The entire group of girls was now listening to us, not just the few who’d been flirting with Logan. They all wanted something. I could feel it. I always felt it. The more my status grew in school, the worse it got. I said to them, “Yes, I know I’m being an ass again, but it’s true. You all just want something from us. You want to be our girlfriends. You want the attention we can give you. You want to be powerful and popular.” They were like pigeons, just waiting to see if I would throw them some breadcrumbs. “Go away. Find me at a party and I’ll be nicer, but not in school. I don’t have the patience in school to deal with this.”
I skimmed over Logan. He’d been flirting, maybe I shouldn’t stop that? Fuck. I didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t get hurt again. All I knew was that enough damage had been done.
Ethan came down the hallway and pointed at me. As he went past us, he said, “Supposed to tell you that Kate’s waiting for you.”
“See. That shit.” I shook my head. “I’m not her boyfriend. I don’t come when she barks.”
Logan asked, “Does she want a quickie?”
“Who the f**k knows.” I grabbed my bag from the locker, then shut it. The girls were still there. They didn’t go away. They would scatter at times, but they never went far. “I’m not in the mood.”
He asked, “Are you going?”
“No.” I gestured to the parking lot. They weren’t leaving so we’d have to go. “Let’s get some food before practice. We got an hour to wait and I don’t want to deal with Kate.” She’d come looking. She would want something, demand something, and I’d have to be an ass**le yet again to get her to back off. It was tiring.
Logan laughed and as we headed for our cars, I saw Marissa at her locker. She was different and perplexing. She didn’t want anything from me. She didn’t even want me to sit with her. She wasn’t like the rest. Even now, she stood out from the others. There were cliques all around her. Girls were giggling, whispering together, but she wasn’t. She stood alone with her back turned to us. She wasn’t even paying attention to us. She was focused on a book she was holding, but she wasn’t putting it in the locker. She wasn’t reading it. She was staring at it with her head down.
Logan saw her too. “Who’s that?”
“Mr. Rooney assigned seats today.” I pointed at her. “She’s my table mate, but I’m not supposed to talk to her.”
He snorted. “You were talking? To a stranger?”
“She’s different.”
As we headed farther down the hallway, we glanced back. She saw us, then gasped, turned red, and whipped back around. Her head hit her opened locker door, but she didn’t do anything. She buried her head inside her locker as if she hadn’t hit it. Then we turned the corner and Logan nodded at me. “Yep, she is. That’s for sure.”
I was okay with that. When we were almost to the door, we saw Tate was coming back in. Her path came across us and she stopped. The blood drained from her face, and she jerked back as if she’d been hit. We stopped and I glanced at Logan. Pain flashed over his face. I’d been right. He was covering it up. He looked away and walked around her. Nothing was said. The encounter was filled with tension and hurt. At seeing that, at seeing how much it still hurt him just to see her, I gritted my teeth. She had hurt my brother. It was time for her to know.
She spoke first. “What do you want, Mason?”
“He loved you.”
She flinched again and turned away. “Yeah, well—”
“You don’t get to talk right now.”
She flushed, but she didn’t leave.
I added, “You’re like all the other girls. You used my brother and you wanted to use me too.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
I snorted. “Yes, it was. You were friends with Kate. I saw you guys. You’re the popular girls in our grade and what? You wanted more, didn’t you? You didn’t even like me, Tate. You wanted the power that I could give you, but you didn’t think it through.”
“MASON!”
Hearing Kate yelling my name, I turned to make sure she couldn’t see me. I wasn’t hiding, but I didn’t want to hear her crap at that moment. I told Tate, “Logan asked me today if I sicced Kate and her friends on you.” She met my gaze then, waiting for the answer. “I didn’t, but I’m glad they’re making your life hell.” Logan acted normal today. He was getting better, but it had taken months. “When Kate is done with you, that’s when I’ll start. I will break you just like you broke him.”
10
THE SURPRISING CONNECTION
The next week, Mr. Rooney sent half the class to the library. We were assigned a project to work on, but the same instructions that he enforced in his classroom were applied there. No talking. Period. The only person you could talk to was your table mate. Glancing to where mine had gone, she scooted around the group and walked to the very back of the library.
As I followed her through the book cases, she went to a table set in its own section. It was away from the main lobby and isolated with bookshelves all around it.
I put my notebook on the table and took a seat. “I’m not a typical dumb jock, but I had no idea this was back here.”
She paused, her fingers stopped flipping through her pages, and she studied me for a moment.