Sway

  Sway

  Shelfbrooke Academy

  M. F. Lorson

  Copyright © 2019 by M.F. Lorson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover: Parker Premades

  Proofreading: Jessica Bucher

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Thanks for reading!

  ***

  About the Author

  Also by M. F. Lorson

  Stage Kiss

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Keep Reading!

  Varsity Girlfriends

  Mountain Creek Drive

  For my little Janes

  Prologue

  Everyone has that one person they completely screwed it up with. For me, it was Christopher Wentworth. It was the summer after Mom died, and Dad, my younger sister Mary, and I were spending the summer at my Aunt Ginger’s house in Boston. We’d come up for Mom’s funeral and just sort of stayed indefinitely. Not that I minded. Anywhere sounded better than home at the time.

  Mom had grown up in the area, but we’d never really spent any time there. Thanks to Dad’s borderline obsession with the past, our summer had turned into one New England history lesson after another.

  June began with the Salem Witch Trials, and by its close, we were heavy into war memorials. By the time I met Christopher, I’d been to Fort Warren seven and a half times. I couldn’t fully count the first time since Mary had spent the entire ferry ride yacking in the tiny bathroom. We hardly got off the boat then. On our second attempt, she fared only slightly better, making it across with minimal heaving and maximum complaining. We made the best of it, but Mary’s constant moaning and whining were enough for Dad to decide the rest of our historic vacation would need to take place on land.

  That’s when I got the idea to start island hopping. If Mary couldn’t ride the ferry, she couldn’t very well tag along either, could she? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to spend time with my family; it was just that everything was different between us now that we were three instead of four. Besides, we had shared close quarters for so long that I felt like I would explode if I didn’t get out on my own.

  It took some convincing, but eventually, Dad agreed that fifteen was old enough to take the ferry to and from the six different islands that made up the Boston Harbor State Park. I think he knew I was doing it to put a little space between us, but he was new to single parenting and saying no was still hard for him. Both Mary and I used it to our advantage. Me, for a taste of freedom, her to amass a giant collection of gift shop stuffed animals.

  I liked all of the islands well enough, but Georges was my favorite. The old civil war fort was shaped like a pentagon and walking amongst its stone walls felt like visiting the set of Game of Thrones or one of those Shakespearean remakes. Plus, there was often music on the great lawn that circled the fort. Music and tourists. Some quite lovely to look at. I knew it was silly, but I fantasized I would meet a boy there. A nice French boy, only in the states for a short time, on vacation just like me. I’d get my first kiss down some secluded hall, my back resting against the cool granite, a summer breeze blowing my hair back like every romantic scene I’d ever read about. That’s not how it happened though. Not exactly.

  By midsummer, I was pretty much a professional at the forty-five-minute ride from Boston Harbor to Georges Island. I started each morning by picking up a coffee at my favorite little shop, Steam on the Harbor. It was an eight-minute walk from there to the wharf, but it was worth it because their lattes were the closest thing to heaven I’d come across yet. Usually by the time the ferry blew its warning horn, I was standing at the bow, looking out over the city, laughing with the rest of the commuters as the late arrivals sprinted toward the dock.

  But on the day I met Christopher, I was running late. I handed the cashier my $4.95, digging the crumpled bills and change from the bottom of my leather handbag. I knew I should have ignored Mary and left at my usual time, but ditching her was mean enough, refusing to listen to the short story she’d worked on all weekend felt too cruel. Little did I know, her short story was actually seventeen pages and counting.

  It was faint inside the shop, but I recognized the sound of the warning horn creeping through the open windows. I looked up at the clock above the register. The ferry left at 7:30 a.m. sharp. If I wasn’t on it, I had to pay full fare later in the day. I didn’t have the money for that. Nor did I want to wait to start my day till ten. I could make it if I ran, like really ran, arms and legs digging into the wind. But my latte, my perfectly crafted, vanilla and cinnamon sprinkled latte was never going to survive sloshing around in its cheap paper cup.

  “Looks like you’re stuck on land today,” said the cashier with a sympathetic smile. My shoulders slumped in defeat. I stepped aside to let the next in line put in their order. Only the next in line didn’t order. Instead, he followed me to the standing table where I reluctantly set down my coffee.

  “How bad do you need to get on that boat?” came a voice I didn’t recognize. I looked up from my cup to the boy in front of me. I had seen him before, once or twice in the coffee shop and a few times on the path to and from my aunt’s house. But this was the first time he had spoken to me. His eyes were the color of the ocean, deep on the outside and bright at the center.

  “I...it’s not crucial,” I stammered. I’d had plenty of fantasies about meeting a boy that summer, but up until that point, I hadn’t spent any time talking to one.

  Unfazed, the boy picked up my coffee cup and removed the spill proof lid. With the skill of a barman, he tipped the hot liquid from my cup to his travel mug, wasting not one drop before sealing the cup with a hard twist.

  “It just so happens I’m headed there too. I can run it if you can,” he said, raising his dark eyebrows suggestively. “Otherwise, I’ve just stolen your coffee,” he laughed.

  I glanced back at the clock. We had four minutes to sprint the distance between the shop and the ferry. It was enough time if I had the guts to put the rest of my afternoon in the hands of a stranger.

  A small smile slipped across my lips. Riding the ferry with this boy was a nice thought. It wasn’t a kiss under the stone arches, but it was a start.

  “I’ll race you,” I said, surprising myself with a sudden jolt of confidence.

  “You’ll lose” said the boy with a smirk. He grabbed the travel mug from the table and hurried his way through the crowd out into the cool morning air. Seconds later, I was following him down State Street. It was lucky I’d worn tennis shoes that day. Had I worn flip flops like usual, my Christopher Wentworth story might have stopped in that coffee shop.

  My breath was coming hard and fast as the wind pushed us down the half-mile descent to where the commuters sat waiting. I wondered if the two of us had ever sat there before, watching the late arrivals, not knowing that one day we would be making the trek together.

  He was fast, but I was too. I kept pace right beside
him. I couldn’t quite put my finger on his running style. whereas I ran with fluid grace acquired from years of running cross country; he ran hard and with purpose. The grace part not so much. Soccer maybe, I thought, sneaking a glance at his shoes. Basketball boys tended to stick to a particular brand, but there was no familiar swoosh adorning the side of his cross trainers. The final warning horn blared through the air around us, yet we still had a two-hundred-foot gap to close. The commuters at the back stood to watch us make our last desperate claim for entrance. I couldn’t make out their faces, not with my lungs threatening to burn their way out of my body. I could imagine their reaction though. Part humor, part sympathy. Maybe one of them even recognized me.

  With one hand flailing the boy waved at the ticket taker. “Wait!” he hollered, his voice clear and steady over the wind. It was pointless though. I’d seen this very thing a dozen times before. The man in the orange vest would look up, shake his head and seal off the entrance. The ferry waited for no one.

  Except on this one day, as if knowing it was the start of something special, it did.

  The ticket taker winked at us as we scurried over the bridge from the dock to the ferry. Once across, he fastened the rope behind us and radioed the captain, all clear. Short of breath from the run and the strange heart palpitations caused by the boy beside me, I collapsed into a seat on one of the benches closest to the back of the boat. The wind whipped my hair back, causing wayward strands of chestnut curls to loosen from my ponytail as we pulled away from the dock.

  “Your coffee,” said the boy, passing the silver travel mug from his hands to mine. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks as his fingers grazed mine, but I resisted the urge to be bashful and look away. Something about this boy made me feel brave. I took a long sip, enjoying the taste of hot coffee. The extra foam I ordered had dissipated on the way over, but it didn’t matter. I was pretty sure that it was the best cup of coffee I would ever have.

  “I’m Christopher, by the way,” he said, drumming his hands on his knees.

  “Anne,” I replied, raising the mug in front of me. “And thank you for saving my coffee. I’m only half a human without it.”

  Christopher laughed. “I had ulterior motives, you know.”

  “Oh really,” I said. “And what were those? Let me guess. This is your way of staving off boredom on the forty-five-minute commute. You want a partner for the ride.”

  Christopher tossed his head back and laughed. “Forty-five minutes! Are you serious?”

  I squinted at the boy beside me. “How is it you were headed to this boat and yet you don’t know how long the commute is?” Christopher gave a sly smile, reaching his arms above his head in an exaggerated stretch before resting one squarely around my shoulders.

  “It’s probably not best to begin a relationship with a lie, Anne, but you should know that I had no intention of taking the ferry when I got up this morning.”

  That was the first best moment of my summer. From that first morning on, Christopher and I spent every spare hour we could together. We visited each island multiple times. Tried every latte Steam on the Harbor had to offer, and there was kissing, so much kissing, at Fort Warren, in Salem, on the bow of the ferry. If there was a moment to be captured with a kiss, we took advantage of it. What we didn’t do was talk about the fall when he would stay behind and I would enter my first year of boarding school. There were never any real goodbyes between us. Goodbye shattered the illusion. In the world that we chose to live in, the summer was infinite and the islands our playground. I didn’t think it was possible to screw it up then.

  When I entered my dorm room for the first time sophomore year, Rachel Russell was perched on the end of her extra-long twin bed. My new roommate was from a family with money. It only took a quick glance around the room to pick up on that. I hadn’t entered any of the other dorm rooms, but walking past their open doors was enough to tell me that ours was a little different. The back wall was outfitted with built-in bookshelves stretching from floor to windowsill, turning our space into a miniature library of leather-bound volumes.

  At the sound of my suitcase scraping over the doorframe, Rachel’s eyes popped up from the book in her hand. Most kids our age read on a tablet or phone. The fact that she held an actual, real live, pages-smell-good copy of Twelfth Night told me she was different. She cocked her head to the side, looking at me with interest—me, who was nothing then. My long brown hair was wadded into a messy bun, strands sticking out in each and every way from leaning up against the cab window. I wore yoga pants and the same T-shirt I had been wearing for the past two days. It wasn’t that I was a slob, though I’m sure I looked like one. The thing was: I was still in mourning. If I couldn’t take the ferry with Christopher anymore, how was I going to keep that ever-growing Mom-shaped-hole in my chest from completely swallowing me?

  Rachel said nothing, just observed as I lugged my massive suitcase up and onto the empty bed across from hers. From the corner of my eye, I watched her pick the book back up. Her eyes skimmed the page casually, but I knew her focus wasn’t on the book. She was studying me the same way I was studying her. I wondered why a second-year girl like her didn’t have a roommate. What was she busy wondering about me? Later she told me she was just trying to play it cool. Not seem too eager for a new roommate just in case I turned out to be a real nut job or extra clingy. She probably should have screened me better, seeing as how I turned out to be a little of both.

  I didn’t bring much with me that first year. There was no one to tell me what to bring and watching reruns of Gossip Girl hadn’t prepared me for life away from home as much as I would have liked. I got into Shelfbrooke because my mother had gone there, and my grades were the right fit, but that didn’t mean I knew what I was doing. Boarding school was still a big mystery to me, and I was deadly afraid I wouldn’t fit in.

  Trying not to make too much noise, I neatly placed my clothing in the narrow chest of drawers at the base of my bed. These things could be worn only on school-sanctioned holidays and before the first day of class. My Shelfbrooke uniforms would be delivered by the laundry crew each Tuesday afternoon. All of this was explained at my brief orientation with Dean Thomas, who I spent ten minutes calling Principal Thomas before he cleared his throat and corrected me.

  Once my clothes were put away, I retrieved the only two personal items I’d brought with me: a snow globe depicting Chicago and a strip of photos from the machine in Downtown Crossing where Christopher and I spent our last day together. I tucked the pictures into the mirror on my side of the room, pausing for a moment to study the images. They were all the cliche poses everyone did when forced to take four pictures in two minutes. There was the first happy smile, the space between us so big that we looked like siblings and not lovers. Then the do-over frame, cheek to cheek, grinning like Christmas morning. Below that was the obligatory silly face. Fingers were pulling our mouths open at the sides, tongues poking out, one eye squinted shut, the other wide and peering into the camera. His silly face was better than mine. I looked like a crazy person. He looked like a movie star, ready to look good for the camera regardless of the prompt. And of course, the last shot was a kiss. My gaze lingered on that kiss. If I squeezed my eyes closed and tuned out everything around me, I could still remember what it was like, his lips pressed to mine.

  Rachel crossed the room to where I stood, inspecting the photo.

  “Is that your boyfriend?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, then, “No, maybe.” Officially we hadn’t even decided what we were. The whole summer had been a beautiful blur. Conversations about the future were strictly off limits. Now that I was at Shelfbrooke and he was back in Boston, knowing what we were seemed a lot more important.

  “That’s probably for the best,” said Rachel, weighing in on my relationship status as if the two of us had been friends all our lives and not roommates for thirty seconds. “If you want to make a good impression here, there is no worse way to start than to com
e in with a boyfriend from a public school.”

  “Really? I asked, my gaze drifting from Rachel back to the photos of Christopher and me. I’d never been to a fancy private school before but, a no-boys-from-home policy seemed pretty elitist, even for a place like Shelfbrooke.

  “Public school boys are fine for spring break or shenanigans at your parent’s Christmas party,” said Rachel. “But actually dating one? Eek, you just don’t.”

  I bit the bottom corner of my lip. I was starting a year later than everyone else; by default I stood out. If this girl who clearly belonged here said that Christopher was going to make me a pariah then what choice did I have? And the truth was we weren’t going to see one another anymore anyway. It wasn’t like Dad was going to let my maybe boyfriend fly out to Chicago for winter break. Aunt Ginger had been kind to let us stay all summer, but she wasn’t offering to adopt me. So, when evening rolled around, and Rachel introduced me to her friend Will, I didn’t bat an eye when he asked if I had a boyfriend. I said no, simple as that.

  It wasn’t so easy telling Christopher. In fact, I didn’t tell him at all. Instead, I sent him a Dear John letter on Shelfbrooke stationary. I kept it simple. We were in a different place now. I didn’t have off-campus privileges as a sophomore. I wanted to focus on getting to know my new classmates. It was important that I blend in here, etc. I did my best to tell him softly, but I was still nervous about his response. For months I held my breath every time I keyed into my mail compartment.