Crave. Melissa Darnell

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СКАЧАТЬ through a section of nothing but pines just before reaching the junior high and intermediate schools. The first traffic-light intersection marked the start of downtown Jacksonville, where all of a sudden it became nothing but streets and business after business, mostly single-story shops and a few three- and four-story buildings for the occasional bank, hotel or hospital. And more pines winding around and through every area of housing large and small, even butting up against the edges of the basket factory and near the Tomato Bowl, the brownstone open-air stadium where all the home football and soccer games were held.

      I used to love my hometown with its cute boutiques and shops full of antiques where Nanna sold her crocheted designs. I even used to love the town’s ribbons of pines and the way the wind in the trees added a subtle sighing to the air. When the fields of grass and hay turned brown and dead in the winter, you could always count on the pines to keep Jacksonville colorful all year long.

      But the town’s founding families, locally referred to as the Clann due to their Irish ancestry, had ruined it for me. Now when I heard the wind in the trees, it sounded like whispering, as if the trees themselves had joined the town’s grapevine of gossips. Those gossips had probably produced the long line of famous actors, singers, comedians and models that Jacksonville’s relatively small population of thirteen thousand residents was so proud of. Growing up here, where everybody talked about everybody else, either made you want to live here forever or run away and become something special just to prove the gossips and the Clann wrong.

      I wasn’t sure I wanted to be famous. But I definitely wanted to run away.

      We made the daily turn through the neighborhoods that led to Jacksonville High School, the drive made shady by still more pines and a few hardwoods that lined the modest streets. And then the blue-and-yellow home of the JHS Indians exploded into view, its perimeter choked by woods thick and shadowed, and I felt my shoulders and neck tense up.

      Welcome to my daytime prison for the next four years, complete with a guard shack and a guard who lowered a heavy metal bar across the driveways on the dot of 8:00 a.m. every weekday, forcing you to accept a tardy slip in order to gain entrance when you were late. Unlike a teacher who might be convinced to let you slide, the guard was notoriously without mercy, ruling our school’s entrance as if it were the gates to some medieval castle.

      If JHS were a castle, then its royalty would definitely be the twenty-two equally merciless Clann kids who ruled the rest of the campus.

      The Clann kids had probably learned their bullying tactics from their parents, who ran this town and a good portion of Texas, inserting themselves into every possible leadership role from county and state even to federal government levels. Local rumor had it that the only way the Clann could do this was by using magic, of all things. Which was total bull. There was nothing magical about the Clann’s power-hungry methods. I should know. I’d had more than enough of their kids’ idea of “magical” fun at school. After graduation, I was so out of here.

      While Nanna pulled up to the curb by the main hall doors, I sucked down a quick slurp of tea, adding a burnt tongue to my list of pains for the day.

      “Better take that with you.” Nanna nodded at the thermos. “You should feel it kick in pretty soon, but you might need more later.”

      “Okay. Hey, don’t forget, today’s an A day, and I have algebra last period, so—”

      “So pick you up in the front parking lot by the cafeteria. Yeah, yeah. I’m old, not senile. I think I can keep up with your alternating A-B schedule.” Her twinkling green eyes nearly disappeared as her plump cheeks bunched higher into a wry smile.

      The front parking lot was closer to my last class on A days. The first class in five years that I’d shared with Tristan Coleman …

      “Savannah?” She shifted the car into Drive then looked at me with raised eyebrows, a silent prod to get moving. I climbed out into the pine-scented warmth of the morning, shut the door and gave her a wave goodbye.

      Tristan …

      His name echoed through my head, fuzzing up my mind with old memories and emotions. An answering tingle rippled up the back of my neck and over my scalp. Ignoring it, I stuffed the forbidden thoughts back into their imaginary box and turned to face the main hall doors. The day was sure to be miserable enough without my stewing over backstabbing traitors like him.

      Sure enough, I shoved through the main hall’s heavier-than-normal glass front doors and slammed right into the Brat Twins, two of the Clann’s worst members. Yep, the perfect start to a fabulous day.

      “Watch where you’re going, idiot!” Vanessa Faulkner said, brushing off imaginary dirt from her latest Juicy Couture purse.

      “Yeah, try looking before you just barrel in,” Hope, her mirror-image sister, added. She reached up and patted her perfect platinum curls, the tiny mole to the left of her smirk the only difference between the two sisters.

      I glanced around. We already had an audience for my daily humiliation. Great. My hands itched to try and smooth my own wild curls as my stomach twisted into knots. Why did the Brat Twins have to treat me like this? Just because I couldn’t get a tan? Because my hair was the wrong color, too frizzy, not shiny enough?

      “Well? Aren’t you at least going to say you’re sorry?” Vanessa demanded.

      For a moment, the anger drowned out everything else. What would happen if I slapped that smirk off her face? She couldn’t go crying to her precious Clann for the usual revenge. Nanna was retired, Mom worked for a Louisiana-based company and my father owned a national historical-home restoration business. The Clann couldn’t touch my family.

      Or could they? Several members of the Clann were politicians at the federal level. And Louisiana was within easy reach of East Texas. So maybe they did have enough connections to at least get Mom fired. Crap.

      My backpack’s strap bit into my hands as I swallowed down all the things I wanted to say and instead muttered, “Sorry.”

      “Yeah, you are,” Vanessa said. She and her sister laughed like hyenas high on helium and turned away.

      I should have just let them go and been grateful to get away from them. But a headache pounded at my temples now, and all I could think about was how different things were when we were kids. Back when these girls were my best friends.

      As soon as my hand touched her shoulder, Vanessa hissed.

      Both sisters whirled around to face me again. Shocked by the fury on Vanessa’s face, I stepped backward until the wall of lockers stopped me. Whoa. This was nuts.

      “Van, why are you being like this?” I made a point of using my old nickname for her. “We used to be friends. Remember Valentine’s Day, fourth grade? We held that pretend wedding, and you two were my bridesmaids?” That was the last day we’d all played together, and it was one of my favorite childhood memories. The twins and I had prepared for the ceremony by sitting in a circle on the merry-go-round and braiding flowers into each other’s hair. While my first and only boyfriend, Tristan Coleman, had stood beneath the nearby oak tree watching us, waiting for me.

      Waiting to give me my first and only kiss …

      Everything about that half hour had seemed so sweet, almost magically perfect. But I must have been the only one who’d thought so. Because the next day, all of the Clann’s kids had refused to talk to me, not even long enough to tell me what I’d done to upset them. Including Tristan. Ever since, the only time anyone СКАЧАТЬ