I turn in my seat to give her a look.
“Whose side are you on anyway?” I ask as we pull onto the road heading toward the gate. On either side of us, huge willow trees sway in a gentle breeze and early spring sunshine turns the grassy grounds a brilliant emerald. I could almost be happy here if I hadn’t been ripped violently from the only home I’ve ever known and stuck in an ice castle with an aloof writer and a brooding stepbrother.
“I try not to take sides in any situation,” she responds, pausing once again at the exit as other students honk behind us. From what I hear, there’s another party happening tonight that I’m beyond relieved to not be attending. “If I only told you what you wanted to hear, how would that help?”
“You are far too even-tempered and level-headed for your own good,” I respond, absently opening my group text with Sally and Nevaeh. They’re going out to the lake with some of the boys from the high school, and I can’t help but feel a pang of FOMO. At the very least, they’ve both texted me back today which is a massive improvement over the past several weeks.
“I hear that a lot actually.” Danyella grins as several cars zoom around us and leave us in the dust. That’s when I realize why everyone’s so ticked off with Danyella, and it’s not because she observes basic, common sense safety measures. She also drives like a grandma. We’re doing thirty in a forty-five zone right now. She notices me peeking at the speedometer and gives me a look. “What? Did you know that your odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident are one in a hundred? That’s two-thousand-five-hundred times more likely than being murdered by a serial killer.” There’s a long pause here as Danyella refocuses on the road. “Also, the car can’t go any faster than thirty miles an hour anyway.”
“Your parents must really hate you,” I respond with a teasing smile, thinking of Saffron’s old car, the one that I plastered with bumper stickers. Then I think about the shiny new sportscar sitting in Tess’ four-car garage and my smile fades a bit at the edges. My affection isn’t easily bought, apparently. I’m not sure if that makes me a spoiled brat, a pessimistic asshole, or something else entirely. “Also, this car must build a shit-ton of character.”
“Oh, I’m straight blessed,” she breathes with a laugh, snorting as I reach down to fiddle with the radio. It’s stuck on a worship station and I’m this close to bleeding from the ears. But as I fiddle with the dial, I realize that ‘stuck’ really is the operative word here. I can’t change the music. “If you imagine the words ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ in place of ‘Jesus’ or ‘God’, then really, it just sounds like you’re listening to love songs.”
“You get more interesting by the minute, you know that?” I relax back into the seat as we putter down the winding forest road toward Medina. The only negative about Danyella’s house is that it isn’t all that far from Tess’. Really, it’s within walking distance.
“Well, my sister is being groomed to take over the company from my parents, and my brother is the black sheep of the family, so I do my best to fall somewhere in the middle of all that.”
“What did your brother do to become the black sheep?” I ask, imagining all sorts of strange and twisted stories. Nobody ever said I was lacking in imagination.
“He detoured a bit from the whole ‘CEO/startup/big tech route’ that my parents wanted.” Danyella shrugs and then flashes a grin. “He became a foot doctor.”
And that right there, that’s a punchline to an exceptionally good joke.
I knew I liked this chick.
It takes us about thirty minutes longer to get back into Medina proper with Danyella behind the wheel as opposed to say, Chasm the speed demon or Doctor ‘I drive a Range Rover with my own name on a vanity license plate’ Paul. Seriously. It says “DCTR P” on it. Who does that? As a rule, I don’t trust people with vanity license plates.
As we pull into Danyella’s driveway, I’m struck by the absolute absurdity of this neighborhood. Her house is nice, granted, but it looks similar to the fancy McMansion that Nevaeh’s family lived in back home. The only real difference here is price: Nevaeh’s family paid about half a million for their home while Danyella’s family paid about five million. I know, because I looked it up on Zillow.
“And here we are,” she says, using sheer brute force to shove the driver’s side door of her car open. It groans in protest as we both climb out and she shuts the garage door behind us, giving me a tight-lipped smile. “The neighbors signed a petition that says I can’t park my car in the driveway because it devalues the other houses in the neighborhood.”
I just stare at her for a moment, giving a nice, slow, sarcastic blink.
“God, I hate rich people,” I murmur as she laughs and uses a keypad next to the door to let us in.
I’ve already spotted Lumen’s BMW outside, so I’m not surprised when we walk into the kitchen to find her bent over the counter, scrolling on her phone.
“I told you to ride with me,” she says playfully, standing up and turning around to lean her butt against the center island. “Danyella drives like a ninety-year-old woman.”
“You know I’m capped out at thirty miles an hour,” Danyella responds mechanically, like she’s regurgitated this line about a thousand times already. “Don’t be jealous that my parents are instilling the ideals of hard work and self-sacrifice into me.”
Lumen scoffs and tosses her blond hair, her skirt riding dangerously high up her thighs as she lounges in the Schaeffers’ kitchen as if she’s as comfortable here as Chasm is at the Vanguard’s. I’m still not entirely sure what Danyella and Lumen’s relationship is really like. From what I’ve heard, they’ve known each other since kindergarten, but they don’t exactly hang out on the grounds of Whitehall.
“Rumor has it that Parrish assaulted you in the hall on your way out,” Lumen continues as Danyella opens the fridge and offers me a drink. It looks like a supermarket drink aisle threw up in there. Must be a rich people thing, to have a half-dozen of every flavor and brand and type of beverage ever created. I choose a bottle of red Gatorade while she hands Lumen a Fiji water without even asking.
“He tried,” I say with a long-suffering sigh. “He seems pissed about the …” I can’t even say it without blushing. My boobs are already beet red beneath my uniform, I’m sure.
“The kiss?” Lumen guesses, and then she laughs. The sound is like tinkling bells or the beating of fairy wings or something. She’s almost too perfect to be real. The smile she gives me is mysterious, almost coquettish. “Don’t tell me that was your first?”
That beet red color my body seems so fond of entertaining spreads across my breasts, cheeks, and forehead. Luckily, Lumen and Danyella can’t see the worst of it.
“No, it most definitely wasn’t,” I respond slowly, thinking about Parrish. Again. My mind seems to circle back to thoughts of him in an unhealthy way. I should be working to build friendships, not daydreaming about a lazy, entitled asshole. I clear my throat, but Lumen’s laughing anyway. Danyella gives us both a weird look.