CHAPTER ONE
My big brother, Fitzwilliam Darcy, could suck it.
I mean, seriously. He’d already spent the last four months being whatever the brother-equivalent of a helicopter parent was, but this truly took things to a whole new level. He didn’t even pretend this little Saturday visit was because he missed me, his one and only sister. It was explicitly to check in on me, to make sure I had plans to do my homework and go to class and not illegally deal Adderall to my fellow high schoolers.
Which, sure, is what happened last year. But I wasn’t about to do it again.
As I stepped out of my dorm at Pemberley Academy and into the bracing central New York air, I shivered and pulled my peacoat closer to my chest. September was such a crapshoot up here—it could be seventy-five degrees and perfect, or it could be down in the thirties, just to mess with all the new kids whose parents shipped them up from Florida for the best education on the East Coast. I’d grown up out here, knew how to deal with cold, but freezing September days still always felt like a betrayal.
At least I wouldn’t be exposed to the elements for long. Fitz’s car was parked directly in front of the dorm—if he were any closer, he’d already be in the wood-paneled lobby. He’d finally bought something new in the couple of days since he’d dropped me off at school, so I didn’t recognize the exact model, but Fitz always got the same kind of car. Classy, not at all flashy, but expensive enough for people who knew cars to stop and take notice. I was not one of those people, so as I climbed into the passenger seat, I only mentioned—
“This car has fewer cup holders than the last one.”
“Hello to you, too.” Fitz’s car may have changed, but he never did. Tall and dark-haired, people usually managed to guess that we were siblings at first glance, with our shared sharp features and hazel eyes. The main difference was the constant look of disappointment glued to my big brother’s face whenever he was around me. “It’s good to see you.”
“Same. Why did they take away some of the cup holders?” I drummed my fingers on the armrest, which was definitely heated. A nice touch, a classy consolation now that he’d moved back to freezing upstate New York to babysit me. “Where are you supposed to put your drinks?”
“There are still two cup holders in the front seat, which only holds two passengers.” Fitz sighed as he pulled out of the driveway of my dorm, turning to head off campus. I was allowed to have guests in the dining hall, and the entire staff at Pemberley would fall to their knees in praise if Fitz showed up for breakfast. Ever since he’d graduated the year before last, it was all I’d ever heard from everyone. How’s Fitz? Where’s Fitz? Such a shame, I heard he had to transfer, he must be happy to be closer to you. Which was exactly why I’d never let him join me there. “Why would you need more than two cup holders?”
“You’re telling me you don’t foresee a single circumstance in which a person might want more than one drink?” As we passed through the gates of Pemberley, I let myself exhale. Those gates, with their cast-iron finishes and literal spikes on top, felt like my personal iron maiden these days. Ever since The Incident, but, if I was being honest, before that, too. “Picture it with me, big brother. You’re driving cross-country. Epic road trip. Grand Canyon, probably.”
“It would be a better use of both time and money to fly.”
“Okay, but you didn’t.” It was as good a distraction as any, to banter the way we used to, to pretend for a few minutes that The Incident hadn’t irreversibly ruined us. That the last six months of our lives hadn’t been garbage. I flicked at the lock on my door, up and down, until Fitz activated the child locks and I was forced to stop. “You’re driving. It’s late. You need some caffeine, but it’s also about a million degrees, because you’re in the desert, and our pale Yankee bodies aren’t suited for those kinds of conditions.”
“And?”
“And…” I paused for dramatic effect. Tall trees, some of their leaves already changing, whipped past my window. “And you want coffee, but you also need a cold drink! Boom. That’s two cup holders, right there, and now you’ve deprived your passenger of their beverage options. That is terrible hospitality.”
“Well, when you take up interior car design, that can be the first thing you correct.” If you didn’t know Fitz, you’d never hear the edge of a joke in his voice, but I’d learned to recognize it. This was what his sense of humor had whittled down to over the last few years. Brief glimpses of what my brother used to be.
We pulled into the parking lot of Townshend’s, a diner that Fitz (of course) had discovered when he was at Pemberley. We’d driven here together at least once a month my freshman year, his senior, when he’d pull himself away from the demands of applying to all the world’s top colleges and leading the debate team to victory to hang out with little old me. We’d order bottomless pancakes, even though the diner had threatened to take them off the menu after one specifically epic eating extravaganza the day before spring break. For an extra couple of bucks, they’d put whipped cream and M&M’s on them, too. Fitz’s laugh would be more than an edge to an admonishment and I’d be glad to hang out with my brother, the only family I had left.
It wasn’t the sort of place our parents had taught us to visit, with its absence of cloth napkins and a sommelier, but since my dad passed away four years ago, when I was twelve, and my mom had taken the opportunity to abandon me and my brother to the staff and to each other, it wasn’t like there was anyone to stop us.
Now I just had Fitz to stop me.
“No. No way.” The squeals of the hostess echoed through the relatively empty diner as we pushed through the door, the warmth of the overactive heater inside a welcome reprieve from the biting cold. “Tell me that’s not Fitz Darcy.”
“Jenn.” Fitz raised up his mouth in what might be called a smile, had his eyes gotten involved. Squeals were basically standard when grown-ups around Pemberley saw Fitz. If the teachers, support staff, and local townspeople could have voted for homecoming king, it would have been him, every time.
I mean, it wasn’t, because the homecoming court was a teenage popularity contest and actual human popularity among our peers was not something that either of us had ever excelled at. Fitz was more the valedictorian type, while I was … neither of those things. But still.
“What are you even doing here?” Jenn led us to our table way more slowly than I would have liked, my stomach already growling. “Hasn’t the semester started for Caltech? Or do you geniuses out there need less time in class than everyone else?”
“I’m at SUNY Meryton this year, actually.” The remnants of Fitz’s smile disappeared as we settled into the torn vinyl booth at the back of the diner, where the smell of griddled foods threatened to overwhelm me. “I transferred to be closer to home.”
“Why would you—oh.” Jenn’s face flashed with a recognition I needed to get used to as she looked over at me, and I wanted to melt into the vinyl, become one with the vinyl, since I was pretty sure vinyl booths never had to feel guilty about a single mistake they had made over and over again for the rest of their lives. Plus, they got to live next to the pancakes, and kids dropped food into the cracks of the seating all the time. It would be a less humiliating life than the one I currently led. “Right.”
The Pemberley Academy gossip mill churned hard and fast. It had been all over school within hours when Brian Churlford’s dad, a state senator, had gotten caught taking his mistress on a Canadian joyride. The GroupMes had lit up when Andrea Smithing paid one of the townies to take the SAT for her, and she’d gotten kicked out.
So when I, Georgiana Darcy, heiress to the Darcy empire, little sister of school Golden Boy Fitz Darcy, got caught up in a drug scandal at the end of sophomore year, yet managed to avoid expulsion simply on the basis of my family name? People found out pretty quickly.
My fingers twitched and I willed myself not to curl them into fists. Darcys didn’t show when they were upset.
“Our usual order, Jenn, thanks.” Fitz’s hands gripped onto the plastic menu, white around the knuckles. “And add an orange juice, for my sister.”
“I just brushed my teeth,” I said, as Jenn took the menus and fled the scene as fast as she could, obviously grateful to avoid Darcy Drama. “You don’t need to order for me.”
“I know the way you eat when I’m not around, Georgie.” He pulled out his phone to fire off a quick text, then turned his undivided attention back to me. “The vitamins in that juice might be the only ones you get all week.”
“Funny.” I rolled my eyes. Fitz was just three years older than me. Not old enough to act like my dad, and yet. I squirmed under his gaze, intimately aware of the oncoming conversation that I had no way of avoiding.
Sure enough, Fitz leaned forward on his forearms across the table, fingers intertwined. No elbows involved, naturally. My brother might be in a trash diner eating trash pancakes, but he was still a Darcy, and he never forgot it. Never let me forget it.
“Have you heard from him?”
Actually, no, I hadn’t expected the conversation to go to him that quickly, this early in the morning. My stomach churned unpleasantly. “Obviously not.” Jenn returned with our drinks, a huge mug of coffee for Fitz and a Diet Coke for me. The small glass of orange juice she set down next to it was accompanied by an apologetic smile as she backed away. “He doesn’t have my number anymore.” Fitz had gotten me a new phone number in the weeks following The Incident, once he’d pulled me out of school. It was a real boon to my already nonexistent social life.
“He hasn’t tried to email you?” Fitz continued to press as I blew bubbles in my Diet Coke, which I knew would annoy him. The soda annoyed him enough. “Or … slide into your DMs or something?”
I grimaced. “No, Fitz, Wickham hasn’t tried to ‘slide into my DMs.’” It was barely a lie. Just a … rearranging of the truth. And I hadn’t even read his emails, which had all poured into my phone when Fitz briefly reinstated my internet privileges over the summer.
Hadn’t read them that much, anyway.
More than once.
Fine, twice.
“Beanpole.”
“Don’t call me that.” He’d taken the nickname up after Dad died, in some sort of weird-for-a-then-sixteen-year-old paternal instinct. “What did you want this to be, Fitz? A super-fun breakfast where I tell you that hey, it doesn’t matter that I got pulled out of school two weeks before the semester ended last year? That I had no way to contact anyone the entire summer, so I couldn’t even try to explain my side of the story, and now the entire student body hates me?”
“If you hadn’t gotten mixed up with a drug dealer—”
“I didn’t know he was a drug dealer!”
“Pancakes!” Jenn’s voice, a trilled out singsong, cut through a fight that was quickly turning vicious. Before I got to add, and you’re the one who wanted us to be friends. Fitz and I both leaned back, my brother straightening the collar of his button-down. I didn’t bother to try and adjust the wrinkles out of my tie-dyed Camp Sanditon T-shirt. “You two know the drill. No new plates until this one is finished. Are we trying to break any records today?”
“The world is wide and full of possibilities, Jenn.” I kept my gaze on my brother as I spoke, his eyes smoking with anger. “Let’s not rule anything out.”
The two of us spent the next ten minutes in relative silence, punctuated only by my aggressive chewing and the whoosh of the whipped cream can. Jenn brought plate two out to me the moment I finished my first, which left me with a lot more goodwill toward her than I’d started with. Fitz, meanwhile, had only moved a few of his pancakes around, clinging to his coffee cup like it was a lifeline as he watched me.
“You’re going to choke.”
“And you’re going to lose our pancake battle.” I nodded toward his plate, where the glob of butter on the top of his stack had melted into a mess of grease that dropped all down the sides of his food. “Catch up.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“Right,” I said. Fitz’s appetite had declined when our dad died and disappeared entirely after he’d found me with Wickham. His coffee consumption, on the other hand … Jenn filled up his cup without a word as she passed by, and he winced as he took a long draw. “That stuff’s going to give you an ulcer.”
Copyright © 2022 by Amanda Quain
