Hateful by Eden Beck
Chapter One
<script data-cfasync="false" src="/cdn-cgi/scripts/5c5dd728/cloudflare-static/email-decode.min.js"></script>“Alex! Dinner!”
I sit up groggily and push the sleep out of my eyes, glancing down at my bed. My sheets are tangled around my unshaven legs. I’m in my own bedroom at home in Ohio, I realize with a start.
And at least it’s a start. I’m so used to waking up thousands of miles away in my dorm room at Bleakwood that for a moment there, I’d forgotten where I was.
Bleakwood is a prestigious boarding school for gifted kids in Switzerland. Or, at the very least, that’s what it’s supposed to be. It wasn’t very long after I arrived that I realized Bleakwood isn’t exactly what I thought.
It’s less of an institution for higher learning and more of a social club for the children of the world’s elite. I’m the first kid to ever go there on a scholarship, and it shows. Sometimes it seems as if my peers have only ever heard of people who don’t actually own their own private jets.
So, in a way, I became an immediate novelty. And not in a good way.
But even still, having Bleakwood on your college application is pretty much a guaranteed admittance, so I’ve been fighting for that scholarship like my life depends on it … because, in a way, it does.
Bleakwood is a huge, magnificent, prestigious, all-boys boarding school.
And despite everything else, that is where the main problem lies, of course.
Because I’m not a boy.
That’s why it’s such a shock for me to realize I’m hanging out in a nightgown. Back at Bleakwood, I’ve been masquerading as a boy for the better part of the last six months—with mixed results. Only a few people know the truth, including my roommate Rafael, the school nurse, and the dean of the nearby all-girls academy.
Oh—and Jasper.
Jasper.
Head of The Brotherhood. My bully. My tormentor.
And also now the keeper of my greatest secret.
But he, somehow, isn’t the one who worries me the most.
My stomach knots up as I think about the head of the girl’s school, a conniving woman named Dean Robin—or Headmistress Robin—depending on who you’re talking to. I don’t know much about her except that she definitely wants something from me.
She paid for my ticket home over this break. She’s the reason I got into Bleakwood in the first place. And some time before I left, she told me that she needed me to gather information on the school.
That she needed me to be her spy. But other than that … I’ve been left completely in the dark ever since I left for break. Left to stew and wonder at all hours of the night what to expect from Bleakwood when I return.
“Alex!”
My mother’s voice cuts through my thoughts, more shrill this time.
“Coming!” I yell, shoving the blankets away from my body and swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. I’m still jet lagged. There’s a six-hour time difference my body has to adjust to, and I only got here yesterday.
Yesterday. No wonder I’m so confused about where I am.
I throw on some jeans and a T-shirt and shuffle barefoot downstairs to the kitchen. Above the railing are rows of framed photos of my brothers—Caleb, Spencer, Blake, and Mason—and me and my parents. The noise coming from the kitchen swells up to meet me as I descend.
My house is never quiet.
“Put the food on the table!” Mom is yelling when I reach the first floor. “Stop trying to—Spencer, I swear to God!”
Spencer laughs and jerks a glass dish full of what looks to be mashed potatoes away from Blake’s grasp. He grabs a serving spoon and shoves it into them, pulling out a big wad of potatoes and flinging it into Blake’s face.
“SPENCER!” Mom shrieks again, near hysterics already.
“Sorry,” Spenser replies with a grin, putting the spoon back into the potatoes before heading into the dining room.
“There you are, Alex,” Mom says wearily as I cross the living room. “Could you take this plate to the table?”
She barely has the energy to glance at me as she waves in the direction of a bowl before turning back to something simmering on the stove.
I nod and grab the big platter of some sort of vegetable thing she pointed to. At the table, Caleb and Mason are already fighting over portions while Dad watches wearily from the head of the table. Spencer lounges in his chair while he dishes up food neither Caleb nor Mason has touched.
I walk to my place at the table and put the vegetable dish in the center before settling into my chair. Mom follows, and Blake isn’t too far behind, still rubbing his face with a towel. He has a large red mark on his cheek where the hot potatoes hit him.
It’s hardly the first injury to happen in this kitchen. Probably not the first injury to happen in here today.
“Caleb! Mason!”
Mom’s yells have barely any effect on them. They slow their fighting, but don’t stop.
“Boys,” Dad rumbles, not even looking up from his paper.
Still, now they stop.Mom throws Dad a grateful look as she settles into her seat. I grin down into my plate.
Dinner proceeds as usual. My brothers begin to bicker over food, despite the fact that Mom has made enough to feed a small army. I, meanwhile, end up just picking at my own plate.
I can’t help it. I’m nervous. I may be back with my family now, but in a few weeks I’ll have to head back to Bleakwood.
And I don’t even know if I can go back, especially after everything that’s happened.
After everything I’ve done, and after everything that’s been done to me.
Caleb leans over the table, his eyes looking at me with an uncomfortable level of scrutiny. But rather than ask me more painfully astute questions about what’s really been going on at school, he just grins maniacally at me.
“Hey, Alex, you gonna eat that?” he asks, jamming his finger into my pile of potatoes.
Immediately, I see red. I go from zero to livid in a split second. Here, in this moment, it isn’t Caleb that I see.
It’s Jasper.
All I can see is my bully’s grinning face, jamming his own finger into my food as he yanks my tray away from me, taking my lunch for the third time this week.
I act reflexively; I grab my fork and stab it into the back of his hand. And I don’t jerk it back out—even when I realize, at last, that it isn’t actually Jasper in front of me.
Caleb lets out a cry of pain and the table erupts into chaos. I push the tines of the fork into his flesh as everyone around me yells. I hear myself yelling, my sentences coming out jumbled to my own ears, screaming things like “Fuck off!” and “That’s my food, you dipshit!”
Someone grabs my wrist and finally yanks it away from Caleb. I lose my grip on the fork, letting it clatter noisily to my plate in front of me on the table.
Across from me, Caleb cradles his bleeding hand.
“What the hell, Alex?” Caleb yells, holding up his injury for me to see what I’ve done.
But I’m unrelenting, even if I know I should feel guilty.
“Don’t touch my food,” I growl, struggling against the iron grip on my wrist, my heart beating like a jackhammer.
Caleb glares at me, the kind of hatred in his eyes that’s reserved only for siblings. “You should just fly on back to that stupid school of yours.”
I bare my teeth at him and start reaching for my fork a second time, but this time it’s my mother who reaches out to swat the utensil from my hand.
“Alex!” my mom snaps at me, shooting me a look that makes me whither in my seat. “This is ridiculous. Maybe that school is too much for her,” she adds, glancing towards my father for one brief second.
He, as usual, is barely paying attention.
This is somehow the thing that pushes me back over the edge.
“Maybe it is!” I scream. My head is swimming when I wrench myself away from my mother’s grasp as she reaches for me. My feet carry me back upstairs and into my bedroom.
I slam the door and lock it before sinking down to the floor, hyperventilating. My breaths feel sharp and jagged in my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut, struggling to breathe. I’ve never purposefully hurt one of my brothers before. And as rough as we can be, we’ve never drawn blood.
Not until today.
One day home, and this is already what it’s come to.
My time at Bleakwood has changed me, and it’s definitely for the worse.