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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Robyn Fenty set her luggage down in the entrance way to Waverly dorm room 303 and looked around. The room was exactly as she, Alex, and Jasmine had left it, except for the lack of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butt-filled ashtrays, and designer clothes strewn all over the room.
Last fall, because they'd only been sophomores, Robyn and her two best friends, Alexandra Crane and Jasmine Sanders, had been assigned a horrible, cramped room with only one window. But then Jasmine had bribed three nerdy senior girls to switch with them the first week of school by promising them invites to the best secret parties. They'd wanted this room because it was bigger than most, with casement windows overlooking the Hudson River, and because it was close to the fire escape, ideal for sneaking out after curfew.
Alex hadn't arrived back at school yet, and Jasmine had been expelled at the end of school last year. They'd all been caught on Ecstasy in the middle of the rugby fields at five in the morning by Mr. Purcell, the uptight physics teacher, who liked going running with his three giant Dobermans before sunrise. It was the first time they'd ever tried E, and it had taken them a moment to stop laughing at the ridiculous-looking dogs before realizing what enormous trouble they were in. The girls had all been called into the headmaster's office separately (first Jasmine, then Robyn, then Alex) but the only one to get in any real trouble was Jasmine, who was promptly booted out of Bridgeport.
All this summer, Robyn's mind had spun, thinking about why Jasmine had been expelled and she and Alex hadn't been. Had Alex set it up that way? Alex was super secretive about her life at home; her mom and dad never came to Parents' Day, and she never invited anybody to her house in East Hampton. Jasmine had once dropped a hint that Alex had some family issues she didn't want anybody to know about. Could she really have orchestrated Jasmine's expulsion so she wouldn't expose her secrets? It sounded totally soap-operaish, but Alex was so dramatic that Robyn wouldn't put it past her.
She nestled into her desk chair, actually glad to be back at school. Beyond not talking to her two best friends (she hadn't heard a peep from either of them) her summer had been a disaster. First, there'd been the Atlanta Magazine photo of her at Onyx, dancing on a table with a vanilla martini in her hand. The caption read: Overserved and underage: Is this appropriate behavior for a governor's daughter? Needless to say, that hadn't gone over well with her mother's conservative Georgian voters. Oops.
After that nightmare, Robyn had flown to her family's villa in Barbados. Her dad was Caribbean and spent his summers working on real estate deals there. She had hoped that the island would be the perfect backdrop for a romantic rendezvous with her boyfriend, Christopher Brown. But that visit had been anything but romantic. Try awkward.
"Hey," came a gravelly voice behind her. Robyn wheeled around. Chris. There he was, all rumpled, sexy six feet of him, standing in her doorway, looking more gorgeous than ever.
"Hi." She felt her palms get slick with sweat.
"How are you?" he asked, pulling at the worn hem of his polo shirt.
