Brightly Burning Bridges: A Bully Romance (Kings of Capital)

by Ivy Wild

  “Whatever, Garrett,” I said through an inhale of my own.

  “I fucking mean it,” he replied. “You’re pussy whipped or something.”

  I turned to give him an exasperated look. “Come again.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “That joke expired in 2005.”

  Garrett shrugged. He couldn’t care less about what people thought of him and I always envied him for it. “I’m just saying, ever since you started hanging around that little albina, you’ve not been quite right.”

  “I was never hanging around her,” I said, coughing slightly on a bad drag.

  “Could have fooled me. Was she an interesting lay or something? What’s she look like down there?”

  I clenched my teeth. I knew Garrett’s remarks were harmless, but they still pissed me off. “I dunno man. She just does my homework.”

  Garrett chuckled. “And what’s in it for her? Good dick?”

  I let my head loll back in the outdoor patio chair. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “See? Pussy whipped.”

  “Give it a rest, Garrett,” I said pointedly. I was having a bad high and Garrett talking about Skyler’s pussy was not helping.

  “If you’re not dicking her, is she available?”

  I pursed my lips and if it weren’t for the drugs swimming in my system, I probably would have gotten up and punched him.

  “No,” I said instead.

  Garrett just rolled his eyes at me and I let him. I fell asleep at some point and woke to the chilling presence of my father in the house. I could see his Bentley parked in the driveway from my spot on the balcony and I snuffed the remaining embers of my joint out before throwing the ashes into a flower pot that held most of the cinders of my soul.

  Garrett was long gone and I shivered in the crisp November air. My fingers were slightly numb from the cold, but I didn’t care. I knew things with my father were going to get heated in a second and I’d be nice and warm.

  I walked inside and he was standing there, almost as if he was waiting for me.

  “Welcome back,” I said sleepily.

  “Were you smoking on the balcony again?” he asked with narrowed eyes.

  “Please don’t pretend like you’re a parent, Percy. It makes us all uncomfortable.”

  “Get in the car, we’re going to the hospital,” he barked.

  “Why?” I asked with a yawn. “It’s not like you’ve ever cared that mom was there. Why now?”

  “Just do what I say, for once in your miserable life, Silas.”

  He was right. My life was miserable.

  “I’ll drive myself, thanks,” I retorted and he opened his mouth to say something but I shut the door to my room in his face. I could hear his oversized, out of shape body bound down the stairs and I groaned. I did not want to spend time with my father. Even more than that, I did not want my father to spend time with my mother. He didn’t deserve to be around her. She’d always been too good for him.

  But as much as I was tired, coming off a high and didn’t want to be in the same room as Percy, I also didn’t want him anywhere near my mother without me being there. So, I managed to slide on a clean pair of clothes, splash cold water on my face and get myself over to the hospital, my hatred for my father driving me there.

  He was talking to one of the nurses by the time I’d arrived. I breezed past them and he reached out to try and stop me, but I pulled back just in time. “Silas,” one of the nurses called out. “It’s not a good day.”

  I was getting this more and more frequently. In fact, the last day she had been fully lucid with me was when I’d visited her with Chipotle the first time I’d met with Skyler. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  “And I told you I didn’t care,” I yelled back at her. People shushed me and gave me irritated looks as I walked down the hall, but I didn’t care. The only person I cared about was lying in bed, her brain melting away from the world and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  Mom’s diagnosis had come as a shock to all of us. I’d agreed to be tested when it was discovered and thankfully, I didn’t carry the gene. Still though, there were moments where I wish I did. Then at least she wouldn’t have to go through this alone.

  I didn’t know how I was going to process her death. I kept thinking about it, wondering what it’d be like when it happened. Wondering what I’d feel—if anything. The whole world seemed to be going numb on me lately. Nothing was fun. Nothing was exciting. I needed higher and higher highs to even be marginally amused.

  Not that anyone knew. This was all sealed beneath a smooth smile.

  People didn’t deserve to be let in to my personal life. I’d made that mistake once. I thought I could trust someone with the other side of my life and I’d been sorely mistaken.

  Some people tattoo weak shit like “Trust No One” on their biceps as a reminder. Apparently, those pussies never had someone legit betray their trust. Because, if they had, they’d never need fucking ink in their skin to remember it.

  I pushed the door open to my mom’s room. It smelled entirely too much like bleach and disinfectant, which told me things were probably really bad at the moment. My father was still talking to one of the nurses, totally unconcerned about seeing his wife. But, I preferred having time alone with her anyways.

  “Ciao, mama,” I said to her softly. She didn’t open her eyes. She just laid in bed, her lips mumbling words in Italian that I couldn’t understand. I sat next to her, held her frigid hands and just let the silence fill the room and press against my ears.

  Growing up, there had always been laughter when I was around my mother. She was vibrant, joyful and full of life. My father was never home and she always admitted to not being a good Italian mother. So we went to restaurants pretty much every day. Our favorite place was a run-down Friendly’s that had finally shuttered its doors this past month. We used to drive thirty minutes just to share a chicken tenders basket, luke-warm fries and hot fudge sundaes but damn it was my favorite.

  The door opened and my father strode inside. He didn’t say anything. He just stood at the foot of my mother’s bed and looked down at us with a mix of disgust and apathy.

  “Is anyone aware of your mother’s condition?” he asked me without a hint of sadness.

  My mind flashed briefly to Skyler. “No,” I finally replied.

  “Good. Keep it that way.”

  “Why?” I knew why my father didn’t want my mother’s condition broadcast to our high society bubble. People would talk. People would ask questions. People would gossip. He hated all of it. And he was an idiot.

  Because when people talked, it meant you were on their minds. Which meant that was an opportunity to manipulate them into thinking or saying things that would help elevate your position. Percy was a successful businessman, sure. But he’d gotten to his position based on a small family inheritance and a lot of sweat. In everything he did, he insisted on taking the hard route.

  Things could be so much easier if he’d just flex a little.

  “I don’t want people knowing that she’s ill.”

  I rolled my eyes at his thin explanation. “People are going to realize when we have a funeral. She’s not got much time left.” The words left my mouth but they didn’t register. How could they?

  “We’re not going to be holding a funeral. She wouldn’t want us to fuss over her.”

  I grit my teeth. “What the hell would you know about what she wants? And thanks for speaking about her in the past tense. She’s still fucking with us.”

  Percy scoffed. “You call this with us?” he mocked, gesturing wildly to my mother’s ailing body. “She’s already gone, Silas.”

  “She could get better. They’re doing studies—” I began to say but he cut me off.

  “They’ve been doing studies for decades and none of them have worked. Face the facts, Silas. She’s gone and there’s no bringing her back. Time for us both to move on.”

  “So, that’s it then?
That’s all you came here to do? Sign off on her death certificate prematurely?”

  “I came to pay my respects.”

  “You’re a bastard,” I seethed, flashing him a menacing look. He just rolled his eyes at me and walked out the door, leaving me alone with my mother and the silence.

  * * *

  My wrist still ached from when I’d fallen last week on my way up to the front of the classroom. Of course I suspected it was Silas, but I couldn’t prove it and he wasn’t going to fess up—or apologize.

  I hadn’t meant to start the Cold War that was currently raging between us. But when I’d gone to school on the Monday after his party, I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. All I saw when I did was the way he looked at me right before he’d stolen my first kiss.

  A girl’s first kiss wasn’t supposed to be traumatic. I’d yearned for mine since I was a little girl. All I wanted in the world was for boys to like me. Shallow, I know. But when you looked the way I did, the need to be accepted and liked burned hotter in my soul than most of my peers. It probably had something to do with the fact that my father ran out on my mother when I was born. I think that was literally the definition of “Daddy Issues.”

  When you yearn for something, you imagine it, over and over and over again. And every time you picture it, the situation gets further and further from reality. At least that’s how it is for most girls. I think this is how Bridezillas are born into the world. From young girls reimagining their weddings a million times until their vision requires a circa 2009 Taylor Swift style horse drawn carriage.

  But, to be fair to myself, my dreams about my first kiss had stayed relatively grounded. My mother always told me she’d named me after clear skies, but I rarely had my head in the clouds. Girls like me couldn’t afford to dream. Reality smacked us in the face too often for our heads to get inflated.

  However I imagined my first kiss, I did not imagine it the way Silas had delivered it. He tasted of booze, marijuana and another girl. It was awful and it flipped my stomach upside down, because even though he was vicious to me, if some higher power had given me the ability to take that kiss away, I wouldn’t. The moment his lips pressed against mine, it felt like every nerve ending in my body lit up.

  He was so beautifully damaged.

  And I was the only person he’d ever showed that side of himself to.

  Problem was, I wasn’t sure which side of Silas had kissed me.

  Not that it seemed to matter anymore. His stunt in the classroom a week ago and the way he’d laughed about it afterward told me he’d very clearly gotten over me. I should have expected the teasing to start up at some point. He was easily the most popular boy in the high school just for existing. He didn’t do any sports, he wasn’t a member of any clubs. He was just Silas Jenkins. The notorious Party King.

  Every girl wanted him and every guy wanted to be him. The only people at the school that weren’t entirely infatuated with him were himself and until recently, me. I tried to put Silas out of my mind as I made my way over to my locker to grab my books before catching the bus home.

  I kept my head down, but the hushed murmurs as I passed by in the hallways had my stomach in knots. Normally people didn’t pay much mind to me if I kept to myself. I was just the ghost of a girl that faded into whitewashed walls. So, all this attention was disconcerting.

  I rounded the corner and the world dropped from beneath my feet as I looked up. A crowd had gathered around my secluded locker spot and I suddenly understood the reason for all of the hushed whispers.

  White paint and glue had been slathered all over the front of my locker and across the windows next to it. To make matters worse, the culprit had thrown a tremendous deal of white feathers against the drying liquid. The entire area looked like a deconstructed pillow with me at the center of it.

  I decided I could do without the books in my lockers but one of the teachers spotted me and they called out my name sharply.

  “Skyler!”

  I sucked in a breath and tried to turn around and put on a fake smile. I wasn’t quite sure how Silas did it, because mine was paper thin and cracking down the center.

  “Did you do this?” It was Ms. Clifford. She was a little heavy set, with dark brown hair and naïve eyes.

  My eyes widened at her accusation. “No,” I said quietly, trying to curl in on myself as the number of onlookers increased due to the promise of drama.

  “Well, if you didn’t, who did?”

  How was she so dumb? She was supposed to be a teacher. Did she not remember that Silas had clearly tripped me in her class just a week before? Or did her students mean so little to her that she couldn’t be bothered with a severe case of bullying?

  “I don’t know,” I lied. Implicating Silas would have played out two ways. The first, is that he would have gotten called to the office, but that would only spur him on to behave worse. Unfortunately, Silas’ father donated a good deal of money to this school. There was no way that administration would even put Silas in detention, let alone suspend him.

  The second option is that I would implicate him and nothing would happen at all. And that was probably the worst of the two options. Because in Silas’ eyes, it would mean he’d won.

  So, I stayed quiet. Acted like I couldn’t possibly understand why someone would want to do something so horrendous to me and let Ms. Clifford announce my fate without due process of the law.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to clean this up, Skyler. Please call your parents and let them know they’ll have to come and pick you up later this evening once you’ve finished.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, realizing I’d be walking home again.

  “Alright everybody get to your buses please,” Ms. Clifford announced, as if any of the people attending this school didn’t have private chauffeurs or luxury sedans of their own. I stood still, my head looking down at the floor, as people passed by me with malice on their tongues.

  The whole school knew who had pulled this prank. That was just the thing about having power. When you had a certain amount of it, no one would challenge you lest you turn it on them.

  When the remainder of the student body finally cleared from my normally peaceful corner, I walked up to my locker and turned the small dial to open it. Thankfully it hadn’t been glued completely shut so with a little extra effort, I was able to get it open. A note fluttered to my feet when I pulled the feathered door open and I looked down at it.

  “You are the victim of a series of accidents,” was scribbled in blotted black ink across the torn piece of notebook paper. Something outside caught my eye through one of the gaps in the painted windows. Silas was standing there at the fountain, looking up. Our gazes met and he smirked before walking off.

  He thought he’d won.

  That I’d just fold.

  Well he was wrong.

  So very wrong.

  I grabbed the books I needed from my locker, stuffing his note into my pocket, slammed the door shut and made my way outside to catch my bus.

  Ms. Clifford could go to hell.

  And Silas Jenkins could go fuck himself.

  I was nobody’s doormat.

  Every day on my way home from school, I stopped by Silas’ front door, lifted the rubber welcome mat that screamed irony and darted away as fast as possible. I didn’t want a confrontation with him. I didn’t want to speak to him.

  I reserved all verbal battles for school.

  Where it was public.

  Where I could prove that there was one person in the fucking Academy that would challenge the Party King.

  So, I still did his homework. But, I did it strategically. He wasn’t getting one hundreds anymore. There would always be one or two questions where the answer was way off the mark. And I knew those questions and always bounced the discussion over to him, very much on purpose.

  At first, he was able to play it off. But every time he read out an answer completely unrelated to the subject, the class and th
e teacher started questioning his intelligence. Some people fight grand battles, but my tactic against Silas was much more sinister. I chipped away at the little confidence I knew he had.

  He tried to play it off like he didn’t care what people thought of him. Deep down, he was as much of a liar as I was. Unfortunately, Ms. Clifford’s planned discussion for the day didn’t focus on the readings in a way that I could showcase Silas’ lack of preparation. Instead, she’d apparently watched too many episodes of the Walking Dead and wanted to talk about what we would all do in the event of the apocalypse.

  I wasn’t sure how this related to Modern English Literature, but good thing she was able to draw the connection.

  “So, I think it would be really cool if we all arranged our desks in a circle to facilitate the discussion,” she said. We all groaned but dutifully picked up our desks and dragged them across the floor until we’d created a ring around the border of the classroom.

  I was somewhere in the middle of one of the sides, and strangely, I was okay with that. Lately, I’d been feeling more confident about myself, more able to open up during classes, more okay with people looking at me. I was starting to accept that they may not like me, the way I talked or the way I looked and I was starting to be okay with that.

  My desk was across the room from Ms. Clifford’s and just to her left, in the corner opposite me, sat Silas. His long legs stretched out beneath him as he reclined in the desk, acting like the entire class was a bore for him. At this angle, I could see beneath his desk. He had his phone out and he was clearly texting someone.

  I desperately tried not to care.

  “Alright,” Ms. Clifford said. “Now that we’re all settled, I’ll start off the conversation. The question is, ‘If you knew the apocalypse was coming and that you probably weren’t going to make it, what’s the one thing you would do before you died?’”

  I rolled my eyes. A rather morbid question for one thirty on a Friday.

  “Alice, why don’t we start with you?” Ms. Clifford said to the girl next to her in a cheery attitude that didn’t quite fit the prompt.