by Barnes, Vivi
Finally, the bus pulls up and I take one last look in the direction of my street, grateful that either Derrick slept in or he decided it wasn’t in his best interest to follow me.
“What happened to your hand?” Candy shrieks, pointing at my homemade wrap, already red-stained.
“I cut it.” I shrug my backpack over my shoulder and step up to the open door of the bus.
“With what? A machete? What’s with the towel?”
“No Band-Aids.” If she only knew.
As the houses slip away, so does the threat of Derrick chasing me to the corner. The adrenaline fades and my body starts to relax a little. I can feel tears stinging the backs of my eyes. I shake my head to force them away and sit up straight.
Don’t let him get to you, Liv. You’ve been through hell before. You can do this.
You can do this.
You can do this.
The bus finally pulls up to the school and I get out to walk over to the parking lot. Z’s bike is in its usual spot, and the sight of it makes my stomach flip over in anticipation and impatience. I follow the stragglers to school, biting my trembling lip fiercely.
I can-NOT cry at school. I can’t.
I move woodenly through the crowds of students and manage somehow to find my first class, but stop at the door. What if the teachers call on me? What if someone asks me about my hand? What if someone can tell what happened?
I can’t go in there.
I stand in front of the door, quaking as other students pass by me, oblivious to my dilemma. Someone calls my name, I think, but I don’t turn.
I can’t!
I flee to the girls’ restroom and head straight to the last stall, the disabled one, and fumble with the broken lock before giving up, collapsing on the floor in tears. The stall door swings open again.
Get up, Liv, get up.
But I don’t. I sit there, sobbing and shaking, knees pulled close to my body, head buried in my arms. Someone walks in and says something in a faraway voice, but I can’t understand anything. I shrink away when she touches my shoulder, never looking up. I don’t know if she’s still here. I don’t care. I heave with racking sobs, my body ripping in half.
Voices sound again. Someone puts hands on me. My body jerks and I hear my voice croak out, “Go away!”
“Liv!” The familiar voice finally reaches me. I open my eyes and peer through the thick veil of tears to see Z kneeling next to me, his eyes wide with shock. The sight of him releases a fresh wave of tears, but I let his arms wrap around my shaking body. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
I can’t raise my head, just sob even harder into his chest, gripping his shirt. I hear him say something to the other person in the bathroom about getting me out of here. I recognize the owner of the second voice—Sam. She dampens a paper towel and offers it to Z, and he places it on my cheek. It’s cool against my skin. He asks me to breathe deeply and slowly, but my body still shudders with dry sobs, turning into hiccups.
“Tell me,” he says in a deadly quiet voice. “Was it someone here at school? Another kid?”
I shake my head, wanting to tell him but not finding the words. I start crying again. He pulls me back to him and strokes my hair.
“I don’t know about the bike,” he says to Sam. “I don’t think she’d be able to hang on.”
“It’s okay, she can ride with me.”
I want to ask where they’re going to take me, but decide I really don’t care. As long as it’s not to class and not back to that hellhole.
“Come on, girl. We’re getting you out of here,” Sam says in a soft voice.
Z keeps his arms around me, helping me into a standing position. He touches the towel covering my gash but doesn’t say anything about it. My body still shakes, but I’ve got no more tears left.
Sam wraps an arm around my waist from the other side. “Let’s get her out front and I’ll pull my car up,” she says quietly as they walk me out into the deserted hallway.
As soon as we’re through the front doors, Sam leaves us. Z wraps his arms around me to steady me, leaning against one of the columns.
“I-I-I’m sorry.” I choke the words out, but Z just holds me, stroking my hair and whispering gentle, calming words. Soon, Sam’s car swings into the parking lot and I climb into the backseat, Z next to me. I’m sick to my stomach now, and my eyes burn so much I can hardly open them. I lay against him, my body ice cold, despite the warm jacket. His hands move up and down my back to warm me.
The next thing I know, Z is shaking me gently awake. “We’re here,” he says softly. I step out of the car, trembling and unsteady on my feet, and see Sam holding something steaming in a to-go cup. She offers me some but I shake my head. Z puts an arm around my shoulders to guide me into the house. Nancy meets us at the door, brows furrowed in concern.
“I got Sam’s text. What’s going on?” she asks.
“Don’t know,” he says shortly. “Taking her upstairs.”
“I’ll put on some tea.”
Z escorts me up the stairs and down the long hallway to his room, where he tucks me into his bed.
“Don’t go,” I say drowsily as he pulls the blanket over me. Blackness dances around the rims of my eyes, beckoning me into the soft world of dreams.
“I won’t.” He sits next to me and smooths my hair with a gentle hand. I know he’s worried and upset. I can’t bring myself to talk about it. Not yet.
I let the sweet darkness envelop me.
…
Z
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting at the foot of the bed, watching her shoulders rise and fall with every breath as she sleeps. Minutes? An hour? My body and mind are still numb with shock for this strong, seemingly resilient girl who completely fell apart this morning.
What the hell happened? I’ve asked myself this question a hundred times. She said it was no one at school, ruling out that creep Tyson, not that an idiot like him would be capable of bringing her down like this. That leaves Derrick or Denise or someone else. She mentioned a party that the Carters were having, so it could’ve been someone there. And she did tell me yesterday that Derrick had a talk with her about…
I can’t finish the thought. I clench my hands so hard I’m sure I’ve drawn a trench in my skin.
Someone knocks softly at the door. A sober-faced Sam peeks her head in. “How’s she doing?” she asks softly.
“Still sleeping.”
“Here.” She sets a cup of water and two tablets on my desk. “Nancy said we should give her Tylenol as soon as she wakes up because she’ll probably have a raging headache from crying so much.”
“Thanks.”
“What do you think happened?” Sam whispers. “The asshole she lives with?”
“I don’t know. She mentioned they were having a party…”
I stop talking as Liv moans and rolls to her side, her eyes still closed but her face pinched. I move over and carefully adjust her bandaged hand so she doesn’t put pressure on it.
Sam steps up and touches the bandage. “Nancy did a good job,” she observes quietly. She glances at the bloody towel in my trash can, shaking her head.
I run my hands through my hair for the hundredth time, hating this sense of helplessness. Sam looks at me, chewing on her bottom lip like she does when she wants to say something.
“Just spill it,” I tell her.
“This makes it easier, right? I mean, she’s here now.”
I frown. Yeah, she’s here now. This doesn’t mean she should be here. I was up all night last night trying to figure out what to do with the information I found. This morning I had decided to simply tell her, to show her what I had discovered and see what she wanted to do about it. I should still do that.
I don’t know.
What the hell happened?
“Z?” Sam’s voice startles me. She’s frowning slightly, like she can tell what I’m thinking. “Nancy wants us downstairs—she wants to talk about our next steps.”
“Next steps?”
“Yeah, what we’re going to do now.”
“Sam…”
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t say you don’t know what to do. I…”
I put a hand up to stop her as Liv stirs again. “Outside,” I whisper.
We step into the hallway and I pull the door shut behind me.
“Where are you going?” Sam asks as I start toward the stairs.
“Downstairs. If I have to say anything, I may as well say it to Nancy, too.” Although exactly what I’m going to tell them isn’t yet clear to me. One thing’s for sure, Liv can’t stay here.
And I’ll stick to that.
Chapter Seventeen
“The cares, and sorrows, and hungerings, of the world, change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass off, and leave Heaven’s surface clear.”
—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Z
“Why do you keep asking him what he thinks?” Sam addresses the question to Nancy, whose fingers are pressed to her temples. I have a headache, too. Thirty minutes of arguing, Sam won’t get off my back, and we’re no closer to a decision. “He’s not going to change his mind. He doesn’t care that the timing is perfect.”
I take a deep breath. Losing my temper will only cause Nancy to tune me out and Sam to win. “She’s… It’s complicated. She’s just not ready.”
“She’s ready. You’re letting this thing you have for her get in the way and it’s ridiculous. Nancy, he’s not objective anymore, you can see that. His head hasn’t been in this for a while now. It’s just like I’ve been telling you.”
“It’s not like that,” I say, throwing Sam a nasty look. “After Sam threw me under the bus, I had to tell her. And she wasn’t ready for it. If I could’ve been left to do it my way, another week or two and she would’ve fit right in.”
“Another week or two that we don’t have now, dumbass.”
“Let it go, Sam. You’ve said enough,” Nancy says firmly. “She stays. And Z, I understand your feelings, but you do need to pull it together, okay? Especially before Bill gets here.”
Anger and dread churn in my stomach. “She’s definitely not ready to meet him.” I’m barely able to say the words. Nancy’s face is set; Sam’s is triumphant. I turn to storm out of the kitchen. Right now, I just want to go for a ride on my bike as fast as I can to blow off this anger before I put a fist through the wall.
I round the corner and almost run into a wide-eyed Liv. Shit. How long has she been standing here?
“Hey,” I say, forcing a smile to my lips and letting my anger dissipate. “How are you?”
She smiles and I relax, taking her hand. “I’m okay, I guess,” she says. “Just a little weirded out.”
“I bet.” I curve my hand around her waist and pull her to me, pressing my lips to her hair. She smells of flowers and me, a startling combination that makes me want to never let her out of my arms.
She looks up into my eyes. “What was that all about?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I murmur. “Right now, I want to know what happened to you.”
Sam and Nancy appear from the kitchen and Liv holds up her bandaged hand. “Thanks for this,” she says.
“Of course, you poor girl,” Nancy says. “Come sit down and tell us what happened.”
“I don’t think so, Nancy.” My arms tighten around Liv, but she pushes away.
“It’s okay,” Liv says. “They can hear. It’s probably better, anyway.” She peers up at me from underneath her lashes, knitting her eyebrows slightly, and I know exactly what she’s thinking. Something she’s going to say will make me want to beat the living shit out of someone. I can feel the fury burning in the pit of my stomach already.
Nancy leads us into the living room, sitting in an armchair with Sam perched next to her. I sink into the black leather sofa, keeping my arm around Liv’s waist. She is silent for a couple minutes, apparently lost in thought as she draws some random design around my knuckles with her unbandaged hand. Sam and Nancy lean forward, intent on Liv as if she’s about to recite a Grimm’s fairy tale.
“So, after you dropped me off yesterday, Derrick was pissed. That’s an understatement. It was the second time he saw me with you, and I guess he assumed we had been…” She trails off, her cheeks turning pink. “Anyway, he told me they were going to have a party for his work people. It wasn’t that many people, but they were weird, so I went to my room. I mean, I was supposed to be helping but I couldn’t stay out there and watch them get drunk and stupid. So I got on my laptop and remembered a disc I had found with my foster paperwork weeks ago.”
Her fingers have stopped their movement around my hand and are now pressing into my skin. “You okay?” I whisper as her face pales. “Want to stop?”
She shakes her head in a jerky motion. “Anyway, I put the disc in the computer and…and so it was my room…and I got upset but then I had to go back outside.”
She mumbled everything together so fast I couldn’t have understood that right. “Wait a second, back up. What did you say?”
She looks at me, her large brown eyes rimmed in red, though there are no tears. “It was my room. They…he was recording me—a camera—in my room.”
Like a flipped switch, everything stops. There are no sounds, no movements, no breaths. I am shock-frozen in a block of ice, screaming and pounding my fists on the inside but unmoving on the surface.
“Everyone left and I started to clean up, but I slipped and fell and sliced my hand on a piece of a broken bowl. Derrick…” She hesitates, clearing her voice. “BasicallyDerrickattackedmeandwouldn’tletmegobutIgotaway.”
It takes me a moment to piece together the rushed words. She mumbles something about him drugging her at the club then doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t have to. Freed from paralysis, I slowly look from the hands that are gripping mine to the eyes that are squeezed closed. Her chest is rising and falling faster, but as she opens her eyes to fix on mine, she’s not crying. She’s not crying. She’s not even…
I jump up and start pacing. Nancy and Sam scramble to their feet at my reaction but I keep my eyes on the ground. Only one thing I know. One thing.
Derrick is going to pay.
“Stop and look at me,” Liv says, her voice high-pitched, but I can’t. “It happened to me, not you. Z, look at me!”
“Z, take it easy.” Nancy tries to take my arm. I yank it away. “Breathe. Count to ten. Now.”
Her unusually firm voice brings me back to years ago when she took psychology classes to learn how to help me deal with my anger; self-control techniques she thought could help the angry boy who wanted to destroy everyone who’d hurt him. It used to help. I close my eyes. One, two, three…
Liv’s sweet, innocent face fills my mind.
Four, fivesixseveneight.
I head to the door, pausing only to grab Sam’s keys from the foyer table. Somehow Sam and Liv get to the door first, though, blocking my way with linked arms. Nancy is calling to me from behind. I ignore her.
“You can’t do this,” Sam says. “You’ll get caught and no one will care about why you did it.”
“Get out of my way.” I step forward, staring through them at the door. It’ll take me fifteen minutes to get to the scumbag’s house.
“No!” Liv steps forward, unlinking her arm from Sam. “I won’t let you get in trouble on my account. He’s not worth it.”
“Move, Liv,” I snarl through gritted teeth.
“No,” she says firmly. She reaches out to cup my fist in her small hand, unwrapping my clenched hand to thread her fingers through mine. The touch is a gentle breeze to my raging storm, softening me.
“No,” she whispers, slipping her bandaged hand around my neck. My hands automatically wrap around her waist; she feels so small in my arms. She stretches up to press her lips against my ear. “You have to trust me. You can’t go. N
ot now. I need you here.”
And that’s it. I know the fight is lost with those words. “Liv,” I choke out, hating how weak I sound, “he can’t…”
“It’s okay. We’ll figure something out.” She loops her arm through mine and effectively moves me away from the door and toward the staircase. Nancy and Sam gape at us.
“Well, you were right about that,” Nancy says to Sam, who shakes her head. I ignore them.
As soon as we get inside my room, I turn to Liv, who’s watching me cautiously. “That asshole can’t get away with this.”
“I know. Don’t you think I know that?” Her voice starts to rise. “Since when did this become your problem? It’s up to me what we do about this. Me. Not you. ME.”
“Shh…it’s okay.” I try to take her in my arms but she pushes away.
“No! I’m not a child.” She glares at me, which doesn’t bother me at all. Anger is good. Anger turns into action. “Promise me you won’t do anything to him. Promise!”
What?
I stare at her, sure she’s joking.
She’s not.
I sink to the bed and rest my head in my hands. I do not understand her at all. “Why? After what he did…”
“Because if you go beating him up or whatever, you’ll get caught. He’s not worth that.” She takes a deep breath, ending in a sigh. “You’re all I have. I don’t want to see you in jail.”
I lie back on the bed, tugging her with me. Her head rests on my chest.
“Your heart is beating so fast,” she says, drawing circles over it with a finger.
I run my fingers through her tangly hair, afraid of the feelings I have for this sweet girl. How could anyone hurt her? And I don’t understand why she’s letting Derrick get away with this. The rage begins simmering again within me. One, two, three…
She glances up at me, her eyes narrowed as if she can read my mind. “Maybe we should just call 911.”