Saint (Angelview Academy #1) - E.M. Snow Page 0,24

the advice, I’ll tell you the same thing I told Saint: I’m not going anywhere!”

To my surprise, he smirks and shakes his head. “Fuck, Saint was right about you.”

I furrow my brow, my heart beating with panic. “What? What does that mean?”

He just chuckles, and I clutch the rope as my panic blossoms into fury.

“Watch your back, Ellis. You think Saint’s been rough so far? You haven’t seen anything yet.”

With that, he turns and swims away from me to the edge of the pool, climbing out without giving me the answers or the help I was so desperate for. I watch him go, my heart sinking to the bottom of the pool.

8

“Why did I sign up for AP Biology again?” Loni whines, then bangs her forehead against her open book. “It’s awful. Mr. Wilkes is awful. Why did I do this to myself?”

I glance up from my textbook with a wry grin. “Because you want to get into Yale. Regular Biology does not get you admission into Yale.”

She grumbles under her breath. Henry, who is spread out next to her with Dorito climbing all over him, shares an amused glance with me. It’s Friday night, and the three of us are huddled in Loni’s room studying for an exam coming up the following week. She and Henry are laying side-by-side on her bed, and I’m on my stomach on the floor. I need to roll over onto my back, though, to bring feeling back into my elbows, which have been supporting my weight for the past half hour.

I let out a deep sigh and stare up at the ceiling, my thoughts wandering to Liam. I haven’t gone back to the pool since he made it clear he wouldn’t help me with Saint. There doesn’t seem to be much left for us to talk about, really, and I can’t stand the thought of staying on friendly terms with him when he won’t lift a finger to defend me against his friends.

Still, despite how angry and disappointed I am, I’m a little sad, too. I kind of miss our late-night swims, which is weird as fuck to realize. Being able to co-exist with him in that space had given me a deceptive feeling of hope that things could get better for me. Without him and that hope, forcing myself out of bed every morning has become a feat of immense willpower.

I wish I hadn’t said anything to him. I wish we could go back to before, when I could still hang onto that hope.

The sudden ping of a phone pulls me from my depressing thoughts, and I glance up to see Loni reading something on her screen. Her eyes light up and she looks down at me as her glossy lips curl into a grin.

“What is it?” I ask, surprised by her growing excitement.

“So, I just got a message from my friend Martha who’s super cool and not a dick that there’s a party happening at a nearby beach tonight. She wondered if we all wanted to go?”

“We?” I almost scoff at the notion that anyone would invite me to a party.

Loni nods her head emphatically. “Yes, we. Martha and her friends don’t run in Satan’s circles. They’ve got no reason to hate you, and she knows we’re friends, so she specifically included you in the message.”

“Let me see.” I’m not going to believe it until I have definitive proof that she’s not just trying to make me feel better about being a loser.

She hands me the phone without hesitation, and to my shock, I see she’s right. Martha did mention me by name in her text, as well as Henry.

I hand the phone back to Loni, a little dumbstruck.

“Um…I mean, I guess that could be fun—”

Loni lets out an excited shriek and bounces off her bed, which sends her kitten screeching and racing toward the bathroom. “Yay! This will be so great for you, Mal, to just hang out with people who aren’t psychopaths. There might still be hope for your social life!”

I sit up and watch her skip to her closest, startled by her exuberance. While I appreciate her determination to save me from my state as a social pariah, I’m not optimistic that one beach party is going to undo all the damage Saint and his crew have done to me.

Still, it does sound like fun, and I don’t want to disappoint Loni, so I slap on a big smile when she reemerges from her closet with a cute