Welcome to Bridgeport Academy, an elite boarding school in New York where glamorous rich kids don't let rules get in the way of a good time.
[ Based on the It Girl series by Cecily Von Ziegesar ]
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Dear Mr. Jordan, I'm afraid I will no longer be able to assist you with your office tasks. I will, of course, continue my work on the Disciplinary Committee as class prefect, as I am serious about my commitment to that position. Thank you for understanding.
Alex looked at the note, written in her slanting cursive on one of her monogrammed correspondence cards. Was it too personal to use one of them? Maybe she should just email him. But no, it felt like a more suitable ending to their ill-fated affair to write the note on her expensive stationery, with the AJC engraved in the corner. Maybe, she thought wistfully, it would make him wonder what her middle name was. Also, it made her feel like a heroine from a novel, a wounded female so elegant that she managed to write such a polite letter to the man who had scorned her.
Not that she was angry. She just felt deflated and confused. If Michael hadn't wanted anything to happen between them, he'd had plenty of opportunities to stop things. But he'd encouraged her, hadn't he? Alex hated that she felt so defensive about it, wondering if she had only imagined there was ever anything between them.
No, that wasn't right, she answered herself as she crossed campus to Stansfield Hall, unlocked but generally silent on weekends. She thought back to the first time she'd met Michael, thinking at first that he was a student. She was unable to shake the feeling that from the very beginning, while he'd been kind of sheepish about his attraction to her, he still never tried to hide it. And it wasn't just a casual flirtation. He invited her out to dinner, took her in his plane to his home in Newport, and had drinks waiting for her on his sailboat. He'd given her wine, lit candles for her, sent cars to pick her up and take her back to campus, invited her to spend the night with him, taken her clothes off...These were not actions of a man afraid of being inappropriate.
She climbed the three flights of marble stairs to his office, her heels echoing loudly, and then paused when she heard a shuffling noise inside and music playing softly. Silently she placed her note directly in front of the door and tiptoed back down the long hallway.
An hour later the sun was getting lower in the afternoon sky and Alex was still aimlessly wandering around campus. It was a glorious summer afternoon, and she was too depressed to go indoors and spend her Saturday in the library alone, without even a cute boy to text.
Alex wiped her nose pathetically on the back of her hand. She hadn't spoken to Quincy for a week now, not since Black Saturday, when he caught her coming off Michael's sailboat at the docks. Suddenly she felt a tug of longing in her stomach, remembering how nice it had been to just hang out with Quincy and smoke weed and rag on their families together. She found herself missing his voice that just last week she'd found so annoying.
Without thinking about what she was doing, Alex's Gucci slides led her along the path past the northern end of Bridgeport's campus toward the old cemetery. Robyn thought she was morbid to like hanging out there, but it was a secluded space, the most modern gravestone dating from the late 1800s, and she and Quincy had always found it peaceful and romantic beneath the canopy of forest, set back from the main road. It was a long walk, past the Bridgeport gatehouse. She remembered how excited she'd been the night Michael's car had come to pick her up. She shook her head, trying to forget how stupid and childish she'd been, and concentrated instead on the gorgeous, sunny afternoon.
