“My what?”
Suddenly, Anders was shoved from the side, away from me.
“Leave her alone, you nugget!” A tall, thin guy was now standing between us. Stuart.
Anders made as innocent a face as he could muster. “I was only askin’,” he said. “It’s a perfectly natural question. I mean, look at them, they’re huge!”
I realized that Anders had been talking about—well, talking to—my breasts, and my entire face got so hot, I worried it might catch fire.
“You’re so rude,” Stuart continued. Stuart was a good seven inches taller than Anders, and Anders took a step back. “Don’t you know how to talk to a lady? I thought you were a baron or something.”
“Lord,” Anders spat out. “I’m a lord. And I would definitely know how to talk to a lady . . . if I saw one. But all I see here are girls. Wee girls, although some of ’em are a bit bigger than—”
Stuart gave Anders another shove, causing him to swallow the end of his sentence. Anders stumbled, recovered, and then started down the hall. After a couple of steps, he stopped, turned around completely composed, smiled, and said, “Come now,” and held out his arm. To my amazement, Elsie grabbed it. She and the other girls left with him.
“You’re mental!” Jo slapped playfully at Stuart. She turned to me. “‘Mental’ means ‘tough,’ by the way.”
Good to know, I thought. Although the American meaning would work just as well for these Scottish boys.
“If he’s such a jerk, why do girls like him?” I asked.
“Because he’s rich,” Stuart answered. “Most girls would love to be his girlfriend, because they know if he married them someday, they’d pretty much be royalty.”
“Who cares about being rich?” I asked. “I mean, I wish I had tons of money, but I would never marry a creep for his.”
“You have no idea how rich Anders Campbell is,” Jo said. “He’s not sports-car-and-mansion rich, he’s castle-and-landed-title rich. Not that I’m into that, either,” she added, shooting a worried look at Stuart. “I’m just saying . . .”
“What does that mean, ‘landed-title rich’?” I asked.
“His family is one of the most powerful in the Highlands,” Stuart explained. “Up until just a few years ago, we all paid taxes to them.”
“Lies!” I said.
“No, it’s the truth,” Jo answered.
Jo and Stuart walked me to the office so I could officially check in. The hallway incident had delayed us, so they had to leave me if they were going to make it to their homeroom before the first bell rang.
I got my schedule, but no map. “So I start in Room 312?” I asked the woman behind the desk. She wiggled her chins, then turned away to answer the phone.
I left the office, but as soon as I was out of sight of the doorway, I sagged against the wall. I didn’t want to be the new kid, didn’t want to be the foreign orphan everyone stared at all day. I fought a violent urge to run away.
“Are you lost?” A guy I hadn’t seen before was striding confidently toward me. He was slender, had reddish-brown hair, and was attractive, but almost in a feminine way. There was something very familiar about him. He reminded me of the British movie stars who are always getting the girl on film, but probably didn’t in real life.
“Aye,” I answered, mimicking the Scottish affirmation I’d been hearing since I arrived, and immediately regretting it because of how lame it sounded coming from my mouth. “I mean, yes. I’m lost. Sort of hopelessly.”
“You’re Maren Hamilton, aren’t you?” he asked.
“The one and only,” I mumbled.
He smiled. “Well, I’m Graham Campbell, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Campbell?” Without meaning to, I spit the word out as if it were poison. “Like Anders Campbell?”
Graham smiled even wider. “I take it that you’ve already met my cousin. And if history serves, you are probably owed an apology for whatever he said to you. Please accept mine.”
I couldn’t help but smile back. Graham was like the gentlemen in Jane Austen novels: sweet and chivalrous. He didn’t look like he could throw a punch, or survive one for that matter, but he oozed charm without even trying. I bet mothers loved him.
“Is it true what they say about your family?” I asked, unable to resist questioning someone with royal blood. As a little girl who grew up playing princess, I had to admit, I was kind of fascinated by the whole thing. “Are you really all powerful and stuff, and had people pay taxes to you?”
“Yes, it’s true,” he answered. “Why?”
“It’s just crazy, that’s all.” I shrugged. “We don’t have that kind of thing in America. It’s like something out of the Middle Ages. Do you have serfs too?” The rude comment slipped out before I could stop it.
Thankfully, Graham didn’t show the slightest sign of annoyance. “Not so much anymore.” He grinned. “You have to remember, yours is basically an infant country,” he said, somehow without making it sound like an insult. It must be the accent, I decided. Makes everything sound so much more civilized. “America has been around for, what, three hundred years? Britain has been populated for over three thousand. Change comes really slowly here. But change is good, right? I can tell you’re going to mix things up. You’ve got a fire in your belly.” He cocked his head toward me.
For the second time that morning, a warm flush fell over my body. I drew my notebooks tighter against my stomach, recalling my first nightmare in Scotland, when kissing a hot guy with red hair made my guts spill with blood.
If only you knew.
CHAPTER 7
A few days later, Jo and I were hanging out in downtown Aviemore, if it could even be called that. The main drag was only six blocks long and ended at the Tesco. There wasn’t even a stoplight.
My grandparents had insisted I stop moping around the house, and to be honest, it was nice to do something besides sit and worry, imagining a million different insane scenarios about my mother’s death and the cursed journal she sent me.
It was an unusually warm day for Scotland—a whopping 70 degrees—and we were celebrating the sun with ice cream. As much as I wanted a hard scoop of caramel mocha fudge, the only choice in town was vanilla soft serve. The clerk stuck a long piece of waxy, crumbly chocolate in it before she handed me the cone. Jo said that made it “a 99” but couldn’t explain why, since it cost more than 99 pence and it was definitely more than 99 calories.
“Your grandparents don’t have a dog, do they?” she asked, swirling her chocolate bar through her ice cream.
“No. Why?”
“I heard there’s something weird going around. People’s dogs are dying. Like, a lot of them. Stuart’s did just last night.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s terrible,” I answered. “Is it like a disease?”
“Sort of. I guess the dogs are going crazy and freaking out and strangling themselves on their collars and stuff.”