He ignored me in the hallway today. Again.

It shouldn't have hurt as much as it did, but as I stared around at all the coupled up seniors making plans to go to college together after the school year was over, kissing and hugging and PDA'ing all over the place, I realized that I wanted that, too.

I had that, just not here. Not at school, not in public, not ever.

It was always in the soft quiet of his bedroom, in the afterglow of bliss and ecstasy as the steam off our bodies cooled and he tugged me into his side, fingers caressing the skin of my arms as I unloaded the things my foster parents had done that day and he shared his football stresses with me.

Every night of the week I'd stayed with him for two straight months, and while we weren't dating, we had made it very clear that we weren't seeing anyone else, either.

So why did he have his arm wrapped lazily around Leah Maren's shoulder in the hallway after blatantly ignoring me?

"Hello? Earth to Cami? Anyone in there?"

I flinched as my best friend's hand waved back and forth unceremoniously between herself and my eyes.

"Sorry, Mo. Just got distracted. What did you say?"

"I asked you if you were going to the elective field trip museum thing. You told me Friday you'd let me know if David or Nina signed the form, but you never got back to me."

I cringed at the sound of my foster parent's names coming from my best friend's mouth, but I hadn't informed her of how bad the situation at 'home' had gotten.

"The permission slip is in my bag and ready to go," I told her proudly, jutting my chin up and plastered a smile on my face that I really tried not to let slip as the person in question I couldn't take my eyes off of removed his arm from Leah's shoulder and instead began faux wrestling with his best friend.

Mo's dark, charcoal lined eyes twitched and crinkled at the edges, almost like she didn't believe me, but her doubt dissipated in a cloud of male testosterone and Axe Body Spray as her crush began sauntering toward us, in line with the rest of their friend group.

Suddenly, the air in my lungs froze, the oxygen frosted over with ice crystals that kept me from inhaling a single breath to keep my brain working properly.

Colton—my Colton—was making eye contact with me.

This is NOT a drill, I repeat—THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

I barely had a moment to register the cacophony of students blathering on with gossip or even pretend that I was busy with something at my natural mahogany wood locker (because of course the fancy rich prep school had to have wooden lockers) before Colton strolled down the hallways of Hartingrove Academy as if he owned the whole place.

He was close to owning the whole damn place—his best friend and reigning homecoming king (and captain of the football team where he was the quarterback, as well as student body president and prom king shoo-in, as well as...well, you get the picture) was the son of the dean.

Technically, being besties with the dean's son shouldn't have allowed preferential treatment, but, well, nepotism was clearly alive and well even if they wouldn't admit it.

"Cam, why is Colton Wright staring at you?"

I had no fucking clue.

Normally, he went on his own way at school and I followed his lead.

We never talked about it in the faint glow of the orange streetlight lamps that seeped through his dark grey curtains over his windows.

We discussed his football games, his anger at teammates and coaches, stress about his ACL injury that kept him in the ice bath longer than necessary, and we briefly talked about my foster family and how I wished I could just run away.

Once things veered into darker territory, however, I always turned the conversation to something funny or weird, or even sexual. Anything to avoid talking about what was going on at home.

He was my distraction and my safe haven.

And what we had was good.

It wasn't like I was in love with him, and we kept to ourselves at school and in public, but I couldn't lie to myself and say that I wouldn't want something like that for myself, even with him.

Especially with him.

Chestnut brown hair glided over his forehead in a swooping cut, brushing his eyebrows that framed picture perfect brown eyes.

Fresh faced and without any stubble, Colton Wright's appearance was always purely put together and yet effortless at the exact same time, like he had just stumbled out of bed, but after waking up with him countless mornings, I knew that there was so much effort put into that artful sweep of hair and his outfit selection.

Grey sweatpants, trending sneakers and a game-day t-shirt with a matching hoodie thrown on top, Colton was the epitome of every student athlete at Hartingrove.

The football players were allowed to 'dress out' on game-days, all the while the rest of us were stuck in our uniforms—the classic white button up, black pleated skirt or pants, black tie for boys and a black blazer for girl.

I gingerly touched the dark strands of my hair between my fingers, realizing that I should've taken Colton up on his offer for that shower with him this morning instead of using the last dregs of my dry shampoo bottle.

My hair was never glossy and smooth, but rather a cheap imitation with dollar store products that harmed more than cleansed, but I didn't have much choice in the matter.

I had no car, no job, and a foster family that didn't want me, so my hair care options were limited to stealing Colton's professional salon quality products in the shower when he wasn't looking, which, unfortunately for me wasn't often considering he used every option he had in order to see me naked, even after two months of basically living together.

Not once in those entire two months, however, had he ever met my eyes out in public and not immediately looked away.

"Scholarship pussy!"

I cringed out of my daydreaming as Carter Jennings whooped and hollered at the two girls struck dumb in the middle of the hallway while the "golden boys" glided along.

I bet you can guess the two girls he was referring to.

A piece of the school's 'inclusivity and diversity' endeavors, Mori Catawnee, more fondly known as Mo, represented the first Native American to attend Hartingrove, which basically meant that the school needed a quota of students from a designated number of national or ethnic groups.

Me? I represented the population of foster kids in need. There were plenty to choose from but my grades were the deciding factor.

In other other words, the school was way too white, and didn't have enough poor people attending.

My goal was to escape hell—I mean, high school—with a 4.0 GPA and attend a prestigious college on yet another scholarship which included not only tuition but housing and a meal plan as well, so I only had to pay for extras. If I had a place to live and food in my stomach, I could survive just about anything.

I had so far with much less, at least.

So yeah, we could be classified as "scholarship pussy" but it wasn't like Carter Jennings was ever going to get to see it.

I turned my head to gauge Colton's reaction but he only slapped his buddy on the shoulder and kept walking with a boisterous laugh spewing from his mouth that was supposed to be only reserved for our secret tickle fights or when I was being particularly weird with him one night.

Not when he was blatantly making fun of me and my best friend in front of the rest of the school.

His other friends paid us no mind, except for Colton's best friend, the dean's son, all around perfect golden student who was apparently the only one in my way for achieving that coveted valedictorian spot—Parker Hartingrove (yes, the school was named after his ancestors)—who had his eyes trained on the scene his friends were making with something akin to disgust in his dark brown eyes.

The boys, ranging from football gods to the captain of the basketball team to the school's starting pitcher in baseball and a lone lacrosse star sprinkled somewhere in there, they had everything covered, except, maybe the swoon-worthy bad boy of the group.

No, he was the "outcast", nothing swoon-worthy about an actual alcoholic quiet badboy that frequently vandalized the school property yet still was allowed to keep his spot at the school.

Why? Because he was in the exclusive category of "privileged." He was Parker Hartingrove's brother, Grey Hartingrove, and everyone I knew kept their distance from him, myself included.

The group most likely didn't even need a "bad boy" for their ranks, however, because they were all bad—in their own way.

I turned my heated, humiliated face from the boys who took up far too much space in the hallway as Colton Wright, Carter Jennings, Alec Reed, Nate Covington, and Parker Hartingrove shoved stragglers up against their lockers to make room for them.

Leah Maren caught up with them at the last minute and threw her arms around Colton's shoulders from behind just as he passed me.

I turned and locked eyes with him once more as she said something to him not-so-quietly that had me deflating like an old, withered balloon.

"Guess who got the key to the supply closet?"

My face a perfect blank mask, I grabbed my things from my locker, slammed it shut, and shoulder checked the boy who had supposedly saved me from my wrecked life.

Now? I had no idea what I was going to do. He wasn't technically cheating on me, but I needed to have more respect for myself than to let him play games with my mind.

Mo caught up to me, a surprised and half scared look crossing over her features, and I pushed down the pain long enough to make it seem like I was fine, when I was anything but.

"What was that about?"

"What, that? Those assholes think they can block the hallways, it's so annoying."

Mori didn't know about my fling with Colton, didn't know that I was virtually homeless aside from the times my foster family forced me to go back because they could smell a social services home visit coming.

It was like they were sharks and the home visits were blood in the water. It freaked me out how perfectly they could anticipate those visits and put on the perfect facade of a good foster family.

Mo thought I was a perfectly happy person, and I didn't want to see the pity in her eyes when she realized that wasn't the case. It wasn't like her family had the room to take me in, either, but I sometimes silently wished that Mo would see under the surface and realize that I wasn't okay, that I was staying with a boy who ridiculed me in public just so I'd have somewhere safe to sleep at night.

I was just about to turn my phone off for homeroom, the only class we would be attending before our class trip to the National Museum for the Arts, when a text came through from Colton.

I turned my phone off before he had the chance to reply and pushed down the roiling queasy nausea threatening to burst forth from my stomach and linked arms with Mo before entering homeroom, avoiding eye contact with the rest of the students who would be attending the class trip.

Parker, the main ringleader of his group, was front and center unlike the rest of his friends who were most likely getting trashed in the supply closet if Colton was to be believed.

I would've wondered why Parker wasn't joining in on the fun before that little exchange in the hallway, but I was suddenly too tired to care.

Parker's light blonde hair was so at war with the sharp angular cheekbones adorning his face and the slightly darker eyebrows above icy eyes.

The back of his head was the last thing I saw before Colton strolled through the door, swaying slightly on his feet, with a giggling Leah hanging off his arm.

I would've thought 'kill me now' if I believed that this class trip wouldn't already do the job for me.