Page 1 of Forever We Fall

“What are you looking at, pretty boy?”

The guy who asked the inane question sits a table over in the great hall. He saidpretty boyas though it is a curse. Maybe it is. At least my face doesn’t look like the back end of Headmaster Bridgeport’s bulldog.

Instead of telling him so, I avert my gaze.

I hadn’t been looking at him, per se. I’d been assessing my new, and ironically old-as-dirt, home. The place looks like the cover of one of my mom’s Regency romance novels. She always snuck away to read them when my dad was out on business, but I found her collection. Reading them gave me plenty of juice for the spank bank. Even better than my dad’s stash of porn mags. I found those too. The books, at least, require a bit of imagination.

The difference between the Regency novel I’m suddenly living in and my mom’s? This one doesn’t have a woman in sight. Not even the teachers are women. No luscious boobs to be perused. No skirts to hike. No cherries to pop.

The only pair of tits in the school is the headmaster’s secretary, Miss Booth. She made enrollment bearable, at least.

“I said, what are you looking at?” The guy has pushed up from the table. He towers over his group of friends, who all turn and look at me.

Where my new nemesis looks like a dog’s behind, his friends look like they could grace the pages of an Abercrombie & Fitch quarterly. Very white. Very hot. Very exclusive.

“I heard what you said.” It’s the first time a student has spoken to me since I moved in last week.

“Then answer me, you?—”

He’s about to call me an Asian slur because he’s as creative as the headmaster’s dog too. The double doors opening cut him off. I’ve heard them mumble a variety of insults under their breath from the day I arrived. Hell, I’ve heard them from the first day we moved to London. I was six at the time. Nine years have passed. Nothing has changed, except I’m no longer in London or with my parents.

British mum. Japanese dad.

The attendance clerk rushes through the center of the hall as though his pants are on fire. His frail arms pump, shuttling his thin frame forward with more oomph than I expect from the old guy.

No matter his mission, he doesn’t miss an opportunity to sneer at the nearly two hundred students in the room for first lunch.

“Sit down, Phillip,” Bud Randal hisses, projecting his severe case of halitosis. The guy’s breath smells worse than his pitted teeth look. When my father and I were in his office for enrollment, I spent it dodging the stench.

I hope my stupid tormentor gets a nose full. Phillip. Dusty-ass name pairs nicely with the guy’s dusty-ass face and attitude.

The clerk waits until the kid complies, then rushes up to the head table where our professors enjoy the last few moments of their break.

How they can live here in this relic of a time gone by in a place with no women for their entire adult lives is beyond me. Talk about hell on earth. Perhaps they’ve committed some egregious crimes, and this is their punishment.

Mr. Randal whispers in the headmaster’s ear for several beats. I know the head guy is holding his damn breath. I would be. Then the clerk retreats as quickly as he came.

The murmurs start immediately. I don’t make sense of them until we’re up in single file, like prisoners, headed to our afternoon classes.

There’s a new student.

Another one.

It doesn’t take much to get this place riled. Of course, some of these guys have been at this boarding school since year one.

I can’t imagine being raised in this awful place, away from your family or anyone who ever cared about you. It’s bad enough that I had to leave my friends and my stupid home at fourteen. If I was five fucking years old, I’d know for certain that my family didn’t give a shit about me. It explains a lot about the tight-knit friend groups and lack of social norms here.

Right now, this place is just a punishment. I can earn my way out—not home but back to Japan with my grandparents.

Or so I’ve been told. I’ll believe it when it happens.

“We haven’t had a new student who wasn’t a blasted first year in like five years, and now we have two in as many weeks,” someone chirps behind me as we shuffle along.

“Yeah, well, no one wants to come to this backwoods boys’ school, and I can’t blame them,” his friend says.

Me neither.

We disseminate into the various halls and make our way into ancient classrooms that probably saw kids huddled under the desks during World War II.

---