Page 56 of Hired Help

Bloodshot eyes. Skin with a grey undertone. Hair doing god-knows-what at the weirdest angles. I splash water on my face, then drink some from my cupped hand.

Better but the starting point was so low, it barely counts.

I stagger the few steps back to the bed and fall facedown onto it, groaning. I’m still dressed in my suit but I loosen my belt, undo the top button on my fly, and generally make myself comfortable.

When the clock’s gone past eight, I slink to the cafeteria, not bothering to return to my room to shower, change, or shave. The few other students who’ve made the effort to grab breakfast aren’t in any fit state to point fingers. I’m not the only one nursing a hangover, nor am I the only person still dressed in last night’s finery.

“Good to see you, man,” Everett says ten minutes later, spying me skulking at the corner table and joining me despite the clear warning in my gaze not to do so. “You got home okay, then?”

“Guess so.”

“You weren’t in your room when I checked,” he adds, head cocked and the start of a smile fluttering at the corner of his mouth. “Does that mean Lissie got treated to an afterparty?”

“Who?”

The query isn’t a wind-up. For a moment, I genuinely have no idea who he’s talking about. Then I remember the last-minute date I’d set up for the senior dance. The girl I’d abandoned to her friends.

Did I spend five minutes talking to her? Probably not even that. She’d gone off to sit with her friends and I’d baled, heading out the back of the venue to sulk.

“Whose bed did you spend the night in, then?”

Everett’s teasing but there’s a wary expression hiding at the back of his eyes. I shake my head. “I crashed in the common room.”

He doesn’t believe me. Nor would I in the reverse situation. But he also doesn’t pry further.

“Got any plans for the day?”

“Thought I might treat myself to a shower at some point.”

“Wow. The rich tapestry of your social life leaves me dizzy.”

“Fuck off,” I retort in a jocular tone, his teases working. “I feel like someone poisoned me.”

“Someone did.” He crams toast oozing with an overload of butter into his mouth and chews, not bothering to close his lips on the spectacle. “You. And you paid an exorbitant price per shot for the privilege.”

A wave of nausea grips me at the roots of my hair, then slowly drips down my body, coming to rest in my churning gut.

“Maybe we should talk about something else.”

He pulls a tab of Berocca from his pocket and drops two into my water. “There you go. All better.”

The fizzing, bubbling addition soon turns my drink electric orange. Not a shade that looks like it’ll help me, but I force it down, along with a cooked breakfast that thankfully settles my stomach rather than doing battle with it.

Everett relaxes back in his chair, giving me another of those wary glances, then apparently winning some internal fight. “What Brooke did was really fucked up.”

“No shit.” I wipe a piece of bread around my plate, soaking up the last greasy remnants of my meal before shoving it into my mouth.

“You call your dad yet?”

“I wasn’t speaking to him before. I’m definitely not speaking to him now.”

“He looked as surprised as you were.”

A vague outline of the night forms in my head, fuzzy but clear enough to see, and yeah, his face had been shocked.

Probably not as shocked as mine. I don’t know how much Mum talks to him these days, but he must know I attend Kingswood. He must have known there’d be a chance I was at the senior ball.

“I doubt it. There’s what…? Two hundred enrolled in the senior years. Hardly mind-boggling odds.”

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