9: NICHOLAS

Seiji was mad at him. That wasn’t exactly unusual, but this time it was Jesse Coste’s fault.

Seiji had been silent coming back from the woods, then quiet all night without even uttering the normal bedtime stuff like Turn off the light immediately, Nicholas, and Don’t speak to me. He hadn’t come to breakfast this morning, even though he’d said he would, and Nicholas had saved him a seat.

He kept remembering the moment in the dark woods when Jesse had said Seiji should go with him, and the way Seiji—who never hesitated—had hesitated. Some part of Seiji wanted to go.

Seiji hadn’t gone. Probably because Jesse Coste was an enormous jerk. But Seiji seemed tempted by the idea of Exton and the fencing team there.

Nicholas couldn’t really imagine a school better or fancier than Kings Row. Even when he’d got a brochure for Kings Row sent to Coach Joe’s gym, the place had looked fake to him, a school out of a book or a childhood dream. Nicholas had worried he’d get grubby fingerprints on the brochures, but now that he was there, he felt—and plenty of students acted—as though Nicholas might get grubby fingerprints over the whole school. If there was a better school, Seiji deserved to go there.

He deserved a better fencing partner. Nicholas had figured out that when they were together, sometimes Seiji was fencing someone else, someone also fast and left-handed, but with an advanced skill that Nicholas didn’t have. Yet. He’d have it soon, if Seiji would just wait.

Wait, and not return to Jesse.

How were they supposed to be rivals if Seiji went to a whole other school and forgot Nicholas existed? Nicholas didn’t want him to leave. But he knew uneasily that he would be furious if he were Seiji, cut off from having what he wanted. If Exton was to Seiji what Kings Row was to Nicholas… then Nicholas shouldn’t get in his way.

Nicholas was too dispirited to steal much of Eugene’s bacon.

“Having a domestic, bro?” asked Eugene. “You fighting with Seiji again? Can’t help but notice he’s not here.”

“Yeah, uh…”

Nicholas wasn’t going to get into the whole Robert Coste is my father and his other, legitimate son was trying to lure Seiji away from the team in a limo. He’d never told anybody about Robert Coste. And it seemed like a lot to spill to Eugene over scrambled eggs. Eugene would probably focus on the Robert Coste issue, and right now Nicholas was preoccupied with Seiji.

“I broke his watch?” Nicholas hazarded at last.

He’d been worrying about that off and on. It seemed like basic roommate etiquette—a word from the Kings Row brochures that Nicholas didn’t know how to pronounce—not to break your roommate’s stuff. Seiji must be mad about that, too. Jesse probably wouldn’t have broken Seiji’s watch.

“That sucks,” said Eugene. “But it’s Saturday. Wanna head to town with me and get it fixed? There’s a fancy jewelry shop where my dad got his good watch repaired.”

“Oh, great.” Nicholas was relieved. He’d been at a loss about what he should do. He rewarded Eugene by saying, “Thanks, bro.”

Eugene beamed. “If they can’t fix it, they can totally sell you a replacement.”

Nicholas frowned. “I hope they can fix it. I think this watch might be kinda expensive. Reminds me of a watch a guy from my last school had, and that watch cost a hundred dollars. Can you believe any watch could cost a hundred dollars?”

Outrage made Nicholas’s voice louder than he’d intended. Aiden, passing their table with a cup of coffee, jerked out of his reverie at the noise. He looked a bit pale and twitchy; Nicholas figured he might’ve already had too much caffeine.

Aiden halted beside their table and remarked, “I do find that incredibly hard to believe.”

Even Aiden could see it was ridiculous. Nicholas nodded, feeling fully justified in his indignation.

“Insanity, am I right?”

There was a silence. Aiden took a thoughtful sip of his coffee.

“Let me put this another way,” said Aiden patiently. “How much do you think the watch, which I am wearing on my wrist right now as we speak, cost?”

“I dunno, fifty bucks?” Nicholas shrugged. “It’s pretty nice.”

“You keep me humble, Cox,” remarked Aiden. “Of course, everyone else won’t stop telling me how amaz—blah, blah, blah, bloo.”

Nicholas tuned out Aiden and reached for his toast.

His day was looking up. Eugene was taking him to get Seiji’s watch fixed. Nicholas had twenty bucks. That should cover it. Seiji would be pleased. This would be simple.

It wasn’t simple.

Nicholas had never been to Kingstone before, but as soon as he arrived, he knew he didn’t belong there any more than he belonged at Kings Row. Nicholas and Eugene went down a broad main street flanked by white and black buildings that practically screamed We’re so fancy we pretend we live in a chess game.

“These are bow ties.” Nicholas grimaced as he gestured to the buildings. Eugene looked puzzled. “You know, stores so tiny and expensive you’re not supposed to call them stores?”

“Oh! You mean boutiques, bro.”

“Yeah,” said Nicholas gloomily. “I think I do.”

Nicholas knew at a glance, even before they went into the jewelry store, that Eugene had made a mistake.

WEIRS FINE JEWELERS was painted in discreet green and gold above the door next to a clock surrounded by fancy black iron swirls. Even the hands on the clock had little curly black iron paddles. The two Kings Row guys who’d tried to hassle Nicholas the other day were in there, talking about “Daddy’s birthday present.”

“Oh Lord, it’s the poors,” remarked the taller one as they came in.

Eugene flushed.

Nicholas did an imitation of the guy’s nasal voice. “Oh Lord, it’s the creeps who call their fathers Daddy.”

Then he looked at the price tag on something shiny in a glass cabinet even fancier than the cabinets in which the Kings Row trophies were kept. He swallowed.

The jewelry store staff showed the other Kings Row students a shiny array of cuff links. The staff was dressed in white shirts and black pants that might have been a uniform but could have also just been fancy clothes. They were like weird polite penguins. One of them gave Nicholas a look up and down, then back up almost incredulously, as though he couldn’t reconcile Nicholas’s face with the Kings Row uniform.

“It’s the scholarship kid who tried to have a scuffle with us the other day, isn’t it?” asked the nasal-voiced student. Nicholas suspected his name might be Eustace, though that was a terrible thing to think about anybody.

Eustace’s tone suggested that he’d kicked Nicholas’s ass somehow due to being rich, instead of Nicholas backing off on his own. Now all three of the jewelry-selling penguin people were giving Nicholas dubious looks.

“You wanna go now?” Nicholas demanded, surging their way.

When he strode forward, a member of the staff coughed pointedly.

“Bro,” whispered Eugene. “No, bro.”

He tugged Nicholas aside to a shiny glass case full of watches. Nicholas stared at the price tag on one watch. Surely that was a typo. It was a watch, not a rocket.

“We could take those guys,” Nicholas muttered.

Eugene seemed agitated. “There’s a lot of glass in here. And I’ve never actually been in a fight!”

“Seriously?” Nicholas glanced at Eugene, who Coach Joe would’ve described as beefy. “But you’re huge.”

“I’m a lover, not a fighter!”

The Kings Row jerks were pointing at Nicholas and miming him slipping stuff into his pockets. The quiet, discreet staff quietly and discreetly asked Nicholas to leave.

Nicholas had been wrong. Turned out you could kick someone’s ass just by having money and wearing your uniform the right way. Without throwing a single punch, those rich boys had won the fight.

Eugene’s whole big, usually good-natured body was bristling as they left the store. He resembled the offspring of an angry cat and a weight-lifting porcupine. “They acted like you were going to shoplift!”

Nicholas shrugged. “Who hasn’t shoplifted, right?”

Eugene said in a hollow voice, “Oh my God.”

“I mean,” Nicholas elaborated, more squirming than shrugging at this point, “when you’re hungry? I mean, if your mom got wrapped up with work or whatever and maybe forgot you, and you could use a snack.…”

Eugene said, in a very different tone, “Oh my God!”

“It’s not a big deal,” Nicholas said with finality. “I don’t care. What I do care about is that we haven’t got Seiji’s watch fixed, and I don’t see how we’re gonna do it. They’re not going to let me back in there, and honestly, I think that place would charge more than I could afford.”

“Yeah, I…” Eugene squinted. “I think you might be right.”

He said it almost apologetically. Nicholas shrugged again. He didn’t see what Eugene had to be sorry for.

“My cousin’s friend works part-time at this store which mostly sells, um, maybe stolen phones,” suggested Eugene. “Maybe he could help?”

He escorted Nicholas down the narrow, winding backstreets of Kingstone until they passed a wall with some graffiti on it. Beyond some smoking kids and above what used to be a stable door, in white letters on black paint, was written NEEDFUL BLING. Nicholas felt this was definitely more his sort of place.

Eugene’s cousin’s friend wore an old Kings Row hoodie and was chewing gum and barely took his eyes off his phone. Eugene explained the problem.

“Bro, you gotta help us,” said Eugene. “We can’t go back to that store.”

The guy finally lifted his eyes from his phone. Nicholas gazed at him in mute appeal.

“I was a scholarship kid myself,” said Eugene’s cousin’s friend. “I’ll see what I can do about the watch.”

Nicholas grinned at him shyly. “Appreciate it.”

Nicholas thought that’d been a totally successful trip into town, but for some reason, Eugene remained unusually quiet and thoughtful as they strolled out of the store and down the hill toward their school.

“My family doesn’t have a lot of money compared to some of the other Kings Row kids. We can’t, like, take vacays in Europe. I sometimes feel kinda lousy about it,” offered Eugene as they walked back through the winding streets.

“Oh really?” asked Nicholas. “I thought you guys were totally rich. Like, you have all those brothers and sisters, and I heard them mentioning having their own rooms? Even though there are so many of them!”

Nicholas hadn’t always had his own room, even though there was only one of him. Sometimes he slept on the sofa for a few months, until they had to move again. When they’d had a studio, he’d slept on the floor.

Eugene was quiet for a while longer.

“It’s relative, I guess, bro.” He shook himself out of whatever had him twisted up to add, “Those guys from our school? Don’t let them get you down. They’re jerks and bullies.”

“Oh, whatever.” Nicholas rolled his eyes. “They can try. Kind of adorable, if you ask me. Wow, I’m so sad—I totally didn’t notice I don’t have any money until you pointed it out, dudes! C’mon.”

He mimed wiping away tears running down his cheeks with his fists. Eugene was still looking a bit shell-shocked, for some reason.

Nicholas searched his mind for something to cheer up Eugene.

“Hey, you wanna know something funny? I thought you were trying to bully me the first time we met. When you gave me the wrong directions on my first day of school, and I got lost in the woods.”

Eugene, to Nicholas’s surprise, looked dismayed rather than amused.

“No!” he exclaimed. “Oh no! I thought it was a totally awesome prank! ’Cause, like… you were new, and you didn’t know which way to go, and you’d get… lost in the woods. In a hilarious way. ’Cause pranks are fun, right?”

Nicholas shook his head, grinning a little.

“You know we’re bros now, right?” Eugene asked anxiously.

Nicholas’s grin spread. “Yeah, I know we’re bros now.”

They fist-bumped. Eugene went home for dinner, since it was Saturday, and Nicholas walked slowly back to Kings Row alone.

He and Eugene were bros, but Eugene didn’t get it. He couldn’t, not really. Other people weren’t gonna make Nicholas feel lousy. It wasn’t about what other people did. It was about what Nicholas did, or failed to do. Or who Nicholas failed to be.

Hey, Dad, Nicholas thought defiantly, taking a detour to stop by the framed photograph of Robert Coste beside a shining trophy. Even in his mind, it felt like a lie. Robert’s blue eyes were fixed on his glittering prize. He couldn’t see Nicholas.

Nicholas didn’t care about limos or watches or morons. But he cared about other stuff.

Robert Coste didn’t know about Nicholas, and he wouldn’t want him if he did know. Robert knew about Jesse, though, and Jesse fit in at a school even fancier than Kings Row. Jesse was one of those rich kids who always got what they wanted.

Everything in the world that Nicholas wanted… it all belonged to Jesse. Even Seiji.