Bad Boy Hero - Tanglewood Academy

Maybe once I get back and I’m lying down in bed—oh God, bed sounds incredible right about now—I can look for clips of the game online, see if anyone recorded it.

That’s the main thought going through my head as I step up to my doorway and slot my key into the lock. Then I freeze, because the lock doesn’t turn, which means it’s already unlocked.

My stomach twists uneasily, and I grab the knob, pushing my dorm room door inward. The second it swings open, I gasp, my jaw falling.

The entire room is trashed.

Crushed beer cans litter my carpet. Half-empty beer bottles are strewn across my bed, soaking through the sheets. My closet has been flung open, all my clothes tossed around, and it looks like there’s beer staining them, too. There’s even a whole bottle of Jack in the corner, which looks like it’s been opened and emptied across my laundry basket, then tossed into the wall so hard it cracked in half.

Tears sting at the backs of my eyes.

“Oh, my God,” someone exclaims behind me, in the hallway. And if possible, my mood plummets even lower. “What a disaster!”

I turn to find Bette wearing the phoniest shocked expression I’ve ever seen, her mouth a perfect, lipsticked O.

“Missy, did you throw a rager in here? You know this kind of behavior is unfitting of a Tanglewood student!” She leans around me, and that’s when I realize she has her phone in her hand, the camera extended.

She’s filming this.

This is the final straw. I reach up and make a grab for the phone, but Bette dances backward, out of reach. “Ah, ah, ah. No touching of other students’ personal property is allowed here at Tanglewood.” She actually has the nerve to wink at me.

“Oh really?” I yell. Dorm room doors are starting to open up and down the hallway, but I don’t care who witnesses this. I’m too furious to care. “Then what the hell do you call this, Bette?” I give up trying to grab her phone, and slap my palm against my open dorm room door instead. “You destroyed my entire room.”

“Please. As if I would ever be caught dead touching anything in your room,” Bette replies, still in that faux voice that grates on me like nails on a chalkboard.

“That’s bullshit and every single person here knows it.”

“Do they?” Bette cocks her head to the side, her eyes flashing with a triumph I don’t understand. “Does everyone know that you weren’t here tonight to do this yourself?” She taps at her chin with a forefinger. “Well, I suppose if you could tell everyone—and prove—where you actually were tonight, then maybe you’d have a case to prove you didn’t…” She waves a hand toward my room. “Have an illegal party in your boudoir, instead.”

My stomach sinks all the way through the floor now.

She knows.

It’s the only explanation for her expression right now, the kind of grin you see on a cat right before it devours the canary. Bette tosses her head and glances up and down the hallway at her audience. I spot Yvette looking at me, wide-eyed and worried. Behind her, Sara and Leah are shifting on their feet, uneasy. Neither of them will meet my gaze, which only makes me ball my fists, furious.

“Well, Missy?” Bette says, head cocked, eyes alight with bemusement. “What’s it going to be? Are you going to tell us all where you were tonight, if this isn’t your doing?”

My choices are either to confirm what everyone here must suspect about me by now—that I’m not one of them, and I never will be—or to cave in. To let Bette win. To possibly even get suspended for it. I feel nauseous, like I’m going to be sick.

But I can’t lose my place here. Even if it means my current social pariah status will become permanent. I refuse to let Bette win.

“Tick tock,” Bette’s saying. “Come on, Missy, you only have two choices here.”

But then another voice speaks up, from behind me, up the other direction of the hallway. A familiar, deep baritone. A couple of the other girls gasp at the sound. “No,” Keanen says. “She doesn’t.”

10

I turn slowly to find Keanen standing just behind me. But his eyes are fixed tightly on his sister.

“I can handle this,” I tell him, my voice low and calming. Because this is exactly what I didn’t want to happen—for family to fight family.

But he’s glaring past me at his sister, totally oblivious. “I can’t believe you. I knew you were childish and petty, but this is a new low even for you.”

Bette’s jaw drops. All her earlier vicious excitement is gone, evaporating into tightly coiled anger. “Me? Keanen, I’m trying to help you. You don’t understand how girls like her operate. All she’s doing is using you for your money—”