Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [126]
I was going to have to learn this man all over again.
I guess all journeys begin with a single step . . . or an $80,000 convertible Mercedes. God willing, it would move fast enough, and we could find Mallory in time.
Want more Chloe Neill?
Read on for the opening chapter of
FIRESPELL,
the first book in her Dark Elite series.
Available now!
They were gathered around a conference table in a high-rise, eight men and women, no one under the age of sixty-five, all of them wealthy beyond measure. And they were here, in the middle of Manhattan, to decide my fate.
I was not quite sixteen and only one month out of my sophomore year of high school. My parents, philosophy professors, had been offered a two-year-long academic sabbatical at a university in Munich, Germany. That’s right—two years out of the country, which only really mattered because they’d decided I’d be better off staying in the United States.
They’d passed along that little nugget one Saturday in June. I’d been preparing to head to my best friend Ashley’s house when my parents came into my room and sat down on my bed.
“Lily,” Mom said, “we need to talk.”
I don’t think I’m ruining the surprise by pointing out that nothing good happens when someone starts a speech like that.
My first thought was that something horrible had happened to Ashley. Turned out she was fine; the trauma hit a little closer to home. My parents told me they’d been accepted into the sabbatical program, and that the chance to work in Germany for two years was an amazing opportunity for them.
Then they got quiet and exchanged one of those long, meaningful looks that really didn’t bode well for me. They said they didn’t want to drag me to Germany with them, that they’d be busy while they were there, and that they wanted me to stay in an American school to have the best chance of going to a great college here. So they’d decided that while they were away, I’d be staying in the States.
I was equal parts bummed and thrilled. Bummed, of course, because they’d be an ocean away while I passed all the big milestones—SAT prep, college visits, prom, completing my vinyl collection of every Smashing Pumpkins track ever released.
Thrilled, because I figured I’d get to stay with Ashley and her parents.
Unfortunately, I was only right about the first part.
My parents had decided it would be best for me to finish high school in Chicago, in a boarding school stuck in the middle of high-rise buildings and concrete—not in Sagamore, my hometown in Upstate New York; not in our tree-lined neighborhood, with my friends and the people and places I knew.
I protested with every argument I could think of.
Flash forward two weeks and 240 miles to the conference table where I sat in a button-up cardigan and pencil skirt I’d never have worn under normal circumstances, the members of the Board of Trustees of St. Sophia’s School for Girls staring back at me. They interviewed every girl who wanted to walk their hallowed halls—after all, heaven forbid they let in a girl who didn’t meet their standards. But that they had traveled to New York to see me seemed a little out of the ordinary.
“I hope you’re aware,” said one of them, a silver-haired man with tiny round glasses, “that St. Sophia’s is a famed academic institution. The school itself has a long and storied history in Chicago, and the Ivy Leagues recruit from its halls.”
A woman with a pile of hair atop her head looked at me and said slowly, as if talking to a child, “You’ll have any secondary institution in this country or beyond at your feet, Lily, if you’re accepted at St. Sophia’s. If you become a St. Sophia’s girl.”
Okay, but what if I didn’t want to be a St. Sophia’s girl? What if I wanted to stay home in Sagamore with my friends, not a thousand miles away in some freezing Midwestern city, surrounded by private-school girls who dressed the same, talked the same, bragged about their money?
I didn’t want to be a St. Sophia’s girl. I wanted to be me, Lily Parker, of the dark hair and eyeliner