“What in the ever loving fuck …” Glavin’s jaw drops, as do the rest of ours.
Because the ass we were just staring at, the body I was fantasizing about grinding up on me at the homecoming dance, is none other than my sworn enemy.
Blair Oden.
Apparently, a summer away has turned her into every teenage guy’s wet dream. Jesus Christ, I actually think I can make out the form of her nipples underneath that tight white T-shirt. It has a little bow right where her cleavage dips down, and apparently her ass hasn’t been the only thing to round out. The sight of that fucking pink bow on her shirt accentuating tits that would be more than a handful if I felt the weight of them—
It makes me burn with everything from lust to fury.
The thing is, I’ve always thought Blair is pretty. Not in a conventional way, but I know her on a deeper level. She’s hilarious and sincere, and the way she never gives a fuck what other people think is so refreshing in this damn town.
No, she’s beautiful. It just takes a little more looking to see it.
But now? The girl who’s standing across the parking lot is a damn knockout.
Curves in all the right places, chocolate waves down to her ass, and there’s … maybe it’s a confidence I’ve never seen on her before as she moves across the blacktop to the entrance of the school.
“What the fuck happened to her this summer?” Glavin wonders aloud.
“It looks like she went into a plastic surgeon, that’s for sure,” Duff, a dick from the lacrosse team who I never understood why we allowed to hang out with us, puts in his two cents.
“Either way, I wouldn’t mind laying her down in the back of my truck.” Matthew’s eyes are hungry as he tracks her.
And me? I want to rip everyone’s eyeballs right out of their sockets. Because once upon a time, all that could have been mine.
Two years ago, Blair Oden betrayed our friendship. She made a mockery of me for no fucking reason. So, I made good on ruining her high school existence.
I looked for her all this summer. Around town, at the office that both our fathers share, at the lake parties I knew she’d never show up at. I kept an eye out so much that it only ended up further angering me, further supplanting that sadistic need to make her pay.
I have no idea why she threw away our friendship a week before our sophomore year started. Especially when it was just on the cusp of being something more. In all honesty, on an alternate timeline, I probably would have kissed her in that closet during seven minutes in heaven. But she dashed any hopes I’d had, and there was nothing left between us.
Nothing but hate and spite.
And now, there’s maddening desire, because holy shit if my cock isn’t rock-hard for her right now.
But there’s more than that kind of poison flowing through my veins.
I am downright pissed. How dare she leave town and come back, reinvented? I spent years trying to overcome the embarrassment she threw my way. And now she’s going to show up, flaunting her ass and shaking her hips like her shit doesn’t stink?
No. I am about to bring her back down to earth.
Blair wrecked me in a way no one ever had, or ever could. So it’s my mission to serve that dish back cold, on a silver platter.
2
Blair
So far, so good.
There have been no sexually explicit words spray painted on my locker. No porn magazines falling out of it. I wasn’t catcalled by one of Sawyer’s friends, and none of the mean girls have come up to tell me how average I am.
All in all, I can call this the most successful morning of high school I’ve had in two years.
Maybe they all forgot about me while I was away for the summer. Hell, I forgot about me.
I spent the summer in Haiti, volunteering to build an all-girl’s school in one of the most impoverished villages in the country.
It’s a miracle I was allowed to go; between Dad’s fretting and constant worry I’d be kidnapped, and his inability to accept that I didn’t want to work a summer internship at his architecture firm, I thought my chances were slim to none. But I got my butt on the plane. And then I survived the first week of bloody rips in my hands from holding a hammer for the first time in my life, and of sleeping on a cot with the thinnest blanket possible while the heat and mosquitos tried to eat me alive.
After that, though, it became the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life. Growing up in a privileged, upper-class suburban town in New Jersey, my peers are more concerned about which BMW they’re getting for their birthday than whether or not they’d have running water into next week. I’ve always felt out of place here, too aware or something for my own good. Going to Haiti, spending time with the people there and meeting all of the children who I hoped like hell would be given a better chance from the school we built … it was something more than myself.
I shed the pathetic, quirky persona that had been slapped on me over the years. I am no longer the weak, bendable girl who took too much snickering in the halls as she passed. This summer left me with a newfound confidence that I’ll carry with me through this school year like a suit of armor.
My locker is a ghost of how I left it last year. We do clean outs at the end of every semester, but I usually leave some of my personal effects since this has been home base and will continue to be here at Chester High School.
The picture of our student government last year is tacked at the top, showing me with my arm around Nate, the President to my VP. We’ve run every year uncontested, mostly because class cabinet is an undesirable job to the rest of our peers. Humping each other at dances and getting drunk at the homecoming football game are much more important things than all of the work that goes into organizing them.
There are two pictures of Laura and me, one from homecoming last year, posing in our dresses in the front hallway of my house. And the other from our class trip to the local amusement park freshman year. I smile, knowing we’ll have the best of times this year before she heads off to the top ballet company in New York City, and I go off to college. That is, if I get into my top choice.
My fingers land on something pinned just underneath the homecoming picture. It’s a ticket stub, one I shouldn’t keep here, but I’m too weak to throw it out. It’s from a movie that Sawyer and I saw together one weekend just before freshman year. His mom had dropped us off, since we both couldn’t drive yet, and he used his allowance money saved up over three weeks to pay for my ticket and popcorn. I like to think that was the beginning of the spark for us, the romantic thing that could have taken flight.
Instead, we’d become enemies.
“Here I thought you actually did something productive over the summer. But I guess you just went under the knife. Did we finally get to you?”
Sawyer’s voice is too close to my ear. Typically, I’d jump back with a start, or try to swat him away. I would show him, or his cronies, how much they were affecting me.
But I was different now. Something about being away from this place, away from my tormentors, has strengthened me. There’s a whole wide world out there, places far away from this judgmental town. And soon, I’ll be able to break free and explore them.
That notion gives me confidence, which allows me to stay stock-still as my nemesis leans far too much into my personal space.