Page 7 of Save Me

Even so, I keep my eyes fixed on my lasagna as I carry my tray through the room to our table. I only dare look around once I’ve sat down with the rest of the posters on the chair beside me and my backpack on the floor. Lydia Beaufort is nowhere in sight.

Lin opens her planner on the table opposite me and studies it while sipping her orange juice. I can see Chinese pictograms,triangles, circles, and other symbols on the pages, and yet again I admire her system, which looks way cooler than the colors I work with. But then I remember the one time I asked Lin to explain what they all mean and what she uses them for; half an hour later, I’d given up even trying to understand.

“We forgot to put a sample poster in Lexie’s pigeonhole,” she murmurs, stroking her black hair behind her ear. “We’ll have to do that after lunch.”

“No problem,” I say through a mouthful. I think there’s tomato sauce on my chin, but I don’t care. I’m starving, probably because all I’ve been able to eat since yesterday is a few cornflakes.

“I have to help Mum with an exhibition after school,” Lin says, pointing to one of the Chinese words. Her mother recently opened an art gallery in London. It’s going well, but Lin often has to help out, even on weekdays.

“If you need to head out early, I can put up the rest myself,” I say, but she shakes her head.

“When we took this job, we agreed to split the work fairly. We do this together or not at all.”

I smile at her. “OK.”

At the start of term, I told Lin that I don’t mind doing some of her share now and then. I like helping other people. Especially my friends—I don’t have that many. And I know that her home situation isn’t always easy and that she often has to take on more than she can really manage. Especially considering how much schoolwork we have this year. But Lin is just as ambitious, and just as stubborn, as I am—that’s probably one of the reasons we get on so well.

It’s almost a miracle that we found that out. When I started at Maxton Hall, she moved in very different circles. In those days,she’d spend her lunch breaks sitting with Elaine and her friends, and it would never even have occurred to me to speak to her, despite the fact that both of us being on the events team meant I’d clocked that she’s just as keen on journaling as me.

But then Lin’s father created a genuine scandal, and their family lost not only all their money but also their friends. Suddenly, Lin was alone at break times—I’m not sure whether people didn’t want anything to do with her anymore or whether she was too ashamed to speak to them. But I do know what it feels like to suddenly lose all your friends. It was the same for me when I moved here from my old school in Gormsey. I felt overwhelmed—higher academic standards, the nonschool stuff, the fact that everyone here was so different from me—and at first I couldn’t manage to keep in touch with people from home. My friends there made it pretty clear what they thought of that.

Looking back on it now, I realize that true friends don’t just laugh at you for wanting to get involved with things at school. I used to laugh off names like “nerd” and “smartarse,” but it wasn’t really funny. And I know that it’s not real friendship if they don’t even try to understand what you’re going through. They didn’t ask even once how I was, or if they could do anything to help.

But back then, it really hurt to see those friendships break up like that, especially as nobody at Maxton Hall wanted anything to do with me either—or even noticed me. I’m not from a rich family. I have a six-year-old backpack, not a designer bag, and a secondhand laptop, not a gleaming MacBook. I don’t go to the weekend parties that the cool kids spend the whole next week discussing—for most of my classmates, I simply don’t exist. These days, I like it that way, but my first few weeks at Maxton were lonely, and I felt very isolated. Until I met Lin. Our experiences with our friendsaren’t the only thing we have in common. Lin also shares my two biggest hobbies: She loves organizing stuff, and she loves manga.

I have no idea if we’d have got to know each other without the business with her parents. But although I sometimes get the feeling she misses the days when she was a somebody here and hung around with people like the Ellingtons, I’m glad to have her.

“OK then. You go to Lexington and put up the posters in the library and the study center on the way. I’ll do the rest, OK?”

I hold out my hand for a high five. For a moment, Lin looks like she wants to say something, but in the end, she smiles gratefully and claps my hand. “You’re the best.”

Someone pulls out the chair beside me and drops onto it. Lin turns pale. I frown as she stares, eyes wide, from me to the person sitting next to me, and then back to me again.

I turn very slowly—and find myself looking straight into a pair of turquoise-blue eyes.

Like everyone at this school, I know those eyes, but I’ve never seen them up close before. They belong to a striking face with dark brows, high cheekbones, and an arrogant, handsome mouth.

James Beaufort is sitting next to me.

Looking at me.

From close up, he looks even more dangerous than he does at a distance. He’s one of the guys who act like this school belongs to them. And he looks like it does too. He’s perfectly poised and self-assured, his tie is perfectly knotted and straight. The uniform is pretty ordinary, really, but on him, it looks amazing, like it was made to measure. Which is probably because his mother designed it. The only thing about him that isn’t precise is his hair—unlike his sister, he prefers a messy style.

“Hey,” he says.

Have I ever heard him speak before? Yelling across a lacrosse field or drunk at an event, yes. But not like this. His “hey” sounds friendly, and there’s a spark in his eyes. He’s acting like it’s perfectly normal for him to sit next to me at lunch for a chat. But it’s the first time we’ve ever exchanged words. And I’d rather keep it that way.

I look around cautiously and gulp hard. A few heads have turned our way. It feels as though the cloak of invisibility I’ve been wearing the whole of the last two years has slipped a little.

Not good, not good, not good.

“Hey, Lin. Mind if I borrow your friend a minute?” he asks, not breaking eye contact with me even once. His eyes are so intense I get shivers down my spine. It takes me a while to process what he said. The next moment, I turn to stare at Lin, trying to tell her without words thatIwould mind that, but she isn’t looking at me, only James.

“Sure,” she says, “no worries.”

I just about have time to grab my bag off the floor before James Beaufort’s hand is on my lower back as he steers me out of the dining hall. I speed up a touch to get away from his hand, but I can still feel the warmth of it, as if it had burned through my blazer onto my skin. He leads me past the huge staircase in the lobby and doesn’t stop until we’re well out of sight of anyone going in or out of the dining hall.

I can imagine what he’s after. He hasn’t even looked once at me in the last two years, so this must have something to do with his sister and Mr. Sutton.

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