The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(10)
The person who married Harold six weeks later wasn’t my mother. The woman who was making him miserable now? That was the Ella I recognized, coming out of deep freeze.
Harold’s driver pulled up in front of Whitechapel, and my stomach did its usual roller-coaster drop. Audrey slipped her phone into her bag, hustling out of the car so quick she was absorbed into a pod of rich girls by the time my feet hit the sidewalk.
I’d spent my entire life as the new kid, and it never stopped sucking. It didn’t matter if you were starting seventh grade in Podunk nowhere, or your junior year at Whitechapel, the fancy-ass Upper East Side academy Harold paid my way into. The students were the same wherever I went: clannish, judgmental, and unwilling to make an independent move.
My Monday-morning ennui was overlaid with a low-level dread. I kept expecting to see the red-haired man. He’d broken the skin that separated me from that strange, dreamlike day in my childhood, brought it close. Now that he’d shown himself, he could be anywhere: the man pretending to look at his cell phone on the corner of Eighty-Sixth Street. The jogger running with a Starbucks cup. Maybe I’d walk into class and he’d be there, disguised as a substitute teacher and reading that green book. I ran my hands down my uniform skirt and breathed.
The first half of my day was Comp, Medieval Lit, Calculus, and lunch. My performance in those classes could be rated as good, fine, bad, and terrible, respectively. After lunch was Drama with Audrey and her gang of future Real Housewives. It was the one class she never skipped, which had something to do with the fact that our teacher was a floppy-haired former TV actor who made us call him Toby.
But she ditched today. Her absence meant that, for once, we had the right number of people to pair up for scenes at the end.
And when Toby started flinging his corduroy arms around, pairing us up at random, I had a premonition: I’d get partnered with Ellery Finch.
5
Everyone at Whitechapel was rich, but Finch was on another level. Back when she still thought I was impressable, Audrey had given me a Google-powered tour of her school’s best and brightest—aka, richest. She’d shown me a photo of a younger, geekier Finch at a fancy event, sandwiched between a silver-fox type and a beautiful brown-skinned woman wearing a necklace Ella would’ve loved, which looked like a chain of throwing stars.
Finch was almost as short as me and skinny, with a crackling energy that followed him like an aura. His hair grew in every direction, and his eyes were caffeinated and quick, a brown a few shades lighter than his skin. He dressed kinda like old photos of Bob Dylan: work boots and high-waisted pants. I had no idea how he got his uniform pants to ride so high.
None of this would’ve mattered to me except for one thing: he knew who I was. Most people don’t, and if they did, they wouldn’t care. Being the estranged granddaughter of a minor, largely forgotten literary celebrity mattered to pretty much nobody, especially in a school where fundraiser auction items tended to include guitar lessons with somebody’s pop-star father. It was just my luck that one of Althea Proserpine’s few remaining superfans happened to go to Whitechapel, and managed to find out who I was. Finch had cornered me at my locker my first week of school.
“You’re Alice Proserpine, aren’t you?”
“Who told you that?”
Finch was beaming. I’d seen him around, even thought he was kind of cute, but right then I wanted to swipe the grin off his face. “Audrey. Not that she actually told me.” He made a gesture down his front, as if pointing out that being short and Dylan-y was enough to explain why Audrey would sooner shop at JCPenney than be seen talking to him. It was.
“I’m Alice Crewe,” I’d said quietly, looking over his shoulder. Considering Proserpine was a ridiculous last name of my grandmother’s invention, my mom was cool with me going by any last name I wanted. I’d chosen mine at age eight, after reading A Little Princess.
He nodded. “I get it. Proserpine’s a lot. I mean, I should know. Technically I’m Ellery Oliver Djan-Nelson-Abrams-Finch.” He clocked my look of horror. “No, seriously. People always say, ‘But what happens when two people with hyphenated last names marry each other?’ Well, that’s what happens. I go by Finch.”
People passing by were nodding at Finch and giving me the appraising new-girl look. I should’ve been used to it, but I wasn’t.
“Cool story, Finch,” I said, with more acid than I intended.
He blinked but didn’t walk away. “Your grandmother’s book is like nothing I’ve ever read,” he said in a quieter voice. It was a tone I was familiar with: the hushed voice of the true believer.
It made me prickle with discomfort, and with something else—a jealousy I didn’t want to look at too closely. “I’ve never met her,” I’d blurted, slamming my locker shut. “You probably know more about her than I do.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a lie or not. The bitch of it was, we probably knew the exact same stuff about Althea, from the same secondhand sources—except he’d gotten to read the book. Before he could say another word, I’d cut through the crowds and down the hall.
That should’ve been the last time we spoke, but Finch had a way of turning up.
First I saw him in the park, jogging in a corduroy jacket. I’d wondered if he was running from a mugger, then saw the embarrassing white sneakers and realized corduroy and denim were his exercise clothes. “Alice!” he’d yelled as he passed, his voice happy and his hair exploding around his headphones.