“Has your mom ever cut your eyelashes to make them grow thicker?”
I shook my head. “My mom never gave enough crap to change my diaper, probably.”
That was my last night in New York City for several years.
The next day, Mom knocked on the Vans’ door and threw my meager possessions into the back of a taxi.
She didn’t even say goodbye. Just told me to stay out of trouble.
I was shipped off to the Andrew Dexter Academy for Boys on the outskirts of New Haven, Connecticut.
All because of one stupid kiss.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHRISTIAN
Past
She was going to come. She had to.
I didn’t dare dream anymore. Not often, anyway. But I did today.
Maybe because it was Christmas, and there was a part of me—small as it might be—that still believed in the holiday-miracles mumbo jumbo they spoon-fed us as kids. I wasn’t a good Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but word on the street was God showed mercy to all his children, even the screwed-up ones.
Well, I was a child, and I sure as hell needed a break. This was his time to make good on his promise. To show he existed.
I hadn’t seen Mom in six months. The days came and went in a flurry of homework and swim team. For my fifteenth birthday, I’d bought myself a prepackaged cupcake from a gas station and made a wish to make it to my next birthday alive. I hadn’t even gotten a half-assed by-the-way-are-you-alive phone call since I’d been shipped off from Manhattan. Just one crumpled letter two months ago, stained with rain and fingerprints and an unidentified sauce, in which she’d written to me in her signature italic handwriting.
Nicholai,
We will spend Christmas in my apartment. I will rent a car and pick you up. Wait for me at the entrance at four o’clock on December 22nd. Do not be late or I will leave without you.
—Ruslana
It was impersonal, cold; you could find more enthusiasm at a funeral, but I was still stoked that she remembered my existence.
Tapping my holey loafer against the concrete stairway at Andrew Dexter’s double-doored entrance, I glanced at my watch. My backpack was flung between my legs, all my worldly possessions inside it. Waiting for time to slog forward reminded me of all the times I’d waited for Mom in the cemetery outside Arya’s building. Only now I didn’t have a pretty girl to pass the time with. That specific pretty girl had turned out to be nothing but a bag of snakes. I hoped wherever Arya Roth was these days, karma fucked her long and hard, without a condom.
A kick to my back snapped me out of my mental fog. Richard Rodgers—Dickie to anyone who knew him—peppered the gesture by flicking the back of my head as he typhooned down the stairs to the waiting black Porsche pulling in front of the boarding school’s entryway.
“Mom!”
“Darling!” His socialite mother got out of the passenger door with open arms, wearing enough real fur to cover three polar bears. My classmate threw himself into her embrace. His father waited behind the wheel, smiling glumly, like a child during Sunday service. It was hard to believe Richard, whose claim to fame was farting the alphabet with his armpit, was worthy of this hot woman’s love. Dickie’s mother pulled away to take a better look at him, bracketing his face with her manicured hands. My heart lurched and jerked like a caught worm. It hurt to breathe.
Where the hell are you, Mom?
“You look so good, my love. I made you your favorite crumble pie,” Dickie’s mother cooed.
My stomach growled. They needed to get the hell out of here and stop blocking the driveway. Richard hopped into the car and screwed off.
She’d come. She said she would. She must.
Another hour passed. The wind picked up, the sky turning from gray to black. Mom was still nowhere in sight, and my already shaky confidence was crumbling like the stale pie the janitor had slipped into my room the day after Thanksgiving because he knew I was the only kid who stayed on school grounds.
Four hours and sixteen smacks on the back and “see ya next years” later, it was pitch black and freezing, the snow falling from the sky thick and fluffy, like cotton balls.
The chill didn’t register. Neither did the fact my holey loafers were soaking wet, or that the two tears that had slipped from my right eye had frozen midroll. The only thing that sank in was the fact that Mom had stood me up on Christmas and that—as per usual—I was alone.
Something soft and fuzzy landed on my head. Before I could turn around to see what it was, this boy I knew from the swim team, Riggs, plopped down on the stair next to me, mimicking my pathetic hunch.
“Sup, Ivanov?”
“None of your business,” I hissed, ripping the red velvet hat from my head and dumping it on the ground.
“That’s a big-ass attitude for someone who weighs forty pounds.” The good-looking bastard whistled, giving me a once-over.
I twisted his way, punching his arm hard.
“Aw. Shithead. What’d you do that for?”
“So you shut the hell up,” I growled. “Why else?”
What was he doing here, anyway?
“Die in hell,” Riggs Bates replied cheerfully, finding the situation infinitely amusing.
“Already am,” I replied. “I’m here, aren’t I?”