by Brooke Moss
I dumped her at the movies one night. She didn’t take it well.
Dad’s voice jerked me out of my thoughts and back into the present. “If you ever miss a practice again because you’re driving that piece of garbage around in my car, I’ll end you.”
I nodded, refusing to meet his eyes. Water still dripped off me, landing with echoing drips on the cement floor. I was freezing my butt off, but wouldn’t let it show. “Yes, sir,” I said, clenching my jaw. “Sorry, sir.”
I wasn’t sorry. Dad hated Mac because when his mom, Karen, divorced the police chief—who resided so far in Dad’s back pocket, I was pretty sure he sat wedged halfway up Dad’s butt—Mac chose to live with his mother. Which essentially meant my dad couldn’t control Mac like he controlled everybody else in town. He didn’t care that Mac would’ve done anything for me and had saved my butt from trouble more than a few times. I just wouldn’t be stupid enough to get caught hanging with Mac next time. Dad might be intimidating enough to break up my girlfriend and me, but not strong enough to end my friendship with Mac. He’d already tried plenty of times.
Dad’s hand came down on the side of my neck with a decisive slap. His grip hurt, but I didn’t allow myself to flinch. “Your car is mine for a month. Got it, hot shot?”
Dammit. I ground my teeth together to keep from reacting. Without my car, I was reliant on my parents to get to and from school and practices. And Mom said carpooling gave her a migraine, but we all knew it was because she started drinking at two in the afternoon.
Dad’s grip tightened, sending a shock of pain down into my collarbone. “I asked you a question, Andrew.”
Coach walked past the doorway again, this time shaking his head. If I didn’t make nice with my dad and get back into the pool soon, he would confront us and we’d have a bigger scene than usual.
I could punch him, I thought. I could jam my knee into his balls so hard his eyes would fall out of his head and bounce across the wet floor. I could do it. Sure, Dad had been a star swimmer twenty years ago, and he still worked out a few times a week now. But I was younger, and every bit as built. Even more so. I could bench press two hundred pounds, for hell’s sake. I could kick the hell out of my dad before Coach even realized what happened and came running to stop me.
It would feel good as hell to punch my dad in the face and drop him. Serve him right, too. My hands flexed at my sides, aching to be used, and adrenaline pumped through my veins. Damn, I wanted to flatten him so bad.
I pictured my mom crying when I got home, and the aftermath of having beat the hell out of my own father. He’d kick me out of the house for sure, or worse yet, keep me there, and make my life even more of a living hell. Knowing him, he and Chief Kiss Ass would let me sit in jail for a day or two, make me sweat it before bringing me home and doing some butt kicking of his own. And if I sat in jail for a few days, I would be benched for the next few swim meets, and then I’d never get a scholarship. And if I didn’t get a scholarship, there was no way for me to get out of Twisted Tree, Washington, population one thousand, three hundred forty seven.
I swallowed back my anger, leaving a trail of bitterness in my throat. It tasted like acid, and burned my stomach. “Yes, sir,” I said finally. “The car is yours.”
Chapter Two
Her.
I could feel Paula’s eyes on me as I shuffled towards the school doors, but I didn’t look at her. I don’t know why, I’m sure she was just trying to be nice. It wouldn’t have killed me to smile at her, but still, I grabbed the icy metal handle and jerked the door open without a backwards glance. As soon as I was enveloped in the stifling warmth and aroma of gym socks of my high school, I looked over my shoulder, but she was gone.
My stomach wrapped around itself, twisting into a painful knot. Seven years and eleven foster homes later, and I still had a split second of panic whenever I saw someone leave me behind. No matter how many times someone reassured me that they wouldn’t abandon me, I never believed it. Probably because they all did eventually.
Reason #872 why I was screwed up. According to my therapist, I had reactive attachment disorder and acute abandonment issues. But I didn’t needed a fancy label to tell me I was the dented can of peas at the grocery store. Nobody wanted the dinged, dingy can off the shelf. That’s why they pushed it aside and took the fresh, intact ones.
“You don’t always have to be so rude,” Jessa said, tugging me back into reality.
I blinked at my sixteen-year-old foster sister, shoving my thoughts to the back of my mind. This wasn’t the time to crack up. Not in the middle of the school hallway. “What?” My voice cracked.
It was then that I realized I’d not spoken since waking up that morning, despite sitting through breakfast with Paula and all the other kids. I seemed to do that a lot, avoid joining in the conversation. And it wasn’t like they didn’t try to include me. Paula and her husband, John, had tried to engage me since I’d moved into their home in August. Now it was fall on this damned island, and I’d still only uttered a handful of words to any of them.
But seriously, who wanted to sit around a table eating waffles, beaming at each other, and making small talk? It was all so Disney channel. I barely kept myself from vomiting all over the tabletop.
“You treat her like crap. She tries so hard, and you ignore her and Dad. All the time.” Jessa tucked her short black hair behind her ears and blinked at me. She was Asian American, with a five foot zero inch, fine-boned frame, and short highlighted hair she wore in curls. Every. Single. Day. She made me feel completely giant and cumbersome. I hated that about Jessa.
I also hated that she’d been adopted by Paula and John when she was just three years old, so she’d had years to adapt to their family, and I’d only had a couple of months. I hated that she—and the other four kids in the Coulter household—all had nicknames and school pictures hanging on the wall. They’d all had time to meld into the tapestry of this family, and I’d been thrown in like an afterthought.
I opened and closed my mouth. My stomach ached, like it always did when I worried. I wanted to tell Jessa sorry. That would try to make it work, try to fit in with their family. But the words just tripped over themselves in the back of my throat and choked me.
I didn’t do words. Or feelings.
“I am not.” I hiked my backpack higher on my shoulder, and hid behind a veil of my straight, dark hair. “Get off my back.”
She followed as I headed for my locker. She moved fast for such a little thing. “I’m not on your back. I’m just trying to help you. We’re all trying to help you.”
Cringing, I turned down a different hall. I was trying to lose her, but Jessa kept right at my heels. I didn’t feel like being lectured on my inability to bond with a group of strangers that pulled my picture off a website a few months ago.
After seeing some video some random teenage foster kid posted on YouTube all about how awful it was to age out of the system, Paula and John looked on the Washington State database for waiting children. Which is basically a fancy name for a website filled with kids nobody else wants. Not even our parents or extended family, considering the fact that their legal rights are all terminated and we were left to bounce from home to home until we hit eighteen. That was what I planned on doing. Age out, then find some mediocre job in the city where I could disappear.
That is, until Paula, John, and their colossal God complex decided they wanted to save me. As if they didn’t have enough to worry about. Besides Jessa, there were four other adopted kids of different races and sizes, all adding together to make the Coulter family look like a damned ad for the United Colors of Benetton.
I squeezed through a group of kids talking to each other while scrolling through their phones at the same time. Pretending to be enthralled by unlocking my locker, I silently willed Jessa to leave me alone. To go find her cheerleading friends, or go get extra credit in one of her advanced classes. She was one of those overachiever types.
“You can’t just
ignore me, Posey.” Jessa leaned against the locker next to mine and watched me with a frown. “If you’re going to be a part of our family, eventually you’re going to have to talk to me. To us.”
I twirled the lock, and tucked my hair behind my ears. “I’m not ignoring you.” I heard her take a breath, so I decided to cut her off with a big, fake smile. I probably looked like the joker. Smiling wasn’t my thing. “This is me not ignoring you.”
She watched me for a few beats, presumably waiting for me to crack a real smile, or laugh, or something. But I just dropped my fake grin and stood there.
“You know,” Jessa said eventually, pushing off the locker and starting to walk away from me backwards. “Someday you’re going to regret being cranky all the time. And when you do, you’re going to wish you could have a redo for these past few months.”
I scoffed, and shoved my backpack inside. “Doubtful.”
But Jessa didn’t hear me. She’d already given me a halfhearted wave and walked away.
For a moment, I felt sorry, and I wanted to chase her down to apologize. Strike up a conversation about something we had in common—even though I had nothing in common with the perky, over-achieving, social tour guide types—and forge a friendship. But just as quickly as I thought about doing that, the idea washed away when I remembered that I don’t do friendships. I stay alone and unattached. Cool and disconnected.
It was a little over the top, but it’d served me well for seventeen years. Eleven different foster homes in seven years, and while my aunt wound up adopting my little brothers, she had passed over me. I’d become hard and crusty. Poor Jessa was adopted from the system when she was three. The Coulters were the only family she remembered. I didn’t have that luxury. I remembered every home, every shitty foster parent, every kid I’d ever been forced to share a room with, and every gory detail about my stay.
Every. Detail. Good and bad.
Pulling out my Lit book, I shoved all my emotions to the back of my mind. Emotions were useless. The only control I had in my life was over my emotions, and I wasn’t about to start letting them spill over for some stupid cheerleader.
I scuffled in the direction of Mr. Kingston’s office, ignoring it when a group of girls—blondes, mostly—whispered as I passed by. “Oh, look. It’s Miss Congeniality.”
“Oooh, sarcasm.” I shoved past the bleach brigade. “Inventive.”
“Bitch,” one of them muttered.
Her word plunked me on the back, then rolled off. I didn’t worry about making people like me. In the end, everyone wound up despising me anyway, why bother in the first place? Dropping my book on a desk in the back row, I settled down to wait the five minutes before class started. Most of the kids at Twisted Tree High stood in the hallways, congregating until the last millisecond before classes began. Probably because they’d all known each other since birth, so they all had plenty to chitchat about. But since I’d only been there since September, and joining the senior class in the world’s smallest high school was ultra passé, I usually skipped social hour.
“Posey. Just the girl I’ve been waiting to see.”
I cringed as soon as I heard my teacher’s voice for two reasons. First, Mr. Kingston was like five minutes out of college, and he and his wife had been students at TTHS themselves before that. He was pink-cheeked and enthusiastic about helping kids, and changing lives, and all of that bunk, and I was his latest project. In the four weeks since school started, he’d been harping on me to work harder and live up to my full potential. As if he knew I had potential after having me in his class for twenty-two days. Not that I was counting. Still, the poor bastard never listened when I tried to explain there was no full potential. He’d figure it out eventually.
“Oh, goodie.” I slouched down in my seat and looked at Mr. Kingston through my bangs. He was sort of cute, in that typical western Washington I wear socks with sandals and still sport a goatee way, but I wasn’t into that whole teacher-student thing. A girl in my old high school was, but not me. I didn’t do boys anymore. Not that I was into girls, or anything. I’d just been dicked around by enough males—old and young—to last me a lifetime.
Mr. Kingston didn’t appear affected by my surly attitude. Damn. “So,” he said, sitting down at a desk a few spaces away from me. “I was going through your transcripts.”
My stomach hurtled, but I didn’t allow myself to register a response. Instead I just blinked at him.
“And both your test scores and homework scores are consistently on the low side.” He opened a manila folder with some pie charts and graphs on it. “You know, when you first came to Twisted Tree, your parents—”
“Foster parents,” I interrupted.
“Right.” Mr. Kingston smiled mildly. Seriously, he was annoyingly patient. “Last week we gave you a series of aptitude and IQ tests. We also went through records from your last five schools, dating clear back to the fifth grade.”
So get to your point. I looked down at my hands and started picking my black nail polish off.
“Your scores are off the charts,” he said.
Bingo.
He slid a couple of graphs across my desktop. “I’ve discussed your efforts in your other classes, and the consensus was clear amongst all of us teachers.”
I’m not performing up to my capabilities, right? I’d been told this by a do-gooder teacher at every single school I’d ever been in. In fact, I was sure I could say it in Spanish, too. Thanks to Mrs. Lopez at Garfield High, in the shittiest neighborhood in Ballard.
“You’re not performing up to your capabilities.”
Bingo again. I dug in the pocket of my hoodie for my iPod. Maybe if I fished it out, and started unwinding the ear bud cords, he’d take the hint and leave me alone. Couldn’t I just collect my C and get out of this class without any “you can do better” garbage from the teacher?
“Po, I have a feeling you can do better than that.”
I shot him a venomous glare. Nobody called me Po. Nobody. It was bad enough that my mom saddled me with a name like Posey Rose Briggs—which was apparently the name of the boyfriend she’d had when I was born, not the actual guy who’d helped make me, whose last name she couldn’t recall. But being a poor foster kid called Po was the icing on the crap cake that was my luck. Thanks, Mom.
“The report on The Winter of our Discontent you turned in Monday was incredible. I showed it to my wife, and she almost cried,” he said. “You see, there are glimpses of brilliance amongst the missing assignments and last week’s bombed test.”
Pride filled my chest like helium, but I registered none of it on my face. “So?”
A few seconds passed, and the only sound in the classroom was the ticking of the clock on the wall, and the humming chatter of everyone out in the hallway. I think he was waiting for me to breakdown. To thank him for the compliment or beg for him to pass me. But I wasn’t going there. I wasn’t interested in kissing some teacher’s ass just to get through some bogus English class.
All I needed was to pass. I didn’t care if it was by one sixteenth of a point on the curve, so long as I got my diploma and got the hell out of here, I was good.
Finally, Mr. Kingston sighed, and leaned forward. He rested his elbows on his knees and I could feel his heavy stare on the side of my face. “Posey, right now you have an F in my class.”
My eyes met his with a vicious glare.
He put his hands up. “Does this come as a shock to you?”
Well, duh. I looked back down and bit the insides of my cheeks. Dammit. I knew my grade in here was bad, but I didn’t think I was flunking. Geez, we’d only been in school three weeks.
I wasn’t a moron. I knew how many credits I needed to grad—
“You need to pass this class to graduate,” Mr. Kingston said gently. “I know you want to graduate. You might act like you don’t care, but I know otherwise. Am I right?”
Sniffing, I shifted my gaze to the window. It was raining. Again.
“Then
let’s get the year started off on the right foot. Let’s get this grade up.” When I didn’t say anything, he tucked the charts back into his folder. “I’ve been thinking about how to help you, and I think I’ve come up with a plan.”
I pressed my lips together and sat up straight in my chair, still watching the window. I knew where this was going. This wasn’t my first rodeo. Crossing my legs at the ankles, I pressed my thighs together so tightly they ached. If this sick bastard put one finger on me, I was going to kung fu this desk right into his face.
“I want you to tutor someone for a while,” he said after a very dramatic pause.
Wrinkling up my face, I looked at my teacher through the corner of my eye. “Excuse me?”
Mr. Kingston chuckled. “I knew you could talk.” He leaned back in his seat and folded his arms across his chest. “Listen to me. I am willing to help you earn extra credit by working with a fellow senior. His grade is weak right now, and he could use a real boost to get a scholarship he’s got his eye on. I think that a student with a passion for literature is exactly what he needs. That’s where you come in. I would help him myself, but my wife is very pregnant, and I’m needed at home as much as possible. I think this is a way for us all to get what we need.”
My stomach tightened. “Him?”
He nodded. “Uh huh. He’s in this class with you. Drew Baxter. Do you know him?”
I groaned and closed my eyes. Of course I knew him. We only had five hundred kids in this school, and the popular ones were practically hailed as royalty by not just the kids, but the adults, too. It was insane to watch. Parents stopped and pointed out the star athlete to their little kids like they were spotting a damned unicorn. And when the son of Twisted Tree’s mayor, Curtis Baxter, came into the one and only convenience store in town, suddenly there was no line to pay for fuel. No charge for a pack of gum. No wait to get to the pump.
It was sickening to watch, really.
“Yes, I know him,” I said through clenched teeth. The one time I’d ever spoken to Drew Baxter had ended with him shaking his head and calling me a freak. I didn’t understand why the girls in this place fell all over themselves to warrant his attention. I mean, sure. He was cute, but it’s not like Adam Levine was the captain of the swim team.