Champagne kisses, p.1
Champagne Kisses, page 1
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Kitty Parker.
All rights reserved under Kitty Parker. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form or by any means including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
1
"We're moving to Linbury," Dad had announced, three weeks after my half-brother Neil died and our world fell apart. "We need a fresh start."
I had agreed. My life was a mess: my family didn't stop fighting, my friends and my boyfriend didn't know what to do or say around me anymore, and my stepmother was like a little child who'd lost a favorite toy. But I didn't think Linbury was the ideal place for a fresh start. My boyfriend Curtis had once described it as the Beverly Hills of New Jersey: a small town with nothing but gigantic houses, spoilt rich kids, Mercedes convertibles, and fancy private schools for miles. It was worlds apart from Manhattan, the big city I'd been born and brought up in. It had enormous white mansions atop rolling hills, antiseptic gardens that were cleaned and pruned within an inch of their lives, perfect-looking residents, and greenery that was so lush and so fresh that it made me feel like a dirty old tramp.
But it was the place my father's hospital had transferred him to, and it was where we moved a week after Dad's announcement, before I had a chance to talk to Curtis or my best friend Rachael. Although I doubted we'd have been able to talk properly anyway, because they'd begun to treat me like a stranger. They'd never in their lives experienced anything but normality, and by then, I had.
The day everything started, I was at Big Happy Family, the bakery in Linbury Airport I'd taken up a job waitressing at to pay for my books and clothes and Beethoven CDs. I'd taken a bus to the airport, walked inside the bakery, slipped into the staff toilets, and stopped in front of the sinks. The walls of the toilet were a dull green, but Jazz, my eighteen-year-old coworker, had dyed her hair neon yellow and the colour brightened up the room.
"Hey," Jazz said. "You're late, Sum. What's the excuse? Vicious dogs chasing you in Romania?"
I smiled. Jazz didn't know much about me, which was what I liked most about her.
"Something like that," I said, slipping on my apron over my denim shorts. "Nice tongue stud," I added, as Jazz made faces in the mirror.
"Hey, gotta have something new for the guys at Linbury Public," Jazz said, shrugging. "They expect that." She rubbed her hands together gleefully. "Senior year! Can you believe it? One more year with the locker graffiti and teachers who use too much hair gel, and then I'm out. Florida, baby!"
I eyed Jazz. She was wearing a hideous multicolored poncho that clashed heavily with her sweatpants and her frizzy yellow hair, and a sign on her back that said 'Mary-Jane Cohen'. Where the nickname Jazz came from, I didn't know. Sometimes Jazz reminded me of my Hadley, but without the attitude and the drinking that had been customary for my stepsister ever since we'd lost Neil.
"What do you think?" Jazz flourished her arms. "The poncho's cool, isn't it? Makes me look like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz."
"You're weird," I couldn't resist saying.
"Yeah, but I'm still cool, right?" Jazz smiled brightly. "Okay, kid, get out there and serve people their food. There's millions starving outside while we admire ourselves."
Not exactly. Big Happy Family was almost deserted – there was just a family with a small girl by the counter and a guy with his head bent over a book at a table at the back of the room. Androvich, the other waiter, had supplied the family with cakes and lemonade. I headed for the guy.
"Hey," I said, flashing my professional Big Happy Family smile.
He raised his head. He was, I noted distantly, extremely hot – long lanky body in tight black jeans that went on forever over long legs, a black leather jacket over a white t-shirt that showed off tight abs, messy dark hair that fell into dark eyes with the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen on a guy. And a scowl that was even more prominent than the rest of his lean face.
I sneaked a glance at the book he was bent over, reading. The cover told me that it was Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. And I'd thought I was the only teenager in America to have read that.
"What?" he snarled, annoyance written all over his features.
I took a step back, startled by the venom in his tone. There were things about my job I liked – Jazz, being at the airport, the fact that the bakery was deserted enough for us to have plenty of free time. But among the things I didn't like, rude customers who thought they were always right was at the top of the list, with the fact that we had to be nice to them coming a close second.
"What can I get you?" I said evenly, refusing to display offence at his tone.
He looked me up and down, the scowl giving way to a smirk. "A hotter waitress would be a good start."
I felt my eyebrows rise involuntarily. The jackass. The rude, arrogant jackass.
Except I didn't really care. My life had been torn apart a few months ago. An arrogant jackass taking out his bad mood on me wasn't going to be able to break my heart.
"I'm really sorry," I said lightly, offering a professional high-wattage smile to hide my thoughts. "We're out of stock for that. We do have cakes, though. And sandwiches. And coffee. Maybe you want some of that?"
His eyes dropped back down to his book. "A big fat coffee with all the milk and sugar you have." Funny, he seemed like the type to eschew milk and sugar and go for the blackest of black coffees.
"One tall regular with milk and sugar coming right up." My cheery tone sounded too fake, probably because it was. I walked back to the counter. Jazz was standing behind it, her gaze fixed on the rude customer, a strange expression on her round, open face.
"What's up?" I asked, adding sugar to the coffee I'd poured out.
"That guy's a fucking son of a bitch," Jazz said under her breath.
I looked at her, surprised that she felt so strongly about some random guy with a stick up his ass. "He's just a jerk," I said carefully.
"Zach Gellar isn't just anything." Jazz turned away abruptly. When she spoke again, her voice was as cheerful as usual. "Hey, you want to get that old dude who just came in? He looks like he could use some lemonade."
I bit my lip. There was a mystery here. I didn't want to probe into whatever it was that Jazz didn't want to talk about, but I couldn't help wanting to know more. I'd always been a sucker for secrets.
"Zach Gellar," I said cautiously. "That's his name?"
Jazz looked at me and let out a sigh. "You're going to start at Thornton Academy in September, right?"
"Yeah…" I wiped my hands on the rag by the counter. I had applied to Thornton, which was a private school ten minutes away from my new house, and to Lincoln Central, which was over in the next town. Both had accepted me, thanks to my grades and carefully-chosen extracurricular activities in Woodhouse High, but Thornton had offered me a scholarship that covered three-fourths of my tuition. "Registration is this afternoon."
"Well, be careful there," Jazz said quietly.
I glanced up sharply. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, be careful," said Jazz, arranging sandwiches on a plate. "Everything's going to seem just perfect there at first, okay? Beautiful and nice and tidy and well-ordered. But it isn't. At all."
How did she know? What was she hiding? I wanted to know, but I wasn't sure if I could ask. I wasn't Rachael, the girl who'd been my best friend back in the city. I didn't know how to intrude on people's privacy without offending them.
"I still don't get what you mean," I said instead.
Jazz fixed me with a gaze that was unusually serious for a bubbly, warm-hearted girl with dyed neon-yellow hair. "Just be careful." She paused for a long time. "And you'll see what I mean when you get there."
Decidedly ominous. But I was sure that whatever happened, I could handle it.
I hoped.
* * *
I went for registration at Thornton Academy right after my shift ended. It had been established by Lord William Jameson IV, a British army general, in 1739, as a military training ground for young boys; it had become a boarding school for white Americans in 1801, and had eventually transformed into a co-educational day school that was one of the most prestigious ones in the country in the 1950s. Now it had the pick of the brightest, richest, WASPiest kids and teachers on the East Coast, and standing outside it that sunny August morning, I wasn't at all sure what I was doing there.
The red brick main building was covered in ivy and surrounded by acres of lush green land. Towering black iron gates with a gold-plated plaque reading 'THORNTON ACADEMY' separated the long gravel pathway to the school from the m
ain road outside. I had to flash my learner's permit as identification and have my picture taken by a small security camera atop the gates before the surly security guard opened a tiny door in one side of the wall and let me through. I felt even more intimidated once inside; I would never fit in here.
"Are you new?" The male voice came from behind me. I whirled to face a tall athletic-looking guy with curly brown hair, friendly brown eyes, and an innocent face. He was very cute in a boyish, easy way, but what really struck me about him was that he looked kind. Kindness, judging from the way immaculately-dressed strangers on the streets smirked at my clothes and from the rude asshole's comment at Big Happy Family in the morning, was not the prevalent character trait of people in Linbury.
"Yeah," I said cautiously.
"I thought so," the guy said, offering a frank smile. I was decidedly not single, but I couldn't help liking that smile. "I mean, I know pretty much everyone here – I'm a senior and on the Student Council and all – and I've never seen you before." He wiped his right palm on his worn blue jeans and reached out to shake my hand. "I'm Chris."
"Summer Ward," I said formally, allowing myself to smile politely back.
It was a Thornton tradition that during Registration, the principal met each and every student individually to give them their schedules and impart choice words of wisdom. This was why Registration went on for about a week, since he or she couldn't meet all four hundred and eighty students at one go. I had already been nervous about it, and seeing Chris didn't make things any better. He looked so comfortable standing there, as if he belonged and knew he did.
The tourist brochures called Linbury 'a kind of paradise'. If that was the case, then paradise wasn't very welcoming.
"So which grade are you in?" Chris asked as I looked around uncertainly, trying to figure out which path to take to get to the administration building, located half a mile away from the main school building.
"Starting sophomore year," I responded, feeling impatient. I didn't have time to stand around talking idly to some rich boy who was probably just being friendly out of pity, no matter how nice he looked. "Could you please tell me where the principal's office is?"
"Sure," Chris said. "In fact, I can take you there. I'm going there myself."
I shrugged reluctantly and followed him down the walkway. Gigantic trees lined each side, and in one corner of the manicured lawns was a marble fountain. Chris kept up a running commentary as I fell into step beside him. "The stables are behind that pond, along with the tennis and basketball courts. The football, soccer, athletics, field hockey, and lax fields are over there. There's an indoor gym and a swimming pool inside the school building. See that glass building over there? That's the greenhouse. The kitchen is just a few steps away from that." I already knew all of that from the brochures, but I let him talk; if he did, I wouldn't have to, and if I didn't have to, there would be no risk of me blurting out my secrets to him. Not that I would anyway – but I didn't want to take any chances.
"Well, here we are," Chris said finally, pushing open a glass door of a smaller red brick building. Inside was a soft-carpeted room with mahogany furniture, wooden walls, a buttery leather couch against a wall from which hung a painting, a desk behind which sat a platinum-blonde skinny woman, and a wooden door leading to the principal's inner sanctum. One of the most gorgeous girls I had ever seen sat on the leather couch.
"Christopher Raymond Fitzgerald!" the girl shrieked, jumping off the couch to fling her slender tanned arms around my companion's neck. She drew back, a seductive smile on her full, pouty, highly-glossed mouth. She was tall and curvy, with glossy black hair cascading in a straight waterfall down to her lightly-freckled red-halter-top-clad shoulder and gleaming long-lashed dark eyes. "I've missed you so much!"
"That's good to know, Roxanne," Chris laughed, gently disentangling her arms from his neck. I did a quick mental assessment. Jazz, who mysteriously knew quite a lot about Thornton, had told me a little bit about the students after Zach Gellar had left the bakery, and Roxanne Vivienne Cartwright's name had cropped up quite often. This gorgeous girl, I realized, was Roxanne, Principal Cartwright's daughter and the undisputed Queen of the school. Evidently, Chris – Christopher Raymond Fitzgerald, Roxanne had called him – was popular enough to be good friends with her.
Neither of them paid any attention to me, which suited me just fine. I sat down on a chair by the door and waited for whoever was closeted with the principal to come out so that I could have my turn.
"How was riding camp up in Maine, Chris?" Roxanne was asking. "You look so tanned and gorgeous. I would so consider hitting on you if you weren't taken by one of my best friends."
I'd been wondering whether Chris was gay – in my experience, no straight guy was as nice as he had been to strangers, unless the stranger was five foot six, blond, and female enough to have breasts like Pamela Anderson's. I had my answer now: he had a girlfriend.
"I'm flattered," said Chris, grinning. "Where've you been, Roxy?"
"Oh, you know – Paris, Venice, a week in Rome – it's all so blah." Roxanne waved a dismissive hand. "I'm kind of sick of all that crap. Next year, I'm going to Hawaii. Or even Miami. Europe is so done – I swear, there were so many Americans trying to look French when they were dressed in shit from The Gap, I wanted to set off an atomic bomb or something."
"You're such a snob," Chris teased good-naturedly.
"Please, sweetie. I can't help it if I have high standards, can I? Oh my God, Evelyn, hi!"
The door to the principal's office had opened, and a girl even more beautiful than Roxanne was had stepped out. I felt my breath catch with envy in her throat as I took in the sheer beauty of the girl. She was tall and slender, perfectly formed, with lustrous blond hair glistening in the sunlight descending down to her waist and enormous, icy blue eyes. Her flawless skin and chiseled features made her face look graceful and open and sweet but her elegant posture suggested that she was anything but pure and open.
"Roxanne," she said, her tone well-bred, her accent polished, her voice sweet and clear. "Chris. Hello."
"Hello, you moron?" Roxanne gave the beautiful blond girl an affectionate hug. "You see us after eight weeks and that's all you can say to us? What've you been doing in Linbury all by yourself?"
"She went to Atlanta," said Chris, embracing the girl – Evelyn, Roxanne had said her name was – lightly. "Hey, sis."
I felt my jaw drop. The Greek goddess-slash-Ice Queen and nice guy Chris were related?
"Hi, Chris," Evelyn said coolly, kissing him on the cheek. "How was Europe, Roxy?"
"Excruciatingly boring." Roxanne wrapped one arm around Chris and the other around Evelyn and surveyed herself in the mirror opposite them. "All I did was talk about you guys to the girls I met in Spain. She said a gang like ours is stuff storybooks are written about. You know what she named us? The Champagne Gang."
"The Champagne Gang?" Chris echoed, looking amused.
"Hell, yes. We're rich, famous, hot, and hard to imitate. We're like Dom Perignon. Right, Eve?" She nudged Evelyn's waist with her own.
"You sound like a strange commercial, Roxy," said Evelyn. "I'm honoured that you go around telling people in Europe about your friends, though."
Roxanne smiled. "It was because I was missing you guys so much. Remember last summer? We pulled off so much fun shit, but this year...God, all I did was sit around. Well, I guess I should go butter up my father now."
"Summer Ward, you're up after Evelyn Priscilla Fitzgerald," the platinum-blond female – presumably the school secretary – at the desk intoned.
Roxanne raised her thin arched eyebrows and looked at the secretary with disdain. "Excuse me. The last time I checked, my name was Roxanne Cartwright."
The secretary looked intimidated. "I – I'm sorry, Miss Cartwright," she stammered. "But the names on my list say Summer Ward registered first, and then Roxanne Vivienne Cartwright."
"I don't give a fuck about your – who the hell is Summer Ward?" Roxanne said irritably.
"Um." I sat up in my chair, wondering how I could be so invisible to Roxanne when I was sitting just a few feet away from her. Maybe people wearing sneakers and no-name jeans simply didn't register in Roxanne's line of vision. "That's me."
