Page 19 of Sweet Ruin

I only worried about what this might end up meaning for Noah and Kaden’s friendship. I didn’t agree with a lot of what Noah had done lately, but I knew how much he needed his friends. I hoped Noah wasn’t selfish enough to hold it against Kaden if he did decide to be friendly with me again. Especially when it meant he’d be hurting his own cousin if he did. But if felt like I barely knew Noah these days, so, unfortunately, anything was possible.

CHAPTERSIX

Iwoke the next morning to the sound of thundering bangs against our bedroom door. I gasped as I was wrenched from sleep, and Cress and I bolted upright in our beds. I glanced at the clock and was horrified to see it was only 4:00 A.M.

“What’s going on?” I asked as Cress flicked the light on, and we clambered from our beds. My heart was racing as we rushed for the door. Was there some kind of emergency?

Cress must have had a similar thought because she shared a worried look with me before she pulled the door open. To my surprise, there was no one standing in the entrance. When we leaned out of the room and looked down the hallway though, we saw a group of boys dressed entirely in black running for the exit. It suddenly all started to make sense.

We weren’t the only ones to suffer a rude awakening. Some girls were standing in their doorways, and others were still opening their doors to see what all the noise was about. We all filtered into the hallway as we watched the boys escape.

“You better run!” one of the girls shouted after them.

“Way to be original!” another girl called out.

We could clearly hear the boys’ laughter as they hurried through the door at the end of the hallway and down the stairs.

“Ugh, they do this every year,” Cress said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s usually sometime in the first semester. But we never know when it’s going to be. You’d think they’d be bored with it by now.”

Anna slowly made her way over to us from down the hall. She was rubbing sleep from her eyes and was clearly exhausted like the rest of us. Yet she somehow still managed to look glamorous in her pink silk pajamas.

“Can you believe these prats?” she groaned. “I was having the best dream about finding a gorgeous pair of stilettos.”

“You dream about shoes?” I asked.

“You don’t?”

“I’m so sick of it,” Lily said, coming to join us. “I have a test this morning, and I really needed to get a good night’s sleep.”

“It’s so annoying.” Amber was still leaning against the wall near her and Lily’s room. “They always get away with it as well. Their dorm dad just doesn’t seem to care.”

The boys’ prank seemed to have woken up every girl on this floor, and everyone looked as though they felt the same way as Amber.

“Maybe it’s finally time we get revenge.”

I glanced over my shoulder, surprised to find Veronica had been the one to make the suggestion. There were a few other girls surrounding her, and they nodded in agreement.

“How?” one girl asked her.

“We give them a taste of their own medicine,” she said. “No one pranks me and gets away with it.”

There were more murmurs of agreement and many thoughtful faces as everyone began to dream up a suitable act of revenge. We were all pulled from our thoughts by the sound of yelling at the far end of the corridor.

“Girls!” We all turned as our dorm mom came marching toward us. “It’s four in the morning. Everyone get back to bed before I start handing out detentions.”

The girls groaned, and a few tried to explain what the boys had done, but Lisa didn’t seem to want to hear it. We all trudged back to our rooms to try and get a little more sleep before our actual alarm clocks woke us up.

My heart was still racing though, and I knew the chances of getting any more sleep tonight were slim. It left me feeling exhausted and annoyed. I might not have had a test this morning like Lily, but I still wanted a good night’s sleep. Lisa had put a stop to talk of a revenge prank before it had really started. But even if we weren’t getting revenge on the boys right now, I had a feeling no one was prepared to let their rude wakeup call go unpunished.

* * *

Cress,Anna, and I were scowling when the twins joined us at breakfast.

“You guys suck,” Anna said. “How dare you interrupt my beauty sleep. We should banish you from our table.”

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