And I needed some armor, because, honestly, the girl was starting to scare me. Her reaction to me was over the top, and it made her seem both bitchy and unstable. A charming combo if ever there was one.
She looked me up and down, scorn oozing from her pores. “I didn’t know the uniform came in children’s sizes. Did they give you a training bra, too?”
Great, here come the height jokes. Though I was a perfectly respectable five foot two, of course Lilac had to have several inches on me. I estimated she was a solid five-nine.
My smile grew broader. Sometimes the best defense was a good offense—I hoped that was true here. “Lucky for you, it comes in extra large.”
My new pal narrowed her eyes. Then she shoved me aside, elbowing her way into the lavatory.
I stared at the slammed door, rubbing my arm where she’d pushed me. The game, I supposed, was on.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Range Rover with black-tinted windows met us at the island’s airstrip. That is, if you could call a snowy field bisected by a thin stripe a runway, and if the bleak rock we’d just landed on qualified as an actual island.
I unzipped the neck of my navy blue parka and gasped at how surprisingly temperate the climate was. “Wow. It’s actually not that bad out.”
“Aye, it’s never so bad between weathers.” Our driver smiled at me, revealing more than a few missing teeth. I wondered if he was one of the old ones Ronan had mentioned. His accent was slow and loping, but easy enough to understand. “Excepting the wind. When she’s blowing, stand fast, or she’ll lie you flat.”
I thought of the view from the airplane. A small, treeless, and mostly uninhabited island in the middle of the Atlantic. I imagined the wind, when it came, would be violent.
I turned a slow circle, taking it all in. Long, flat shelves of rock stretched into the distance. The shallow dusting of snow was already beginning to evaporate, fading to a uniform gray a few shades darker than the colorless sky overhead.
Bleak. And yet somehow utterly breathtaking. “It’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful?” Lilac stepped from the plane, lithe as a cat and gorgeous as ever in her uniform. Apparently, navy and gray were just the things to bring out the highlights in maple-colored hair. I frowned, but she met it with a smile. “Whatever you say, freak.”
That word again. I cringed. But then I caught Ronan’s eyes. There was warmth in them, wrinkling just at the corners. His gaze flicked quickly away.
The old man sniffed the air. “The snow, she never lies long. My guess, we’ll be up to seven degrees by noon.”
“Seven?” Lilac jammed her fists in her parka, as though chilled by the mere thought.
I looked at her, unable to conceal my amazement. “Celsius.” Duh. “That’s”—I did the quick calculation—“mid-forties to you.”
“God, you really are a mutant.” She shouldered past us, dropping her bag unceremoniously at the rear of the car for someone else to deal with, and then climbed in.
As the driver loaded the trunk, Ronan took shotgun. That left the three of us to wage a mini standoff to see who’d get stuck in the back middle spot. As if it really mattered. But, apparently, Lilac deemed me too repugnant even to sit next to. Rather than upset me, the notion brought an amused smile to my face. She was one queen-bee alpha bitch, and must’ve positively ruled her high school.
Lilac’s icy stare tilted the balance and Mimi lost, situating herself on the smooth, slightly elevated stretch that was the middle seat. I got in, cramming myself as close as possible to the door so as not to touch my thigh to Mimi’s. I glued my forehead to the cool window to endure the drive in blessed silence.
The sea pressed in from all around. Even though I’d grown up in Central Florida, the state wasn’t that wide, and despite my aversion to swimming, there was something familiar about beaches, about the ocean. But this, this churning sea, was completely foreign to me. It was furious, treacherous, slapping against the coast like it was out for revenge.
The landscape was rock and more rock. Tremendous, flat expanses like tabletops, jagged outcroppings, sheer cliffs. And just offshore there were towers of it, spearing up from the sea like chimney stacks or the skeletons of giants.
The Range Rover slowed, turned, stopped.
I came back to myself, sitting up, craning my head for a glimpse out the other side. A medieval-looking fortress loomed on a hill in the near distance. It was rough-hewn, constructed of beefy gray stone, and stood in contrast to what appeared to be well-manicured gardens hidden beneath a light blanket of snow. The snow was the dry, powdery sort that made everything seem fragile and frozen in time. A shiver crawled across my skin.
We’d parked at the edge of a courtyard, where a crowd was already gathered. Though it was hard to tell with all the people, the yard seemed to be circular, in a slight depression in the earth. A cluster of standing stones ringed the far edge of the circle in a half-moon, with a gigantic granite platform at the center that looked ready to receive human sacrifices.
Between the milling throngs and those Stonehenge-wannabe stones, the alarm that’d been tripped when I’d first spotted Lilac and Mimi shrilled back to life. I realized the buzz from my airplane “refreshment” had worn off, and I found myself craving another drink of it. The stuff was like liquid courage.
We got out and, at Ronan’s urging, joined the crowd at its fringes. I guessed there weren’t more than one hundred people there. Ignoring my misgivings, I stepped in. It was just enough to separate me from Lilac and Mimi, but not so much that I couldn’t find Ronan if need be. I didn’t know exactly what need there might be, but I did know that crowds like this put me on guard.
It was like being dropped into a buzzing hive of female chatter. Many of the accents were from the U.K., but I caught a few American voices in there, too, as well as the occasional foreign language.
I picked up on a distant conversation in French and shut my eyes, letting the familiar, sultry sound of it wash over me. Maybe this place wouldn’t be so bad after all.
But then my eyes flew open, realizing. I scanned the crowd. Girls ... just girls. A sea of them, all around. Some had their navy parkas slung over their arms. All wore the gray tunic and leggings. And they were, every last one of them, pretty.
I scowled. How could Ronan think I’d ever fit in with all these Top Model rejects? I couldn’t resist the urge to compare myself to them. I definitely wasn’t ugly, but I also knew for sure that I was far from classically pretty. My big eyes annoyed me—I thought they made me look like a bug. Between that and my wide mouth, I was fairly certain I resembled some sort of backward fairy-tale frog that had yet to turn into a princess.
And then there was my hair. Though long and blond sometimes felt too conspicuous, it’d actually helped me blend in. I’d discovered the need for Florida camouflage the hard way at the age of twelve, with the discovery that not all girls can pull off bald as pertly as Natalie Portman. Granted, I hadn’t cropped it all off, but with my light blond hair, it’d looked close enough. I’d thought I looked Swedish. Not Daddy Dearest, though. He’d thought I looked like a lesbian, and commemorated the whole affair with the gift of a split lip.
Like that, I’d become the repellent fascination of all the coral-lipsticked mommies at my middle school. Attention was always the last thing I craved, so aside from evening out the layers, I hadn’t cut it since.
The memory stung, and I sank into my shoulders, imagining myself disappearing into the crowd. Wandering deeper into the fray, I stared in horrified fascination. It was just like high school. Ronan had plucked me from obscurity and dumped me into a surreal high school from my nightmares. And it was a girls’ school.
Cliques were already beginning to form, like finding like. Stoner girls with flat stares gravitated toward one another. There was a large contingent of gang girls circling one another warily. And a small group of slightly bedraggled, once-homeless waifs, looking like diamonds in the rough but for the raw fury in their eyes. Then there were the Lilacs of the crowd—just a very few of this rare breed—all reeking of drug-addled yacht parties with other bored socialites.
No weird, smart girl clique in sight. If I’d thought I’d finally make some friends, I’d need to think again.
I heard the strains of French again. My whole life, I’d dreamt of traveling to Paris. My accent was flawless. I adored madeleines, and Vanessa Paradis, and the films of François Truffaut. I was practically a native. If I belonged anywhere, their group was it. Lifting my chin, I strode toward the sound of their lilting voices.
I found the pair of them at once and stood for a second, listening to what sounded like a eulogy to their confiscated cigarettes. If their language hadn’t given them away, their looks would have. They were both pale and model thin. One had the supershort, blunt-cut bangs that only French girls and maybe Katy Perry could pull off. The other had pixie-short black hair that made her look wistful and bohemian.
“Bonjour,” I greeted them, trying to walk the line between friendly and cool. “Quel bordel, n’est-ce pas?” I thought it a clever yet insouciant version of Some mess, huh?
They froze, staring at each other in wide-eyed shock. Pixie didn’t even deign to look at me. But Bangs turned her head slowly and in a thick accent informed me, “You will not speak to us.”
And like that, they resumed their chatter as though I weren’t even there.
Suddenly, I felt ill. More than that, I wanted to disappear. Apparently, not even sharing an effed-up, life-altering experience like this was enough to make me friend material. Not even a crazy island in the middle of nowhere counted as enough in common where Weird Smart Girl was concerned.
Snow began to drift down. The temperature seemed to have done a nosedive, much like my outlook.
I zipped my parka back up. Mid-forties, my ass. So much for our driver’s charming local wisdom.
“It’s like that scene in the Santa movie.” An American voice cut into my thoughts. Could I please, for once, get away from the Christmas references? I stole a look, spying a matched pair of brunettes with vaguely New York accents.