Chapter Four Julia
CHAPTER FOUR
“Manhattan isn’t a place where you fit in. Millions of people, all crammed together, and not a one of ’em fits in. Just find your spot and start chiseling.”
—Remington
Julia
“Everyone starts their day in their transition class, which is basically just homeroom,” Jasmine said, leading me away from the office and down a busy hallway. I could still feel eyes on me and I tried to ignore them, I really did.
But every time I glanced away from Jasmine, I just saw a very intimidating army of beautiful, uniformed robots.
Girls with long hair in blazers and skirts, guys with short hair in sweaters with ties, dudes in jackets who looked like they were ready to take over their fathers’ businesses—they moved in groups of three and four, appearing as if they’d all been cast for a Vogue private-school photo shoot.
“You and I are in the same transition, so that’s good,” Jasmine said. “Also—ask me any questions about anything while we walk.”
“Okay,” I said, wishing I could just say, Tell me who to avoid and who to watch out for.
“So what made you guys move here?” she asked, shifting the bag on her shoulder. “Business?”
I thought back to what Bernard told us to say.
“Yes. My dad has a lot of business here, so my parents decided it was finally time to put down roots in New York,” I said.
She nodded. “Have you been here before?”
“I haven’t, but they have,” I said, which wasn’t a lie. When I was little, my parents took the Amtrak to New York a few times for their own little vacation, but I didn’t need to pitch it as a tourist situation.
No, I was going to pretend they’d been business travelers who’d enjoyed the Big Apple for businessy reasons, multiple times.
“Have you always lived here?” I asked, immediately regretting how unsophisticated the question sounded.
“Yeah,” she said. “My dad grew up on the Upper West Side and never wanted to live anywhere else. I’m a lifelong New Yorker.”
My face was on fire as we continued through the halls, because everyone was looking at us when we walked by. And even though my uniform should’ve made me look like every other girl in the building, I somehow knew I wasn’t doing it right.
Of course, my unmanageable hair played a huge part in that.
Because this looked like a school full of girls who knew how to wield a flatiron.
My unruly hair, however, was another thing entirely.
There were people who had curly hair, sure, but I had curly with volume that was almost impossible to tame.
I’d gone to the salon a few times and paid a small fortune for relaxer treatment, but it never lasted long enough to make up for the cost.
Today I’d pulled the front up in a clip and kept the back down, unloading half a bottle of gel and hair spray in an attempt to keep it under control.
“Hey, Jaz,” a blond girl said as she ran up to us.
Come on, I thought in disgust. What is with the hair here?
This girl had a blond bob with perfect blunt edges, and she looked like everybody’s all-American. Like, her style aesthetic was how every grandparent wants their granddaughter to look in a photo.
“Did you already get the tickets for later?”
“Yeah, they’re in my wallet,” Jasmine said. “I’ll give them to you at lunch.”
“Hi, I’m Donovan,” she said to me.
“Julia,” I replied, happy that Donovan also seemed decent.
“Donovan’s in our transition and she’s also kind of always with me, so you’re either going to have to get used to her or hate her for the rest of the week,” Jasmine said with a smile.
“Yeah, I’m sure you’ll hate me,” Donovan said. “I’m a real pain in the ass.”
That made me let out a little of my breath. Maybe the private-school students would all be this normal—wouldn’t that be great? I’d imagined Gardenwood Academy to be very much a mean-girl situation, but maybe that was unfair?
“Also there’s already a rumor going around that your brother is crazy hot. Is he single?”
“God, calm down, Donovan! She just got here and also probably doesn’t want to discuss the heat status of her twin brother.”
“I just like to get business out of the way quickly. Single or not—it’s an easy question.”
“He is single,” I said, “but a little on the obnoxious side, so you might want to reserve your opinion until after you meet him.”
“Obnoxious I can do,” she said with a smile.
We kept walking, and as we did, Donovan started giving me information on the people we passed, quiet little drops of intel.
“That’s Colin Streeter,” she said under her breath as we passed a massive guy who looked kind of like a linebacker in a suit coat. “Great football player, nice guy, terrible boyfriend. Steer clear unless you like bossy.”
“Noted,” I said quietly, though I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to have to worry about being chased by football players.
“And the girls by the auditorium doors—see them?” she murmured, gesturing with her head to our left.
I glanced over, and five girls were standing there, five girls who were all staring down at the papers in their hands. The tallest one, who looked exactly like Sadie Sink, appeared to be reading aloud from the pages.
Jasmine said, “Donovan, you’re not going to—”
“They’re the Oscars,” Donovan interrupted as we passed, her voice loud enough for me to hear but not for anyone else to register.
“Theater kids with enough talent and connections to blow up any day now. Dasha—the one with all the eyeliner—was in a film with Leo DiCaprio last spring, and the short girl beside her is Anthony Hopkins’s stepsister’s granddaughter. ”
“But no one calls them ‘the Oscars’ anymore,” Jasmine interjected as I wondered how girls who looked that sophisticated could be my age, students at my school.
“Don’t you still think of the labels, though?
” Donovan asked her, then explained to me, “In seventh grade, there was this whole thing where everyone created social labels for all little cliques at the academy. The Oscars, the Skins, the Toms, the Judges, the Dead Poets, and… well, I can’t remember the rest. It was basically just middle-school nonsense, but my brain still catalogs people by those little tags. ”
“Yeah, same,” Jasmine said. “But it became a whole huge thing where parents got involved, such middle-school drama, so pretend you never heard of it because people still have feelings.”
“Got it,” I said, watching as Dasha put a hand over her chest and took over for the tall Sadie Sink, speaking and gesturing wildly.
The Oscars.
We kept moving through the crowded hallways, and Donovan kept giving me info that I appreciated knowing, yet also terrified me because it was confirmation that the entire student body of Gardenwood Academy possessed a stronger sense of self than I’d ever dreamed of having.
The Toms were five guys—Corbin, Chuck, Hunter, Harrison, Jack—who pretty much ruled the school. Lacrosse superstars from the most powerful families. As we passed, I found them all to be intimidatingly handsome but in a red-flaggy kind of way.
“The trouble with the labels started when Corbin found out which Tom they were named after,” Donovan said quietly as we passed the group. “He assumed it was like Tom Brady or some jock superstar, but it was actually Tom Buchanan.”
“From Gatsby?” I asked, feeling nervous when I made eye contact with the red-haired guy in the group.
“Bingo,” Jasmine said. “Corbin didn’t like that, but his father—Edward Archington of the Chase Bank Archingtons—really didn’t like it.”
“Understatement of the century,” Donovan said, nodding, and I was dying to hear how Edward Archington of the Chase Bank Archingtons had reacted.
But I was too afraid to ask, so I just said, “Oof.”
“Oof for sure.”
By the time we reached the classroom at the end of the hallway, I’d learned about the others.
The Judges were three mean girls who harshly judged everyone and everything—and also their fathers were actual circuit court judges.
The Dead Poets were a group of writerly students (the only ones who didn’t sound scary) who constantly discussed literature and were also “wicked hot.”
But the Skins? They sounded the scariest of all.
“They’re like the female version of the Toms, in terms of power and popularity,” Donovan explained.
“ ‘Skins’ refers to the fact that they’re so flawless, the only explanation is that they must be aliens wearing lab-created, perfect-human skins.
Coco is their leader, they’re each more disgustingly stunning than the next, they wear all the best clothes, and they’re at every good party. ”
“Is this a big party school?” I asked, remembering the cornfield parties I’d been to back home.
“For sure during the season,” Donovan said.
“The season?” I inquired, thinking of the debutantes in the Regency-era historicals I loved to read.
“That’s a whole other thing. Come on, we don’t want to be late,” Jasmine said dismissively, pointing in the direction of the classroom doorway.
I swallowed down my nervousness as we went into the room.
“Hey, Mr. Sparks—this is Julia Lowell, a new student.”
Jasmine walked right up to his desk and I followed. The man, who looked to be in his thirties with thick, dark hair, gave me a smile.
“Well, good morning, Julia Lowell. Where are you from?”
“Nebraska,” I said, immediately aware of how quiet the room became when I said that.
“Wow, I expected a New York address, not a Midwesterner,” he said, tilting his head. “We don’t get a lot of those around here. This has got to be quite a change.”
“It definitely is,” I said, nodding and wishing I could go hide behind a desk.
“Less cows?” the girl in the front row muttered without looking up from her phone.
I didn’t know if I was supposed to answer or if she was just being rude, but I said, “I haven’t seen one yet, so probably yes.”
That made her look up from her phone, her long-lashed eyes narrowed. “Probably?”
I shrugged. “Probably.”
“Well, welcome to Gardenwood,” Mr. Sparks said. “Hopefully, you’ll find that my class is not too daunting—”
“Or boring,” Donovan added.
“Or boring,” he agreed. “Although, you can’t listen to anything Donovan says because she finds everything boring.”
“Not true,” she said.
“Totally true,” someone said from the back.
“There’s an open desk over there, and I will get you a textbook as soon as the bell rings.”
“Thank you,” I said, nodding.
I turned and headed for the empty spot, and I was almost there when I heard someone say his name.
“You’re so wrong, Damion.”
My head whipped around. There was no way there could be more than one person in New York City named Damion, right?
Okay, not right, but still. What were the odds I was going to meet two Damions in the short time I’d been in Manhattan when I’d never met one in my entire life?
Please let those odds be high.
No such luck (what did I expect?), I thought, because there he was, walking through the doorway with another guy.
He was tall—whoa, even taller than I remembered—wearing a gray crested V-neck sweater with a shirt and perfectly tied tie underneath it.
Nice black pants, brown leather messenger bag slung across his body, big-faced silver watch that looked a lot like a Rolex, and a signet ring.
Not the same aesthetic as the man I’d assumed to be a pickpocket, but oh my God—it was definitely him.
No, no, no, no, noooooooooo!
“I’m so right and you know it,” he said, smiling at his friend, until he saw me.
He saw me.
Our eyes met, and I swear to God everything froze. Everything froze for a solid ten seconds before his mouth flatlined.
His throat moved as he swallowed. His smile disappeared in an instant, like it’d never been there. His jaw flexed.
And then he said, in the most sarcastic tone, “Holy shit, as I live and breathe, it’s Julia Nebraska.”
What the fu…
I watched him swagger toward me, my brain unable to process this unexpected turn of events.
Is this what it feels like to go into shock?
The guy whose nose I thought I’d accidentally broken, the dude I accused of stealing my wallet, the person I called a THIEF, was a student at my school.
A Rolex-wearing student at my fancy private school.
Which meant he was rich.
Oh God.
His shoulder bumped mine slightly as he walked past—oh my God, was that an accident or is he intentionally bumping into me?!—which made me stumble into the desk behind me.
It was nothing, my little trip, but enough of a something that I heard a few chuckles float around me.
Embarrassed, I sat down and pulled a notebook out of my backpack as dread settled in the pit of my stomach.
Ugh. What have I done?
No wonder he’d seemed so annoyingly amused as he’d held Will’s wallet just out of my reach that day. He was a snooty prep-school guy. I bet it was just so entertaining to mess with the chick who’d naively assumed he was a petty criminal.
There was no way he wasn’t going to tell everyone that hilarious story, right?
I shot a glance in his direction, relieved to see he was looking down at a book as I studied him and his dark hair, thick and a little curly on top.
The tortoiseshell glasses he wore looked…
well, really good on him. He had brown eyes, no—hazel—a sharp jaw, and a somehow…
muscular neck. He was, annoyingly, a very attractive guy.
Hot, even.
But I’d engaged with him enough to know it didn’t matter. He was a jerk.
And probably a hyper-entitled trust-fund baby.
Yep.
It only took a few hours for him to prove me right.
I was walking down the hall at the end of the day, leaving my mind-bogglingly disappointing after-school meeting with Mr. Green, the meeting where I learned some extremely unfortunate news about my math tutoring situation.
I was juggling an armful of freshly assigned textbooks when I lost my grip and dropped them all.
I sighed and kind of wanted to cry—it’d been that sort of day—as I knelt down in the busy hallway and scrambled to pick them up before being trampled to death by the young coastal elites who all seemed to hate me.
I was reaching for the English book when I glanced up to find Damion walking in my direction. He was with two other guys, laughing and talking, and they were oblivious to my existence.
But he definitely saw me.
He gave me a sly smile as his dark—wicked—eyes took in the details of my situation. But instead of slowing or swerving to go around me or, God forbid, bending down to help me retrieve my books, he completely walked over them.
He walked. Over. Them.
Walked over them!
The tip of his fancy loafer made contact with my lit book as he passed, sending it spinning farther out of my reach as he continued on like I hadn’t even been there. Like I didn’t even exist. I cursed him under my breath as I watched him walk away.
What a dick.
An asshole.
And, as Mr. Green had just informed me, my potential new math tutor.