by Tiffany Sala
“Oh, you’re going to be all right,” I said. “Like I said, the worst of it is you might be a bit more ugly at the end of it.” Another flinch. I was certain of it now. “It’s your own damn fault, anyway. And what sort of handling did you have for me when I was in hospital due to another accident that was your fault? You convinced everyone around me that I was losing my mind, that I was responsible for that accident, and then you took the opportunity to cop a feel.” My laugh was pretty obviously lacking in any humour. “Ah yes, I’m familiar with how you handle me. You’ve been abusing me ever since.”
“I never did anything to you that you didn’t—”
“Shut up, Lucas, I won’t ask again.” I knew once I walked away and got a proper night’s sleep I was unlikely to have the courage to speak to him like this again. I had to use the opportunity, the same as he always did. “Shall I guess what you were going to say? Want? Enjoy? I guess I did enjoy it, I can’t argue that: you’ve got a pretty magical mouth and hands… although probably more so before you smashed yourself up for no good reason.” Lucas winced again, even though he’d actually kept his mouth shut. “As for want… okay, maybe you did make me want it in the end. But I never wanted any of it the way you gave it to me. By that sort of logic you could say someone can never be raped by a person they’re attracted to, because they always want it no matter what, right?”
“I never raped you—”
“I suppose you didn’t,” I said, “because I don’t feel like I was ever raped, but you definitely knew what you were doing was crossing a line. You were very careful to make it seem like I had a choice even when you’d already set it up so that I couldn’t make one you didn’t like. Like I said, abuse.”
“Whatever you think you’re—”
“And I’ve realised something,” I said over the top of him. “Just while I’ve been in here. You always come across as so confident, so careless, like nothing can rattle you… but there is one thing that scares you right now, isn’t there?”
He was staring at me through those eyes that didn’t really see me now, protecting himself, but I knew I had him.
“You’re vain, Lucas Starling,” I said. “You’ve gotten too used to being the most handsome guy in the room, in the town. You know you can play on your looks and your charm and get pretty much anything you want out of a situation. But how’s that going to work if your nose is crooked and your face is all scarred and lumpy? I suppose your parents can pay for the best plastic surgery money can buy, but you never do know if things like that will turn out right, do you?”
He was rocking a little from side to side. He was definitely rattled.
“That’s why you’re so desperate to convince me you never left me to fend for myself in a bad neighbourhood tonight.” The triumph in my voice was a little scary even to me. “You think those other girls—those better girls—might not want anything to do with you once they see what you look like now. I might be all you’ve got so the stakes are a little higher when it comes to how you treat me now. Right?”
“See Callie, this is what I mean, you’re so insecure.” But he was grimacing like he couldn’t even sell that to himself, and I didn’t think it was just the pain.
“I’m not insecure, Lucas. I am just in a position where I don’t need to take your usual crap, so I’m not taking it.” I heard nearby footsteps, voices, and I got up off the bed. “And I think I’ll skip the molestation, actually. I don’t want to have any contact with you right now.”
I’d had some idea in my head of making a clean exit, but I collided with Lucas’s family on the way out.
“Sorry,” I said, backing into the room to allow them through. “I’m just heading out now, so you can have your privacy.”
“I’ll drive you home,” Lucy said.
“No,” I protested, “it’s fine, I’ll…”
She gave me a few seconds to continue failing to come up with any reasonable explanation for how I intended to get home. There was probably a bus, but I had no money on me and I wasn’t familiar with the timetable. Anyway, if I took as long as a bus would take getting home, my parents were probably going to have enough time to figure out I was missing and panic. Or, in my mother’s case, assume I was with Lucas and try to get in contact with his family, which would be worse.
“Come on,” Lucy said. “I’ve got to go pick up some things from home anyway.”
Her parents didn’t even call her out on having just been from home. I made a quick decision: Lucy was the Starling family member I was least nervous of, so if I had to spend a few minutes with her to get safely away from the rest, that was the best choice. “If you’re sure, then thank you.”
“See you another day, Callie,” came his voice, a lot softer, more careful, than when he’d been talking to me in private. It was for the benefit of his parents, for convincing them he was still a pretty good guy, and not for me at all.
“See you, Lucas,” I returned. I could play his game if he so desperately wanted it. “Try not to bother your parents too much with your chatter. Better let that pretty face heal.”
Chapter Fifteen
I felt satisfied with myself for how I’d handled things until I was walking out of the hospital alongside Lucy. The sun was well on the way to rising, casting a harsh light over my actions, and at just that moment Lucy glanced over at me.
“Thanks for coming to see Lucas. If I were you, I’d probably have just wanted to go home and get some sleep. He might not know how to show it, but it’ll mean a lot to him.”
“I’m happy if it made a difference to you,” I said.
“I’m sorry he’s given you such a bad impression of himself,” Lucy said. She found her way to her car and unlocked it. No open roofs for her. “He’s a bit out of control these days. He really needs someone to rein him in, you know, before it’s too late.”
Not that she was giving me any feeling that she was begging—it came across as more of a warning—but the only thing I knew was that it wasn’t going to be me. I felt like telling her that, along with just how often I’d seen Lucas step on her seat to get into the car instead of opening the door like any civilised person, but daylight was furnishing me with just enough shame to keep me nice. And if I wanted to make a proper break with Lucas, I probably shouldn’t start by doing anything to provoke him.
I deflected Lucy’s words just enough with something that had struck me as a bit weird while we were entering the hospital. “You two are twins, right? But you said before you had university classes to attend…?”
“Oh, yes,” Lucy said. “I finished high school a long time ago.” It occurred to me at that point there were a lot of reasons I maybe shouldn’t have asked the question of her in the first place, but it seemed too late now. “While I was doing my cancer treatment I was in no condition to go to a proper school, so my parents hired a tutor to homeschool me. Later on my mum was at home all the time anyway looking after me, so she took over the tutoring. She was good at it of course, but I was kind of sad, my old tutor was really nice. Anyway, I wasn’t able to do much in the middle of treatment, but when I was feeling better I would get into it really hard. I didn’t have anything else to do, once I was out of formal schooling I became a bit out of the loop.”
I’d always felt a bit isolated at school, compared to girls like Ashleigh who seemed to have more than any one person’s fair share of social life. It must have been worse for Lucy though, especially having a brother who still had all of those things and was probably not shy about rubbing them in to her. It seemed like the sort of situation where some person you hardly knew saying I’m sorry would just be annoying at this point, though.
“I had someone from school ask after you the other day, actually,” I told her instead. Maybe it would mean something. “I mean I didn’t have anything to tell them… I didn’t even remember you’d been sick until Lucas told me, our families were never close enough for me to hear about it a lot. So people you knew back then are still thinking about you.”
“I’m sure they are.” Lucy was making the sort of smile I wondered if she’d used a lot when she was in the midst of her treatment, trying to convince everyone she was okay. “But they don’t have a whole lot of time for me any more, that’s all I’m saying. I’m not hating, I understand, but it’s sort of hard to ignore at the same time.”
“I’m sorry I never saw you after you left our school,” I said, just because it felt uncomfortable to continue the conversation without saying something.
“We were never friends before I left, though,” Lucy said. “Our families weren’t even close, like you said. Oh, was that the right turn to take?”
I was finally starting to recognise some of the streets we were driving through. “I think so?”
“I guess you were already on Lucas’s radar back then, mind you,” Lucy continued. “I remember not long after we started at Sands, Lucas started bothering you all the time.”
“Well don’t bring it up to him.” A sudden genuine flash of panic was stirring me out of the drowsiness that had settled as I grew more comfortable being around Lucy. “That was sort of what set off all of this. He got so mad that I remembered it at all, though how he managed to forget when you seem to remember…”
I shut my mouth so hard I bit my lip. Why had I brought it up at all?
“Honestly,” Lucy said, “I don’t mind reminiscing about being kids, but I want to stay the fuck away from whatever is going on present tense. But I’ll say one thing. Whatever you had going on with my brother back then, years ago… it’s got absolutely no connection to anything that might be happening now. He was a different kid back then. I mean he’s always had his issues, always been a bit of a brat, but everything changed at a certain point. And I don’t want to talk about that any further either, because I think you can guess… it has a lot to do with me.”
“I’m sorry to be bringing all of this up again for you,” I muttered.
“I’m not,” Lucy said. “But this is between the two of you now. I’ve got my own issues to take care of.”
My parents were more relaxed than I expected they would be when I banged on the front door at about seven in the morning and made them come open it in their dressing gowns. It probably helped that I had Lucy by my side, who was just as slick as her brother when it came to charming the way through awkward situations. It definitely helped a lot that she didn’t look enough like Lucas for either of them to guess she was his sister. It just looked like I’d sneaked out of the house to muck around with a friend, and since I was sober-looking and not covered in blood, there weren’t a lot of questions to ask.
Lucy didn’t say anything to expose herself as being related to Lucas, either. “I’ll see you later, Callie, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, even though I didn’t think she meant it. She was just keeping up the ruse of us being friends.
I waved her back off down the driveway and shut the door on her before my parents could notice we seemed to have the same car. They were so sleepy still I don’t think they even bothered looking.
“Well since we’re all up,” Dad said, “how about coffee?”
“It’s nice to see you with some other girls, Callie,” Mum commented. “I mean, it’s not like we don’t like Tamara, and there’s that other girl you see a lot of at school… Aileen, right? But it’s good to have a few other friends to turn to.”
I thought she was trying to be nice, in her way, but after everything Lucas had said to me before the accident, it just made me feel sick. I slumped in my seat at the kitchen table and put my face in my hands.
Lucas was still wrong, but he’d said a lot of things that I could take something from. Unfortunately, all I was able to take right now, in my current state of exhaustion, was how much of a failure I must seem to my parents. I had hardly any friends, and I wasn’t even a star student to account for it. And I certainly wasn’t getting better at having a social life at my current job, where the men either wanted to have at me or avoided me out of fear they would end up caught in a sexual harassment lawsuit or trouble with their wives.
I hated to admit it, but I thought Lucas had been completely right about that. They would never let me get ahead.
Okay, so that meant I was fucking up school, social life, and job. What else was left?
I took a couple sips of the coffee Dad put in front of me just to be polite, then I pushed my chair back from the table.
“Sorry, I just don’t think this is going to cut it. I’m going to go sleep until I have to head in to work.”
“You need to learn to pace yourself for these all-night parties, Callie,” Mum called after me. “Got to have your coffees earlier in the night, or find somewhere to nap, or—”
“I don’t think I want you telling her what I think you’re about to tell her,” Dad interrupted.
“Oh come on,” Mum said, “when have I been to that kind of party in the past decade?”
I was pretty sure I’d made it clear to Lucas I wasn’t going to just let him move me around as he pleased any more, so I didn’t really expect to hear from him again. And as I’d expected, once he returned to school, he kept his distance. I didn’t so much as glimpse him until Wednesday that following week. Of course he’d always been pretty sketchy with when he decided to bug me, but I would have at least expected him to try to make me drive him home from school if he’d been still interested in messing with me. I might even have been open to considering it.
And that was the problem right there: I was starting to feel bad about the way I’d spoken to him in the hospital. He had done something awful to me, and he deserved to face the consequences, but my timing had been terrible. I’d hit him when he was in pain and scared. Right or wrong, I was struggling to deal with having done that.
There was no way I would approach Lucas at school by myself, and showing up at his house seemed like the sort of escalation he was likely to be able to use against me, if he was inclined to do so. I’d never before appreciated just how vast the gulf between us was. Unless he chose to recognise me, I had no power to force an engagement.
By Friday afternoon I was distracted by a different problem: everyone in my classes was paying attention to me.
Outside of the Lucas Incidents in my life, I had never attracted much attention at school. I wasn’t particularly unpopular, or particularly smart, and though I had the ‘chigger’ strike against me, I didn’t act bogan enough for anyone to hold that against me. I guess the situation with Lucas had proved I wasn’t particularly unattractive either, by high school standards. So there was nothing about me to make me a target. I was pretty sure the majority of the kids who had come in at year eleven from other schools didn’t even know my name.
Now, all the glances and muttering told me that state was entirely over.
My friends weren’t in any of my Friday afternoon classes, but I managed to run into Aileen on the way to my final period of the day. I grabbed her before she could just wave and skip on, and dragged her sideways into a secluded row of lockers.
“Do you know anything about everyone pointing and gossiping about me today?” I asked.
Aileen shrugged out of my grasp. “Just that Ashleigh is pissed enough to punch you, and everyone else is talking about you either being a nasty gossip or beating Lucas up.”
“What?” Aileen had been far too gleeful in conveying the details to me. “He was in a car accident! And I was nowhere near his car at the time—”
Aileen took a step back. “Don’t bite my face off, I’m just telling you what I heard.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t get the feeling you did anything more than hear it. I thought we were supposed to be friends.”
“And there is no way you would stick your neck out for me that much if you heard the biggest creeps around this place slagging me off.” Aileen shrugged. “What difference does it make, Callie? I thought you were always the one who said you didn’t care what other people said. You had your path in life, and nobody was going to sway
you from it. Wasn’t that right?”
I had said that… but I’d said it in the days before Lucas had decided to drive headlong back into my life. Before he’d completely broken me down.
“Whatever,” said Aileen, as if I’d actually given her some response. I was just standing there in front of her, jaw dropped, unable to think of anything to say. “I’ve got to get to class.”
I watched her stalk off, her overly-short skirt flaring with each stride and her hands still on her hips even though she had her back to me now.
It probably was too much for me to expect Aileen or even Tamara to stick up for me against whatever they were hearing. It wasn’t like I spent that much time with them outside of school. I was too busy doing my own thing—doing that job Lucas had pretty nicely convinced me was a waste of my time.
I had no memory of getting to English, or of what Ms. Alton said before she turned us loose to work on some stuff from the textbook. I don’t know if I even opened my book, but Ms. Alton was usually resigned to the fact that a class requiring reading and writing for the last period of the week was always going to be lost on some. She touched my shoulder once on an early round through the room and asked if I was all right, but when I assured her I was fine she left me alone on subsequent passes. She could see I wasn’t really working, but she’d probably also heard some of the gossip going around about me. Maybe teachers felt sorry for whoever was under the social microscope and cut them a bit of slack.
The class was both interminable and over more quickly than I expected. I made a break for the gates as soon as Ms. Alton gave us the all-clear to go, my mind so focused on the goal I was surprised I didn’t walk straight through a wall.
“Hey,” spoke up a guy whose face I was familiar with, but whose name I had never learned. He stepped up alongside me and clapped a hand on my shoulder I flinched away from. “What’s up, Callie?” he mocked me. “Do you just not like it when guys pay you attention?”
“I’d like it just fine if the ones who did it weren’t absolute assholes,” I snapped back, and then I started to run for my car. They could all point and laugh at me as I went if they wanted.