Prologue
Kailani
People always say you should trust your instincts. I wish I’d trusted mine. I wish I could rewind time to the day I knocked on his door. I wish I’d never looked into his eyes. And most of all, I wish he’d never looked back into mine.
My toes sinkinto the sprawling green lawn as though I'm standing in a pit of quicksand. A part of me hopes it might just swallow me up. Because then I wouldn’t be here, staring up at Landon Blackwood’s mansion with this empty feeling in my chest. If I could rewind time, I might go back and unlearn what my best friend just told me. I might rewind it all back to the day I first stood on his veranda with a plate of pineapple in the hot July sun, waiting to introduce myself.
I’ve been here more times than I can count over the summer. Two hundred steps from my driveway to his. I know what the marble in his foyer feels like beneath my bare feet. My fingers have memorized the roughness of the etched glass table on the patio. And when I breathe deeply, I can still smell the lingering notes of spicy vanilla and sweet tobacco that haunt the halls where Landon Blackwood lives.
Time never existed in this place. Nothing else existed here. Landon is an entire universe, and I always thought it was so strange he didn’t seem to realize it. Until him, I always just assumed beautiful people knew their value. They knew the effect they had on the rest of us. But Landon is an enigma. A strange, tortured boy I spent an entire summer with, yet I don’t really know him at all. I don’t think anyone does.
I tutored, and he listened. It never felt right. It always felt like I was holding my breath, waiting for the truth to come out. I was an imposter and didn’t belong to this exclusive club. I didn’t belong in his orbit with his tall, muscular body that moved like a piece of poetry. He gave me a new appreciation for art, and I wanted to study him every day. Some colors can never be replicated, and they exist in his eyes. Those gray orbs hit me like bullets every time they move, shredding me open and making me bleed. He’s an entire world. An energy. The subject of song lyrics, and the reason for wars.
When he looks at me, my heart gallops. And then it shatters to pieces. I’ve never seen anyone so achingly empty. He’s a house with four walls but no pulse. His insides are covered with dust, broken furniture, and memories long forgotten. In the echoey cavern of his heart, I can only imagine a dark, shadowy landscape where dreams go to die.
This house is a reflection of him. Impossibly beautiful, but hollow. Everything he owns is expensive and orderly, but there’s no life inside. I’ve felt that way from the moment I first entered his sacred space. It’s always been too quiet. Too clean. Too still.
Tonight, it feels unfamiliar and ugly, like betrayal. The behemoth white mansion is lit up like Gatsby’s fictional residence on Long Island Sound. Music blasts from the open windows, and partygoers stumble about with raucous chatter. I imagine this was exactly what Fitzgerald envisioned when he wrote the magnum opus on self-indulgence. But that fictional setting doesn’t make sense in this reality. Landon hates everyone. He’s the boy who grumbles responses and tosses dark looks around like candy. He doesn’t throw parties.
So why the hell did he leave this note on our front door, asking me to come over tonight?
I glance at the piece of paper in my hands again. Landon’s handwriting is artistic. I should know because I’ve had plenty of time to study it. But this looks like it was written in a hurry. Just three little lines.
My house.
8:00 PM
Landon
My chest feels weird. Maybe I’m coming down with a fever. Or having a heart attack. It’s possible, right? I think I need a sick note to get out of this party. But as much as I don’t want to go in there, another part of me is desperate to see why he wants me here.
“You really didn’t know?” Courtney peers at the scene from beside me, her eyes shooting laser beams into the mansion and everything this town represents. Her face is carefully neutral, never allowing any emotion to bleed through.
My bestie throws off a hate-the-world vibe, and the only color that exists in her wardrobe is black. She’s not a ray of sunshine. She’s a hurricane. And if you told her the world was ending in two seconds, she would simply shrug.
Court doesn’t come from old money either, and therefore, she’s an outcast like me. I met her in the cafeteria at Black Mountain Academy, bonding over the only table that didn’t require a gold-encrusted invitation. After disproving her initial doubts that I was one of the brainless urchins, as she likes to call them, she eventually let her guard down, and we became good friends. But she’s been gone for the entire summer, visiting her dad in Georgia, and she came over to see me as soon as she got home. While I’ve been getting her up to speed on what’s been happening in her absence, she’s been getting me up to speed on who Landon Blackwood really is.
“I didn’t know.” I release a breath, realizing how stupid that sounds.
Most girls my age are obsessed with social media, but I was raised on a steady diet of sunshine and surf. Growing up in Hawaii, my mom was a single parent trying to bring me up on a paper-thin budget. We couldn’t afford many things, so I found ways to entertain myself that mostly consisted of reading, dancing, and spending time outdoors. I was taught the importance of being present. My grandmother didn’t want me to lose touch with the world around me like everyone else has, and since she looked after me so often, that practice sort of stuck. I guess you could say I was a little sheltered in that way. When I finally did get a cell phone, I used it for calling and texting. It never occurred to me to look up Landon’s Snapchat or Instagram or whatever because I don’t have those accounts myself.
When the principal asked me to tutor Landon, the only information I received was that he’d just moved back to Black Mountain. Being a transplant myself, I hadn’t been here long enough to know his history. After a rough start to the tutoring sessions, I saw him practically every day. The school said he needed a little help, but that was obviously an understatement because Landon was behind in almost every subject. Of course, I thought it was a little strange, but being that he was so cagey, I never worked up the courage to ask him for an explanation. I was more concerned with getting him caught up in time for the new year than checking to see what he posted each day. But now that Court just dropped this bombshell of truth about his identity, I’m dying to know.
“Why didn’t you tell me you guys were hanging out?” She eyes me curiously. “You never mentioned him when we talked this summer.”
“We only hung out a few times.”
I’m not sure why the lie slips from my lips, but I always got the impression that Landon wouldn’t want anyone to know about the tutoring. It felt like a secret, and I didn’t want to betray that. But the longer I stand here, digesting the scene before me, the more I realize this summer was a bigger secret than I ever could have imagined. Nobody knew he was here, and the entire time, I was completely oblivious to who he really was. Now everything makes so much sense. His barbed wire exterior. The immediate distrust when we met. The disbelief when I said I didn’t know him. I thought he was just an angry guy with trust issues. As it turns out, he’s one of the most famous faces of our generation.
The time we spent together doesn’t mean anything. This party is proof of that. That must be why he invited me. He wanted me to see the truth.
I always suspected it would be like this summer never happened once school began this year. We’d sit at different tables, and maybe he’d look at me in the hall, but he’d never admit that he knew me. Because deep down, I understood he was one of them. I just thought we had more time before the line was drawn. I’d nurtured a silly, girlish hope inside me that these feelings weren’t one-sided.
“I’m so stupid,” I groan toward the sky. “I just thought he was the new kid.”
“Yeah, no.” Courtney snorts. “This town loves to claim him as their very own. Black Mountain’s child actor turned teenage heartthrob. He never really lived here permanently, but his grandmother did, and he’d visit her between filming breaks in LA. I still can’t believe you’ve never seenBlood River Legacy.”
“We didn’t even own a television before I moved here,” I remind her.