why the hell she’d want to send a college essay to someone who dropped out of tenth grade.
An answer comes without much prying.
“Sweet, thanks,” Poppy says as she settles back into her seat and starts to gather her things. “It’s so freaking annoying. They make you jump through, like, a million hoops just to submit one thing. It’s a miracle she didn’t blow her brains out when she applied.”
With her designer bag back on her shoulder, Poppy blows us a kiss and heads off, leaving me to pick up the pieces of the bomb she doesn’t know she just dropped.
“I’m gonna head out too. Need me to walk you back?” Hunter prods my shoulder with his knuckle.
All I can do is shake my head and give him a weak smile, not trusting my voice not to crack. I shovel a bite of steak into my mouth to avoid answering, happily sitting in silence while Hunter pesters Gabe about a party tomorrow night. I’ve already made up my mind to leave too. Not with Hunter, but on my own once enough time has passed. No way I’m sitting here alone with Gabe.
I’d always wondered how much Solina told her friends about us, about me . Whether she kept the details to herself, or if she wore them like a badge of honor. We’d been through too much not to feel some kind of pride for making it out alive. Or, well … one of us did.
And she had told them about me. But not the sister who worked twelve-hour shifts to pay for her uniforms. The sister who stayed up until 5:00 a.m. when she had a fever last year. The sister who gave everything to her because it was all I had left to give.
Our story has never been easy to tell, but at least I was always willing to tell it.
Shame and guilt and rage pulse through me like adrenaline, nestled so deep I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to shake it off. I came here to find the truth about what happened to Solina, but it was stupid to think I wouldn’t uncover things she never wanted me to find along the way. It makes me sick. It makes me angry. It makes me want to scream.
All because my sister may have been a person I don’t understand.