The Devil of Westbrook Academy

CHAPTER 3

Is there such a thing, though actual healing for a girl who still craves the burn of a particular pair of ice-blue eyes, the same eyes that once made her feel like the center of the universe and then let her fall straight through the floor when it mattered most?

Bad judgment. That's the only diagnosis that fits. If I'd had a single ounce of sense back then, I'd have clocked those eyes for exactly what they were: a slow-motion car crash wearing a beautiful face. I could have spared myself years of aching for a gaze that only ever brought me pain in the end.

Every time I close my eyes now, there's nothing but dark waiting on the other side. And here I am, driving straight back into the source of it.

God, I need that joint.

My fingers won't stop drumming against my thigh. I let them, too tired to fight every single symptom at once while the memories crowd in uninvited.

"Miss?" Trumbull, again, gently prying me back into the present. Right. He'd asked something.

"I'm okay, T. I appreciate you asking." Okay. Safe word. Reveals nothing. He didn't need to know there was a stretch of time. I genuinely hoped the sun wouldn't bother rising with me still in it. That dying felt like the only exit sign in a building with no other doors.

I click my tongue piercing against my teeth, over and over, an old nervous tic that's outlasted every therapist who tried to talk me out of it.

"Christ," I breathe, feeling my heart stutter unpleasantly in my chest. Some things you can't just quit. I've tried.

My will to actually want things died a long time ago. My body kept walking around anyway, a house with all the lights off, scars tucked under the floorboards where nobody thinks to look. Four years spent trying every possible method to quiet the noise in my head, and mostly failing. Depression doesn't negotiate. It just waits you out.

Time is a thief, is the thing nobody warns you about. It took the version of me that should have gotten to be reckless and young beside her brother. It took my voice, my nerve, my say in my own life.

It took four boys who built me up and then, when it counted most, let me fall.

And Westbrook Westbrook took the most from all of it, which is exactly why my hatred for this place has only sharpened with age instead of dulling.

Today it's like the last four years simply didn't happen, like I could step back into my old life seamlessly except grief doesn't work that way. Grief keeps a ledger. And once again, this town has taken something from me. Something bigger than my own life ever was.

I don't know what to do with grief this size. I'm furious and helpless in the same breath, denial and numbness fighting for the same real estate in my chest.

Just the word alone grief sits heavy on the tongue, like it wants to drag you under with it.

"Everything is all right back there, Miss?" Trumbull's voice again, quiet concern threaded through the monotone.

"Just need water," I whisper, and somehow the old man catches it anyway.

"Of course." A chilled bottle appears over the seat.

"Thanks," I mumble. Of course there's Fiji water stocked in the car. Of course there is. Trumbull's been a fixture and family both since I was six years old, longer than either of my actual parents have bothered being present.

"My pleasure, Miss."

I know darkness intimately. I don't know this particular grief yet, the kind that steals your air a little more with every mile we cover, closing in on the one place on earth I never wanted to see again.

I roll the tongue bar anxiously, trying to anchor myself to something physical instead of the panic building steadily under my ribs. Can't let it loose. Not here. Not in this town. Never in their town.

We roll deeper into the valley, and I watch it slide by the glass impossibly manicured, sun-drenched, staged like a postcard. Half of me wants to torch the whole place and eat fried chicken from The Haven while I watch it burn.

It's always summer here, somehow, even in the dead of winter. Blue skies, gorgeous trophy wives, easygoing rich husbands who've never once had to worry about consequences. As if we don't all know exactly what's crawling around under the surface. As if Westbrook Blues isn't held together entirely by secrets nobody says out loud.

A small girl catches my eye through the window, running through sprinkler spray in someone's front yard while a stressed-out nanny scolds her from the porch. The kid doesn't care. She just keeps laughing, keeps running, blissfully unaware of how ugly this world can get, or how far people will go to snuff a light like hers out completely.

I was her once.

Careless. Content. Full of dreams I actually believed in.

I used to see this whole world in color. I used to love watching the stars from my bedroom window, courtesy of the boy who stole my first kiss in secret and then acted like a stranger to me the second anyone else was watching. I hated that about him. I was addicted to it anyway.

Now the stars don't do anything for me at all.

Four boys consumed my entire world and then dismantled it, piece by piece, right when I needed them most to hold it together.

I hate replaying this loop, but they're never far from my thoughts, any of them.

Silas mischief incarnate, self-appointed best friend since second grade, back when every other girl in class wanted nothing to do with me.

Rowan quiet, brilliant, painfully gentle, the boy who somehow needed my protection as much as I apparently needed his. He made me feel like I belonged somewhere, even in his silences.

And then him. . Ace. The one whose eyes stole the air straight out of my lungs on sight. Cold-tempered, sharp-edged, carrying grief he never once let anyone see except, somehow, me. He used to hold my pinkie in secret, look at me like he despised my existence, and still manage to feel like the only steady thing in a world that never stopped spinning.

There used to be four.

"Oh god," I whisper, throat tight. Tears sting before I can stop them.

Four. Not three. Never three, not in my memory, not once. But today the math doesn't hold, because my twin George, my other half, the reason I kept breathing at all through the worst of it is gone.

I shut my eyes, useless as it is, hoping to open them into a version of reality where none of this is true.