Finding Marnie: Heartless Few (#4) Read online

  I’d trudged into school, made it through homeroom on autopilot, and was heading out of the class on my way to chemistry when Mr. Kostopoulos called my name and beckoned me to his desk. I’d quickly run through the list of possible misdemeanors he could be pulling me up on but had drawn a blank. There had been nothing I was aware of—not that there ever really was. Arlo was a completely different story, but even he, as far as I was aware, had kept his nose clean for at least the few weeks prior. I had no idea why he would want to speak with me.

  I split from the throng of kids shuffling out of the room like sheep and stood by his desk, staring at my feet, shoulders hunched against the worst.

  “It’s okay. Don’t look so worried. You haven’t done anything wrong. We have a new student starting today in ninth grade, and Dr. Campbell has requested you as their student buddy.” Oh. Hell. No. The last thing I needed was to be stuck with some kid as he found his feet around the school. What the fuck was I supposed to say to him?

  I shook my head, still staring at the floor. Mr. K seemed prepared for my refusal. He chuckled.

  “See, here’s the thing. Just because I ask kind of nicely, let’s be clear, this isn’t a request, it’s a mandate. We all know it’s Dr. Campbell’s way or the highway. And by highway, I mean a month of after-school detentions on your record.”

  Motherfucker.

  I’d briefly considered just taking the detention, but I knew the boys wouldn’t forgive me for missing that many band rehearsals, and Mom wouldn’t forgive me for giving her more school shit to worry about than she already had to deal with because of Arlo. I didn’t want to do that to her.

  Damn. Our principal was a smiling assassin. At first glance, she looked like a sweet, kindly mom, but in reality, Dr. Lorna Campbell was a tiger, and she quietly ruled the school with an iron claw. I couldn’t say we all enjoyed her methods, but her take-no-prisoners approach was firm but fair and had elevated Ambrose Hill High from one of the poorest performing schools in the district to a shining example of inner-city excellence. At that moment, however, I could happily have strangled her with my bare hands.

  I shrugged, still resolutely refusing to make eye contact. “Good man. I knew you’d make the right decision.” Mr. K slapped my shoulder and sent me on my way. “Hurry now. Dr. Campbell is expecting you, and you know she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.” I knew. We all knew.

  As I walked into the reception area outside Principal Campbell’s office, she appeared in the doorway, clearly waiting for me.

  “Nice of you to finally join us, Mr. Jones. Now hurry up. I’m not getting any younger over here.”

  She wasn’t getting any older either, at least not if her looks were anything to go by. I wasn’t sure how old she was exactly, but she held a doctorate, and I knew she had three sons around my age, so she must have been older than she looked.

  I shuffled over to the doorway, and she stepped aside to let me pass. I took a few steps into the room and stopped in my tracks.

  Could this day get any worse?

  Standing near one of the easy chairs in the principal’s office was a girl. My mind flicked quickly back to Mr. K’s words. “We have a new student starting today in ninth grade, and Dr. Campbell has requested you as their student buddy.” He hadn’t actually said the person was a dude; I had just assumed. I had thought it was a pretty safe assumption, though, as who in their right mind would assign me of all people to show a girl around the school? I couldn’t even talk to other guys, never mind a motherfucking girl.

  When I got past the general shock of my buddy being female, my jaw slackened, possibly to floor level, when I properly took in the appearance of the girl in question. To say she was cute was an understatement. She was out of this world. Of course, I instantly developed a blush so deep it felt like the entire top half of my body had been doused in kerosene and set alight.

  The girl looked at me wide-eyed, perhaps equally surprised to find that her buddy was a guy. Speaking of her eyes, they were wide set and beautifully angled, almost like a cat’s, and black as coals. But the thing I noticed most overwhelmingly about them was a deep sadness. She looked as though her heart was broken and seeing it in her made me feel the same way. My heart ached on her behalf, and I didn’t even know who she was, or why she was suffering.

  Her face was framed by bangs cut with precision into her long, thick, ultra-straight, jet-black hair. Little had I known at that point, but I was destined to spend years walking a few paces behind her, sporting an agonizing hard-on, watching that shiny mane swishing seductively just above her perfectly pert butt as she sashayed from A to B. It was to be my personal form of delicious torture.

  She was literally breathtaking. I opened and closed my mouth, trying to get air into my oxygen-starved lungs. My attempt was futile. The girl stared back at me with what appeared to be a mix of mild curiosity and definite irritation. You and me both, chica. She blinked rapidly, turning her lips up at the corners into something that hovered between a smile and a grimace. I wasn’t quite sure which. Her. Lips.

  I had been so busy staring into her eyes like a deer in the headlights—officially making our exchange the longest time I’d maintained eye contact with anyone other than family and close friends for as long as I could remember—that I had completely missed her lips. Now that I had seen them, I couldn’t take my eyes off them, or see anything else. They were full, red, and pouty—so much so that they almost appeared swollen, but I knew they weren’t. They were the shape of tightly rolled rose petals, and I wanted to kiss them more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.

  I swallowed. Hard. Dr. Campbell cleared her throat.

  The girl smiled a little more, then laughed shyly. I noticed more about her then, like the fact that she was unusually tall for a girl of her age—she looked like she was on the younger end of freshmen, maybe even thirteen years old—and that her legs seemed to go from the floor to just south of her armpits. She was like a tall and supremely beautiful version of Daria.

  “Hi.” She spoke first because I was a social moron.

  Please, voice, don’t fail me now. “Hi.” Yes!

  “Luke Jones, this is Marnie Harloe. She just transferred here from Michigan.”

  Marnie stuck out her small hand.

  “Marnie.” The way she said her name. Oh my God. She had an accent. It was cute as all fuck, and the last piece of the puzzle I needed to give me the boner from hell right there in the principal’s office. I prayed to every god and deity I’d ever heard of that neither she nor Dr. Campbell looked toward my crotch. In reality, it was probably pretty safe to assume that neither would.

  “Luke.” When I shook her outstretched hand, a spark flowed through her to me. My body tensed, and my dick grew even harder. What was that?

  “Okay. So now that we have the introductions out of the way, we can get to the formalities. Please, sit down, both of you.”

  Dr. Campbell had made her way behind her desk and was now sitting in her fancy reclining leather chair. She motioned for us to sit in the two green, fabric-covered, upright chairs on the other side.

  I realized I was still holding Marnie’s hand. It was warm and smooth like the heart-shaped alabaster ornament our dad had once given to our mom as an anniversary present. I released it, embarrassed. More embarrassed. I sat, and so did she.

  The principal handed me a copy of Marnie’s schedule and explained what the buddy arrangement meant for both of us. I was to take her under my wing for the remainder of the semester, which had only begun a few days earlier, helping her find her classes, sitting with her at lunch, walking to the school bus with her. It sounded like a big fat chore. It was basically a glorified babysitting gig. Hell, I didn’t do all that shit for my own kid brother, let alone a total stranger. To say I didn’t want to do it was to put it mildly.

  I stared down at the worn government-issue brown carpet and sighed heavily. I knew there was nothing I could do to get out of this arrangement, so I was going to have to just deal with it. As Mr. K had already rightly emphasized, saying no to Dr. Campbell wasn’t a viable option. Considering that speaking was hardly an option for me most of the time—not without becoming a stuttering mess, at least—the chances of my arguing my way out of a decision with the principal were pretty much nonexistent.

  As we left her office, despite my initial hesitation, I became almost immediately thankful that Dr. Campbell had forced this unwanted interaction on me. So much so that after striding down the hall ahead of Marnie in silence, forcing her to almost jog to catch up with me, when we reached her classroom, I took the unprecedented step of making the first move to break the ice between us.

  “S-s-so why have you transferred? Your family move here for work or something?”

  She already had her hand on the doorknob, ready to enter the room, but stopped in her tracks at the sound of my voice. She turned back to me, looking irritated.

  “Nope.” She was clearly not a great conversationalist. That made two of us.

  “Why then?”

  “I don’t have any family, except my grandma, Mia. Both my parents died.”

  “Oh s-s-shit. Sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t know. That’s why you asked. Dur.” Shit.

  “Car crash.” She said the words out of the blue.

  “Huh?”

  “Car crash. It’s how my parents died. I knew that was going to be your next question, so I thought I’d save us both the awkwardness. I moved here because it’s where Mia lives, and she’s now my legal guardian.”

  And this was why I hated speaking to people. Only a few moments in, and I’d already wrecked it. Fuck.

  Marnie spoke as though reading my mind. “It’s okay. I know people are going to ask. I’m cool with that. Besides, for every question you ask me, I get to ask you one back.” Oh. Hell. No.

  I felt myself nodding involuntarily. Today seemed to be opposite day. Shit.

  “So, before you got to the principal’s office, she told me you have a twin brother. Are you guys identical?”

  “Yeah.” I saw her bank the information and wondered why she wanted to know.

  “Bonus question. Being as I’m new and an orphan, I get a free pass.” What? No! Before I could raise my objections, she was asking anyway.

  “Are you pitching a tent for me, or Dr. Campbell?” She nodded toward my swollen crotch before turning again to enter her classroom.

  Holy shit. I’d just been schooled by a freshman. So much for nobody noticing. I only hoped the principal hadn’t seen it too. Either way, I was more embarrassed than I had ever been. My cheeks were so hot, I felt like they’d been dipped in molten lava. Marnie smirked, knowing she had me backed into a corner.

  “Okay, thanks for showing me the way.”

  I did the only thing I could—bobbed my head in lieu of saying goodbye, looking anywhere but at her, and got the fuck out of there. But because I had no shame, and definitely no game, even after making that much of a fool of myself, I still couldn’t resist turning around to get one last look at her as she went into her class. I would forever be glad I had, as I was just in time to catch her staring at me as I walked away. Yes! I figured the redness in her cheeks put us just about even in the humiliation stakes.

  * * *

  Despite the unpromising start, the next two weeks with Marnie were the most blissful of my life. Even with my initial shyness and her ability to make me feel like a fool, the two of us had clicked from day one. We’d had an instant bond and an easy connection. We just made sense. My words flowed freely, and I could talk to her like I could my brothers and the guys. It was as though we’d known each other for years. She was kind of like the little sister I never had, except really nothing like a little sister at all.

  Being with Marnie brought out feelings and urges in me that I hadn’t known existed. First there was the near-permanent state of crippling arousal that was a fact of life when she was around or whenever I thought of her—which was pretty much 24/7, especially at night time—I went to bed with visions of her running through my mind, and a boner to match, and woke up every morning the same way.

  However, I also felt insanely protective of her. Like the kind of protective that could push me to rip out someone’s jugular for looking at her the wrong way. It was completely out of character for me, and far more Arlo’s style, totally irrational. Not only that, but despite everything she’d been through with her parents dying, Marnie seemed to be this tough, smart, streetwise girl who needed nothing from anybody. Especially not me. Seemed to be.

  Whatever life threw at her, Marnie Harloe took it in stride. Being taunted and called Orphan Annie or Mile-high Marnie, rejection by the popular girls in her class, in fact most of the girls, it didn’t seem to matter—it flowed over her like water off a duck’s back. The two faces of Marnie Harloe—the smile and the snarl—always seemed to get her through.

  Except from day one, I saw something else when I looked at her. There was a third face, one that was hidden most of the time and to most people. The sadness that I noticed in the principal’s office was always there, just under the surface. Sometimes it was covered by a smile but more often than not, a frown. At other times it peeked its way through when she let the mask slip.

  That face made me want to scoop her up and keep her in a cabin in the woods. It made me want to tear anyone who hurt her limb from limb with my bare hands. That face had my heart from the very moment we met and always would. It was just a shame I couldn’t muster the words to tell her so right away. It was a failing I was going to live to regret for a long time to come.

  Chapter Three

  Marnie

  Present Day

  As the elevator doors slid open, I glided into the midtown offices of Wildefire Model Management. WMM had been my agency since forever. In fact, since the beginning. I was discovered by the owner and CEO, Sandra Wilde. It may have seemed like one hundred years ago, but I still vividly remembered the day she approached me and offered me a modeling contract on the spot as I stuffed my face full of chili dog at Luna Park—not the least of reasons being because my chin had been adorned with a giant glob of chili sauce throughout the entire exchange. The pain of that realization hadn’t dulled even after all these years, despite the fact that it hadn’t gotten in the way of me going on to have a successful modeling career.

  If I could reverse time, I’d go back and wipe off that sauce before I started a conversation with one of the most powerful figures in fashion. Still, sauce or no, here I was all these years later, still in the game. I kind of enjoyed these contract re-signing meetings. Yes, they were a chance to do the standard “let’s air-kiss, then pretend we give a fuck about what has happened to the other person since we last did this” charade, but on the other hand, as one of her “legacy”—read: old—signings, it was always good to see Sandra. She was a colorful character, to say the least, literally—what with her shocking pink hair and taste for blindingly bright and flamboyant clothing. Naturally, she had an effervescent personality to match, priding herself on being Wilde by name, wild by nature.

  I remembered feeling completely awed and overwhelmed by her that first time. She had approached me and immediately launched into a gushing spiel about my looks, and my limbs, and my hair, and my complexion, and my everything, all at one thousand decibels, and much to the amusement of passersby.

  That was probably why I had stood like a statue with sauce on my face. At least, that was my excuse, and I was sticking to it. It’s true that at that point I had never met anyone as “out there” as her, though once I’d started modeling, she was to become the first of many larger-than-life personalities I would find myself working for, with, or alongside. Little had I known, that in after a very short while in the industry, everything that had initially seemed so extreme, outrageous, and exciting would become old hat, expected, predictable, and even boring at times.

  Whenever I looked back on that time, I wished I could somehow bottle the naiveté-driven enthusiasm I’d felt. Of course, I had been deeply flattered that someone would consider me even remotely model-worthy. The irony of the fact that the very things about which I had been mercilessly teased at school, earning me the nickname “Mile-high Marnie,” —my skinny, flat-chested, gangly frame, my porcelain complexion, and my “weird” Eurasian features—were now being lauded was not wasted on me. Of the thousands of people at the amusement park that day, that Sandra had seen something special in me had been a huge boost to my nonexistent self-confidence.

  Twenty-twenty is most definitely a biatch. When I thought of that poor optimistic girl, clutching her chili dog and daring to hope that her luck was about to change, I just wanted to fucking cry. I remembered thinking that maybe I was finally going to be accepted, to find my tribe. Maybe I was finally going to be on the inside, instead of on the outside constantly looking in. What green-as-cabbage Mile-high Marnie didn’t realize was that as far as cliquey, bitchy, relentlessly unforgiving environments went, moving from high school to the modeling industry was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the blazing infernos of hell.

  I had been clueless and clutching at straws, so desperately wanting to fit in somewhere, anywhere, because the truth was, I never had. Not at home or at school. From day one at school, kids seemed to sense my vulnerability and went for the jugular every time. They were like a pack of wolves zeroing in on the smell of fresh blood. Even before the “incident,” I had always been the outsider, the outlier, and the onlooker.

  It’s no surprise, really. I had basically dragged myself up, assuming the role of mother and father just as soon as I was able. I’d cooked, cleaned, kept house, and kept myself washed and clothed, but I was sure people could tell from a mile away that I wasn’t like other kids, that my home circumstances were odd, to say the least. I had done my best, but looking back with adult eyes, I suspected my best had been nowhere near good enough.