Page 33 of The Heir Apparent
“How could I forget?” I said, smirking.
Louis gave me his perfect smile. “We’ll see you at breakfast.”
I, of course, would not be at breakfast. I had a knack for disappearing at mealtimes, insisting to my boarding master that I simply had to spend all of lunch searching for a missing library book in my suite. Dinner, however, was inescapable, so I crowded out my plate with vegetables and hoped no one noticed. Half the residents in my boarding house were edging towards the same precipice as me. The hardcore girls ate nothing but carrot sticks and then had to hide their telltale tawny hands in their pockets. But I knew Louis saw everything, and I could sense he had been weighing up the consequences of reporting me to Mum or a school counsellor. So far, he hadn’t said a word to anyone and was trying to coax me back from the brink by pressing a muffin or a latte into my hands.
The impending dance was causing me alarm because almost every other girl would be wearing a Hervé Léger bandage dress and I would not. Greater than my fear of being photographed in a tight dress on the front page of theDaily Postwas looking bad in a tight dress on the front page of theDaily Post.I scrolled through the expensive sausage casings online and knew that if I attempted to wear one, I would only resemble one of those pythons that eats a whole deer and lolls on the side of the road, immobile and trapped in digestive hell. So I used the credit card given to me for emergencies to order a one-shouldered Jason Wu flowy mini dress in an ice-blue chiffon instead. I would look like the rich virgin I was, but I supposed there was power in that.
As we got ready that evening, Amira regarded the dress. “You look so gorgeous,” she insisted.
We kept our suite door open, the custom before all dances and balls. Rihanna songs wafted down the halls on a cloud of Miss Dior. Amira was wearing a red bandage dress with a keyhole front that put curves on her where none existed. I was intensely jealous.
“No,youlook amazing,” I said.
We zipped up our coats and hid our black cherry VKs in our pockets. Then we set off for The Mound, teetering on the matching black Christian Louboutin peeptoe platforms that Vikki had bought for us.
“I’m going to kiss Rafe tonight,” Amira declared.
Rafe Fernsby was Amira’s current obsession, a boy whose father was caught up in Ireland’s financial crash and currently dodging creditors in Turks and Caicos. The fact that Rafe continued to show up each term suggested the family’s accounts had not yet been frozen—or that a wealthy grandparent had stepped in to keep him enrolled.
“Isn’t Rafe’s father going to jail?” I asked.
“His father is abaron,” she said. “They’ll never do it.”
I rolled my eyes, but said nothing. When I first met Amira, I avoided her. I had no time for those who were obsessed with rank, a stance that was easy for me to hold given that when it came to rankings, I was mere inches from the top. Amira’s mother had been telling her since she was a toddler that she must see marriage as a ladder into the aristocracy. Consequently, she was like a walking copy ofBurke’s Peerage. The book, which lists in excruciating detail every duke, marquess and earl in Britain, is better known as the “snob’s Bible,” and Amira was its greatest devotee.
We might never have been friends, but a few months into our Shell year, she spotted a photographer hiding in the elderflower shrubs that grew along Astley’s hockey fields. She stopped our game, lined up a row of balls and then smackedeach one in his direction. When he finally ran, she chased after him with her hockey stick in hand, unleashing a barrage of insults and threats.
She returned a few minutes later, sweaty and triumphant. “Don’t worry, Lexi, I made him delete the photos and I swore I’d murder him if he ever came back.”
We were friends after that.
She looked at me now and smiled. “Rafe might have a friend for you, you know.”
“No thank you,” I said.
Most of the boys at school gave me a wide berth out of respect for Louis. They also probably feared the fuss and drama of dating someone like me. But this suited me fine since I was terrified of them. As a girl, I’d been repeatedly warned of the danger of boys who would coax me into sending nudes or who would hide a video camera in their room and record us having sex. These images would inevitably find their way onto the internet and into the tabloids, destroying my life and, with it, the thousand-year-old British monarchy.
“Things are different for your generation,” Papa said to me when I was eleven. “You must assume that there is a camera watching you every moment of the day.”
My only option, I concluded, was to convince a boy to fall hopelessly in love with me so that he would never betray me. Such an arrangement had eluded me thus far.
I always felt strange on The Mound, the top of which was only accessible by a scrubby spiral path. It was rumoured to be a site for ancient Pagan rituals before becoming the motte of a Norman castle. Sometimes when I ascended The Mound, I thought of all the wars my family had fought, the invasions, the empire-building, the noblemen and women who had schemed and murdered and seduced their way to power. This hill had stood here for centuries as my ancestors came to rule these lands. Now it served as a hangout for rich teenagers. Including me, the unexceptional descendant of a great family.
Amira and I scrambled up the path in our ridiculous shoes to find half the Remove class, including Louis and Kris, already there. Despite the cold, Amira removed her coat, opened her VK and sauntered over to Rafe, who was sprawled on the bough of a tree with a few other boys. I planted myself on a bench between Kris and Louis but didn’t dare to remove the bottle from my coat. Unless we were in our small circle of trusted friends, who always offered to pile their iPhones and Motorola RAZRs into a shoebox for good measure, Louis and I did not drink or smoke in public ever.
“Who’s Amira talking to?” Kris asked.
“Rafe,” I said. “She’s got a thing for him.”
“He’s a bit of a tosser, though,” Kris muttered.
“Yes, but he’s a futurebaron.”
He laughed. “Wow, her standards are really dropping if she’s ready to step down from prince to baron.”
Like millions of other girls, Amira had grown up with a poster of Louis on her wall. She’d blown out every birthday candle with the sole wish that she would one day be his bride. She still hadn’t forgiven Kris for telling us all this.
“I only wanted to marry you until Imetyou,” she said to Louis constantly.
