Arsène’s mac ’n’ cheese was atrocious. Lumpy and unevenly cooked, with balls of orange powder everywhere. His ramen made you wish you were drinking bleach instead, and I hadn’t even known screwing up ramen was possible. Yet here we were, eating stale instant ramen swimming in what looked suspiciously like piss from Styrofoam cups. Riggs mixed whatever was in the flask with Tropicana, which gave it the diluted yet sharp taste of dish soap. This had to be the lowlight of my life. If God did exist, I was going to sue.
The three of us were sitting on Arsène’s bed. It was a bunk. We sat on the bottom part, using his roommate Simon’s top mattress to prop our legs.
“Love what you did with the place.” Riggs motioned with his wooden chopsticks around the room. Arsène had an entire wall on which he’d graffitied a thousand times in neat, black, and bold handwriting:
I hate Gracelynn Langston. I hate Gracelynn Langston. I hate Gracelynn Langston. I hate Gracelynn Langston. I hate Gracelynn Langston. I hate Gracelynn Langston.
“Who’s Gracelynn Langston?” I swallowed a lump of mac ’n’ cheese without tasting it.
“Arsène’s evil stepsister,” Riggs supplied, slurping a noodle into his mouth. I was still trying to work the chopsticks. There were a ton of things rich kids knew how to do and I didn’t. Using chopsticks was one of them.
Arsène flashed me a deadly look, his brown eyes scanning me head to toe. I could tell he wasn’t sold on me. Riggs was a go-with-the-flow type of guy, but Arsène didn’t seem hot on extending his social circle, which currently only included Riggs.
“You sure about this, dude?” Arsène asked Riggs. “We don’t know anything about him.”
“That’s not true. We know he’s dirt poor and is a good swimmer.” Riggs laughed, but somehow, I couldn’t be offended by anything this guy said. There was no malice in him, something I couldn’t say about Arsène.
“What if he tells about the flask?” Arsène spoke directly to Riggs, ignoring my existence.
“Look at him. Does he look like he can hurt anyone? I wouldn’t trust him to kill a cockroach. He won’t tell about the flask.” Riggs waved him off. “So. Arsène. How do you feel about Gracelynn Langston? And please don’t hold back.” Riggs chuckled into his Styrofoam cup of MSG and sewer water.
“I’d murder her if she was worth wasting a bullet on,” Arsène ground out, his eyes hard on his food. “She’s the reason I’m spending Christmas with you dickheads.”
“Not this again.” Riggs yawned. “Either fess up to what happened with her, or stop bitching about her.”
“You were the one who asked.” Arsène kicked Riggs in the shins. “Hey, can this guy even talk or what?”
“I can talk,” I clipped out, stirring the noodles in my cup. I just didn’t want to. There was nothing much to say, really.
“I’ll amend—can you say anything interesting?” Arsène pinned me with a look.
“Cut him some slack. His mother stood him up,” Riggs explained.
“Bummer.” Arsène sucked his teeth. “So what’s your story, morning glory?”
“How do you mean?” I scowled.
“How’d you end up in this prison for teenagers? No one came here willingly.”
Forcing myself to look up from my food, I met his gaze. “Got caught copping a feel of a billionaire’s daughter. This is my punishment. Haven’t seen my mom in over a year. Don’t know if I ever will again.”
It was only when I said these words that I realized I genuinely didn’t know if I’d ever see her. Arsène stroked his chin, considering this. He looked like he could murder someone for real. Whereas Riggs had that scruffy, cute look girls really liked.
“Whose fault was it?” Arsène asked. “The getting-caught part.” He put his Styrofoam cup on the floor, grabbed mine, and did the same. He opened his nightstand drawer and took out vinegar chips and some popcorn. He popped both bags open, and I let out a relieved breath.
“Does it matter?” I asked.
“Does life matter?” Arsène deadpanned. “Of course it matters. Vengeance keeps a person going. If there’s someone to blame, there’s payback.”
I thought about it.
“It was her fault, then.” I helped myself to a handful of popcorn. “The more I think about it, the more it feels like a setup. Her dad walked in a second after I put my lips on hers.”
“Definitely a setup.” Riggs nodded, chewing his chips loudly, cross-legged. “Was she at least hot?”
“Um.” I rubbed my chin, willing Arya to materialize in my imagination. I didn’t need more than to think her name before I had a clear vision of her. Her swamp eyes and full mouth. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Your guess is not good enough. Show us,” Riggs demanded.
“How?”
“She must have social media.”
“Bet she does, but I don’t have a computer,” I said. It was half the truth. I did have a computer, but the ancient type. One that I could barely use Word on. Even that was because Andrew Dexter Academy demanded we have computers.
Arsène took out a brand-new laptop from his leather backpack and handed it to me. “Here. Use my MyFriends. Just type in her name.”
“You have a MyFriends?” I eyed him skeptically. All I knew about Arsène Corbin was that he was an evil genius who barely attended any classes and yet somehow ended up passing each year with honors. While Riggs spent his time trying to get himself killed by climbing trees, skipping between rooftops, and getting into brawls, Arsène was more the type to build DIY bombs and sell them online. Come to think about it, they were an odd pairing. They were probably so close only because they were forced together by loneliness.
“For research purposes.”
“You mean stalking.”
Arsène kicked my side with his socked foot. “I tolerated you better when you kept your mouth shut.”
I typed Arya’s name in the search bar, feeling my fingertips going clammy. I didn’t even know why. I had thought about Arya often—mainly bad things—but it wasn’t like I liked her anymore or anything.
Arya’s smiling face popped into the feed, and I clicked on it.
“I can’t believe her account is not private.” Arsène’s head almost knocked mine when he peeked into the screen. “Her parents must be dumb as bricks.”
“Her mom is kind of MIA. She’s always on some shopping trip. I think she hated Arya for not dying instead of her twin brother. And her dad is clueless about this shit.” I began to scroll through her pictures.
As suspected, Arya was having a ball while I was away. In the last couple of months alone, she’d posted pictures of herself attending the winter ball at her school, ice-skating in Rockefeller, having a girls’ night in with a friend called Jillian, and licking ice cream in the Bahamas. But the image my eyes kept getting stuck on was the last picture, posted only four hours ago. The location showed as Aspen, Colorado. Arya was standing on a mountain of snow, in full snowboarding gear, smiling to the camera, next to her father. The lava-hot anger that stirred in my stomach wasn’t from the sight of both these assholes having the time of their lives while I was stuck here in an asylum for troubled kids. I was used to getting screwed over by now. It was the person behind them who made my pulse skyrocket. The woman who stood behind them. She was holding their ski poles, looking like she was about to topple over, catering to their every need, as always.
Mom.
“Nicholai?” Riggs waved a hand in front of my face. “How’s that mental breakdown going?”
“It’s her.” I meant Mom, but they both blinked at the picture of Arya, their attention fully on the younger girl.
“No shit it’s her. We have eyes. She’s kind of hot, but not enough to get thrown into Andrew Dexter for.” Riggs scrubbed his stubble with the back of his hand.
“Hotter than Gracelynn,” Arsène spit out, like his stepsister was right here with us and could take offense. I got why he was mad. All these fuckers were off living their best lives, while the three of us were left behind, forgotten.
“No. I mean my mother. She went with the Roths on their Aspen vacation and didn’t even tell me she changed her plans. There she is.” I zoomed in on her.
It was a stupid thing to get mad about, everything considered, and still—what the fuck? Couldn’t she call? Text? Write another stupid letter? She was not stuck in the snow or in traffic or suffering from a horrible accident. She was right there, in the flesh, choosing these people over me, time and time again.
It drove me nuts. How little I mattered to this woman.
I wondered if I’d ever stood a chance in the first place. If maybe she’d given up on me because I’d always reminded her of my no-show father. Or if I’d messed it up myself.
Arsène clapped my back. It was the first time he’d touched me. That anyone had touched me, really, since Conrad had beaten the daylights out of me. “Sounds like she’s a piece of work. You don’t need her. You don’t need anyone.”
“Everyone needs someone,” Riggs pointed out. “Or so I read in the self-help books I steal from the library.”
“Why do you steal them?” I asked.
Riggs threw his head back and laughed. “What else am I supposed to use to roll up my DIY joints?”
“I need people,” I heard myself say. “I can’t get through this alone.”
This school. This life. This bitterness that cut through my skin every time I thought about Conrad and Arya.
“Fine. Then we’ll be each other’s someone.” Arsène perked up, letting the popcorn bag he was holding fall to the mattress. “Fuck them. Fuck our families. Our parents. The people who have wronged us. Fuck Christmas dinners and decorated pine trees and scented candles and neatly wrapped gifts. We’ll be each other’s family from now on. The three of us. Every Christmas. Every Easter. Every Thanksgiving. We’ll stick together, and we’ll fucking win.”
Riggs fist-bumped Arsène. Arsène raised his fist and offered it to me. I stared at it, feeling like I was on the cusp of something big. Monumental. Both Arsène and Riggs were glaring at me expectantly. I thought about that thing Arya had said all those years ago, in Mount Hebron Memorial, about how money wasn’t everything in the world. Maybe she was right after all. These kids were rich, and they didn’t seem happier than I was.
I raised my arm, my fist touching Arsène’s.
“Attaboy.” Riggs laughed. “Told you Nicholai was one of us.”
And from that moment on, I was.