CHAPTER 4: Goodbye Forever

CHAPTER 4: Goodbye Forever

POV: Ivy Bennett

I dragged my heavy suitcase toward the bus terminal and stood under the small plastic awning while a few other passengers started to queue up by the boarding gate, and the water was falling fast from the sky, making large puddles on the concrete pavement while the bus driver opened the lower luggage compartment to take the bags.

"Are you really leaving without saying a single word to anyone else, Ivy?" Noah asked as he walked up quickly behind me and stopped a few feet away, and his clothes were completely wet, and he was breathing heavily as if he had been running down the street for a long time just to catch up with me.

"There is nothing left for me to say to anyone in this town, Noah, because you and the entire school already decided that I was a criminal," I said, turning around to face him while the driver took a ticket from the passenger ahead of me. "You got exactly what you wanted from that disciplinary board hearing, and your hockey team is completely safe from suspension now, so I really do not know why you are even out here right now instead of celebrating with your friends."

"I saw you walking down the main road with your bags from my car window, and I just needed to ask you one more time if you really did it," Noah said, and he looked much less confident than he did during the hearing, and his voice was shaking a little bit. "Something about the way Chloe was celebrating with my brother Julian at our house tonight felt very wrong to me, and they were talking about internships and school files, so I need to hear the truth from you right now without the coach or the principal around us."

"I told you the truth in the principal's office, and I told you the truth in front of the whole school inside the auditorium, but you chose to believe a set of fake files and a girl who wanted a corporate favor from your older brother," I replied, and I handed my printed ticket to the driver, who nodded his head and told me to step inside the vehicle. "It does not matter what you believe anymore, Noah, because my reputation is already gone, and the school board has already expelled me, so I am leaving this place tonight and I am never coming back."

"Ivy, wait, if Julian is actually involved in this exam leak, you need to tell me everything right now because my family has a lot of influence," Noah said, and he reached out his hand toward my arm to stop me from moving, but his hand stopped in mid-air and he dropped it back to his side as my phone began to ring very loudly inside my jacket pocket.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket and looked down at the screen, and it displayed a very long international phone number that I had not seen in over five years, and I knew exactly who it belonged to.

"You should just go back to your team party, Noah, because your brother has already taken care of everything, and we have absolutely nothing left to talk about," I said, and I stepped up onto the metal steps of the bus and took the nearest empty seat right by the window while the driver started up the engine and the whole vehicle began to vibrate.

"Ivy, is that you on the line?" a deep, older voice asked through the phone speaker, and the loud sound of it made me grip the plastic casing tightly against my ear so I would not miss a single word.

"Grandfather?" I whispered back into the receiver, and I looked out the glass window to see Noah still standing alone on the wet pavement, and he was watching the bus pull away from the concrete curb slowly. "I did not think you ever wanted to speak to me again after my mother left the family estate and cut off all contact with New York."

"Your mother made her own personal choices, Ivy, but I have been keeping tabs on you at that academy through my associates, and I know exactly what happened to you today with the Kingsley family and their corrupt school board," my grandfather stated, and his voice sounded exactly like it did when he was running his large corporate boardrooms in the city. "Those people think they can treat you like an ordinary scholarship student just because you used your mother's maiden name to register for classes, but it is finally time for you to come home and claim what is rightfully yours."

"I do not want your money, Grandfather, and I just want to forget everything about this school and start over somewhere else where nobody knows my face or my past," I said, watching Noah's tall figure grow smaller and smaller as the bus moved further down the dark street.

"You do not understand the true situation yet, Ivy, because your mother's personal trust fund was tied directly into the primary holding company that funds the entire Kingsley development project," my grandfather explained, and I could hear him tapping his fingers against his office table on the other side of the line. "Your legal inheritance matured on your eighteenth birthday last week, and that means you now hold a fifty-one percent controlling stake in the parent corporation that owns the land, the buildings, and the entire annual budget of Kingsley Elite Academy.”