Chapter 1
Mrs. Andrea Sato’s AP World History class started at 8:00 AM, stat. Cerys Whitaker arrived in the classroom at 8:05 AM.
Cliche excuse, but it wasn’t her fault. She woke up at 7:00 AM, like usual. She brushed her teeth, brushed her hair and changed. 7:15 AM. She took a light breakfast. 7:27. Isla barged in, claiming that William hid her lucky baseball bat once again, and Cerys had to mediate while Cassandra was at work. 7:30. Will denied having his sister’s lucky baseball bat and Isla started a screaming match. 7:35. Cerys and Isla dug through Will’s room, trying to find her baseball bat. 7:40. Didn’t find it, but found Cerys’s secondhand copy of Wuthering Heights. 7:42. Isla finally remembered she left her bat in her locker at practice. 7:50.
Then, it was the race against time to arrive in time for Mrs. Sato to open her notebook of students and start listing off their names.
“Andrew Mayhorn.”
“Here.”
“Luiza Schiller.”
“Here.”
“Mariana Rumen.”
“Here.”
“Cerys Whitaker.”
No answer. Mrs. Sato raised her face framed by cut-short bangs and wide-rimmed glasses and scanned the classroom for anyone gazing off.
“Cerys Whitaker,” she said again, but no one made moves to answer. She raised her pen and when she was about to write ‘Absent’ in bold letters, the door sprung open.
“Here!”
Cerys Whitaker was a hurricane wearing the skin of a teenage girl. Her long, black braided hair hung back over her shoulders, and her skin nearly glistened in the artificial light. She wore the St. Jude Wisteria Prep uniform, comprised of a clean, white ironed buttoned-up shirt, a dark royal purple blazer with the insignia of the school–A drawing of St. Jude, patron of hopeless causes surrounded by flowers of blooming wisteria–a similarly colored skirt that reached just above her knee, white stockings and a pair of Mary Janes. A Hello Kitty backpack hung off her shoulder. It used to be Cassandra’s when she was going to school. They didn’t bother to buy a new one.
Mrs. Sato clicked her tongue and her pen. “Miss Whitaker. You realize you’re five minutes late to my lesson?”
“I do, but–”
“Not only are you late, but you’re going to spring up excuses about how it’s not your fault, and time is to blame and other external factors?”
“Well, actually–”
She clicked her tongue again. “I am not in the right disposition to hear a late student’s excuses. Go to your seat. For being late, I expect a full-fledged report on our current lesson today and I expect you to present it to me tomorrow.”
Cerys nodded meekly and made her way to her usual seat, somewhere in the middle, closer to the back than to the front.
She sat down and opened her backpack, taking out her notebook, collection of pencils, and her regained copy of Wuthering Heights.
Before Mrs. Sato could move on, the door opened again. And in stepped a boy.
He was refined, Cerys thought, the perfect picture of elegance, if you asked her. Standing tall, not slouching at all, dark skin perfectly clear, hair black and cut short to his head, wearing the uniform of the school, and a book in one hand, a stack of papers in the other.
Mrs. Sato did not click her tongue and pencil at him. She instead smiled.
“Ah, Mister Crane,” she said cheerfully. Mister Crane, for Cerys did not know him by any other name, nodded to Mrs. Sato and approached her desk.
“The reports, ma’am,” he said, his voice rich and a bit deep. He put the stack of papers carefully on Mrs. Sato desk, and then went back to his seat.
Right next to Cerys.
“Who even was the guy?” Cerys asked at lunch. The cafeteria was as you would expect from a school that wanted to show how modern and progressist it was. Rows and rows of tables, filled with students who either brought lunch from home or got it from the cafeteria itself.
Cerys had lunch from home, only because Cassandra got up way before anyone and made lunches for all three siblings. For Cerys, she made a cheese and spinach quesadilla, with some yoghurt with cherries. It was simple and easy, except when Cerys attempted to do it one morning, the quesadilla turned into fragments in her hands.
“Who?” June Crawford asked, looking up from her ham and cheese sandwich. June was Cerys’s only friend at the school. Sure, she knew a lot of people, but June was the only friend. She was tall, with fiery ginger hair and expressive brown eyes. June was a bit of a rulebreaker, but not in extreme ways. Her favorite thing to do was subtly break the school dress code.
Instead of white stockings, she’d wear blue or red ones. Instead of wearing her blazer, she’d tie it around her waist. Instead of keeping her fingers clean, she’d decorate them with rings. Subtle things.
“The guy who sat next to me in Mrs. Sato’s room,” Cerys said, already going to her yoghurt. She was a fast eater.
“Oh!” June perked up. If there was a person who knew everyone in St. Wisteria and their business, it was June. Despite being from an affluent family who demanded she preen for socialite life, June managed several social media pages and had her ways of getting any information.
“Yeah, that’s Maddox Crane,” she said, talking around her sandwich. “His dad is this really famous modern poet and his mom owns a designer house. He’s like loaded.”
“You’re loaded too,” Cerys said.
“Yeah, but his parents made their wealth. Plus, he’s really mysterious,” June grinned. “He rarely talks and reads alot.”
She pulled out her phone and swiped a bit, her eyes glued to the screen before she shoved the phone into Cerys’s face.
On the screen was a picture of Maddox, eyes deep into a book. Cerys recognized the cover as Moby Dick. She should know. She had the same cover. Except hers got wet one time and the corners were chipped. He looked so serene, so peaceful deep inside the story. In the corner of the picture, blurrier was a brown-haired white boy with a huge grin, holding the phone.
Before Cerys could digest the image, June swiped right and there was another picture, of Maddox sitting in class and reading another book. He was holding the book upright so Cerys could see he was reading Oedipus Rex. Cerys had no idea who took the photo. It must have been the same brown-haired boy.
June was right. Maddox read a lot. Even today, he was carrying a new copy of Little Women.
“Mrs. Sato didn’t reprimand him for being late,” Cerys huffed. “But I have to do an entire report by tomorrow.”
June hummed and drank her water. “That’s because Maddox helps the staff around. He delivers papers to the teachers sometimes. He’s also in the literature club.”
“That sounds like child labor.”
June shrugged.
“Gotta go, I have debate club,” She stood up and then leaned over, kissing Cerys on her cheeks before dashing off.
When Cerys turned back to watch June ran off, clutching her backpack and coat, her eyes ran past June’s figure and found the eyes of Maddox Crane, sitting with the same brown-haired boy, and a pair of two other students: a blonde boy and girl, looking extremely similar and dashingly beautiful as if they crawled out of a fairytale.
Cerys looked away first.
