Page 41 of Save Me (Maxton Hall #1)

Ruby

Green— Important!

Turquoise— School

Pink— Maxton Hall Events Committee

Purple— Family

Orange— Diet and Exercise

If I divided my afternoon up by colors, it would look like this:

Purple— Cry my eyes out with Ember

Purple— Cry my eyes out with Mum

Purple— Avoid Dad so he can’t ask me too many questions

Orange— Go for a run with Ember to clear my head

Green— Give James Beaufort the bag back and inform him exactly how far he can take a jump off a cliff

A good list, in my opinion. And if it actually existed, I’d already have ticked off every item except the last.

I spent an hour with my hair in a towel, trying to write him a letter.

Now I’m still sitting here surrounded by crumpled sheets of paper as I decide to call it a day.

I wanted to write something that expressed my anger and disappointment, but on paper, the words suddenly seemed totally irrational.

I wish I’d said all this to him on the sports field, but at the time, I was too shocked to have a ready reply.

Pinned to my noticeboard in front of me is the card James sent me for my birthday.

The words meant so much to me back then.

I genuinely believed he meant them. Now it feels as though I imagined everything that happened between us.

Like all the phone calls, the times we laughed together, our kiss, all of it, were just figments of my imagination.

Suddenly, I can’t look at the card a moment longer. I snatch it off the pinboard, pick up a black pen, and write the first and most meaningful words that come to mind:

James,

Fuck you.

Ruby

I tilt my head to one side and study my handiwork. I wrote the words directly beneath his, and it hurts to see them and to realize that we’ve actually reached this point.

“Ruby?” Ember pokes her head around my door. “Dad’s cooked dinner. Coming?”

I nod, unable to take my eyes off the card.

Ember walks in and looks over my shoulder. She sighs and strokes my arm. Then, without another word, she fetches the box from behind the door and helps me to stow the bag away in it again. My heart bleeds as I put the card on top and tape the box up.

“I can take it to the post office on my way to school tomorrow,” she says quietly.

There’s a lump in my throat, getting bigger by the second. “Thanks,” I croak as Ember takes me in her arms.

My sister takes the parcel into her room so that I don’t have to look at it. I’m grateful to her for not mentioning James’s jumper, even though I clearly saw her eyes rest on it for a moment. I didn’t have the heart to pack it away in the box too. And I refuse to think about what that means.

After dinner, I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I’m giving myself this one evening and night to mourn for what there was between James and me. To grieve for the friend I’ve lost without knowing why.

But no longer than that. I’m still me, and I’ve sworn to myself that I won’t let anything or anyone get in my way.

As of tomorrow, everything will be back to normal, the way it’s been these last two years.

I’ll concentrate on school and go to events meetings.

I’ll have lunch in the dining hall with Lin. I’ll prepare for the Oxford interviews.

I’ll go back to living in a world where James Beaufort, like the rest of Maxton Hall, doesn’t even know my name.

James

Ruby is scarily good at avoiding me. It’s like she’s memorized my timetable by heart so that she doesn’t bump into me anywhere.

When our paths cross, she walks firmly past me without deigning to look at me, both hands gripping the straps of her green backpack.

Every time I see her, I remember her card, which is folded up in my wallet, and which I sometimes pull out when my yearning for Ruby is too strong.

Like now, for example.

When will this finally stop? When will I be able to think about anything apart from Ruby? Especially seeing that this is about the worst possible time to be distracted. The Thinking Skills Assessment is on Thursday, and if I’m going to stand the slightest chance, I need to really shine.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember a single one of the things Lydia and I have been talking about in the last half hour.

We printed out every practice exercise we could find, spread them out in her room, and worked through them one by one, until there was smoke coming out of our ears.

Lydia shuts the book she was scanning for an answer and props herself up on her elbows.

She’s lying on her stomach, knees bent, and she’s kicking her feet in time with the music that’s playing quietly in the background.

When she holds out her hand, I silently pass her the bag of crisps we’ve been helping ourselves from this last hour.

Then I run my fingers around the edge of Ruby’s card, yet again. It’s lost its edge now; the corners are crumpled. I’m about to put it away again when Lydia commando crawls a little way toward me.

“What’s that?” she asks, suddenly, grabbing the card faster than I can react. I want to snatch it back, but Lydia’s unfolded it and is reading my words, and Ruby’s. Her eyes darken, and when she looks up, I can see sympathy in them. “James…”

I snatch the card from her hand and slip it back in my wallet, which I then slide into my trouser pocket. After that, I reopen the book that Lydia had finished with and start to read. The letters make no sense, however hard I focus.

Why the fuck is my heart racing like this? And why do I feel like I just got caught?

“James.”

I look up from the book. “What?”

Lydia sits up, cross-legged, and starts to wind her hair up into a messy bun, which she then holds in place with a hair elastic. “What’s that card all about?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Nothing.”

Lydia raises one eyebrow and glances eloquently at the pocket into which the wallet, card and all, just disappeared. Then she looks at me again, more warmly this time. “What happened between you and Ruby?”

My shoulders tense. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Lydia snorts quietly and shakes her head. “I know exactly how you’re feeling,” she says after a few moments of awkward silence. “You don’t have to act unbothered by the thing with Ruby around me. I’ve got eyes in my head, James. I know when you’re feeling shit.”

I stare at the book again. Lydia’s right. I’m miserable. My entire life is a disaster, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

“The one thing bothering me,” I say, “is this fucking family, and the fact that I can’t face my own future.”

I feel Lydia’s empathetic eyes on me, but I can’t look at her. I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll lose my last ounce of self-control, and I can’t allow that to happen. Not in this house, where my father’s eyes and ears are everywhere, and where I’ve never felt truly safe.

“Ruby isn’t doing well either. Why…”

“I was only keeping an eye on Ruby for your sake,” I interrupt her.

“That’s all there is to it.” The words scratch in my throat and feel so wrong as I say them.

I can’t breathe, and Lydia is watching me so intently that the weight on my chest is getting heavier by the second.

The unfamiliar sting in my eyes makes me blink and swallow hard.

“Oh, James,” she whispers, taking my cold hand and rubbing her thumb over the back of it. I can’t remember the last time we held hands like this. I watch her pale fingers for a while, as they wrap around mine. Somehow, this simple gesture of hers has helped me breathe a bit more easily.

“I know what it’s like when you can’t have a person, even though you know they’re the only thing that would make this life more bearable,” Lydia says out of the blue, squeezing my hand. “When I met Graham, I knew at once that we had something special.”

Suddenly, I look up. Lydia returns my gaze calmly.

She’s never spoken to me about the business with Sutton before, and every time I’ve tried to get her to talk, she’s vehemently shut me down.

The fact that she’s doing it now shows me how crap I am at hiding my desperation from her, and how sorry she must feel for me.

Even so, I’m glad she’s changed the subject.

“How did you even meet? Was it at school?”

She shakes her head. For a moment, it looks like she’s hunting for the right words. I can see what an effort it is for her to tell this story. After all, it’s a secret she’s been keeping for ages.

“It was over two years ago, just after I broke up with Gregg,” Lydia begins, and the hot rage immediately fires up my stomach.

Gregg Fletcher spent months posing as Lydia’s boyfriend when he was actually a hack on a national newspaper.

He used Lydia and broke her heart just to get the gossip on our family and the firm.

I squeeze her hand back. “I was so tired then,” she continues. “Of…everything. I was like a zombie.”

“I remember.” After Fletcher’s tell-all story, the press was on us like hyenas. It was a difficult time, and we all had to find our own ways of dealing with it. Mine were doing coke and getting drunk, hers were a deathly silence and a wall that nobody could break down.

“One evening, I was just desperate. I had nobody to talk to, but I really needed someone. I was fifteen years old, and I’d fallen into a relationship with a journalist because I was na?ve enough to believe that there might be someone out there who was actually interested in me .

Not just Beaufort’s. I was in a bad way.

I was beating myself up, asking how I could have been so stupid. ”

She pauses for a moment and takes a deep breath.

“That evening, I set up an anonymous profile on Tumblr. I just wanted to let everything out, without consequences. My first post was just a pile of messed-up words. I just wrote out how I felt and that I wished I could be a completely different person. A day later, I got a really sweet message.”

I stare at her. “From Sutton?”