He sat down on the piano bench facing the opposite direction. “She wants seconds,” he grumbled.
I laughed.
Davion and his dick were going to land him in so much trouble one day.
Chapter 3
Grace~
School’s only been in session about a couple of months, but with football already in season, the parties every weekend were going down like clockwork. Blackstone Prep Academy, surprisingly, had one hell of a vicious football team. They were the players other teams never saw coming. Because Blackstone was made up of mostly nothing but trust fund entitled assholes, other schools assumed the guys at Blackstone were soft, weak, and pampered.
Newsflash: They weren’t.
Even the few scholarship students and middle-class kids that had been able to get through the prestigious doors of Blackstone hadn’t mattered. Because they were there on scholarships or unimaginable debt, those kids focused on their academic path, rather than indulge in sports or the arts.
And, without fail, every Friday night after our home games, there was a party or two happening in the community of Wakefield. Someone’s parents were always out of town, and the local cops of Dayton no longer bothered with us Wakefield kids. They learned long ago that it wasn’t worth going up against our parents’ money and connections to bust us for partying.
The door to my bedroom opened, and I looked up from laptop to see Sterling taking up the entire door frame. At six-foot-two-inches, Sterling was a big kid. He was committed to baseball, but he has spent most of his life switching between baseball, football, basketball, and soccer. It hadn’t been until we had gotten older that he finally had to choose one, and he had chosen baseball. But all those years of playing sports had honed him into a well-oiled machine.
The dude was hard to miss.
“Staying home again?”
I let out quiet sigh. “Yep.”
Sterling’s gaze held mine in a piercing stare that scared the shit out of most people who found themselves on the receiving end of it. “Grace-”
“Don’t, Sterling,” I begged. “I don’t want to argue with you.”
He took that as his cue to walk into my room and sit down. One thing Sterling was not afraid of, and that was an argument or an outright bloody fight.
I wasn’t sure Sterling feared anything, though.
“How much longer are you going to punish yourself for something you didn’t do?” he asked for the hundredth time. “You had nothing to do with that shit, Grace.”
“Yes, I did,” I argued. “We all did, Sterling. How can you not see that?”
“For fuck’s sake, Grace,” he snapped. “We weren’t even there that night. If the rumors are true, we weren’t there any of those nights.”
“So?” I snapped back. “That doesn’t make us innocent in all this.” My brother wasn’t a bad person, but sometimes his Teflon exterior was hard for even me to get through, and I was his twin, for Pete’s sake. “Christ. How can it not keep you up at night, Sterling? It sure as hell keeps me awake.”
“Because weak people are not our responsibility, Grace,” he countered. “Hell, no one is. The only people I’m responsible for is you and myself.” Sterling was six minutes older than I was, and he took those six minutes very seriously. “How the fuck were we supposed to know that Leah Moffet was going to do what she did?”
I looked into my brother’s emerald green eyes-the same color as mine-and saw no wavering. “That’s not what I’m referring to,” I told him. “I’m talking about the toxic environment we helped create, Sterling.”
“That’s bullshit, Grace,” he bit out. “That toxic environment existed well before we ever got into Blackstone.”
“That may be, but we kept it alive,” I argued. “We…encouraged and nurtured that horrible who’s-who bullshit. We played into the hierarchy and elitist entitlement. Hell, we’re the top of the goddamn food chain at Blackstone. We’ve spent the last three years buying into…all of that bullshit. If we hadn’t been assholes, maybe Leah Moffet wouldn’t have felt she needed to try so hard to fit in and belong. Maybe if we’d been kind and treated everyone the same, she wouldn’t have felt like she…had been less than.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Grace,” Sterling spat. “Do you hear yourself? I’m not denying that we could be better human beings, because you’re right, we’ve been entitled assholes lots of times in our lives. But you’re defending a girl who was fucking your boyfriend behind your back. I wouldn’t be sizing her for a cross just yet, if I were you.”
I bark out a dark laugh. “You’re such a fucking dick, Sterling.”
He cocked his head and his black hair-again, the exact same shade as mine-dipped a couple of strands across his left eyebrow. “Look, Grace,” he let out a sigh, “I know you think I don’t hear you, but I do. I understand the point you’re trying to make. But you are shouldering this entire thing like it’s your fault, and it’s not. I fail to see how Leah fucking Seth and getting pregnant is your fault. You didn’t tell her to sleep with your boyfriend. You didn’t tell them not to use protection. You didn’t encourage her to agree to his fucked-up sexapades. And you sure as hell didn’t tell him to dump her or blackmail her into thinking she had no other options.”
The day I had overheard Leah and Seth’s exchange, I had gone home a mess. I had forgotten my notebook in AP Chemistry, and had been going back for it when I had stumbled upon Leah and Seth tucked away in corner. The encounter had looked intimate and intense, so I had crept over until I heard enough to regret having ever eavesdropped.
As soon has Sterling had gotten wind that I had gone home sick, he had left school to go home and check on me. Our parents were hardly ever home, so Sterling had grown up making sure he took care of me when it was needed.
When he had gotten home, I had been an emotional wreck and I had blurted out what I had overheard between Leah and Seth. I had only been dating Seth for about eight months, so the pain had been more from shock and disappointment than from a broken heart. I had felt duped and humiliated, but nowhere near as torn up as the way Leah had sounded as Seth shattered her heart into pieces.
Sterling had stayed with me the rest of the day, but the next day at school, he had beaten Seth so badly, Seth had been out of school for over a week. The surprising thing about it had been that Sterling had never told Seth why he had beaten him up, and Seth had never asked. I suspected that Seth had already known why because Sterling had made it clear to Seth that he and I were broken up as he had delivered the final blow, knocking Seth out.
Or, at least, that’s how everyone had told the story when it had gotten back to me.
And then, a week later, Leah Moffet slit her wrists in her bathtub, leaving her family a heartbreaking suicide note and a forevermore shattered existence.
And all because she had wanted to belong to the popular crowd.
“I’m just over it, Sterling,” I told him. “I…I don’t want to be around shallow people anymore. I don’t want to be around…people who put money and popularity above being kind and decent.”