Prince Charming
Prince Charming
Copyright © 2014 by S. Celi
Published by Lowe Interactive Media, LLC
Cover Design by
Mayhem Cover Creations
Cover Photography by
Amy Elisabeth Photography
Special Thanks:
Artfully Disheveled
Cover Model: Joel Geiman
Formatting by JT Formatting
ISBN:
Draft2Digital Edition
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products, bands, and/or restaurants referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
For anyone who has ever searched for Prince Charming
––––––––
T
UESDAY, JANUARY 22
––––––––
A
P EUROPEAN HISTORY sucked. So did AP Biology, AP German, and AP English. Even World Cultures class sucked.
Everything about senior year at Heritage High School sucked.
I sat in the second row for every class, and I hated it. It should have been the best year of my life—everyone told me that, but they lied to my face. They looked me straight in the face and lied. By the time we came back from winter break, everything about senior year had turned into a boring mess, like we were all just waiting for the day when we’d walk across the stage in the auditorium and get our diplomas.
I didn’t know how to change any of it.
Mr. Langston’s AP English class was the suckiest of the suck. Fifth period. Somehow, this sorry excuse for an English teacher managed to warp what should have been my favorite subject into a pathetic placeholder in my schedule that always reminded me just how much I was over high school. I’d been over it for most of my senior year, and I wanted to turn around and leave every time I walked into that class. Of course, I never did. Oh, no. I was too much of a pussy to pull something like that.
Besides, school itself had become too damn easy.
The spring of junior year, I’d loaded up my senior schedule with AP classes, designed to give me dozens of hours of college credit as long as I made fours and fives on the tests in May. The guidance counselors and teachers told me over and over again how great this would make my future—that it would complete my path to the top of Heritage High School’s graduating class. I liked being at the top.
No, I
loved
being at the top.
And that’s how I wound up in the second row of Mr. Langston’s class, right after lunch every day, just in time to smell cafeteria food on his breath while he spouted off highbrow comments about classic literature.
“Can anyone tell me three character archetypes often used in Shakespeare?” he asked as he paced across the classroom the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Day. He wore a long green sweater with large wool pills and flakes of Wheat Thins from his lunch all over his chest. He showed up in that sweater every Tuesday.
I cringed every time I saw it.
No one answered Mr. Langston right away. We might have been a classroom of students bound for college and full-ride scholarships, but that didn’t make us eager to answer probing questions from an unmarried man in his forties with two lower teeth missing and small scabs on his face from too many shaves with a blunt razor. In fact, the stalemate between teacher and students had grown more pronounced as the school year inched onward.
“Anyone? Hmm? Anyone?” He held up the thick AP English textbook the school issued us at the beginning of the year to help us study for the AP test in May. His edition lacked a cover, and the front pages curled around the edges. Some of the pages threatened to flap out onto the front row. “This was in the required reading.”
Still no one raised a hand. Seconds ticked by on the clock. Any enthusiasm we once had fled the room back in September, when Langston’s revised syllabus laid out a long line of torturous classics instead of American literature. Nothing crushed teenage spirit faster than Homer. Nothing. And no, Shakespeare did not help any.
“Come on people, this is not difficult,” Langston said, his voice squeaking in a way that screamed annoyed and frustrated. He ran his hand along the bald spot on top of his head. “Character archetypes. Think really hard.”
I looked up from the small doodle of a sinking ship I’d drawn on a random page in my notebook and glanced at the rest of the class. My eyes fell on blank faces and bored stares from kids I competed with for the top of class rank. We were the top 20 students in the class, and, at that moment, I ranked an irritating second.
Only one face in the crowd didn’t get a glance from me. Glancing might turn into staring, and that wouldn’t be okay at all.
I couldn’t look at
her.
I’d get a hard-on the size of Texas if I did. It had happened before.
“Geoff,” Langston snapped, slapping his book on the side of his desk.
My head snapped in the direction of his voice.
“Geoff Miller. I know you have the answer.”
“Huh?”
“The answer to this question, in the required reading. I know you completed the assignment.”
Sometimes a sterling reputation with teachers really stunk, even if my hard work had earned me one. In almost twelve years of school, I’d never handed in one late assignment, skipped class, or received lower than an eighty-eight on a test. Now, in the winter of my life at this miserable high school, that reputation followed me from class to class, teacher-to-teacher, as if they all just expected that I would never be anything different, other than the perfect student with every answer.
I blinked at Mr. Langston and contemplated cracking a joke, or answering him with a snappy comeback that would make the rest of my classmates laugh. God knows I’d thought of more than a few during that specific lecture, most of which involved some kind of joke about boobs and Shakespeare loving sex. I even envisioned the looks on my classmates’ faces. It would be epic.
But, of course, like a model student, I kept all the smartass comebacks to myself.
“Shakespeare didn’t mind using character archetypes,” I said after a couple of seconds. “In fact, most of his plays have them.”
“Very good, Mr. Miller, but I asked for specific examples.”
“The star-crossed lovers, the shrew, the villain.”
“Yes, you’re right.” He threw the book down on his desk and looked satisfied. “I can see at least one of us has done the required reading, and as usual it is Mr. Miller.”
I glanced around the room fast enough to see three eye rolls from my fellow classmates, and a blank stare at the chalkboard from the face I tried my hardest to avoid focusing on every day during this class. She never looked at me. She didn’t even know I was alive.
To Laine Phillips, I was just a waste of air.
T
he door to my locker slammed shut about thirty seconds after I opened it. I had just grabbed my AP Bio textbook when it happened.
“What’s up, Ge-off.”
I swallowed my annoyance. Would it kill him to pronounce my name correctly? Apparently, it would.
“The one and only.”
“Whatever, asshole.” Blake Smithson folded his muscular arms and the white pleather of his letterman jacket creaked. Various awards for football decorated his chest, including one that reminded everyone of his coveted place on the state championship football team. “You’re supposed to give us a ride later.”
“I know. Mom told me.”
Blake leaned up against my locker, ensuring I wouldn’t be able to open it again as long as he stood there. “Don’t be late this time. Like, you know, late because you’re looking up shit in the library.”
“Like, what kind of shit?”
“You know. Academic shit.”
“Because all stuff in the library is academic shit.”
Blake blinked at me as if I’d spoken in Chinese. “Why do you have to keep rubbing your brains in my face?”
“That’s impossible.” I widened my eyes to keep from rolling them.
“Whatever. You think you think you’re so damn superior.”
That was where he was wrong. I didn’t
think
I was intellectually superior to Blake. I
knew
I was. “I won’t be late,” I added after a moment, deciding not to push the issue any further.
“Well, the last time you were supposed to drive us, you were.”
Blake resembled two tomatoes stacked together. He had a round head, ginger-spiked hair, and jarring blue eyes. The bottom half of his body was circular, too, with defined and developed muscles he’d honed during endless workouts for the football team. He played linebacker on the team, and so did his brother Bruce. In fact, Bruce was his twin, and only a mole near Blake’s left eyebrow distinguished him from Bruce.
“Like I said,” I replied, growing irritated. I really needed to move on from this conversation and walk down the flight of stairs to fifth period biology. “I won’t be late.”
“Dude, whatever,” Blake said. He slammed his fist against the locker for emphasis. “Your bitch of a mom told my dad she’s really getting tired of you.”
“I’m sure she is. Since she loves spending so much time with David and you guys these days, instead of me.” I turned and walked down the hallway without another word to Blake. He was a liar. Always had been. But I couldn’t be sure if he’d lied right then.
Yet another reason why it sucked having Blake and Bruce as stepbrothers.
Over the last two years I’d dreamed more than a hundred thousand times that my mom had never met David, Blake and Bruce’s father. I wished she and I still lived in the small house on Rosstown Ave, with the white clapboard and the apple tree in the front yard. I begged God for another chance for us to be a family, but there was no family to go back to at all. My dad had died from cancer the year I turned six.
David Smithson had been Mom’s first high school love. He got divorced from Betsy, Blake and Bruce’s mother, our freshman year of high school. About ten minutes after the ink dried on the divorce papers, he asked my mom out to dinner. She accepted over the phone in a voice I’d never heard her use before. Of course, just a few weeks later, David and my mom had rekindled their love.