The Fated Fire Princess

The Boy Next Door

Jack’s POV

On a good day, I don’t have a single conversation with my father.

It works best for us that way. If we talk, he gets mad, and when he gets mad, well, he gets violent.

For the first few years I knew Harper, I was able to make up excuses for the black eyes and bruised ribs. I was a mischievous enough kid, especially once I met Harper and Effie and started getting into trouble with them. It was believable to Harper, at first, that I injured myself doing various illicit activities in construction zones or forbidden areas within the HQ. 

But Harper is smart—smarter than the faculty and staff at the Academy, I assume, since none of them have ever questioned my stories and she has. By the time we hit our teenage years, she stopped buying my stories.

“He hurts you,” she said one evening when I came to her parents’ suite in the Manor to avoid the painfully close quarters my own family has in our little cottage down the street. “Why?”

I don’t know why, exactly, my father hurts me. Never have. He was a tough guy in high school—a jock, like Logan Townsend and his crew. Maybe he’s disappointed in me for being such a dork in comparison. Maybe he’s just miserable and angry because he’s a janitor and his wife works in a school cafeteria. Maybe it’s something else altogether.

That day, it’s because my mother comes home late from work.

I know what you’re thinking—what does my mother’s schedule have to do with my father beating me?

Well, I’m not about to let him beat her. He’s tried that once or twice, and scrawny as I may be, I had no problem ramming myself into him at full force to get him away from her. He beat me to a pulp afterwards, of course, but he didn’t touch her. Ever since then, it’s become something of an understanding: when she upsets him, I step in before things get violent, and he takes it out on me, instead.

“You shouldn’t do that,” my mother says quietly to me. He’s gone now; after delivering a particularly painful hit to my left eye, which sent me staggering to the ground, he grabbed a bottle of tequila and stormed out of the house. Now it’s just the two of us.

“What would you have me do instead, Ma? Nothing?”

“I’m the one who deserves it. I’m the one who made the bad call of marrying the man. You didn’t have any say in who your father was.”

She’s right about that; then again, if she hadn’t chosen him, I wouldn’t exist. “Well, I’m sure you didn’t think he’d hurt you when he married you.” At least, I hope so.

She bites her lip as she blinks back tears. My mom has pretty eyes—the same greenish hazel as mine—that sometimes you forget to notice when you look at her. Her bushy mane of mousy brown hair—just a bit darker than mine—tends to stick to her temples with the nervous sweat she builds up during the day, when it’s not hidden behind her lunch lady hairnets. And her frown lines have set in deep, dark wrinkles along her once beautiful face.

“I’m such a bad mother,” she whispers. “I should get you out of here.”

Instantly, my heart rate quickens. Out of here? That’s the last thing I want. I might be a total outsider at Farnethia Academy—one of very few regulars amongst a sea of Farnethians—but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Their culture, history, and lifestyle are fascinating to me, but most importantly, I would never want to leave Harper.

“I don’t want to get out of here,” I tell her. “Why can’t we just kick him out of here?”

“You know we can’t do that. We wouldn’t have enough money to survive, for starters.”

“That’s not true. Our house is a part of the HQ, which means the property is owned by the Farnethia Project. They would never kick us out just because we couldn’t afford rent. If they tried, Nell and Milo would…” 

I trail off when I see her expression darken. She doesn’t like hearing about Nell and Milo. The beautiful, powerful, famous couple, who are such wonderful parents to their daughter Harper, are everything my own parents aren’t. She’s jealous of Nell, to be sure, but it’s more than that. She’s jealous of the entire family.

Well, so am I.

But more than that, I just want to be a part of it.

It’s hard to tell how Nell and Milo feel about me. Milo likes me, I think. Being a true Farnethian, he finds Earthlings fascinating. Whenever I’m over, he asks me questions about my upbringing and my thoughts on certain practices or habits of Earthlings. Nell, though… Well, she seems to find me as boring as her daughter seems to find Logan.

To some extent, I get it. Nell was born on Earth, then traveled to Farnethia on her eighteenth birthday. Her return to Earth must have been a letdown, after getting just a brief taste of the wonder that was magic. I probably serve as a reminder of that letdown.

I wish she liked me, though. I can tell how much Nell’s approval means to Harper.

Sensing that the conversation with my mother isn’t really going anywhere, and knowing that my father will be out drinking for the foreseeable future, I decide to leave, too.

I probably shouldn’t go to Harper’s, I suppose. She’d take one look at my rapidly reddening eye and either burst into tears or a spew of foul language—it’s about a fifty-fifty trade-off, whether my bruises make her mad or angry. She’ll demand me to let her go to her parents about my parents, I’ll say no, and a fight will ensue.

I sort of have to go to her, though. I don’t own makeup; I have no means of covering this. I always go to Harper to help me hide them, and angry or sad as she may be, she always does.

“I just want what’s best for you,” she always tells me once she calms down. “I just… don’t think it’s this.”

She’s right, of course. But I’m not sure there’s anything any of us can do about it.

The Farnethia HQ, if you haven’t figured this out yet, is basically a gigantic plot of land that consists of the Farnethia Manor, the Farnethia Museum, the Farnethia Academy, and a handful of other standalone homes, barns, and libraries. My parents live in a standalone cottage just down the road from the Manor, which is where Harper, Effie, Logan, and pretty much all Farnethian kids from the Academy live. If you live in a cottage like me, you’re probably a regular—that, or the help.

Or both.

I don’t even make it halfway to the Manor before I get the nagging feeling that I’m being followed.

I glance around, scanning my surroundings carefully. New Zealand’s South Island is known for its breathtaking geography, and our plot is no different—hilly and green, with rich soil and flowers everywhere. It would be easy for someone to hide in the trees, if they wanted.

I squint harder into the tree line and, for a split second, find what I’m looking for: a flash blond hair and blue eyes that are looking right back at me. It’s a man, though he has long hair like a woman’s, and seems lighter and nimbler than most men.

As soon as our eyes meet, he looks away and disappears further into the woods.

I shiver as I continue on to the Manor.

Weird.