Page 3 of Learning Curve

“Excuse me! He did what?” Cassie’s eyes go wide as she turns her attention back to Ace. “You did what?”

“Mom, relax. Dickson is a great university. Does it really matter why I chose it?”

The three of them start bickering again, so I take out my headphones and put them on. Nine Inch Nails seethes in my ears as I do too, all the things that have added up to this moment running through my mind.

My rich, ridiculous roommate may have chosen this college on a whim, but I came to my decision a little differently.

Almost two years ago, on the day before my seventeenth birthday, while my dad was gone on a bender, I stumbled upon his journal from several decades prior. I thought it was just a place he used to scribble his shit music notes at first, but a couple of pages in, the contents changed entirely. Instead of writing songs, he detailed all the ways he’d screwed it up—how he’d abandoned his young family, changed his last name, and run away to start over. After years of fucking around completely, drinking, doing drugs, and committing any manner of crimes, he finally decided to settle down…with my mom.

In the span of five years, they had my older brother Reece, then me, then the twins, Jack and Travis, and last but not least, our baby sister Willow. And that was that. He never looked back.

Jeff Hayes moved on, but the world Jeff Winslow had created prior to me and my siblings didn’t. He has a whole other set of kids—ironically, four sons and a daughter, too—who are an entire generation older than us, and one of them is a professor here. In fact, he’s the head of the English Department, and my first class on Thursday is with him.

Professor Ty Winslow is in for the surprise of his life, and as much as my dad is the asshole in this scenario, I can’t wait to give it to him.

I guess I’m an asshole too.

Thursday, September 5th

Finn

Rain pelts me in the face as I make the stroll from my dorm in Graham Hall down 120th Street in the direction of where the Newton Building sits on the corner of Broadway. This is my first official class of the semester—English Lit with Professor Ty Winslow.

Other kids run and shriek like the water will melt their skin away, but I bask in the feeling of each cool drop on the heat raging inside me. A brewing ball of anticipation and excitement and a tiny sliver of anxiety churn in my stomach as I think about the look on my target’s face as I turn his world upside down.

From all my research on the Winslow family, I know that Ty Winslow’s had an easy time with money and an even easier time with getting whatever the fuck he wants. He and his brothers are all wealthy—though, I’ll admit, he’s the least silver-spooned of all of them—and it appears they’ve never known struggle, thanks to their cushy life here in the city.

Ty taught at NYU before transferring here to head up the whole English Department at Dickson, and his younger brother Jude owns and runs a PR company for some of the most lucrative clubs in New York. Flynn was by far the hardest to find any information on, but he’s got a huge penthouse in the city and some kind of high-profile name in the engineering world. Winnie, the baby sister of the group, is married to the owner of the New York freaking Mavericks pro football team, for goodness’ sake. And the eldest, Remington, is an investment broker and day trader with a net worth even Google has an estimation for—like he’s some kind of celebrity or some shit.

My three brothers and sister and I, it seems, would have been a lot better off if our dad had abandoned us too. Instead, he drank heavily and got mean nearly every night, and our mom is a hollow shell of herself because of it.

I shake my head to clear it. I don’t need to think about that bullshit. I need to think about how I’m going to deliver my first blow to my half brother.

A gust of wind blows as a girl runs past me in her navy-blue cheerleading uniform, a guy in front of her with combed dirty-blond hair already in the alcove of the building, standing and laughing at her as she sprints through the rain. She turns back to say “Excuse me!” as her elbow brushes mine, and a crack of lightning and thunder a mere hundred feet away startles her just as she’s finishing the motion.

Her feet tangle on each other, and she trips, falling hard on the water-pooled, concrete sidewalk in front of me. I wince, knowing how much that must have hurt on all her exposed skin. The dude in the alcove laughs harder, like a total dickhead. “Come on, Scottie,” he calls carelessly. “Get up. We’re gonna be late.”

I can feel my jaw tick as I step up to the girl and squat down beside her. “You all right?” I ask softly as the rain picks up, coming down even harder. Water drips off the tips of my hair and pauses on the end of my nose before running off to join the rest on the ground.

She’s crying a little but trying not to when she looks up at me, her gaze piercing me right in the chest. Her features are somehow soft and bold at the same time. Plush lips, flushed cheeks, and full, perfectly shaped dark eyebrows that are the exquisite frame for her long-lashed doe-like green eyes.

A tear slips past her right eyelid, mixing with the rain that’s already on her olive skin, and I find myself discreetly reaching out to brush it off. Crinkles form at the corners of her eyes at my touch, and she blinks up at me, her gaze searching mine through the sheen of tears.

She’s as mystified by the gentleness of my touch as I am, and a feeling of unsettling familiarity churns in my gut.

Has someone been rough with her?

“Scottie! What the hell?” the asshole in the alcove calls again. “You’re getting drenched, and my shoes are still taking on water under here. Just get up and come on.”

It takes everything I have not to walk straight over and punch the random fucker in the face, but I don’t, and that’s all that counts. You see, the Hayes men have a history of solving shit with their fists—I guess we learned from the best—but I’m trying to turn over a new leaf.

I ignore his obnoxious self-importance the best I can and ask my question again. “Are you all right?”

She hesitates a beat and then nods, so I stick out a hand and wait for her to take it. When she does, a shiver runs through me. I guess the chill of being waterlogged is finally getting to me.

“I’m always a klutz—” she explains, her sentence cutting off momentarily thanks to an anguished inhale. I follow her gaze to the spot on her leg where her knee is gushing blood.

“Shit,” I murmur just as Prissy Pete arrives with the hood of his Dickson Football-emblazoned rain jacket held up over his precious head in agitation.

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