Her clammy fingers found the lock and with a firm yank, it popped up. After a push, a scramble, and a painful thud to the cold ground, she stumbled to her feet and ran. Her high heels sank into the sodden earth of the field, stems of wheat bristling against her bare thighs. In the gloom of the late spring dusk, Elivia had only one instinct.
Run.
She should have listened to it before. Five minutes ago when he ordered her into the backseat of his polished Porsche. Ten minutes ago when he drove past her turning for home. Half an hour ago when he instructed her to be quiet as they left the restaurant. A week ago when the date was set. Elivia had stopped listening to her instincts months before tonight. It was why she was here, tripping to her knees, her palms taking the brunt of her small body falling to the ground. Twisting onto her backside in that Zimmermann dress she’d bought especially for tonight, she saw only headlights. In the distance, she heard the rush of cars from the motorway. The roar of a lorry. The hoot of a car horn. The sound was barely audible over the drumming of her heart. A beat so hard, so all-consuming, Elivia only just heard his voice.
“Here. Now.” Silhouetted in the blinding headlights of his car, he stood motionless, one finger pointed to the ground beneath his shoe.
He hadn’t chased her. He didn’t need to. Where would she go?
Coward…
Loser…
“Now, Elivia.”
She shut her eyes tight.
Pathetic little bitch.
“Elivia.”
Virgin.
The tears dried on her face.
…not anymore.
*
“Elivia?”
Peeling her gaze from the grey day beyond the tinted window of her parents’ BMW, she met her father’s stare in the rear-view mirror and sneered.
“Cheer up, Lily-pad! It could be worse,” her father cheered from the driver’s seat.
“Could it?” With a concluding scoff, Elivia folded her arms and turned her attention to the glossy Hillside Academy prospectus on her lap.
Boarding school. This was her punishment.
She returned her head to the cool window. She didn’t want to go to boarding school or any other private institute for that matter. They were cesspits of corruption and hunting grounds for the young elite. She could do without a second stint at a ‘prestigious institute’. The last one hadn’t exactly turned out well.
Her parents, however, were adamant. She wouldn’t be accompanying them on their latest trip to Dubai, which was, in their words, ‘strictly business’. She would not be receiving her teachings from an expensive tutor. She would be going back to school after a long summer of dwelling on the past and counting her mistakes. Each one that had led to her ultimate downfall.
Elivia cringed.
Don’t think about it.
She was certain it would take a lobotomy to forget what had happened at Hampton College.
“It’s a new start,” her mother concurred, shooting Elivia her award-winning smile over her shoulder.
Her attractive parents had the temperaments of Spaniels, and so it wasn’t only their appearances that set Elivia apart from her adoptive mother and father. While her hair was as white as swan feathers, Julia and Jonathan Spencer were both dark-haired and almond-eyed. In some ways, she wished she too was blessed with brunette hair. At least then she would blend into crowds.
“You’re going to love it here,” Julia sang, gazing out the window like an excitable dog.
Elivia cracked a smile quickly followed by a frown before either of them saw. She didn’t want to give them any impression she was happy about this decision. A decision she’d had no part in. She’d come downstairs four weeks ago to find the prospectus and the school application waiting for her on the kitchen island, her parents smiling hopefully. It had been in those weeks since, Elivia, a sixteen-year-old with a net worth valued in the millions, had learned that once her parents had made a decision, no amount of stamping her designer heels or throwing expensive hissy fits could change that. Julia and Jonathan had made up their minds. She was going to Hillside Academy. Their alma mater.
“If by ‘love’ you mean absolutely abhor, then sure,” Elivia said, turning up her nose and ignoring the hurt expression on her mother’s face.
She inspected the students grinning out of the prospectus on her lap. With a retch, she picked the white bobbles from her grey pencil skirt constricting her waist. She should have bought a size two; size zero was always pushing it. Preferring to be uncomfortable, which helped keep up her ‘teenage angst’ act better, Elivia folded her arms over her non-existent bust and pouted some more. Just so they knew. In case her parents hadn’t already realised.
Elivia Spencer was pissed.
“Why must you be so negative?” Jonathan said. “This is an incredible opportunity. To study at one of the most prestigious institutes in the country. Seize it, darling. Not everyone gets a do-over.” He adeptly left out why she needed a do-over to begin with, dodging the subject of the incident that had led them all here. Just as her parents always did.
“If you go in with this pessimistic attitude, you’re bound to dislike it,” Julia said, a familiar pout on her lips. Elivia and her mother may not share blood, but they certainly shared mannerisms. Long ago, she’d realised that parents didn’t mean the people who gave birth to you; they were the people you could call home. At that precise moment, her home was abandoning her. Dumping her at a boarding school in the middle of nowhere in the hopes it would save her. She didn’t mean to sound dramatic but after the past three months, nothing except years of therapy could fix her.
Elivia watched the countryside rush by as her father steered his way along those narrow country lanes. Beyond the crumbling stone wall, overgrown with shrubbery, was the Bristol Channel; a flat grey unmoving landscape that could have easily been mistaken for an extension of the equally dull sky. Across the vast channel was a dark slither of land which she assumed, remembering what she’d seen on Google Maps, was Wales. She, however, was in Devon, strapped into the back of a car, her parents’ hawk eyes upon her as though she were a convict on her way to prison. With another grumble, Elivia let out a long sigh and checked her phone for messages.
As if anybody would be texting you.
You have no friends.
“Look, there it is!” Julia squealed, startling Elivia out of her tragic thoughts. “There she is.”
Peering between the two front seats, Elivia spotted it at once. Rising like a flame on top of the hill, the tallest for miles, or a giant red bird perched on the clifftop, ready to take flight into the winds gushing up the Bristol Channel. The red-bricked fortress burned, growing in its magnitude as they drove closer. It was just as Elivia remembered when she’d visited with her parents as a child. Then, it had been a wondrous place. Now, it would be her prison. She would never forgive them for this.
Elivia sat in silence as her father drove down the winding coastal road, the school rising to her right as they made their way inland and arrived in the small village sitting in the shadow of the immense school.
“Oh it never changes, does it, darling?” Julia said, resting a hand on her husband’s thigh.
“It’s just like going home.” With a grin, he swept the car up a narrow residential side street. Elivia almost vomited onto the prospectus.
Her anxiety churned in her stomach as they turned onto School Hill, her throat constricting and the heat rushing to her cheeks. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to be away from her parents. She didn’t want to live with strangers or shower communally or eat every meal in a cafeteria. She wanted her bedroom, her king-sized bed and its familiar pillows. She wanted the den downstairs where she and her parents watched movies every Saturday night. She wanted her private en-suite bathroom and, more importantly, she didn’t want to return to a place of ridicule and torture. At her previous school, she’d been able to escape the nightmare every day at the last bell. Here, there would be no escape if something awful were to happen again. She would be trapped within its four walls, her parents hundreds, possibly thousands of miles away. Who would look after her?
Elivia didn’t believe she was strong or confident. She needed the protection of a pack; be that her parents or a group of bitchy girls. She didn’t feel safe on her own. At Hillside Academy, she would know just one person, an old family friend she hadn’t seen in years. She would be the new girl among hundreds of people who’d known one another for years. Who would want to be friends with her?
The spineless new girl.
As if in awe, her parents fell silent as the car drove beneath the canopy of trees and up to the open iron gates of the school. On either side of the archway stood two great grey stone statues. Upon their plinths were a lion and an eagle; the lion, with its teeth bared and lunging forward, and the eagle, wings spread, its eyes peering down at each new arrival. Their magnitude, like the school, was overwhelming. If only she was as brave and fearsome. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been run out of her last school. Maybe then Bart would have picked somebody else. He had no doubt smelt her vulnerability from a mile away.
Elivia turned her attention up to the wrought iron words curved into the metal of the archway.
Contendo. Pugnamus. Unitas.
“Strive, fight, unity,” Julia said, a proud jaunt to her voice. “It’s the school motto.”
The words struck a chord inside of her. Not that she would admit that to her parents. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing she’d begun to utter the motto in her head throughout the rest of the ride up to the school.
Hillside Academy: September (Volume 1) Copyright © 2023 Jodie May Mullen