“Well, maybe they took time off, y’know, one of them did get married,” Lila chimes in, sarcasm lacing her tongue. Her pink hair is tied up in a messy bun, her eyeliner on the thicker side, in the most beautiful shade of white, which brings out the pale color in her eyes.
I loosen the tie around my neck, take off the maroon blazer, and hang it over the chair. “Astrid still hasn’t come back, it seems.”
“She’s probably on her honeymoon,” Grace rolls her eyes. “Or trying to heal all the injuries you inflicted.”
“It’s useless. She’ll only get them again.”
“What? No, no, no,” Avalon starts panicking. “You’re not beating her up again.”
“Well, I was only half-joking. But I do have big plans for her.”
“Care to share with the class?” Lila asks, taking a sip of Grace’s juice box. Grace, absolutely livid, snatches it away from Lila, then drinks it down in one big gulp.
“Would you two knock it off?” I snap, and their silent eye contest breaks off, both of them giving me a sheepish smile. “The first thing is to do something… well, unethical.”
“What now?” Avalon groans, covering her eyes with her palm, shaking her head.
“I want to break into her dorm.”
“Have you completely lost it?” Avalon hisses.
“Yes, a long, long time ago. Anyway, Grace, are you in?”
“Always,” she grins. “Why do you want to break into Astrid’s dorm, though?”
“Not immediately. After she comes back to the academy. She’s a part of Sinners and Saints; there has to be something about the people working behind the damned thing.”
“I find it odd that she won’t out the rest, now that she’s known to be a part of the group.”
“If she doesn’t know who they are, she’s fucking stupid to even start doing it,” Lila shrugs. “I’d never work with someone whose face and name I don’t know. If they have all the dirty gossip on every student in the school, they’re bound to have something dirty on Astrid, too.”
“And I want to know what it is,” I nod. “Because no matter how big a cunt Astrid is, I highly doubt she’d leak Soren’s sex tape, and the scene from the elevator just to spite him.”
“You think there’s more to the story?”
“Eh, maybe not. But if I can be certain there isn’t, and she did it because she’s a fucking bitch, I can make sure my last semester here will be spent turning her life upside down.”
“What are you planning, exactly?” Grace asks, opening another juice box and sipping on it, leaning forward a little. Lila and Avalon follow suit, making the distance between us fall shorter, with less possibility of being overheard.
“You can’t exactly create a wedge between Sawyer and Astrid, and I’m scared of his reaction if you go way over the top, which,knowing you, you’ll definitely do,” Avalon mutters.
“Sawyer won’t do shit if he wants back in our parents’ good graces. Besides, he doesn’t matter to me anymore,” I lie through gritted teeth, and all of them can see right through the mask I’ve been putting on.
I miss Sawyer.
Fucking hell, losing a sibling while they’re still alive is one of the worst feelings in the world. He’s there, but this isn’t the person I grew up with. It’s not the boy who tried teaching me self-defense when I was in middle school, it’s not the same man who held my hair back after I was throwing up from my first time drinking.
All of the memories, all of our childhood seems to flash behind my eyes. And it fucking hurts. It hurts knowing he chose Astrid, and it hurts knowing he doesn’t care about what she did. I never thought we’d be here, like two complete strangers.
Which is why I’ll no longer associate myself with him above anything mandatory. He’s dead to me, and since it’s already been quite some time since it all went down, no apologies will ever salvage the relationship between us.
“Riiight…” Grace drawls out, her voice laced with skepticism. “Anyway, how can we help?”
“You want to help?”
Lila and Grace nod immediately, and even Avalon, after a sigh of annoyance, nods. A small smile breaks onto my face, and I’ll always cherish my girls,and forever be grateful for being the village I need.
“This isn’t some sort of teenage TV drama, though,” Lila says. “You can’t knock the books out of her hands and such.”
