“What are you doing here?” Susan demanded.
“Signing up for the contest, same as you,” I said.
“I meant,” she snapped, “why are you signing up? You don’t belong here.”
She was keeping her voice quiet enough that the judges weren’t paying us much notice, but the other students in line had all turned to watch our argument.
“I belong here as much as you do, Susan. You, or anyone else in the school,” I said.
“Seriously?” she asked. “You’re really going to do this, Yena? You’re going to fit yourself into a winning design and model on a catwalk?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Why is that so hard to believe?”
Susan shook her head.
“I’m warning you,” she
The prince locked his office door behind him.He went to his desk and opened his email. Ignoring the hundreds of unread messages in his inbox, he scrolled down to an archive folder labeled For Emergencies.The folder was empty except for a single, unsent email draft. The subject line was blank and there was no text in the body. The only bit of information was an email address saved in the recipient field. Nolan double-clicked the email draft to open it, typed a very quick message into the body, and hit Send. In another corner of the prince’s office, a leather armchair and a coffee table faced a grand stone fireplace that was currently cold and empty. Nolan went over and retrieved a bottle of whiskey from the table. He took it with him around the corner, to the narrow library that adjoined the office. In the library,
Lucy and I chatted about our studies as we drove to her house.She told me she was a sophomore and a painter, studying Fine Art and Philosophy. I told her about my dream of becoming a designer someday, and about the contest I had signed up for that morning.I didn’t expect her to be so thrilled about that. She gushed, telling me how much she admired my plan to make high-end plus-size designs.“The world needs you to do that,” she said, seeming awfully confident in my abilities, considering that we had just met less than an hour ago. “There are so many beautiful clothes out there, but not enough of them are available in our sizes.”“We’ll see,” I said, shrugging.“No,” Lucy demanded. “You’re going to do this. You’re going to win this competition, and you’re going to get famous, too — I know it.”She was wide-eyed and super serious.“Yo
YENA I woke to my phone chiming and turned it over to see a reply from Susan. Fine. Meet me in the library at 730. That was it.I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Nolan was already up, talking quietly on the phone and pacing in his walk-in closet.I was wrapping myself in a towel after taking a hot shower, when he knocked softly on the door. I told him to come in.The door swung open gently and Nolan stepped just over the threshold. He glanced at me and then looked down at the floor for a moment. When he looked up at me again, it seemed like he was making an extra effort to focus on my eyes.“Hey,” he said. “Would you like to come have some breakfast with me?”I said, “Oh,” and stalled, fumbling for a lie that would explain why I
Susan was alone. At least that was a relief.“Hey,” I said as she walked in.She looked at me but said nothing. She walked over and sat at the other end of the table.“I just wanted to talk to you,” I continued, “to see if we can find a way to move on from all this. I know things will never be like they were before, but I just want to get to a place where you and I can be civil with each other… for both our sakes.”She crossed her arms and gave me a hard look. And more of the silent treatment.“I’m sorry,” I said. “About Nolan. I know that was hard for you.”Susan looked away and I saw tears flash into her eyes. One rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away quickly with the sleeve of her sweater.“You have to understand, though,” I explained, “that I never asked for any of this. It was actually awful for me, at first —”&ldq
The man returned with a bunch of paper towels from the bathroom. He pulled a water bottle out of his briefcase and crouched on the floor, insisting I step aside and let him handle it.He asked me what happened with the cupcake, and I’m not sure why, but I just told him everything.About Susan being my only friend at the start of the year. About how she begged me to go along with her to the Full Moon Ball, and then completely flipped out when, through no fault of my own, I was chosen by the prince instead of her. And about how I reached out to her last night, and felt so full of hope this morning, and how she got mad about my earrings, and all of the awful stuff she said about my family.Never before in my life had I just opened up and spilled my guts to a total stranger like that. But he was easy to talk to, a good listener, and kept asking questions.Finally I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve been rambling on about my problems and hav
I found the Philosophy building the next day and went inside, hoping I could just wander around a little and figure out which office was Adan’s. It was easy enough to find him. I strolled the first-floor halls for a few minutes, and glimpsed him seated at a desk in the first room I passed that had an open door.I knocked lightly. He looked up and smiled.“Yena,” he said, “Come in, please.”He jumped up from his desk and met me at the door, opening it wide with a welcoming gesture and a sweet smile. We exchanged pleasantries and then sat on either side of his desk.“So you wrote this book, did you?” I asked, producing the hardcover from my bag.I had forgotten that it was all out of shape from where it spent the night.Adan looked at it and grinned.“What did you think?” he asked.“It was super interesti
NOLANYena was sound asleep by the time Nolan got home. He slid into bed beside her and got about two solid hours of sleep before his phone woke him up.The prince had about a dozen news alerts set to trigger a notification on his phone any time something was published online that mentioned certain keywords.Waking to the sound he had assigned to news alerts, Nolan rolled over and reached out for his phone, expecting the notification be something trivial.It was not trivial.He shot straight up in bed and opened up the link.There was a photo of two people walking in the rain, together under a single umbrella. He recognized Yena but could not tell immediately who the tall man with his arm around her was.The headline at the top of the article read, Princess Yena Spotted in Intimate Embrace with Husband’s Half-Brother.Nolan scrolled down. There were more photos.And yes, the man in t
NOLAN Nolan returned to the palace and rounded up a few of his best Gamma warriors to come practice fencing with him. He was frustrated and needed to let off some steam. In the morning, he tracked down that chauffeur from the umbrella incident photos.The man told the prince that Yena had taken a ride to campus the previous morning, but not to attend classes. She said she was meeting with a professor and asked the driver to wait in the parking lot, saying she would only be a few minutes. It was about half an hour, the driver said, between their arrival at the school and the start of the sudden downpour, when he spotted Yena coming out of the building under her teacher’s umbrella. Nolan had the driver take him there. To the exact building where Yena had gone for that meeting