6

He throws up his arms. “Because I really, really don’t want to get caught in the crossfire, okay?” he says. “You think you’re the only person who was looking forward to reinventing themselves once they got here?”

All the heat in me dies.

“Oh.” I guess I hadn’t thought about that.

“You’ve got to get it out of you head that all boys are dumb brutes,” Rafael says, after a moment. “If you’re going to be one of us for the next year, that’s a good place to start.”

“I guess so.”

My stomach growls, a reminder that I haven’t eaten anything since the crap airplane food earlier this morning. Absentmindedly, I reach for a welcome basket of snacks sitting on top of the desk closest to me.

As soon as my fingers touch the plastic, Rafael smacks it out of my hand.

“And the next thing to do,” he says, his eyes dropping down to stare unabashedly at my chest, “is to make sure you don’t give those puppies any extra ammunition to make a sudden appearance.”

I gape at him in horror and move to cross my arms over my chest. “You’re a monster.”

“Sorry, bro,” Rafael says, teasingly. “But for once … you should feel lucky the boob gods haven’t seen fit to bestow their blessings yet. And if you want that to last,” he says, smacking the hand he catches sneaking back towards a pack of licorice, “then you’re going to have to learn how to live with being hungry.”

Of all the things—cutting my hair, smoking cigarettes, chewing my nails down to a painful quick—this is the first thing that makes me pause and wonder if any of this is actually worth it at all. I turn to stare forlornly at the basket of goodies, and after a long moment, pick it up and carry it slowly over to the trash and drop it in.

“Hold up!” Rafael snaps, bounding over and snatching it immediately back out. “Just because you can’t have it doesn’t mean I can’t.” He pats his flat stomach appreciatively and grins. “Papa’s gotta shore up for winter. Rumor has it, it’s going to be a long one.”

Chapter Five

Aside from starving myself, potentially giving myself lung cancer, cutting my hair to look like an escaped prison-inmate, and having to learn this thing called the “ball shuffle”, there isn’t too much else Rafael instructs me to do.

Ha. See what I did there?

I lied. Mostly to myself.

Because according to my new gender-swapping sensei, pretending to be a boy is going to be a whole lot harder than Amanda Bynes led me to believe.

It also doesn’t help that according to Rafael, I need to be checking around every corner and keeping an eye out for dark shadows for when The Brotherhood finally decides to strike.

“So, there’s three of them. Jasper, Beck, and Heath. Jasper’s the ringleader, which you’ll soon find out. The other two … oh, wait … don’t look now, but they’ve already claimed the table closest to the door.”

Naturally, now that I’ve been told not to look, I have to look.

I i

mmediately recognize my mistake. As soon as my eyes lift to the table at the front of the dining hall where we now find ourselves—I look straight into the blonde one’s eyes.

“Look away, now!” Rafael hisses, and this time I obey. Just for a second. My gaze keeps flickering over to them and then away so quickly that I start to feel dizzy. “Were they looking? Please tell me they weren’t looking.”

“What do you think?” I whisper back as Rafael leads us as far away from them as possible, then mulls for a good five minutes over which two seats at the end of the table are going to give us the best advantage.

I, meanwhile, just keep working on perfecting my “ball shuffle”.

“Stop it,” Rafael snaps at me. “You look like you’ve got crabs.”

“Maybe that’ll help with the locker room situation,” I chirp all-too-cheerily as I’m finally allowed to sit in Rafael’s perfectly curated seat selection. I can tell he’s immediately regretting his decision from the way sweat beads on the top of his forehead as he stares worriedly at the empty seat to his right.

“I could sit there instead, you know,” I say, leaning forward from across the table. The wooden tables are so wide I have to practically lean my whole body across it to keep my voice low enough to keep it from carrying down the entire table. This is not going to be a good place to have any kind of secret discussions. Not unless you want them to be overheard.

“No thank you,” he says, curtly. “I think my level of association with you is already far too much.”

“Suit yourself,” I say, flopping down in my seat and pushing it back so it leans onto two legs. “But the other one … I think it really might be better.”

While Rafael grows quiet, his brow furrowing as he restarts the whole inner process again, I take the opportunity to look around the room.

This is one of the only spaces in Bleakwood that doesn’t have tall windows overlooking some scenic view or other. It has arching beams overhead and a small, raised platform off to the side that’s currently being used to house leafy potted plants nearly as tall as I am. Like the entirety of the student body, they look imported from some far-off place. Also, like the rest of the students here, they look like they’re worth a fortune.

One glance around the room at the boys filtering in around us, I see how Rafael singled me out at once. These boys here … they’re not like my brothers. While I was raised with four boys who cut their own hair, wrestled in the backyard after school, and considered hand-me-downs a rite of passage—these boys look like they stepped out of a “rich boys monthly” magazine.

Expertly coiffed hair abounds. Uniforms, though received just this morning and worn all day since they didn’t hike tragically up the mountain all afternoon, are still perfectly pressed. Sure, their nails might not exactly be manicured—but they’re somehow chewed to the quick, like the rest of them, in the most purposefully casual way.

Though these boys are in the midst of the same raging hormone tornado that I am, there’s nary a zit in sight. In fact, the more I look at them closely, the more I wonder if I might have inadvertently walked onto the set of a face wash commercial.

“So, what’s the deal with them?” I ask, jerking my head in the direction of the boys who’ve gotten me entangled into some weird fraternity shit on my very first day. “I mean, how do you even know them? Isn’t everyone here from different schools?”

“Sure,” he says, nodding, “but most of us have families that have been coming here for decades. Some of us, over a century. That sort of thing goes on long enough and it isn’t the only tradition that ends up being passed down. To those three, The Brotherhood is practically a birthright.”

“I thought this was a merit-based school?” I say, knowing it sounds stupid beforehand and saying it anyway.

“Yeah, well, you heard the dean next door … somehow merit has a lot to do with your last name at places like this.”

“Meaning?”

“Any place that has to claim its applications are merit-based.”

“Right.” I glance down at the table in front of me and wish dinner had been served already so I at least had something to push anxiously around a plate. I wonder how many bites Rafael is going to let me take before he smacks the food out of my hand this time. “So, about this Brotherhood … .”

“Actually, I’d like to hear about that too.”

The voice belongs to a boy so tiny I don’t even realize he’s standing over my shoulder until he repeats himself a second time … though that might have something to do with the way I’ve been scouring the faces around me for any sign of imperfections that might convince me one of these boys is somehow still human.

The one now standing beside me points to the seat next to me with a shaking finger. “This seat taken?”

When I don’t claim it right away, the boy lets out a sigh of relief and scurries into the empty seat like a squirrel. As soon as he sits down, I see Rafael calculating him, trying to decide what his addition to our table means for his future social position.

From the way the boy now squirming beside me keeps glancing around him like he’s just waiting for the inevitable avalanche that’s coming, I’m sorry to say it doesn’t bode well.

“Sorry,” the boys says when he catches me staring. “I’m just a little nervous.”

“First time?” Rafael asks, slumping forward with his elbows on the table—clearly resigned to his lot in life. Guess he decided he wouldn’t be lumping in with the cool crowd the moment he made the mistake of helping me.

The boy nods a little too vigorously. His glasses side further down towards the end of his nose with each bob of his head.

“I’m Neville,” he chirps.

“And I’m—”

“Alex, right?”

I don’t get the chance to introduce myself before a deep voice behind me does it for me.

Even though I haven’t heard his voice up close, I know who it is. Even if he hadn’t spoken, I would have been able to sense the presence from the way those around me have suddenly gone so silent.

Neville shrinks back in his chair looking terrified while Rafael just tries his best to look completely nonchalant.

Seems like Rafael didn’t have to explain the order of things to me after all. I get to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. And in this case, the horse has a square jaw, full lips, and eyes that should not be allowed to be that shade of blue.

Jasper, the ringleader.

The two other boys flank his sides, each one standing almost uncomfortably close. It’s like they move as a single unit, a single-minded body.

Right now that mind, that gaze, is on me.

“I—”

Jasper cuts me off before I have the chance to respond.

“We don’t need you to answer. We know who you are. But the real question here, is do you?”

My eyes shift anxiously from where they’re locked with his, back to Rafael. Am I supposed to say something? Didn’t he just tell me not to answer?

“Hey boy!” The one that looks like he could slice me with his cheekbones lashes out with one arm, catching me on the shoulder. And off my guard.

I fall roughly against the table, jarring my elbow into the grooves between the planks of wood. Pain and tingles shoot up my arm and through my body, tightening my stomach with a wave of nausea.

“Pay attention when we’re talking to you,” he snaps. Suddenly those cheekbones look less charming.

“Careful now, Beck. Alex won’t be much use to us if he’s got his arm in a cast for the next six weeks.”

Beck. This one with murderous cheekbones is Beck.

Though Beck looks like he’d happily break my arm here and now, he does shift back half a step.

“Look what you’ve done,” Jasper says, glaring down at me and shaking his head ever so slightly. “You’ve gone and ruined a perfectly nice introduction.”

To his other side, the third boy clears his throat.

“I was getting to you, He

ath,” Jasper hisses at him, closing his eyes for a second before his annoyance gets the better of him. “Like I was saying. Alex. It’s really unfortunate that you got marked by the ash. Usually when that happens … it’s someone who already knows the rules.”

Fortunately, the pain in my arm has subsided but my bruised ego won’t let me stay quiet.

“And what rules are those?” I ask. I keep my voice low, low enough that only these three boys … this Brotherhood … can hear me. I keep my eyes focused on Jasper’s, as unsettling as they are, and wait for him to answer.

For a second, I think he’s going to hit me too. This time, without even bothering to make it look like an accident.

If it was Beck, I’m sure he would have. He’s a jumpy one, this Beck. I’ll have to keep a careful eye on him.

Jasper squints up his nose, his jaw working as he tries to decide what to say next. “I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, newbie, but I suggest you cut it out,” he says. His voice is even quieter than mine, but somehow, it’s far more threatening.

“Because for the rest of our time here at Bleakwood, Alex, we’re gonna make you our bitch.”

Chapter Six

“This is so bad. This is really bad.”

Rafael has taken to pacing across the floor again. I sit on my bed trying, and failing, not to wring my hands raw.

“It can’t be that bad. Not really.” There’s a pit in my stomach the size of the Grand Canyon. Sure, I just ate, but I already feel empty. “Right?”

Rafael heaves a sigh and collapses on his own bed, staring up at the ceiling. He looks striking, framed in silhouette by the huge windows behind him. Like the rest of the boys here, he could be a cover model for Teen Vogue.

“Bad enough that if it wasn’t also my ass on the line, I’d be turning you in right now.”

I squirm, feeling my face color. “Have I mentioned how much I appreciate—”

“Oh, shut up,” he snaps. He turns over on his side and props his head up in his hand. “Look, Alex, if The Brotherhood kills you I’m not going to take responsibility. I can’t protect you from them.”

“Kills me?” I say incredulously, my voice croaking.

“Yes,” he replies flatly. “With families like theirs, you think they can’t cover up a murder? Clean up a little ‘oopsie’ one of their dear sweet boys made? Get real.” He swings his legs over the side of his bed and stands up. “I need a smoke almost as bad as you do. Come with me.”