Wealth, status, and beauty define the elite of Kensington Prep. Every one of them possesses the ability to get away with anything and everything they want, unscathed and remain as privileged and superior as ever.
But Amory Scout decides that tim...
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When Veronica first decided to take me in, she decided to sign me up for therapy sessions at the Marianne Center, a remote rehabilitation centre located in Topanga Canyon.
The therapist I got assigned doubled as a herbalist and a spiritualist-numerologist named Angel Fire, which at first I thought was pretty wacky but I figured that she'd probably fit right in a town where the Hollywood-born royals were named ridiculous things like Blue, Coco, and Apple. Angel's method of helping me heal from the tragic deaths of my family was strange but life-changing.
Before I came across Angel, I was a shell of a human being. Six months after my family's death, various relatives had shuffled me around, unsure of what would make me ease back into normal life. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. I'd just be bedridden, hiding under covers and staring glassily at the ceiling above me.
It was until Angel welcomed me into one of her first therapy sessions, that she asked for permission from Veronica to take me to a cabin deep in the Californian forests and she performed an Ayahuasca ritual on me. She then passed me a twelve-pencil packet of Stabilo's colour pencils and a wad of paper. She watched over me as I descended into spiritual enlightenment and began to hurriedly sketch across the pad.
I was sketching a ballerina. Her ribbon slim figure twisted in the air as the tulle skirt beneath her spun through the air, pink strings knotted into her hair, the spotlight beaming upon her as her graceful feet skims across the stage. After the Ayahuasca brew wore off and I looked at the sketch more closely, I realized, with a jolt as I observed the curve of her nose, that she sort of resembled Carmen Calloway.
"The source of all your pain," Angel attributed, "Now you know your source, you can map through all your grief and lead yourself out of it."
Angel was right. It was like she switched a tap in my brain, where all the numbness and the sadness disappeared. Instead, it was filled with a cold, hard feeling, a type of anger that fuelled me so powerfully through the next few years and only continued to burn brighter with time's passing.
I had to begin to understand how the sources of my pain had essentially avoided punishment while I suffered. It was unfair how she managed to cruise through life so effortlessly, even with the number of skeletons piling up in her closet, collecting dust and decay upon her. How nice it must be to be her, watching the world worship her as I, a girl who was as dead as the victims she relished upon, crumbled into nothingness.
I thought about her brother, how he relentlessly bullied Atticus into irrelevance, making him feel so small that his body became too big for his paltry heart. I thought about their smirks and smiles on the witness podium when the judge declared them not guilty and gave them no sentence for the manslaughter of my parents. I thought about how nice it would be if they finally got what was coming to them if I orchestrated the perfect revenge to take them down and feed them their own just-desserts.
I knew revenge was not exactly the right or the healthiest way to move on but I had no choice. I did everything to move on, to forget, and to accept how things were to be but I couldn't. The loss of my family, everybody I loved, just couldn't be forgiven and it took me a spiritual drug trip with an insane spiritual therapist named Angel Fire to realize it I could never move on until they had a taste of what it felt to be destroyed to no return.
