Dead?
What is wrong with me? I would never wish a parent’s death on my worst enemy. Sorrow needs her father. He could be the worst father in the world, but even the worst of human trash can be redeemed, can’t they?
Sighing, I cross my ankles and stare at Sorrow with my hands tented in front of my mouth. Her long black hair falls around her oval face like a curtain and flows down the front of her buttoned-up black shirt like a waterfall.
She’s tiny like a baby bird and too thin, with skinny arms and fragile bones. Sorrow isn’t the most beautiful girl, but she does stand out with her glacier-blue eyes, tragic past, and attitude of not caring. Sorrow doesn’t give a damn what the world thinks of her.
At least, that’s how she acts on the outside. Deathly quiet. Stoic. Doesn’t speak a lick to anyone except Leigh. I’m guessing Sorrow is a hot mess on the inside. Had she not been, if she were more my type—loud, overconfident, gave a fuck how she looks—I’d make her an exception to my one rule: Keep my options open.
My parents didn’t when they were eighteen and nineteen, and look where that got them—settling when they could’ve been with someone they really wanted to be with rather than sticking around because they made a mistake—me.
Jesus H. Christ, I won’t go down the path Malice and Seven are going—all in love and shit and going on and on about what a great time they’ll have at Dumas University with their girls in attendance. I’m not sure I’ll go, but it’ll be the bomb to experience with my boys.
Bonus? I can have it without a girl tagging along as my girlfriend.
2
Sorrow
Trace Saints’s gaze is intense one moment, then looking past me the next, like I don’t exist.
Like we haven’t been living in the same house. Like we didn’t go to Malice’s party a few weeks ago. Like he didn’t lie next to me on the bed in one of the bedrooms at Malice’s cousin’s place in Dumas during Friendsgiving when the silence between us was unnerving. I’ve never lain next to a boy before, and in pitch darkness.
I had one of my headaches, and he stayed in the dark room rather than leaving me alone. I doubt it was to comfort me. He was the predator guarding his meal from the other predators at the party. There weren’t any. I felt safe around the older guys who were there. The only predator was Trace.
He looked at me like that just now, a predator on the hunt, and I’m the prey, before he changed his mind and looked through me like I wasn’t worth hunting. Too timid. Too thin. Not enough of a challenge for him. I’d trip over my own feet in a chase, and where’s the fun in that? I wouldn’t make a satisfying meal, either.
Years of my father living off his inheritance left him stretching every dollar, including for food. It isn’t surprising that he had no money to his name when he died, and whatever of his inheritance went toward paying off his debts.
Ever since I returned to the real world, I’ve overheard the adults whispering behind my back. It doesn’t help that my story spread like wildfire. No one knew I existed until the firefighters rescued me and Leigh from the burning house.
I try not to listen to the chatter about my family and me, but it isn’t easy to do when I’ve been the talk of the town. The townsfolk say my parents were terrible for leaving me parentless. My parents weren’t perfect, but they were still my parents, and nothing anyone says will change that.
Someone shoulder bumps me, bringing me back to the present. I blink, and the music, the conversations, and the crackling of the fire hit me like a sound wave.
“Hey, are you okay? You were staring off into space.”
Unfurling my fists, I breathe in deep and glance up. “I’m fine.” Trace is looking at me with indifference.
I’m a nobody, nothing special. That’s how he looks at the other girls in our school—except for the ones he’s hooking up with or going on a few dates with before he calls it off. For them, his eyes light up. He’s happy to see them and seems genuinely interested in them as people. His phone pings nonstop. I should tell him to put it on silent, but I’m a guest in his house, and it’s his life.
Trace isn’t happy to see me, and he has no interest in getting to know me. Otherwise, we would talk about more than the weather or our classes on a surface level when we’re in his truck or bump into each other in the kitchen late at night, headed for the fridge.
Who brings up the weather in the middle of the night?
Not being on his radar should make me feel happy, but instead, this unfamiliar ache gnaws at me whenever I think about how he talks to and looks at other girls compared with how he interacts with me.
There is no comparison.
“Leave or stay longer?”
In my peripheral vision, Leigh finishes her bottled water and drops it into her bag. Mine is half-empty and sitting in the cupholder of Trace’s camping chair. It’s pathetic that even the chair isn’t mine. Neither is the bottled water.
I have to stop relying on the Saints’s generosity and stand on my own two feet, starting with the job at the auto parts store that Leigh helped me get two weeks ago. She’s teaching me to drive, too. We’re using my boss’s sister’s car. Soon, I won’t have to rely on Trace to drive me to and from school.
On the first and second days of class, I took the bus. On the third day, Trace grabbed my backpack and angrily said he would drive me from now on.
Did he hear about how the other students refused to let me sit next to them? They would stretch out across the seats or set down their backpacks and glare, daring me to move them. I ended up standing behind the driver’s seat, holding on to a metal pole. Thank goodness the ride was short.
