Page 23 of Sweet Nightmare

But I can’t do that now. I’m stuck here as he walks straight toward me.

“Hey. You okay?” Jude’s voice, low and surprisingly gentle, comes from what feels like a million miles away. “I can tell her to put him in another group.”

He shouldn’t know about Remy, shouldn’t know about everything that happened. He gave up that privilege a long time ago. But he does know, and all I can think is that Caspian told him everything. The jerk.

I know they were friends, too. I know that they still talk in the hall sometimes. But everything inside me is screaming that Caspian had no right to talk to Jude about this. About her.

I don’t want to answer him, but Jude continues to watch me with concern until I finally shake my head—though I don’t even know what question I’m answering at this point. Maybe both at the same time, because no, I am definitely not okay. But last I checked Ms. Aguilar isn’t really interested in how I feel about my group members. Just one more “perk” of being the headmaster’s daughter that I am very much hating right now.

“I’m fine,” I snap at him seconds before Remy comes to a stop next to our desks.

Remy, my cousin Carolina’s closest friend in prison—not to mention the boy she wrote to me about after she finally broke out of the Aethereum. The boy she loved.

Remy, the same guy who came to the island three months ago to tell us she was dead—and that she’d sacrificed herself to save him, that her death was his fault. My aunt Claudia—Carolina’s mother—told him not to blame himself, that we all know there was no stopping her when she set her mind to something.

And while I might agree with that in theory, I still never want to see him again. And I definitely never want to talk to him.

Because something broke in me the night I found out about Carolina’s death, and no matter how hard I try, I haven’t been able to put the jagged pieces of my heart—my soul—back together again. She was my best friend in the entire world. My ride or die, even before she got shipped off to the Aethereum with no warning and no real explanation. Three years later and I still don’t know why.

Part of the reason I’ve been so hell-bent to get off this island the last few years was because I was determined to go find and rescue her from that hideous prison.

And now I’m supposed to do a poetry project with the boy she loved? The boy who just let her die?

A shudder tries to work its way through me, but I tamp it down as ruthlessly as I tamped down the tears.

Weakness isn’t an option—showing it or having it.

And still rage burns inside me, even before Remy’s slow amble across the room finally ends—exactly two feet from my desk. All I know is that there’s no way I’m actually going to last my entire senior year in this place. It’s just taken too much from me.

I need a fresh start.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” Remy asks quietly, nodding toward the empty desk across from Jude. His dark, shaggy hair bounces a little with the nod, the intense look in his forest-green eyes belying the casualness of the question.

I glance at Jude, but his face is blank—a surefire sign that there’s more going on under the surface than he wants anyone to know. And I get it. I don’t want to admit it, but I know that losing Carolina hurt him, too. That what he did to me—to us—didn’t erase all those years of hide-and-seek in the forest, of scraped knees and truth-or-dare and endless troublemaking. Being in a group with Remy must be a gut punch to him, too.

Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier for me to bear, though. But before I can think of an appropriate answer to Remy’s question, a massive lightning bolt shoots through the sky. It’s followed immediately by a boom of thunder so loud it shakes the entire building, and seconds later, one of the two fluorescent lightbulbs in the room explodes.

Glass goes everywhere, including all over the floor in front of Ms. Aguilar’s desk.

She jumps—God, she really is a candyass—then trills, “No one move until I can get this cleaned up. Just focus on your projects and don’t worry about me.”

Like anybody is? In the grand scheme of bad shit that happens at this school, exploding lightbulbs don’t even make the chart.

She crosses to the closet at the back of the room and pulls out a small hand broom and dustpan. I ignore her in favor of looking down at my desk, unable to bring myself to speak to Remy. Jude doesn’t say anything, either. He just watches me with those all-seeing eyes.

When it becomes obvious that Hell will freeze over before Jude invites Remy to join us—and that the rest of the class is suddenly much more interested in what’s going on in our little corner of the room than they are in Ms. Aguilar—I shrug and nod toward the empty desk. It’s not exactly the friendliest invitation, but it’s more than I thought I had in me.

“Thank you, Clementine,” Remy tells me, his tone formal and a sad smile on his handsome face.

Despite the niceties, my stomach does a three-sixty. We’ve only met once, briefly, yet he knows exactly who I am. Then a sickening realization dawns on me—he probably knows way more about me than I want to imagine. He and Carolina were super close. Does that mean she told him my secrets, too? The ones we only dared to share in the dark?

All of a sudden, I can’t help but feel violated. But it’s way too late to do anything about it.

Just because I let Remy join our already messed-up group doesn’t mean I have to talk to him or have anything to do with him. Jude may not care about making a scene—no one is stupid enough to mess with him—but I don’t have that luxury.

So I give up arguing with Jude about John Keats’s relationship with Fanny Brawne and concentrate on getting the questions about figurative language and meter answered. The sooner we finish the assignment, the sooner I can get out of this hellscape.

Remy tries to help at first, but after I deliberately ignore him a few times, he gives up.

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