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  Prince Charming

  Copyright © 2014 by S. Celi

  Published by Lowe Interactive Media, LLC

  Cover Design by Mayhem Cover Creations

  Cover Photography by Amy Elisabeth Photography

  Special Thanks: Artfully Disheveled

  Cover Model: Joel Geiman

  Formatting by JT Formatting

  Amazon Edition

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products, bands, and/or restaurants referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 22

  AP EUROPEAN HISTORY sucked. So did AP Biology, AP German, and AP English. Even World Cultures class sucked.

  Everything about senior year at Heritage High School sucked.

  I sat in the second row for every class, and I hated it. It should have been the best year of my life—everyone told me that, but they lied to my face. They looked me straight in the face and lied. By the time we came back from winter break, everything about senior year had turned into a boring mess, like we were all just waiting for the day when we’d walk across the stage in the auditorium and get our diplomas.

  I didn’t know how to change any of it.

  Mr. Langston’s AP English class was the suckiest of the suck. Fifth period. Somehow, this sorry excuse for an English teacher managed to warp what should have been my favorite subject into a pathetic placeholder in my schedule that always reminded me just how much I was over high school. I’d been over it for most of my senior year, and I wanted to turn around and leave every time I walked into that class. Of course, I never did. Oh, no. I was too much of a pussy to pull something like that.

  Besides, school itself had become too damn easy.

  The spring of junior year, I’d loaded up my senior schedule with AP classes, designed to give me dozens of hours of college credit as long as I made fours and fives on the tests in May. The guidance counselors and teachers told me over and over again how great this would make my future—that it would complete my path to the top of Heritage High School’s graduating class. I liked being at the top.

  No, I loved being at the top.

  And that’s how I wound up in the second row of Mr. Langston’s class, right after lunch every day, just in time to smell cafeteria food on his breath while he spouted off highbrow comments about classic literature.

  “Can anyone tell me three character archetypes often used in Shakespeare?” he asked as he paced across the classroom the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Day. He wore a long green sweater with large wool pills and flakes of Wheat Thins from his lunch all over his chest. He showed up in that sweater every Tuesday.

  I cringed every time I saw it.

  No one answered Mr. Langston right away. We might have been a classroom of students bound for college and full-ride scholarships, but that didn’t make us eager to answer probing questions from an unmarried man in his forties with two lower teeth missing and small scabs on his face from too many shaves with a blunt razor. In fact, the stalemate between teacher and students had grown more pronounced as the school year inched onward.

  “Anyone? Hmm? Anyone?” He held up the thick AP English textbook the school issued us at the beginning of the year to help us study for the AP test in May. His edition lacked a cover, and the front pages curled around the edges. Some of the pages threatened to flap out onto the front row. “This was in the required reading.”

  Still no one raised a hand. Seconds ticked by on the clock. Any enthusiasm we once had fled the room back in September, when Langston’s revised syllabus laid out a long line of torturous classics instead of American literature. Nothing crushed teenage spirit faster than Homer. Nothing. And no, Shakespeare did not help any.

  “Come on people, this is not difficult,” Langston said, his voice squeaking in a way that screamed annoyed and frustrated. He ran his hand along the bald spot on top of his head. “Character archetypes. Think really hard.”

  I looked up from the small doodle of a sinking ship I’d drawn on a random page in my notebook and glanced at the rest of the class. My eyes fell on blank faces and bored stares from kids I competed with for the top of class rank. We were the top 20 students in the class, and, at that moment, I ranked an irritating second.

  Only one face in the crowd didn’t get a glance from me. Glancing might turn into staring, and that wouldn’t be okay at all.

  I couldn’t look at her. I’d get a hard-on the size of Texas if I did. It had happened before.

  “Geoff,” Langston snapped, slapping his book on the side of his desk.

  My head snapped in the direction of his voice.

  “Geoff Miller. I know you have the answer.”

  “Huh?”

  “The answer to this question, in the required reading. I know you completed the assignment.”

  Sometimes a sterling reputation with teachers really stunk, even if my hard work had earned me one. In almost twelve years of school, I’d never handed in one late assignment, skipped class, or received lower than an eighty-eight on a test. Now, in the winter of my life at this miserable high school, that reputation followed me from class to class, teacher-to-teacher, as if they all just expected that I would never be anything different, other than the perfect student with every answer.

  I blinked at Mr. Langston and contemplated cracking a joke, or answering him with a snappy comeback that would make the rest of my classmates laugh. God knows I’d thought of more than a few during that specific lecture, most of which involved some kind of joke about boobs and Shakespeare loving sex. I even envisioned the looks on my classmates’ faces. It would be epic.

  But, of course, like a model student, I kept all the smartass comebacks to myself.

  “Shakespeare didn’t mind using character archetypes,” I said after a couple of seconds. “In fact, most of his plays have them.”

  “Very good, Mr. Miller, but I asked for specific examples.”

  “The star-crossed lovers, the shrew, the villain.”

  “Yes, you’re right.” He threw the book down on his desk and looked satisfied. “I can see at least one of us has done the required reading, and as usual it is Mr. Miller.”

  I glanced around the room fast enough to see three eye rolls from my fellow classmates, and a blank stare at the chalkboard from the face I tried my hardest to avoid focusing on every day during this class. She never looked at
me. She didn’t even know I was alive.

  To Laine Phillips, I was just a waste of air.

  The door to my locker slammed shut about thirty seconds after I opened it. I had just grabbed my AP Bio textbook when it happened.

  “What’s up, Ge-off.”

  I swallowed my annoyance. Would it kill him to pronounce my name correctly? Apparently, it would.

  “The one and only.”

  “Whatever, asshole.” Blake Smithson folded his muscular arms and the white pleather of his letterman jacket creaked. Various awards for football decorated his chest, including one that reminded everyone of his coveted place on the state championship football team. “You’re supposed to give us a ride later.”

  “I know. Mom told me.”

  Blake leaned up against my locker, ensuring I wouldn’t be able to open it again as long as he stood there. “Don’t be late this time. Like, you know, late because you’re looking up shit in the library.”

  “Like, what kind of shit?”

  “You know. Academic shit.”

  “Because all stuff in the library is academic shit.”

  Blake blinked at me as if I’d spoken in Chinese. “Why do you have to keep rubbing your brains in my face?”

  “That’s impossible.” I widened my eyes to keep from rolling them.

  “Whatever. You think you think you’re so damn superior.”

  That was where he was wrong. I didn’t think I was intellectually superior to Blake. I knew I was. “I won’t be late,” I added after a moment, deciding not to push the issue any further.

  “Well, the last time you were supposed to drive us, you were.”

  Blake resembled two tomatoes stacked together. He had a round head, ginger-spiked hair, and jarring blue eyes. The bottom half of his body was circular, too, with defined and developed muscles he’d honed during endless workouts for the football team. He played linebacker on the team, and so did his brother Bruce. In fact, Bruce was his twin, and only a mole near Blake’s left eyebrow distinguished him from Bruce.

  “Like I said,” I replied, growing irritated. I really needed to move on from this conversation and walk down the flight of stairs to fifth period biology. “I won’t be late.”

  “Dude, whatever,” Blake said. He slammed his fist against the locker for emphasis. “Your bitch of a mom told my dad she’s really getting tired of you.”

  “I’m sure she is. Since she loves spending so much time with David and you guys these days, instead of me.” I turned and walked down the hallway without another word to Blake. He was a liar. Always had been. But I couldn’t be sure if he’d lied right then.

  Yet another reason why it sucked having Blake and Bruce as stepbrothers.

  Over the last two years I’d dreamed more than a hundred thousand times that my mom had never met David, Blake and Bruce’s father. I wished she and I still lived in the small house on Rosstown Ave, with the white clapboard and the apple tree in the front yard. I begged God for another chance for us to be a family, but there was no family to go back to at all. My dad had died from cancer the year I turned six.

  David Smithson had been Mom’s first high school love. He got divorced from Betsy, Blake and Bruce’s mother, our freshman year of high school. About ten minutes after the ink dried on the divorce papers, he asked my mom out to dinner. She accepted over the phone in a voice I’d never heard her use before. Of course, just a few weeks later, David and my mom had rekindled their love.

  Of course they did.

  “Geoff!” My mother called from downstairs. The shrillness of it seemed to touch everything we owned in the mansion on Ammunition Ridge. “Diiiiiiiineeeeerr!”

  “Coming, Mom,” I called down the stairs. My voice came out in breathy heaves, because every afternoon since October I’d done fifty burpees and forty-five jumping jacks in my room before allowing myself to check social media. In January, I added one hundred sit-ups three times a week, all part of a private wish that I’d wake up one day in a different body.

  Before I left my room, I clicked out of Facebook and locked my computer. Then I checked it twice. I’d made that mistake before, and I wouldn’t again. I didn’t want Blake and Bruce posting on my behalf for the third time in three months.

  The wide, winding staircase led to the open-air gourmet kitchen, where a variety of smells greeted me: onions, grease, and something sugary. Mom must have been at it again, trying her best to cook the perfect meal. She placed a sizable pot roast with a burned salt crust on the table in the breakfast nook before she turned to me. Blake, Bruce and David already sat in their seats, and the distinctive wide eyes they all shared bulged as they waited for me to take a seat.

  “Milk or water?” she asked as she wiped her hands on her black apron. It said “Kiss the Cook” in red stencil letters embellished with red lip prints on the front.

  I yanked my chair out from the table and took a seat. The chair scraped the tile floor, and I stifled a grin when I heard it.

  David loved to brag. More than once, I’d heard my stepfather tell people he wanted to impress that the kitchen floor had special tiles from Italy he’d found on a business trip five years ago. Each tile cost $150. He made sure people heard the cost when he told the story.

  “I’ll have water, Mom.”

  “Good, that’s already on the table.” She turned her attention to David, who was poised to take a cut from the roast. He’d even already raised his fork. “David, honey, would you like a beer? Maybe something else? A bourbon? Or can I bring up something from the wine cellar?”

  I frowned. She always sounded so sugary and submissive when she talked to David. She’d never been that way with Dad. Why was she always changing herself to suit what she “thought David wanted”?

  “Sure, sugar,” he said. Then he cut into the roast with gusto, clinking and banging the knife and fork as juices spilled out on the white china plate. “Red.”

  Meanwhile, I resisted the urge to throw up. I hated the way his voice sounded when he said “sugar.” It reminded me of the way a drunken cartoon character might speak.

  “Pinot?” She picked up a dark bottle with a fancy label from the counter, and held it out like a trophy.

  “Yep, sugar, that will work.” He didn’t even look at her. I wondered if he noticed how much time and effort she’d put into her hair, or the fact that she now wore makeup every evening to dinner. She never used to do that, either. It might have made her look refreshed and polished, but I didn’t like it. Not at all.

  Blake and Bruce tore into the roast after their dad cut his portion. They didn’t acknowledge anyone, they just did it. As my mother and I waited for them to finish, I swirled my fork around the spinach, lettuce, celery, mozzarella, and tomato salad that took up half my plate. Mom had covered the whole thing in a purple dressing, a recipe that I suspected she got from one of the new cookbooks that lined the shelf above the stove. Again, another effort by her to please David. She never cooked very much before she married him.

  “Hey, now. Don’t play with your food, Geoff,” David said once he noticed what I was doing. He added a disapproving arch of his eyebrow.

  “What?” I said, incredulous as I looked from my food to David, and back again. “I wasn’t playing with it. I was just mixing the dressing.” I looked at my mom for reinforcement on this, but she just shrugged.

  “Stop mixing the dressing, Geoff,” David said. “Eat. Now.”

  I turned my head to him, taking in the sight of this fifty-year-old man with a comb over, who wore a wrinkled brown suit and red tie. What did my mom see in him? He must have been gangbusters in bed. Or, maybe it was the money. She did have an AmEx with a $50,000 limit now, and a personal shopper at Nordstrom. Access like that must have made up for everything.

  I set my fork down against the plate. “What? I’m not playing with my food.”

  He cleared his throat. “Just eat your food, Geoff.”

  “But I wasn’t—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you tel
l me, son. What matters is what I saw.”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “I saw you playing with it, Geoff. End of story.” He talked with his mouth full of food, and with each word a mix of salad bits and shreds of roast threatened to spray across the mahogany table.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” My mom sighed. “Eat the roast. It’s good.” She added a fake smile and pointed at her handiwork. A small piece of beef the size of a dollar bill remained. Mom hadn’t eaten any, yet either. Without another word, I cut it in half and left the rest for her.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 24

  SENIOR YEAR, I had one best friend: Josh Anderson. We sat at a lunch table with two other guys—Mark Crawford and Nathan Priest—both of whom I called good friends, too. Together, we navigated the choppy waters of the Heritage High School cafeteria, a place where students jockeyed for tables with the best view of the room and ate calorie-balanced lunches made by two chefs the student alumni association paid for with private donations. Of all the dangerous places in the preppy school we called home, the lunchroom was the most dangerous. Student reputations rose and fell by the events in that large, loud room located in the center of the building. What happened in the lunchroom never stayed in the lunchroom, and the social hierarchy of Heritage ebbed and flowed just from that fact, and exactly the way the popular kids liked it.

  The four of us ate lunch most days at a spot in the far right corner of the room. The rectangular table sat far enough away from the lunch line to see most of the action, but close enough to check out the hot senior and junior girls. Our section of the lunchroom sat six people, but two of the chairs always stayed empty. Always.

  No girls ever sat with us at lunch, despite Mark’s best efforts to convince them. Mark crushed on at least five girls during senior year, but he had no skills. Every time he talked to girls, they just wound up laughing in his face. He didn’t lose hope, though, and at least once a day he brought up his latest crush.