I check the backseat and, thankfully, nothing looks disturbed.
“Why do they hate you so much?” Ian walks around the car in a slow circle, taking in the damage. He lets out a long sigh when he sees the other side and I know I don’t want to look.
“No idea.” I’m lying and Ian probably knows it. They hate me because of Todd and Tessa and how everyone thinks the trashy girl probably wanted Todd’s attention. Bren may have changed my life, but she will never change who I am to these people. “They’re not too fond of you either.”
“Yeah. True.” Ian looks toward the road, thinking. “They might not hate you as much, you know, if you stayed down more. If you didn’t fight back so much.”
“So let them stomp all over me?”
Ian shrugs, bends down. “This yours?” he asks, handing me a Droid cell phone. Definitely not mine. One of the boys must have dropped it. I should repay the favor by breaking it into a million little pieces and returning it.
Except that’s nowhere near equal to what they just did to my car, to me, to Ian. People like Matthew Bradford and his friends don’t just wreck our stuff. They wreck everything for people like us.
Stay down? My hand circles the Droid, tightens.
Ian scuffs his shoe against the pavement, watching me. “What’re you going to do, Wick?”
I smile at him. “Call my mom’s insurance company.”
And then I’m going to make Matthew Bradford, Sutton Davis, and Eric Williams pay.
18
If finding “bitch” keyed on the side of your car is bad, driving it home is worse. Everyone points, looks at me. I stare straight ahead and pretend I don’t notice, but my face is seventeen shades of red and my neck . . . well, I glanced once in the rearview mirror to check and once was enough. The skin hurts, but it’ll heal. It’s not even that bad.
And yet I’m still shaking.
I want my mom. It’s weird actually. She’s been gone for over four years, but the need is so sharp-edged, it feels like I lost her yesterday. I swing around the officer parked by our house. I don’t stop to say hi, but I know he gets a good look at the Mini. By the time I’m turning in the driveway, he has his radio ready. Great. It’s one more thing I can explain to Carson.
I park my car alongside Bren’s, killing the engine as my adoptive mom walks into the garage. She stops dead, gaze pinned to the Mini.
Then to me.
“What happened?” Bren demands.
I hesitate. There’s no getting around the truth even though I brainstormed lies the whole way home. It’s not that I want Matthew and his cretins to get out of this. I just want to deal with them on my own and yet now, looking at Bren, feeling Matthew’s hands branded on my skin, feeling sudden tears prickling my eyes . . . I want to tell her everything and I want her to fix it. I want someone to save me because I’m too damn tired to save myself anymore.
Griff once said Bren would help me, that she’d never want me to handle Carson alone. If that’s true, I’d have to tell her.
I edge a little closer. “It was keyed by some kids at school.”
“Which kids?”
“Matthew Bradford, Eric Williams, and Sutton Davis.” I pause, waiting to see Bren’s face flush red in anticipation of the ass kicking she’s about to deliver, but it never happens. When I say the boys’ names, she flinches.
“Alan Bradford’s son?” Bren asks.
“I guess.”
Bren swallows, swallows again. “I have a breakfast meeting with Alan day after tomorrow. He’s the only person who’s returned my calls in weeks and—and—are those bruises? What happened to your neck?”
“Matthew Bradford,” I whisper.
Bren makes a strangled noise deep in her throat. “I don’t understand. Did he . . . touch you?”
Are you stupid? Of course, he freaking touched me! I try to work my mouth around something to say and, suddenly, understand what she means. “No, he didn’t touch me like that.”
He just humiliated me. He made me feel like trash. He made me—I inhale hard against the tears. If I start crying now, I won’t be able to stop.
Bren’s shoulders go slack and she rubs her forehead, eyes still locked on my neck. “Do you want to make a statement? Do you want to go to the police?”
Yes . . . no. I’m tripping over her tone. This is Bren. Bren. Shouldn’t she be making me? I don’t understand. Her tone is worried about me . . . not angry with them.
“I’m not sure,” I say at last.
“Wick, if he hurt you, we have to go to the police.”
She sounds stronger this time, but still not herself, and as I stare at her hand (shaking) and how it plays with her nonexistent pearls (when was the last time she wore them?), I start to see everything else: how her cardigan hangs looser . . . how there are smudges under her eyes . . . how I wasn’t the only person Todd took things from.