I BURIED MY FACE IN MY HANDS.
“Don’t tip my trunk!” the girl snapped.
Without even looking, I knew the voice—and the trunk—belonged to Jasmine King, the former Wellington Prep seventh grader who’d just transferred to Canterwood. Jas was so awful that she made Heather Fox, Canterwood Queen Bee and my archenemy, look sweet. And that was NOT easy. Heather’s weapons of choice were intimidation and threats. Jasmine was all action.
“Omigod, could you guys, like, move any slower?” Jasmine asked the movers.
I’d thought this day couldn’t get any more dramatic.
So. Wrong.
Jasmine moving into Winchester might have been the worst thing ever—which, considering the fact that I’d just found out that my ex-BFF and ex-BF were dating, was really saying something.
I dragged myself down the hallway and around the corner. Oh, my God. It was an explosion of luggage. Crocodile-skin bags, rolling suitcases, duffels, satchels, and other luggage that I didn’t even know what to call had been stacked from floor to ceiling. Two muscley guys lifted one of the massive trunks, their faces reddening as they carried it through the doorway.
“Sasha!” Jasmine said, grinning at me. “You came to welcome me to Winchester!”
“Um, not really,” I said.
Jas pouted. “Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about because you tried to intimidate my team at regionals, you poured oil on Aristocrat before Heather’s class, and you ‘accidentally’ spilled molasses on my head at the clinic.” I folded my arms.
Jasmine waved a manicured hand at me. “Oh, please. We’ll have fun! And look!” She pointed to a luggage-filled room. “I’m only two doors away from you.”
“Super,” I muttered. I watched as the guys continued to lug suitcases inside. Jasmine stood with her hands on her hips, the look on her face daring them to drop her luggage.
“Hello!” she barked at one of the movers when he almost lost his grip on the trunk. “Be careful with that!”
“That room was empty before,” I said. “Who’s your roommate?”
Jasmine shook her head. “Livvie said I could have the room all to myself ’cause I’m starting the semester late. I just explained that it would help me adjust better if I had my own room to retreat to. Besides, who needs a roommate when you’ve got teammates?”
I tried not to roll my eyes. Livvie, the Winchester dorm monitor, had to have seen right through Jas’s fake-angel act. Didn’t she?
“Yeeeaaah,” I said. “Whatever. I need to get to my room.”
I hopped over a duffel bag and squeezed along the wall, trying not to cause a luggage avalanche.
Jasmine sighed. “This place isn’t anything like Wellington’s dorms, but I’ll make it work.”
If she hated Canterwood this much, why didn’t she go back to her old school already?
“I think it’s nice,” I said.
“You would.”
I rolled my eyes but didn’t respond. It just wasn’t worth it.
“I can’t wait to meet everyone else,” Jasmine said. She pulled out a lip gloss—a vanilla-cherry flavor I did not have—and smoothed it on. “We can have movie nights in the common room!”
I stared at her. Kidding, right? “We might, but you won’t. Unless you start being nicer, no one’s going to hang out with you.”
I walked away from Jasmine and her posse of movers. I pulled open my door, relieved to get away from her and everyone else.
“Can you believe this?” I wailed to Paige the second the door slammed behind me.
“What?” Paige asked, swiveling in her desk chair to look at me.
“Jasmine is moving into Winchester!”
“Jasmine King? Are you serious? That’s who that was?”
I realized I’d told Paige all about Jasmine and her nastiness, but she’d never met her before.
“Yes! It wasn’t enough that she tried to make my team lose at the Junior Equestrian Regionals or that she made me miserable during Mr. Conner’s clinic. Now she lives here too.”
Paige shook her head. “I can’t believe she got assigned to Winchester.”
“She even got her own room. Two. Doors. Away.”
“That’s not fair.” Paige frowned. “But I guess it’s hard to switch schools in the middle of the semester. Livvie probably thought it would be stressful for Jas to move in with a girl she’d never talked to before. Even you and I got to e-mail over the summer before school started so we could get to know each other, remember?”
I kicked off my boots and rummaged through my closet for clean clothes. “No way Jas would ever worry about a roommate. Trust me.”
Paige shrugged. “Maybe not.” She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but stopped.
I knew Paige thought I was just angry about Jasmine—she didn’t know what had happened with Callie and Jacob. But I wasn’t quite ready to talk about it yet—I could barely even think about it.
I shook my head, pulling a change of clothes out of my closet. One thing was for sure—Winchester was never going to be the same.