Cover

Dedication

To Mary and Mayo Andreen

Prologue

DECEMBER 9TH

Perhaps it was because it had been an unusually warm early- December evening. Perhaps that’s why the bee left its hive to go exploring. Tired of being cooped up with the other bees, it broke free to stretch its bee wings and see a different part of the world. Or perhaps it just needed to get away for a while, finding the other bees to be annoying and wanting some space before it returned.

Whatever the reason, it was a very poor decision.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye as I walked back down the pathway from the campus store in the early evening, a tiny, frantic motion barely visible in the otherwise stagnant water of the decorative pond positioned between the girls’ dorm, Charity House, and the one that housed the boys, Waller Hall.

I stopped to stare until I realized what I was seeing: the bee was upside down in the water. Struggling.

My hesitation lasted a few seconds, then I couldn’t stand it anymore—poor thing—and stepped off the path.

The bee was about four feet out from the pond’s edge, and, despite it being warm out, this was still Connecticut and it was still December 9th.

My sixteenth birthday, as it so happened. And an early Saturday evening. Which meant I should be in the middle of getting ready for a fantastic party designed to celebrate the wonders of all things me.

Instead, I was contemplating the rescue of a bee.

I took off my black Converse, followed by my red-and-green Christmas socks, rolled my jeans over the skinny, pale-white lumps that were my calf muscles, grabbed a fallen leaf, and waded into the water.

Holy hell! It was cold! And slimy. Jesus, what was I stepping on? Was that moss? I really hoped that was moss.

Of course, it was at this exact moment I was found by Arthur Chakrabarti Watercress, who, if not the last person I would want to encounter in this position, was definitely in the Top Five.

“Finley? What on earth are you doing?” he demanded, because Arthur always seemed to demand. I was convinced “haughty” was his default.

I glanced back to see him frowning at me from the stone bridge that arched across the pond, linking the main campus of Barrington Academy—our mutual coed boarding school—and our respective dorms. His straight, inky-black hair was covered by a plain blue knit cap and the earthy green of his puffy jacket stood out against the light coming from the bridge’s faux-old-timey lampposts.

“I’m saving that bee,” I answered, as if this was a sane course of action.

I pointed at the tiny creature, which was now about two feet away.

Problem was, I wasn’t sure I could take another step closer to save the bee without losing my balance on the slippery rocks and falling ass-first into the water.

So I stood there, in over a foot of water cold enough to make me shiver, trying to figure out how to get to the bee and bring it back to dry land, without getting myself soaked in the process. Not exactly how I thought my quick trip from my dorm room to the campus store for a supply of self-pity-party candy was gonna go.

I waited for him to mock me. Which would be understandable. This was a situation ripe for mockery.

Instead, he asked, “So why aren’t you saving it?” His British voice was clipped and precise, like he was a fifty-year-old member of Parliament. Which was one of the many reasons he got shit from our classmates for whom a New England boarding school education wasn’t something to be achieved as much as a birthright.

“Because I can’t move.”

“What?” He cupped his ear. To be fair, he was about fifteen feet away and I had mumbled.

I raised my voice. “I can’t move!”

He seemed puzzled. “Just step back.”

“I can’t.”

The lampposts along the pathway and bridge cast shadows in a way that I couldn’t fully see his face. Not that I needed to. He was clearly looking from the land surrounding the pond, which was two feet behind me, back to me and finding the gap to be undaunting.

But I was daunted.

He shook his head and continued across the bridge. I assumed he’d gone on to wherever it was he was headed. Which was a relief, because I was feeling like a huge dork and no one needed an audience for that.

I glanced back at the bee, now closer to me than a few moments earlier, but also still out of my reach, and wondered, What the hell am I doing . . . ?

“Here.”

My head whipped around to find Arthur on the edge of the pond, extending a long, reedy tree branch toward me.

“Use this,” he continued, nodding in the direction of the water.

I stared at him, surprised and uncertain. In the six months since I arrived at Barrington, we hadn’t had many interactions outside of occasional classroom activity and one tipsy conversation at the Halloween party thrown by Bronwyn Campbell. But he’d never struck me as the sort of person who would give a second’s consideration to the welfare of a bee. It felt beneath Arthur Chakrabarti Watercress, whose British Indian mother was a world-renowned scientist of some kind (don’t ask me the field) and whose white, London-businessman father’s lineage could be traced back to the Wars of the Roses.

He frowned in irritation and waggled the branch. “Do you want to save it or not? Because it’s not going to last forever, given the circumstances.”

Okay. That felt more like Arthur.

I took the branch then turned to look back at the bee, whose movements were slowing. But there was still the matter of the slippery rocks beneath my bare and numbing feet.

“Give me your hand,” he said, as he reached out his own glove-covered right hand toward me. I took it and it did provide balance, even if he had to lean forward, because while seventeen-year-old Arthur wasn’t short, he also was never going to be the tallest member of anyone’s basketball team.

I focused on the bee in the pond, stretching out the stick until it was beneath the struggling insect, providing something solid on to which its pudgy legs could grab hold.

“Got him,” I said. Then I straightened, one hand holding the stick with the wobbly bee and the other still in Arthur’s grasp.

“I see that,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to step back? Onto land, if I’m in any way being vague.”

It took every ounce of self-restraint to not hit him with an equally snarky comeback, but since he was my main source of stability, I bit my tongue.

I tightened my hold on his hand then brought the stick with our rescued bee over for him to take. Once done, I leapt back in the same direction.

My landing was . . . inelegant. I hit the ground on my ass and my red cap slipped off my head, but I didn’t take out Arthur or the bee and I didn’t fall backward into the pond, so, all things considered, I counted it as a win.

Arthur barely spared me a glance. He was focused on the bee. Of course.

The cool, damp earth seeped into my favorite jeans and I knew I’d be spending a couple of dollars’ worth of quarters in the laundry room later tonight.

Which was also not how I’d always envisioned my sixteenth birthday.

None of this was.

And then it got worse.

The laughter reached me first and I immediately thought it was aimed at me.

It wasn’t.

Instead, it came from four classmates headed along the path in the direction of the stone bridge. The shadows hid Arthur and me from them, which was good since the chief giggler was my roommate, Thea Selsky, who only a half hour earlier had told me she couldn’t hang out tonight for my birthday because she was studying with her boyfriend, Beaux. I’d assumed “study” was a euphemism, but I did think they’d be hanging out in his dorm room. Clearly that wasn’t true, either. But where were—

“They’re probably going to Bronwyn’s party,” Arthur said, as if reading my thoughts.

I looked from Thea and Beaux—whom I now recognized was one of the four—back to Arthur, who had transferred the bee from the stick to a sturdy leaf.

Arthur nodded his head in the direction of the retreating quartet.

“What party?” I asked before I could stop myself, already feeling awash in dread.

“For Josie Sutton. Today’s her birthday. Didn’t you get the invite?”

I hadn’t. And I knew it wasn’t an oversight. My classmate Bronwyn was many things but most of all she was precise. Like a laser. And for some reason she did not like me. Especially lately. The first two months of our infrequent interactions were annoying, but the past six weeks her viciousness seemed focused on me to the point that I searched my brain for some way in which I may have wronged her, but came up empty. Sure, I wasn’t the traditional popular girl, but I had never before considered myself the type to get picked on, either. Overall, I was fairly . . . basic, really. Which made her overt dislike of me such a mystery.

“Is everyone going?” I asked. My voice sounded tight even to my own ears.

“I’m not.”

“But you were invited.”

He shrugged, bored. “Everyone was.”

Not everyone.

I grabbed my cap off the ground, stood, then whacked it against my thigh to dislodge flecks of dead grass, and shoved it back on my head, tucking my long blonde hair beneath with more force than was necessary. My brain felt like it was boiling.

I took my phone out of my coat pocket and pulled up Instagram. It only took a few seconds for me to see the first Insta Story from what were the beginnings of a banging party on the rooftop of La Belle’s, a nearby restaurant owned by Bronwyn’s family, which made it easier for the underage to be served.

I hit refresh twice and both times new posts from different classmates appeared. Smiling faces in selfies. All celebrating a sixteenth birthday. Just not mine.

“Are you going back to Oklahoma for Christmas?” Arthur asked.

The question jolted me out of the vortex of misery I could feel building in the center of my chest. If it had come even twenty seconds earlier, my answer would have been “Nope,” because I had already told everyone as much. My parents, my grandmother, and my best friend, Mia. Since the moment I’d been accepted, I’d had fanciful visions of me wandering the snowy private campus in solitude, reading a book, feeling independent. Like Barrington was my own private retreat.

But that was twenty seconds ago. And a lot had changed in those twenty seconds. So even though I opened my mouth with the intention of saying no, what came out was a very firm “Yes.”

Because I meant it. Bronwyn’s snub tonight was the last straw on what was already a hay barn full of snits and jabs and overall bitchiness. And it was enough. I was done with these people and this place. It had once held so much hope for me, but that was now gone.

It was at that moment the bee suddenly zoomed off the leaf in Arthur’s hand and disappeared up into the darkened skies of early evening.

Headed home.

I was rude to Arthur. That wasn’t my intention when I walked away from him without so much as a “thanks for helping save the bee” or even the bare minimum of “bye,” but that was the end result. Rudeness.

It didn’t occur to me that I’d abruptly left him by the pond until I was back in the empty dorm room I shared with Thea, scrolling “find cheap flights” websites, the emergency credit card given to me by my parents in my right hand, tapping against the wooden desk.

Tap, tap, tap, tap.

I hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights when I entered, instead going straight to the laptop, which was next to the window overlooking the pond.

And that was when I glanced over to see Arthur standing where I’d left him.

A wave of guilt came over me. Grandma Jo would not be pleased; she was big on manners.

My first instinct was to tell him sorry when I saw him next, even as a part of me recognized he probably wouldn’t care. Arthur was not big on manners, at least not that I’d experienced.

I’d met him on my first day of classes in Advanced Calculus. My mistake was having taken the first seat in the second row, which turned out to have been his favorite. He’d scowled at me then sat in the first seat of the first row to my left with an annoyed huff and refused to look at or acknowledge me for the next month.

That had pretty much set the tone between us.

As I waited for the airline-finder website to settle on a list of possible flights, I watched him pick up an object from the ground then toss it into the water, and I wondered what Arthur was doing for Christmas.

I supposed I should’ve asked. Was he staying here at Barrington? Or going back to England? The thing about boarding schools was you could stay there when school wasn’t in session if you made arrangements ahead of time.

When I first arrived on campus, I thought that’s what I’d do, envisioning the experience would be like the middle chapters in the Harry Potter books when all sorts of fun and mischief took place as Harry and the gang stayed at Hogwarts over the holidays. In fact, I blame Harry Potter for many of my woeful misperceptions about what it would be like to be a student at Barrington Academy. Not that I expected magic or epic battles with fantastical creatures that could decide the Fate of the World. It was more like a subtle yearning for the extraordinary. In hindsight, I probably should’ve read more Salinger.

At first things had gone fairly well.

I’d enrolled in summer school with the idea of getting my bearings with a few classes before the real work of the fall semester began in earnest. I’d even had my dorm room to myself until Thea’s arrival in mid-August.

The whole experience was so different from my life back in Oklahoma I might as well have landed on Venus. I thought it was cool.

Then fall classes started and I quickly realized things were going to be a whole different level of difficult. Which I’d anticipated. In theory. But the reality?

Yeah, it was a lot.

I’d always been smart. That wasn’t bragging, it was the truth. Even as a baby I’d been what the doctors my parents took me to called “advanced for her age.” A source of great pride for Mom and Dad, but especially Mom, who had always possessed a deep yearning to be extraordinary. Much like a stage mother shoving her child into the spotlight whether they wanted it or not, she decided I would be the one to fulfill that dream.

I would be extraordinary.

For the first fifteen and a half years, I did my part. I met and exceeded every milestone early and my grades reflected that sense of “special.” Which was why I could skip fourth grade and apply to a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut when I was fifteen. I hadn’t gotten in right away and that had been a blow. But a few days after learning I was first on the waitlist, Barrington Academy notified me that a space had opened up, and was I still interested?

Why, yes. Yes, I was.

Mom had run around the house, jumping up and down. Dad looked puzzled by her, but proud of me. Over the years, Mom had kept shelf after shelf in the den filled with my academic honors in a kind of shrine that I found embarrassing, but also secretly pleasing. Because that was who I was: Finley Brown, Brainiac.

And then I arrived at Barrington and I wasn’t special anymore.

I was average.

Average.

It was a shock! I’d never been average before. The first time I saw “C” on my paper I was convinced the teacher had been mistaken.

But she hadn’t. It was real and I didn’t quite know what to do with that.

The obvious solution was to study harder. And I did. And my grades improved to a respectable B-, which was still a gut punch, but I also recognized that I wasn’t in a small pond anymore. I was in Lake Huron and I had better learn how to swim against the waves or I was going to drown.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t drown. But I didn’t thrive, either. And maybe that would’ve been enough for me had I found some sort of accomplishment elsewhere, in sports or Debate Club or any form of extracurricular activity, but I was average there, too. However, there was one place where I wasn’t average: socializing. When it came to making friends and fitting in, I would give myself a D+.

Sure, I’d gone to Bronwyn’s Halloween party, but she’d invited everyone, including Arthur. That didn’t mean either one of us were part of the Cool Kids Club.

Hardly.

I was of the Studies Too Hard All the Time variety and Arthur was . . . well, Arthur. He never fit into any particular category. In a way we were both social satellites, launched from opposite parts of the world, him from London and me from Oklahoma, landing in the same improbable orbit.

A movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention.

I glanced out the window to see Arthur look up toward Charity House. My dorm room was on the second floor, so I couldn’t be sure what he was seeing. Was I visible? Probably not. It was a new moon and there weren’t many lights by the pond. Still, a part of me wondered . . .

Arthur turned and walked away from the pond.

And another part of me couldn’t help thinking this was probably the last time I would ever see Arthur Chakrabarti Watercress, the odd boy from the school where I had bombed. Because I was growing certain that when I got home, I would convince my parents to let me stay in Oklahoma. And while there might be a chance I would encounter Arthur when I returned to Barrington to retrieve my stuff, I knew it was unlikely.

I’m not sure why that struck me right in that moment, why I kept my eyes glued to the blue knit cap and green puffy jacket as they were absorbed by the evening shadows before disappearing around the corner.

But I did. I watched him go. Certain I would never see him again.

Turns out, I could not have been more wrong.

One

DECEMBER 19TH

“You owe me a Christmas!”

Arthur Chakrabarti Watercress stared at me with dark brown eyes that radiated fury and indignation far beyond what one would imagine possible from a boy who stood five foot nine and weighed less than a year-old Great Dane. That’s a guess, by the way; I hadn’t actually weighed either Arthur or a Great Dane, but you get the point. And his ever-precise British accent coupled with a tiny speck of spittle in the lower left corner of his mouth further undermined whatever intimidation factor he was going for. He was lucky I didn’t laugh in his flushed face.

Or maybe because a part of me was still reeling from the surreal fact that he was here. In Oklahoma. In my hometown. And specifically, in the courtyard of my Grandma Jo’s inn, where, I now knew, he and his aunt were staying over the holidays.

Awesome. Just freakin’ awesome.

And here’s another thing—Arthur wasn’t wrong. I did owe him. Not necessarily a “Christmas,” whatever that meant, but I owed him at least an apology, and not about snubbing him post–bee incident. Which I would have gotten to, eventually, if he hadn’t gone off like a rage rooster.

“Arthur—” I tried.

That was as far as I made it.

“No!” He held up a single finger. The index one. Arthur would never stoop so low as to flip anyone the bird. That was for imbeciles and sports fans, I’d overheard him say once back when we were at school, and I was pretty sure he considered the two synonymous.

“My aunt and I would not be trapped in this godforsaken town for the next week for what should have been a perfect American Christmas were it not for your pack of lies that led us here.”

Yeah, okay. He had another point. I hated it when he was actually right, as opposed to when he felt he was right, which was always. Still, “pack of lies” was a little overdramatic, even for him.

I tapped the now-empty plastic cup against my leg. It’d been full of birdseed, which I’d just finished pouring into the birdfeeder when I was accosted by Arthur, who had waited until after brunch before cornering me.

I tried again. “I really am sor—”

“Apologies aren’t going to cut it, Finley Brown.”

Full name. The universal sign for being in trouble. Delightful. It would appear whatever goodwill we may have created ten days ago in our mutual efforts to save the bee had evaporated.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, helpless and increasingly annoyed.

“I want a proper American Christmas and I want you to show it to me. You owe me that. You owe me and my auntie a proper American Christmas. Like on that sham of a website you showed everyone.”

“It’s not a sham—”

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

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