Rough Guy: Providence Prep High School Book 3

by Allen, Jacob

  I laughed to myself, but Samantha adopted some sort of look to her that I hadn’t seen before. Oh, she was certainly angry, but it seemed a little less angry. It seemed a little more… judgmental, but in an analytical way, not in a harsh, condemning way.

  “It’s all about the sports, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s all about you not being able to get a scholarship, isn’t it?”

  “Are you trying to be my therapist? Because my parents can pay for someone much better than you’ll ever be.”

  “No one wants to take you on,” she continued, her assessment distressingly on point. “You want to play college sports, you think it’ll validate you. Maybe you’ll be the cool guy on campus. Maybe even be better than Adam.”

  Ouch.

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I hated that it resonated much more than I would have thought. He had, after all, stolen Emily from me; he had, after all, been described as both the most feared and the most desired man on campus. He had everything that I wanted, and I had nothing that he wanted.

  “But instead, you probably don’t have many options, or you don’t have the options you want. You—”

  “I can go to Vanderbilt as a preferred walk-on if I want,” I snapped.

  But man, if that was my retort? That I could go to the shittiest school in the SEC as a preferred walk-on? That was like being the sole Olympic athlete in a sport for a country that needed at least one representative. Sure, I’d made it to the big leagues, but I also sure as hell didn’t belong.

  “OK,” Samantha said. “So go to Vanderbilt.”

  “And incur the wrath of my brothers? Fuck that.”

  I regretted the words as soon as I said them. Few people knew about that. I needed fewer to remember it. And now, the person who hated me the most would have that over me.

  Fuck, I was such a fucking idiot.

  “Why would that matter?” she said. “You’re your own guy. Who cares?”

  “What did I say about being my goddamn therapist, you—”

  But Mr. Smith came back into the room, and once again, we were reduced to silence, pretending to work on our homework, and being bored.

  This time, though, I found myself looking back at Samantha a couple of times. She had some nerve speaking the way she did. She had some gall, figuring it out as she did. That wasn’t guts many people had.

  It was fascinating, in kind of a fucked up way. How did the awkward nerd better ask straightforward questions than the hot cheerleaders or the gals who wanted to suck me off because I was on the football team?

  School was fucking weird.

  I just need to go to a party school. Life will be so much simpler, I’ll have less worries about who likes who, and I can just get laid off the fact I have a letter jacket. If I can’t get a scholarship, at least I’ll get laid. No one will know the goddamn difference.

  I didn’t believe the thought, though. I knew how sex, while it may have felt good in the moment, would only go so far before the reality of life came rushing back. That much was evident whenever I got laid at Adam’s house parties.

  About twenty minutes later, detention ended. Mr. Smith barely acknowledged us as we both left. I could have easily just kept walking, leaving Samantha in the dust, heading home… but I stuck around.

  Call it morbid curiosity. Call it whatever the fuck you wanted. I wanted to peel the layers back on this girl, understand how she could have figured it out well.

  “You can drink your liquor now,” I cracked when she left the detention room.

  “I’d think you’d need to be the one to do that with everything going on in your life,” she shot back. “I’m not the one dealing with all this shit.”

  I didn’t say a word. I just kept walking forward, but not fast enough to leave her in the dust. What kind of a masochist was I, relishing in this shit?

  “I don’t understand why the scholarship part is so important,” she said. “Your parents have money. You live on Adam’s street. You could go to one of the Ivies, they don’t have scholarships, no one would know otherwise.”

  I stopped, but not before noticing she stopped in her tracks too.

  “You got any siblings, Samantha?”

  “No.”

  “Then you wouldn’t understand.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Just because I don’t have something doesn’t mean I can’t try and understand it,” she shot back. “It’s called empathy. You should try it sometime.”

  “OK, well, empathize this,” I said. “Both of my brothers got scholarships to play football. My dad has made it his life mission for all of us to do that. Now imagine waking up three months before graduation with nothing more than walk-on offers. No scholarships. Imagine going to your father and having to explain you’re actually a giant failure because you have nothing to show for it.”

  “I don’t have to imagine as hard as you might think.”

  I looked at her in confusion but pressed on.

  “So yeah, the scholarship means a lot, in case your non-athletic brain could not compute that.”

  “Well, detention isn’t going to help that,” she said. “With basketball and—”

  Oh, right. That little detail. I actually started laughing. Coach Miller may have suspended me for our most recent game, but I’d actually done one better today at lunch. I hadn’t thought about it much during detention, since my focus was on, well, Samantha, but now that those two topics were overlapping each other…

  “Funny story,” I said. “I quit.”

  Yep. I had quit basketball. What was the point in pressing on?

  I was never going to be a college player. At least in football, if I busted ass hard enough, I could have gotten a scholarship in my junior or senior year. That was never going to happen in basketball, though. It was hard to when I was barely above six feet and dudes six to eight inches taller than me were more athletic and fluid on the court.

  “You what,” Samantha said, jaw agape. “You quit? What? Why?”

  “No reason to keep going,” I said. “It’s stupid bullshit, anyways. Let them figure it out.”

  “But aren’t you the captain?”

  “I was,” I said with a laugh.

  I really didn’t feel guilty about quitting the team. Granted, part of that was my continued adamant statements in my head that this was the right move. Maybe tomorrow, when I woke up without a practice or a game to prepare for, I’d feel differently. Hell, maybe when I got home and I saw my father, I’d feel differently. My father yelling at me had a way of making me think that I was acting like a fucking idiot.

  Right now, though? Nope. Not at all. I could do football and focus on that, get a last second offer. Or, worst case, I could just not give a shit and I could go to a bunch of parties and get laid.

  “I really hope you know what you’re doing, Nick.”

  I pursed my lips.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  I heeled and walked away, this time making sure to put some distance between us, before she could say anything more.

  9

  Samantha

  I still didn’t have a good answer to my question.

  Why has Nick just been such a giant douchebag to me the last week?

  For all of his answers about not getting a scholarship, for what felt like a brief glimpse into his soul about not living up to his brothers or his father’s expectations, I still didn’t have a good answer. The Adam thing felt like it might have had some legs, but that didn’t really lead anywhere.

  But the weekend had come. At least until Monday, when I had to serve an in-school suspension, I was safe from the bullshit.

  Well, not entirely.

  That much became apparent when I got home and my parents were waiting for me on the front porch, their arms folded, their stern glares very real and very much trained on me. There were no newspapers to save me, no emergency requests for work, nothing that could delay this moment.

  This awkward, tense moment that I had nothing to
do with.

  “Let me get this straight,” my mother began. “You had a bottle of alcohol—of actual, real alcohol—in your locker. You have one semester left under our watch. Are you trying to taunt us? Are you just going to turn into all of the other kids and start drinking when you get to college?”

  I bit my lip. How could she not have believed that I had never drank in high school? And even if I stopped drinking now, how could she believe I would not drink in college?

  But most of all, how could she believe that I would want to taunt them by putting a bottle of liquor in my locker?

  “Mom, I swear that I didn’t do it, someone—”

  “Really,” my father said. “Tell us. We’re ignorant. We’re stupid. Enlighten us as to how a bottle of liquor could just magically pop up in your locker without you putting it there. Is this some new law of physics we don’t understand?”

  “Oh, maybe she used her mechanical engineering mind to build tunnels so someone could deposit it there.”

  “Or, maybe she used some sort of mental powers to will the bottle to appear.”

  Really? It’s bad enough Nick mocks me at school. Now, because I slip up, you have to as well? Do I always have to be perfect just to not be mocked in this household?

  People always assumed that I had as close to the perfect family as possible. The Collins sure as hell didn’t; Kevin didn’t; Nick, I now knew, didn’t; Jackie and Emily kind of did, but they were very different than your typical family. It led many to believe that because my parents weren’t immigrants, weren’t hippy, and were white-collar professionals doing very well in their fields, that we had the perfect family.

  But what they didn’t realize was that having two wealthy parents and being an only child didn’t mean anything when your parents saw you less as a human child and teenager and more as another project to mold and shape for college. I wanted to go to Harvard or Yale, but I also wanted to have teenage moments like going to parties, seeing movies with Emily and Jackie, and gossiping about boys. Apparently, doing those things was ground for some serious judgments from Mom and Dad.

  “Tell us, go ahead. We’re waiting.”

  I sighed as I struggled to decide if this was even worth it. For the sake of intellectual honesty, it felt that way, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t something that was harder than it should have been.

  “Someone figured out the code to my locker and planted it in there to get me in trouble,” I said.

  “And who would that be?” my father said. “What did you do to get them mad at you?”

  Blame the victim, really? Dad… why?

  “It…”

  I stopped myself when it occurred to me that saying it was a boy I’d seen at the library was probably going to get me into even more trouble. My parents weren’t explicitly against dating, but they had me so driven and devoted to doing well in school that they pretty much pushed dating out of my sphere of possibility. If I’d brought a boy home, they would have grilled him enough that no one with any self-respect would have stuck around anyways.

  “It’s someone I don’t know,” I said. “I just know I didn’t put it in there, I swear.”

  My parents shook their heads.

  “A dearth of knowledge does not allow for a dearth of consequences, and you know this,” my mother said. “The school, it seems, has punished you enough. For now.”

  Of course.

  “So here’s the deal, Samantha. If you get into Harvard or Yale, all is forgiven. We won’t bring this up again. We’ll let the school handle this. You’ll have to let us know if you leave the house where you are going, but we won’t do anything. If, however, you do not get into one of those schools, if this action causes you to have your offer for admission withdrawn, then you will not want to hear the consequences.”

  I’m a project to them. If I get into Harvard, it doesn’t matter how the project gets completed. If I don’t, then the project was a failure and gets scrapped.

  Maybe not literally, but in a lot of ways, it sure will.

  “Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll make sure this has no impact,” I said. “I’ll send in letters affirming my character. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’m not going to let this prevent me from getting in, I swear.”

  “See to it that you do,” my father said ominously.

  With that, he and my mother went inside, leaving me at the bottom of the stairs. I bowed my head, took a deep breath, and decided the only way I was going to get this solved was the same way I always did. By looking at exactly what I could do to fix it, and devoting myself full time to it. Nothing else—not even friends—mattered right now.

  I went inside, hurried upstairs, and opened my laptop. I checked my phone, deciding to take one more look at it before beginning drafts of letters, when I saw an unknown number.

  “Hey, you get home?”

  Who?

  “Yeah, who is this?” I wrote back.

  I tossed the phone on my pillow. I opened up the Twitter account for Harvard and Yale while Googling “does suspension prevent you from getting into Ivy League?” Before I clicked the first link, though, my phone buzzed again.

  “You know who this is. I’m home safe too.”

  Nick. How the hell did you get my number?

  “Good.”

  I left it at that and turned my attention back to the computer screen. The first link took me to a message board, on which the general advice seemed scattered all over the place. No one outright said that suspension would prevent me from getting into those schools, but no one definitively said that I was home free, either. The awkward middle ground, the gray area, was the one I seemed stuck in, and I wasn’t going to have an answer until March 31st or so.

  My phone buzzed again. I need to turn it off.

  “How did your parents handle it? Did they yell at you and call you an asshat like my dad?”

  He punctuated the text with an eye roll emoji, which felt pretty part for how I felt right then.

  “Not quite like that, but it wasn’t good. Sorry to hear your dad called you an asshat.”

  You want me to be empathic? There you go, Nick.

  I went back to my computer, but this time, I just kept the phone open by me. No point in continuing to interrupt my work; might as well have it right by me to respond immediately.

  “It’s all good,” Nick wrote back just seconds later. “I have to get my asshole tendencies from someone.”

  I actually laughed at that, which was a strange feeling considering he’d been the one to perpetrate all of this onto me.

  “Ha-ha. You don’t have to be an asshole, though.”

  I promised myself one more message before I went back to my work.

  “I try not to be, believe it or not.”

  Wait a minute.

  I felt like I was suddenly seeing the nice side of Nick. Not the one who felt the need to act out because he didn’t get what he wanted. But the one who could be honest. Maybe it was the distance of texting. Maybe it was the realization of what I’d said before. Maybe it was many things.

  Regardless of what it was, I’d take it.

  “You can be a nice guy when you want to be, Nick.”

  If you just didn’t act like little brother all the time, you’d be full of it. The craziest part to me was that Nick was still, at worst, in the top one percent of athleticism in the general population. Yes, the people that he was playing were also in that category, and those who played in college were in the one percent of that one percent, but I think Nick could have benefited from some perspective.

  “Just work on it,” I sent.

  OK, I really have to focus on reaching out to the Ivies here. And don’t forget that Nick is the one who put you here. Him being this way may be real, but so was the way he treated you all this week.

  I saw Nick responding, but I needed to be stronger than this. I needed to not let him distract me from work. I closed my phone before he responded, and I went ba
ck to my search.

  The more I did my work, though, the more I realized that a lot of this was just a matter of ownership. If the schools asked me, I just needed to be honest about it. I didn’t need to preach from the top of the mountain that I had gotten suspended, and so long as I didn’t hide it or deny it or lie about it, then I would be fine.

  In essence, it wasn’t a non-factor, but it wasn’t as big a factor as I had feared. I just had to do everything I could to take ownership of it if it got brought up.

  Maybe I was making excuses to check my phone, curious to see how else Nick would surprise me, but I really didn’t see that there was anything else that needed to be done. I heard my phone buzzing from the corner of the bed, and I lunged forward to get it.

  But it wasn’t Nick. It was Emily.

  “Hey girl! Wanna go hang out tonight? Girl’s night to plan spring break trip to the beach. You in?”

  Oh, thank God. Yes, please.

  “Absolutely. No boys, though. Sick of boys.”

  I wondered if Emily and Jackie knew what Nick had done. I wondered if Nick had bragged about it to Adam and Kevin. Hell, I wondered if Nick was even as close to those two as I had suspected.

  “Sure, no problem.”

  That was all I needed to hear. I liked her text, put my phone to the side, and gave myself a ten minute break to surf YouTube and other sites.

  But a minute later, Emily called.

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re changing your mind about no boys.”

  “No, no, of course not,” Emily said. “But I am wondering why you asked that? Are you seeing someone?”

  “Oh, God, no,” I said, laughing at the thought, even though the question brought back the memory of Nick being right up on me, the smell of his pheromones arousing me and exciting me—but then, also, his presence intimidating me and stirring fear in me. “No, hell no. Did you know what happened this week with Nick?”