Page 6 of The Charade
"No!" Her jaw dropped and she shook her head vigorously. "Ah, no. Definitely not."
"Really?" I frowned, surprised by the insistence in her tone. "You guys seemed close from what I saw."
Scarlett shook her head again. "Mack and I have only ever been friends."
"Was it Carter?" I asked, a hint of envy filling my stomach at the thought of them being together.
Scarlett laughed. "Yeah, no. Carter only dates supermodels."
Of course he does.
My chest fell at the thought. I mean, of course I didn't even really know the guy and we probably weren't even compatible at all, but did Scarlett have to ruin my daydreams already?
"So, is he dating a supermodel right now?" I asked.
"He was dating Sofia Cardoso until last summer when she started dating an older guy."
"TheSofia Cardoso?" My jaw dropped. "As in, the Brazilian supermodel who just did the cover of Teen Vogue this summer?"
"Yeah, that would be the one."
"And they know each other how?" I asked. I assumed it was probably because rich people all knew each other—something I was only getting my first taste of since my mom had just joined the millionaire club only recently.
"She goes here."
I stopped on the step I was on. "Sofia Cardoso goes to school here?"
"Yeah." Scarlett tossed some of her auburn hair over her shoulder with a shrug, like having a famous supermodel at our school was no biggie. "She's in a different house but she's a senior like us, and I'm pretty sure her dad is still insisting she finishes high school here instead of going online."
What?
"A-are there a lot of other people whose names we'd recognize that go to this school?" Elyse asked, on the same wavelength as me since that would have been my next question.
"You'd probably recognize some of their parents' names." Scarlett leaned against the banister. "But Sofia definitely has the most social media followers out of any of the students going here."
Which was probably in the millions.
And though the common room had made me feel so at home earlier that I'd easily slipped into a daydream, the high ceilings and ornate paintings suddenly made me feel incredibly insignificant.
Was I going to even have a chance at fitting in at this school where everyone had known each other for years? With a bunch of people whose families had always run in the same circles?
Elyse and I were probably the only ones who had never even met a famous person until the movie star Justin Banks introduced himself to us after my mom's fashion show this summer. He had asked if my mom would consider designing his fiancée's wedding gown.
I glanced around the landing that Scarlett was on, half expecting to see a famous parent walking toward us after dropping off their teen at school for the year. But I only saw a few younger girls chatting outside a door, looking like they were catching up from the summer away.
Scarlett gestured at Elyse and me to follow her toward the door where the girls were chatting.
"The headmistress is a stickler about keeping the boys from sneaking into the girls’ dormitory at night and vice versa, so this security code is private to just the girls in our house." Scarlett punched in a code to unlock the door that I now realized led to our rooms.
"So boys aren't allowed in our dorm rooms?" I asked.
Scarlett opened the heavy oak door. "They're allowed in here before curfew. They have to check in with our room mom, Heather, and the door has to stay open the whole time they're in there so she can make sure everyone’s behaving. But once ten o'clock rolls around, they need to be back in their dorms, which are on the other side of the common room."
"Has anyone ever broken the rules?" I asked, curious how a simple code could really keep the hormones at bay if a girl was to give the code to her boyfriend.
"People have tried." Scarlett led us down a long corridor with a dozen doors, one of which I assumed led to the room Elyse and I would be sharing. "But an alarm goes off on the dorm parents’ phones if the door is open after curfew, so not many people dare attempt anything anymore."
"Modern technology for the win, huh?" Elyse said.
