Chapter Thirteen Doesn’t Meter to Me
Ms. Aguilar’s words knock the breath out of me, leave me gasping for air as tears bloom in my eyes. I curse the fact that I put my hair up, ensuring that I can’t hide behind it even though I really, really want to right now.
Instead, I pull my hood over my head, and duck deep inside it in a desperate effort to mask my tears—and the momentary weakness they signify. But I wasn’t prepared for this today, had told myself that I’d just be able to avoid Remy for the rest of the year. Just because he’s a senior, doesn’t mean he has to be in my Brit Lit class. Not when I’ve been so careful to turn around and go the other way every time I so much as see him in the halls.
But I can’t do that now. I’m stuck here as he walks straight toward me.
“Hey. You okay?” Jude’s voice, low and surprisingly gentle, comes from what feels like a million miles away. “I can tell her to put him in another group.”
He shouldn’t know about Remy, shouldn’t know about everything that happened. He gave up that privilege a long time ago. But he does know, and all I can think is that Caspian told him everything. The jerk.
I know they were friends, too. I know that they still talk in the hall sometimes. But everything inside me is screaming that Caspian had no right to talk to Jude about this. About her.
I don’t want to answer him, but Jude continues to watch me with concern until I finally shake my head—though I don’t even know what question I’m answering at this point. Maybe both at the same time, because no, I am definitely not okay. But last I checked Ms. Aguilar isn’t really interested in how I feel about my group members. Just one more “perk” of being the headmaster’s daughter that I am very much hating right now.
“I’m fine,” I snap at him seconds before Remy comes to a stop next to our desks.
Remy, my cousin Carolina’s closest friend in prison—not to mention the boy she wrote to me about after she finally broke out of the Aethereum. The boy she loved.
Remy, the same guy who came to the island three months ago to tell us she was dead—and that she’d sacrificed herself to save him, that her death was his fault. My aunt Claudia—Carolina’s mother—told him not to blame himself, that we all know there was no stopping her when she set her mind to something.
And while I might agree with that in theory, I still never want to see him again. And I definitely never want to talk to him.
Because something broke in me the night I found out about Carolina’s death, and no matter how hard I try, I haven’t been able to put the jagged pieces of my heart—my soul—back together again. She was my best friend in the entire world. My ride or die, even before she got shipped off to the Aethereum with no warning and no real explanation. Three years later and I still don’t know why.
Part of the reason I’ve been so hell-bent to get off this island the last few years was because I was determined to go find and rescue her from that hideous prison.
And now I’m supposed to do a poetry project with the boy she loved? The boy who just let her die?
A shudder tries to work its way through me, but I tamp it down as ruthlessly as I tamped down the tears.
Weakness isn’t an option—showing it or having it.
And still rage burns inside me, even before Remy’s slow amble across the room finally ends—exactly two feet from my desk. All I know is that there’s no way I’m actually going to last my entire senior year in this place. It’s just taken too much from me.
I need a fresh start.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” Remy asks quietly, nodding toward the empty desk across from Jude. His dark, shaggy hair bounces a little with the nod, the intense look in his forest-green eyes belying the casualness of the question.
I glance at Jude, but his face is blank—a surefire sign that there’s more going on under the surface than he wants anyone to know. And I get it. I don’t want to admit it, but I know that losing Carolina hurt him, too. That what he did to me—to us—didn’t erase all those years of hide-and-seek in the forest, of scraped knees and truth-or-dare and endless troublemaking. Being in a group with Remy must be a gut punch to him, too.
Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier for me to bear, though. But before I can think of an appropriate answer to Remy’s question, a massive lightning bolt shoots through the sky. It’s followed immediately by a boom of thunder so loud it shakes the entire building, and seconds later, one of the two fluorescent lightbulbs in the room explodes.
Glass goes everywhere, including all over the floor in front of Ms. Aguilar’s desk.
She jumps—God, she really is a candyass—then trills, “No one move until I can get this cleaned up. Just focus on your projects and don’t worry about me.”
Like anybody is? In the grand scheme of bad shit that happens at this school, exploding lightbulbs don’t even make the chart.
She crosses to the closet at the back of the room and pulls out a small hand broom and dustpan. I ignore her in favor of looking down at my desk, unable to bring myself to speak to Remy. Jude doesn’t say anything, either. He just watches me with those all-seeing eyes.
When it becomes obvious that Hell will freeze over before Jude invites Remy to join us—and that the rest of the class is suddenly much more interested in what’s going on in our little corner of the room than they are in Ms. Aguilar—I shrug and nod toward the empty desk. It’s not exactly the friendliest invitation, but it’s more than I thought I had in me.
“Thank you, Clementine,” Remy tells me, his tone formal and a sad smile on his handsome face.
Despite the niceties, my stomach does a three-sixty. We’ve only met once, briefly, yet he knows exactly who I am. Then a sickening realization dawns on me—he probably knows way more about me than I want to imagine. He and Carolina were super close. Does that mean she told him my secrets, too? The ones we only dared to share in the dark?
All of a sudden, I can’t help but feel violated. But it’s way too late to do anything about it.
Just because I let Remy join our already messed-up group doesn’t mean I have to talk to him or have anything to do with him. Jude may not care about making a scene—no one is stupid enough to mess with him—but I don’t have that luxury.
So I give up arguing with Jude about John Keats’s relationship with Fanny Brawne and concentrate on getting the questions about figurative language and meter answered. The sooner we finish the assignment, the sooner I can get out of this hellscape.
Remy tries to help at first, but after I deliberately ignore him a few times, he gives up.
On the plus side, Jude isn’t uncooperative for once.
Maybe it’s because he’s too busy watching Remy with narrowed, suspicious eyes. Or maybe it’s because he senses how close I am to the edge. For the first seven years he was on the island, we were inseparable, and he knows me better than anyone ever has—except for Carolina—and there’s definitely no “enemy of my enemy is my friend” stuff going on here.
After what feels like an eternity of avoiding both Jude’s and Remy’s eyes in the tensest atmosphere imaginable, the bell sounds.
“Today, I am going to be my best, most positive self.”
“And that’s it for today, students!” Ms. Aguilar cheerfully exclaims from her own desk in the corner of the classroom, shaking her head. “I hope you felt your spirits come alive reading and dissecting these luscious poems!”
No one answers her as we all spring up like jack-in-the-boxes and start shoving our stuff into our backpacks.
“I’ll hold on to this,” Jude says, reaching for the notes still sitting on my desk.
I nod my thanks but don’t trust myself to say anything around the giant lump in my throat as grief presses down on me. Instead, I slide the zipper closed on my backpack and all but run for the door.
I push my way into the now-crowded hall, desperate to put as much distance between Jude, Remy, and myself as I possibly can. My brain’s on overload, and the rest of me feels like it’s going to shake apart any second now.
I weave around a pissed-off warlock with an attitude problem before slipping between two dragon shifters who look more than a little high. I have one second to wonder what they’ve been sniffing and how they got the contraband before someone calls my name from behind me.
I turn instinctively, only to find Remy jogging down the hallway toward me, an intent look in his eyes that says he’s done letting me ignore him. He’s tall—even taller than Jude—and between his height and the beeline he’s making for me, we’ve definitely begun to attract attention.
This isn’t where or when I would have chosen to have a showdown with Remy, but if that’s what he wants, so be it.
My knees are wobbling because I’m hungry—the granola bar I grabbed for breakfast was a long time ago—not because I’m the least bit nervous.
Except Remy apparently doesn’t want a showdown after all. Because he stops in front of me with that sad smile of his and murmurs, “I’m sorry about that.”
“Sorry about what?” I ask, much more belligerently than his approach warrants.
He shakes his head, gives me a look that says he knows I’m lying. “I can do the rest of the project on my own.” His languid New Orleans accent softens the words—and his approach.
“Do whatever you want,” I answer with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
It does matter, so much, but now isn’t the time—and this definitely isn’t the place—to have that discussion.
Remy looks like he wants to call my bluff, but instead he just shakes his head. “You’re going to be okay, Clementine.”
I give him a cool look. “You can’t possibly know that.” For the first time since he walked into English class, his eyes twinkle.
“I know a lot of things people don’t think I can know.”
“Except when you don’t,” I shoot back. And though I don’t mention her name, suddenly Carolina is there between us, clear as day.
The light goes out of his eyes, and his handsome face turns dark. I brace for him to lash out at me—it’s no less than I deserve considering what I just said to him—but it only takes a moment for me to realize the darkness isn’t directed at me at all. It’s directed inward, a tornado of grief and rage that’s wrecking him from the inside out.
Apparently, I won’t need to beat him up for Carolina’s death. It looks like he’s doing a good enough job of that all on his own. Even if it’s only visible if you look closely.
Maybe it should bother me that his suffering makes me feel better, but it doesn’t. Carolina deserves his pain. And mine. And so much more.
Still, the fact that he’s suffering, too—that he’s not just glossing over her death like my family has—makes me like him more than I expected to. It also makes me feel bad for him, because I know just how much it hurts to lose her.
Perhaps that’s why I extend the tiniest of olive branches—or maybe it’s because he’s the only person I can share her with. The only person who might actually want to hear what I have to say. Most days even Aunt Claudia acts like she just wants to forget.
Either way, I whisper, “She made really good cookies.”
He grins cautiously, and the darkness slowly fades a little from his gaze. “She told really great stories.”
“Yeah.” The fist around my heart eases just a little, and somehow, I find myself smiling, too. “She really did.”
The warning affirmation sounds—this little exchange has eaten up our passing period—and I glance toward the group therapy room. Last class of the day.
But before I can head that way, my gaze snags on Jude, who is walking down the hall with his friend, Ember. She’s a lot shorter than he is, so he’s leaning down a little to hear her in the noisy halls as he nods along with whatever she’s saying.
But his eyes aren’t on her—they’re on me and Remy. And he doesn’t look happy.
Not that he has the right to look any way about me or what I’m doing—we aren’t friends, no matter how he acted toward the end of English class today. I start to look away as the lights flicker yet again—this storm is really doing a number on our power grid—but then Ember screams.
The sound—loud, high-pitched, nerve-shattering—rips through the hallways as she bursts into flames.