Chapter 1
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
“A roommate?” My heart races as I glance back at the waiting line full of frowns and tapping feet. I’m taking too long. Day one, and the spotlight is already on me. The exact situation I need to avoid as long as I’m at Valentine Academy for Boys.
My accidental nervous outburst forces my fourth-year orientation leader to finally glance up from his clipboard. He rules above me from a cocktail table at the back ballroom wall. Of course this academy hosts orientation in a literal ballroom. His plastic smile and dress shirt are properly buttoned to the neck, and his name tag claims he’s called Maverick.
“Room 503,” Maverick says, leaning forward to hand me a key. I instinctively take a step back to maintain the space between us. “You’ve been assigned to a double room. You’re in Philautia Residence Hall. My floor.”
I push my glasses farther up my nose to inspect the key, which is the size of my fist and made out of brass. “Your floor?”
“Yes, I’m your residential retainer.”
“Sorry, my what?”
“Residential retainer,” Maverick repeats. No explanation. Second years should know this by now. An RA, maybe, but for fancy schools?
“I apologize for the inconvenience,” I try to say calmly, setting the key back on the table, “but I believe I paid the extra fee to reserve a single room.”
It’s a fact. On top of studying nonstop for Valentine’s entrance exams and crafting a perfect portfolio for their Excellence Scholarship application, my summer break consisted of tutoring nearly every elementary schooler in Queens to afford the extra fee for this room. Hard to forget that.
From his cocktail table throne, Maverick scans the parents and students waiting behind us. “It’d be best to discuss this with your caregivers.”
Today would be easier if Mom were here. It’s not like I chose to be alone after my four-hour train ride to middle-of-nowhere upstate New York—Au Sable Forks, population 55. But some parents can’t miss work if they want to pay rent, Maverick.
“She didn’t come with me,” I say.
“Remind me of your name again?”
“Charlie.”
“Last?”
“Von Hevringprinz.”
“Quite a long one you got.”
Never heard that one before, Maverick. “Mhm.”
“If you had paid for a single, then that would be marked here.” He holds up his clipboard and points at my name. “I, too, apologize for the inconvenience.”
Second year and double are marked on the spreadsheet.
Then there’s been a huge mistake. “Would you mind double-checking with the office?”
Maverick rapidly rips a sticky note off a nearby stack like I struck a nerve by questioning his authority as a measly underclassman. “I’ll note it. Large requests like these can only be approved by the principal. What was the reason you listed for requesting a single?”
“Um. Personal reasons.”
His impenetrable smile falls a centimeter. He’s heard that excuse a hundred times, but I’m not about to tell him or anyone else here the real reason. “Since all other rooms have been reserved, you’ll need to stay with your assigned roommate in the meantime.”
“How long will it take?”
Instead of answering, Maverick pulls a wicker basket of phones out from under the table and slaps it down in front of me. “All electronics, please.”
Delilah warned me about the phone ransack. I just didn’t realize it would be so soon. I hesitantly drop in my phone. “I don’t get this back until winter break?”
“If there’s an emergency, the office will happily accommodate you.”
“Right, but—”
“As you should know, we have a history of celebrating Saint Valentine’s lifelong passion for love through our own passion—for learning. This academy is for traditional, intensive study, and all electronic and internet access is limited as such.” After his clearly rehearsed speech, Maverick takes a long look at my basic black T-shirt and jeans that are still too long for comfort despite being cuffed. “And, once checked into your room, students must change into proper uniform.”
“I didn’t know,” I mutter, crossing my arms enough to cover my chest.
How could I? Most people don’t know what goes on behind Valentine Academy’s ivy walls. The outside world only knows that students from here end up in top-tier universities.
Even with Mom and Delilah’s combined wisdom, I feel lost.
“All campus guidelines are in your package.” He hands me a bound stack of paperwork with my full name sticky-noted on top. “Class schedules will be delivered tomorrow morning. Welcome to Valentine.”
* * *
Philautia Residence Hall is the missing piece of a castle.
Rather, a cobblestone tower with turret-like domes that screams early 1800s. Seven metal statues of Saint Valentine, the celebrated man himself, guard the front arch. Some pose with palm branches. Others outstretch their arms in cleric robes. A sign beneath is inscribed with LOVE IS PATIENT, LOVE IS KIND.
A chill rushes through me as I head into the lobby. Thankfully, there aren’t more statues of old men advertising love to the academy’s underage population. Just cedar benches that belong in a glamping cabin and tickle my nose with their faint earthy scent. Chandeliers twinkle above me as I follow a path made by a mahogany rug to a vacant winding staircase at the back.
After five flights, I stand before an absurdly long hallway punctuated with thick wooden doors. The stone-tiled floor is adorned by yet another rug, and the embossed art nouveau wallpaper effortlessly reminds me that this academy was resurrected in 1899. Once I reach the end, I spot the placard I’m looking for.
ROOM 503.
On the door is an intricate engraving of the same crest printed on half of Mom’s sweatshirts. Gold paint accents the VALENTINE ACADEMY FOR BOYS and NAM AMOR TRADITIONALIS EDUCATIONIS running along the top and bottom, and red fills the inner heart design. An arrow brutally stabs through the center.
Beyond this hallway is my roommate. Someone who could discover the truth easier than anyone else here.
“But, man, the blockade.”
“You think G cares?”
I look toward the voices. Two classmates wearing Valentine crest sweatshirts step out of Room 506. As they pass by, one spots me staring and goes in for a handshake. A bro kind.
My panic takes over, making me nearly black out as I floppily twist my hand around his own. He stares a beat too long to be considered normal before he silently continues to the staircase with his friend.
Awesome. Great work.
Re-collecting myself with a breath, I shove my room key into the lock.
The door creaks open, revealing twin beds with the crest on the quilts, cedar wood dressers and desks, and dome windows with velvet red drapes. What’s most jarring is the wallpaper—a repeating pansy bouquet pattern, casting the room in shades of pink and puke green.
No roommate.
The knot in my stomach unravels. He isn’t here. Yet.
Although one side has already been claimed. The bigger side, flaunting a longer wall that allows the bed, dresser, and desk space to spread out, unlike the other. Of course.
Three stacked suitcases of increasing size are beside his bed. No, trunks. Old-timey and leather with brass hinges and everything. Books are scattered along his desk and the floor, flowing onto my side.
Who is this guy? Is he eighty?
Kicking his books out of the way, I toss my five-pound package detailing all the school’s guidelines on the desk that’s apparently mine, then roll my suitcase up to the accompanying bed. When I throw myself on top, my body sinks deep into the ridiculously plush, thousand-dollar mattress. I try to adjust so I don’t drown in my own bed but eventually give up.
I’m alone. In my new room. I cast an arm over my face to block out the world. The fears I’ve shoved down since orientation rush to the surface. My plan to lie low like Mom suggested was already nearly ruined by a handshake.
A handshake.
I feel like I’m twelve again, back when Mom first took me to Valentine’s brother campus for their Hamlet production. The boys who sat beside us used words I’d never heard, messed with each other in ways they innately knew how to, like a magic spell. All I could think was how much I wanted to be put under it too. At first, I assumed since Mom had been an Excellence Scholar on their nearby sister campus, that unshakable feeling was because I belonged at Valentine too. I went to their Shakespeare and Classics camp two years later. Stayed in the sister campus residential hall and fell in love with how much I learned. And realized the truth. I didn’t only want to go to Valentine because of Mom or the education.
I’d been drawn to those boys because I wanted to be a boy. Because I was a boy.
A burst of orientation chatter beyond the window brings the world rushing back around me. Lifting my glasses to scrub my face, I open my eyes again.
A poster of a white teenage boy on the ceiling smiles back.
I jolt and grip the bed. He wears an aloha shirt with half the buttons undone, and a parrot perches on his shoulder. Large cursive text placed across his chest reads Sexiest Poet of the Year. That face is familiar. Too familiar.
My pulse spikes as I hop on top of the mattress to get a better look.
He looks older than when we met at fourteen. His hair is longer, flowing to his shoulders, but I could never forget those blazing blue irises and upturned nose. I check the ceiling above the other bed. Another poster of the same blond, smirking in a tuxedo.
He became a model in the last two years. Or a famous poet. Or both. He was the most talented student during that poetry workshop I was forced to take at Shakespeare and Classics camp. Subjectively, at least. To others.
I’m trapped with a roommate who’s his diehard stan? Him, of all obnoxiously vain people?
Vain. The word clicks something into place for me.
He was the vainest at camp. He would hang up posters of himself.
Maybe this isn’t a stan.
I rush over to my roommate’s desk and rummage through the stacked composition notebooks. A name, an address, something to identify the person I’ll spend every night with for who knows how long? When I open up the third notebook, I go still at the name on the corner.
The only name who would know the truth regardless of how well I hide. Who stole my first kiss and shattered my heart, and who can expose whatever he’d like as soon as he sees me.
Jasper Grimes.
Chapter 2PARADISE LOST
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
Delilah spits out her energy drink. “A roommate?”
I grimace at the regurgitated green liquid on the grass. “That’s what I told them.”
“You paid for a single room,” she says, raising her bumpy nose at me, the only physical similarity we share as best friends. While I can barely control my dark curls, she complains about her blond hair lying too flat. While I have boxes for brows, she’s never had to pluck hers. While Delilah was taller than me by an inch when we met at camp, my shoe inserts shoot me up enough to be the tall one now.
“I also tried to tell them that,” I say.
Digging her stiletto acrylics so hard into her drink that the aluminum crinkles, Delilah leans against the soaring brick wall dividing our brother and sister campuses.
A few parents and students passing through the wall’s gate stare at Delilah’s palpable dark aura the longer she emanates her fury.
My shoulders tense. The focus isn’t on me, but still. “People are watching.”
“Enjoy the show,” Delilah barks at the setting sun and courtyard, where an unsettling séance circle of cupid statues inside a marble fountain shoot water from their arrows. “How dare they shove a roommate on you?”
I haven’t even told her the worst part: It’s Jasper Grimes, the asshole who had me bawling my eyes out to her at the end of summer two years ago.
Delilah has “accidentally” committed arson on oak trees in the surrounding Au Sable Forks woods more times than I’ve seen her in person since camp—twice. Both were a result of her angrily monologuing about Valentine’s strictness and chucking around sparklers that she snuck into camp. Since she’s upset now, I need to assess that anger on a range from tree arson to whole planet arson before I tell her the entire story. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t have any sparklers handy. But with Delilah, you never really know.
“I can’t even help you,” Delilah goes on. “My academy is right there, but it’s basically not with this cockblockade in the way.”
“The what?”
“This wall between us! We all call it that.” She smacks the palm of her hand against the brick wall.
Yet another word I don’t know. Delilah already informed me that summer campers never learn the real campus slang, like how both academy courtyards are the Halos due to their circular shapes and the chocolate-caramel lattes sold at the coffee stands are Jesuses because they taste as good as him. Or something. Cockblockade, however, evaded me.
At least I was familiar with how traditionally the academies operate, even after the recent Saint Valentine’s to Valentine Academy rebrand—an attempt to separate from its religious-focused origins. At camp, everyone attended workshops on the sister campus but slept in their respective residential halls on very-most-opposite map corners, split by this wall. As students now, we only get free rein today and during some winter mixer—which Delilah claims is our sole time to celebrate after months of studying, and which I’ll unquestionably avoid.
Delilah smacks the wall again for dramatic emphasis, pulling me back.
Whole-planet-arson status it is. The best course of action is to wait to share the details on my roommate situation. “My residential retainer said he’d check with the office about a single,” I say. “It’ll be fine.”
“Good. Or I’ll set them on fire.”
“Do not.”
“We’ll see.”
I tug on my left suspender strap. The fact that we need to be in uniforms the moment we’re assigned to rooms—a black-and-red plaid blazer with the Valentine crest on the lapel, matching plaid slacks, bright red button-down shirt, and black ties spawned from the depths of ugly Hell—is cruel. “Do I look like a guy in this uniform?”
“You are a guy.”
“But like.” I wiggle the dress shoes hanging off my feet, which I purposely ordered a size too large. Not my smartest move, but fearing that everyone would notice I have the smallest feet on campus beat my logic. “You know.”
Delilah crosses her arms in her much more aesthetically pleasing uniform. While I look drenched in fresh blood in my suit, she gets a pastel blazer and a plaid skirt that falls to her knee-high stockings. The reminder of how aggressively the brother and sister uniforms play into stereotypes isn’t a thrilling one.
“I thought you finally felt good about this stuff,” she says.
“I did. I do. Sort of.”
“You deferred your acceptance here for a reason.”
I did. To take online classes for a year. To figure out guy clothes and guy hair and other ways to survive, all in the privacy of my bedroom. But. “I guess.”
“No one’s gonna find out. How would they know?”
Jasper Grimes would know.
If he tells anyone, it’s over. The guidance package doesn’t mention transgender students, but that’s the problem. They only use the old church as a bell tower now, but when Mom studied here, going to church was mandatory on Fridays at nine o’clock. She took religion like other students took math. And whenever I visited Valentine before, not a single student struck me as someone who may need updated guidelines for the same reason I do.
Hence, keeping my head down.
“I just have a bad feeling all this will pile up,” I say. “And I’m worried I might not rank top five of my class.”
“Please, you’re the smartest person I know.”
The compliment only briefly warms my chest. Delilah could never understand the fear of losing a scholarship. Although both our parents went to Valentine, hers are doctors drowning in money. Mom was also an Excellence Scholar and now owns a bookshop that, although it’s a cornerstone of the Queens community, is drowning in debt—an anomaly when Valentine alumni get an unofficial fast pass to any Ivy they wish. But Mom wished for her dream instead. “My scholarship depends on it.”
“I mean, I get that. If I want to be able to run for the student council board this year, then I have to rank within the top fifteen of my own class.”
I nod, even though I barely take in what she says.
Delilah sighs, and it comes out a bit irritated and short. A piece of me wants to ask what’s going on, but she distracts me by continuing to talk. “I’m just trying to say that I hear you. About the pressure. I’d back out now if you don’t want this.”
“No,” I say, playing with Mom’s varsity Valentine ring on my finger. “I want it.”
Even more than that. When Grandma and Grandpa were alive, they would ramble about how proud they were of Mom to have scored this scholarship—and when she wasn’t around, how it was “wasted” on a tanking bookstore.
And then there’s Mom. At first, I applied without telling her, assuming the odds of being chosen as one of their Excellence Scholars were microscopically low, and that she would be crushed if I got her hopes up. Once they emailed me that my scholarship was still on the table after I deferred and came clean to her, though, she didn’t cheer like I expected. She only frowned, knowing full well that I would need to stay on the boys’ campus for reasons that might not thrill administration. She insisted there had to be other Ivy feeders in the region besides the one she went to—that I could apply elsewhere, to a place that wouldn’t pose as much risk.
But Valentine is where I realized I was a boy. It’s called out to me all my life, insisting I belong here. It had to be this campus. This academy. After four attempts at explaining this to Mom—alongside reminding her how this life-changing education pointed her toward her love of books and, ultimately, mine—she let go of enough worry to give a hesitant seal of approval.
Yet I’m already facing problems one day in. Exactly like Mom worried about.
“But look how terrified you are,” Delilah says.
“I’m not terrified.”
Delilah points at my hand. It’s shaking.
I drop my arm. “I’ve dreamed of studying here forever. Academics that’ll actually challenge me, and on the boys’ side of campus. I never thought I’d be able to…” I trail off, recalling the worst roommate I could’ve been assigned who might blow up this dream.
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