Page 4 of Lessons in Power

“The queen,” Keyes told me, returning his attention to our game, “is the most dangerous piece on the board.” His index finger trailed the edge of the black queen for a moment, before moving it forward. “Check.”

He was boxing me in.

I could see, already, how this was going to end. “You’ll have checkmate in three moves.”

The old man’s lips parted in a dangerous smile. “Will I?”

He’d gone into this game fully expecting to win it, just like he fully expected me to yield to his decrees about Hardwicke.

“Luckily for me,” I told him, my fingers closing around my own queen, “I’ll have checkmate in two.”

CHAPTER 3

Shockingly, I made it through my Monday classes without developing the slightest inclination to sign up for the debate team.

“Hypothetically speaking,” Asher said as he took the seat beside mine in our last class of the day, “if I told Carmen Seville that you could take care of a little problem involving a vengeful ex–best friend on the yearbook staff and some aggressively unflattering photo angles … would that be a bad thing or a good thing?”

Asher smiled when he said the wordsgood thing. It was implied that I should find that smile persuasive.

Sliding into the seat behind him, Vivvie took one look at my face. “Bad thing,” she told Asher, correctly interpreting my facial expression. “That would be a very bad thing.”

“Allow me to rephrase,” Asher said. “If I had, by chance, volunteered your most excellent services—”

I stopped him there. “I don’t have services.” Seeing the skepticism clear on their faces, I clarified, “Yesterday, with Jeremy’s father? That was a onetime thing.”

Asher raised one eyebrow to ridiculous heights. “So when one of the seniors on the lacrosse team was hazing the freshmen and you surreptitiously recorded said hazing and uploaded it as an attachment to his college applications, that was … what, exactly?”

I shrugged. No one had been able to prove that was me.

“What about that rumor you squelched about Meredith Sutton going to rehab?” Vivvie asked.

That hadn’t been a rumor. It had been the truth—and no one’s business but Meredith’s.

“And that time that Lindsay Li’s boyfriend was threatening to tell her parents exactly how far they’d gone if she broke up with him?” Asher raised his other eyebrow. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t he end up in military school?”

“Your point?” I asked.

“Their point is that you are a meddler.” Henry helped himself to the seat behind me. “An incurable, insatiablemeddler. You simply cannot help yourself, Kendrick.”

And who was right there beside me yesterday?I refrained from pointing that out and turned around to face him. “I don’tmeddle,” I said.

Unfortunately, all that did was set Vivvie and Asher up to chorus, “You fix!”

During my first week at Hardwicke, I’d inadvertently come to the rescue of the vice president’s daughter. At the time, I’d had no idea who she was—all I’d known was that she’d been humiliated by an older boy who’d talked her into taking some veryintimatephotos. When I’d heard the jerk was flaunting those photos, I’d lost my temper, stolen his phone, and issued a couple of pointed threats.

Anna Hayden had been very grateful. She’d deemed me a miracle worker, and just like that, the Hardwicke student body had collectively decided that I was to them what my sister was to their parents.

A professional problem solver. Someone who excelled at crisis management. Afixer.

I’m not a fixer.I’d given up making that particular objection out loud.And, a persistent voice continued in the back of my head,Ivy isn’t my sister.

As I’d recently found out, she was my mother.

The sound of the bell broke through my thoughts, saving me from going down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out what Ivy really was to me now that I knew the truth.

“I know how much you all love Mondays,” Dr. Clark said from the front of the room. “And the only thing that makes Mondays better is pop quizzes, am I right?”

That elicited audible groans.