Gilded Cage

Chapter 47

On Friday morning, Zac stopped by my place to pick me up for school. We arrived on campus primed and ready for battle. Every muscle on Zac's body appeared tense and alert, like a dog with its hackles raised, and I was every bit as on edge. We knew Lily had something dastardly up her sleeve, but the question was—what?

As Zac and I parted ways for class, he gave me a reassuring hug and whispered in my ear, "If she gives you any trouble, I'll destroy her."

I gave him a kiss and murmured back, "If she gives you any trouble, I'll help you bury the body."

Despite my high-and-mighty attitude, I was secretly dreading the arrival of second hour. Yet, oddly enough, my fears never came to fruition. AP History came and went without any incident. The rest of my school day came and went without any incident. The following two weeks were chill as fuck because nothing bad happened to me or to Zac.

Apparently, in order for hellfire to rain, Lily needed to be at school, and the bitch hadn't shown her face at Ashton Wellesley—or anywhere else in person or online, for that matter—since she had fired off that charming text in my direction.

I didn't know what to make of it.

Was she bowing out for good?

Or was this merely the calm before the storm?

Either way, the uncertainty left me with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Still, I was never one to pass over a golden opportunity. I took this time to rebuild the shattered remnants of my reputation at Ashton Wellesley. Without Lily around to instigate our peers, I made surprising headway in quelling the rumors she had spread about me by simply acting unaffected by it all. I went about my daily business, kicking ass in class and taking down names of the teachers and students who dared to look at me funny. They should've known that I wasn't one to take a beating lying down.

When Tilton tried to talk down to me again a few days ago, I chewed him out after class. It was a stupid argument over the essay I just turned in. Now that I relinquished Zac's portion of the points from our research project, I had no choice but to fight tooth and nail for every single point to strive for a mid to high range 'B' in his class.

The man tried to dock me for not citing my sources in the correct format, but he never explicitly specified whether he wanted MLA or APA on his guidelines or rubric. I won the battle in the end, but I could tell from the contentious gleam in his eyes that the war between us was far from over. I just knew he was going to be a knit-picky bitch about everything I turned in from here on out.

By the end of the second week, however, things actually started to look up for me when a whole new slew of rumors about Lily's extended absence began circulating the campus. These outlandish stories did me a huge favor because they decimated all over Lily's good name. The sweet southern belle persona that she had so carefully cultivated for herself at Ashton Wellesley came crumbling down within days. Some of our classmates claimed she checked into rehab for a serious prescription drug addiction. Others suggested that her therapist recommended for her to take time off from school to deal with severe mental health issues.

Normally, ninety percent of the shit that came out of my classmates' mouth was exactly that, pure, unadulterated bullshit, but these particular rumors stuck with me because, honestly, they seemed to describe Lily to a T. I already knew she was batshit crazy. A drug addiction would explain why she was so moody and erratic all the time.

An uncomfortable feeling began to gnaw at me when I wondered if the notes that Zac and I had been sending her actually triggered something damaging in her already damaged psyche. I didn't want to define the emotion as guilt, per se, but, let me be the first to admit, it wasn't a pleasant feeling to carry around at all.