Private School Playboys novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Coat Room
At Founders' Night Roberta finds Brooks with Sheridan, hears he is leaving for London, and pours the punch over his jacket, and Jude offers to ruin him.
The coat room at Hollis Academy smelled like cedar and old money.
I only went in because I'd left my scarf there, and because Brooks had been gone for twenty minutes.
Founders' Night was the biggest dinner of the year.
Every senior in a dress or a jacket, every parent in pearls, and my boyfriend missing from the head table.
I pushed through the wool coats and heard a laugh I knew.
It was Brooks's laugh, low and lazy, the one he used when he was winning.
"She'll never find out," he said.
Then a girl's voice answered, soft and pleased.
"You said that about the lacrosse trip."
I stepped around a rack of camel coats.
Brooks Arrott, eighteen, my boyfriend of nine weeks, had Sheridan Ashworth against the wall.
His hand was inside her silver dress.
Her pearls were tangled around his fingers.
Neither of them jumped when they saw me.
That was the part that burned.
Sheridan just smiled over his shoulder.
"Roberta," Brooks said, and he let go of her slowly. "This isn't what it looks like."
"It looks like your hand is in her dress."
"Okay. It's exactly what it looks like."
He wiped his mouth with his thumb and sighed.
"Look, I was going to tell you after the formal."
I said nothing, because my throat had stopped working.
"I'm going to London in December," he said. "Sheridan's father got me an internship at Ashworth Capital. Sheridan's going too."
"You're leaving?"
"Everybody leaves, Bobbie. That's what graduation is."
"We were supposed to apply to the same schools."
He laughed, and it wasn't kind.
"You thought I'd turn down London for a scholarship girl from Hartford?"
Sheridan covered her mouth with two fingers.
"It was fun," Brooks said. "It was never serious. Don't make it weird."
I walked out of the coat room.
I didn't run.
I walked down the long marble hall with my scarf forgotten behind me.
The ballroom doors were open, and inside, three hundred people sat under chandeliers eating tiny crab cakes.
The headmaster was at the podium thanking the donors.
Roisin was at our table, waving a fork at me.
My boyfriend came out of the coat room behind me, straightening his tie.
"Bobbie, come on. Not here."
I turned around.
"Not here?" I said.
My voice carried.
A few heads turned, then more.
"You told me you loved me in this building," I said. "You said it on the library steps."
"That was a moment."
"It was a lie."
Behind him, Sheridan slipped out of the coat room and fixed her pearls.
She stood close at his shoulder.
"Don't embarrass yourself," she said softly.
Behind them, a waiter carried a crystal punch bowl toward the dessert table.
It was a big one, red and sweet, with floating raspberries.
I took it out of his hands.
"Excuse me," I told the waiter, and he was too stunned to stop me.
Brooks's mouth fell open.
"Bobbie, don't."
"You'll look great in London," I said.
I tipped the whole bowl over his head.
Red punch ran down his blond hair and his white collar.
It soaked the navy lacrosse jacket he wore to every event so we would remember he was captain.
Raspberries slid down his chest.
Somebody gasped.
Somebody else started to clap, and then it was half the room.
Sheridan shrieked and jumped back, a splash of red across her silver hem.
The headmaster stopped in the middle of his sentence.
I set the empty bowl on the nearest table and picked a raspberry out of Brooks's collar.
I ate it.
"Keep the jacket," I said. "It suits you."
Then I walked out through the side door into the cold, and I heard my own breath shake for the first time.
The night air hit my face.
I leaned against the stone wall of the chapel and pressed my palms against my eyes.
I would not cry in front of those people.
I would cry later, in the bathroom, where it counted.
"That was the best thing I've seen in four years," said a voice above me.
I looked up.
A boy sat on the chapel steps in the dark with his long legs stretched out.
He wore a black jacket over a white shirt with the collar open.
I knew him by sight.
Everybody did.
Jude Rafferty, nineteen, the senior who'd been thrown out of two schools before Hollis took his father's money.
Black hair, grey eyes, a scar cutting through his left eyebrow.
He was the reason mothers whispered at parents' weekend.
He stood up, slow, and he was a head taller than me.
"Brooks Arrott is going to spend the next month telling everyone you're crazy," he said. "Sheridan will spend it making sure you pay."
"I know."
"I can ruin him for you."
I stared at him.
"Why would you do that?"
His grey eyes held mine, and something in them flickered, there and gone.
"Because I'm bored," he said. "Because I don't like him. Take your pick."
He tilted his head toward the lit windows.
"There's a catch. You'd have to be seen with me."
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