Piper
Present Day
The vibrating of my phone next to my head wakes me from a nightmarish sleep.
It’s been buzzing for the past ten minutes, annoying the hell out of my subconscious. But I’ve always been a heavy sleeper, and that hasn’t changed, even though I’m currently in my dead parents’ house, recently fucked by my parents’ murderer, a monster without features or a soul that I now know is real.
It would take a lot more than that to give me insomnia, though.
I open one groggy eye and look at the number flashing on my screen. I don’t recognize it.
Could it be…?
Stop. Stop right now.
I clear my voice to try to make myself sound more awake, then answer. “Yeah?”
“Still in bed?” chirps a cheerful, dumb-sounding male voice. “I’m waiting for you downstairs.”
“Huh?”
“It’s Josh. Get your butt moving and let’s go!”
I sit up, blinking in confusion. “What the fuck? I didn’t order a car.”
“I know. I came of my own free will. I quit!”
“You… what?” I’m trying to wrap my head around the chirpy voice that’s like a hammer to my brain. I suddenly understand why my own voice used to annoy Quill so much.
There’s nothing worse than listening to an irresistibly cheerful person when you’re the farthest thing from happy.
To be fair, my voice was the only part of me thatwascheerful. Living in Astley, I got bullied round-the-clock, and my sunny personality turned into a sunny facade that I hid behind, until high school got the better of me. It took exactly one toilet-dunking at Quill’s hands in freshman year for me to get angry.
And I got so fucking angry.
But it also took only one kiss from Quill in senior year to forget all about that and go right back to being cheerful, annoying Piper with him.
With everyone else, though, I kept right on being Pissed-off Piper.
Maybe Iamlike an insect, after all. An insect with a tiny brain and no memory.
Insect. Cricket. What kind of fucked-up nicknames are those, anyway?
It’s crazy what you’ll accept when you imagine someone is in love with you.
Cruel words turn into terms of endearment when they’re spoken by a boy who pretends to care.
I rub my eyes and tune back into Josh’s rambling.
“Still with me, Piper?” he chirps. “Or did you fall back asleep?”
“I’m here,” I yawn. “So… you quit?”
He clicks his tongue, annoyed. “Didn’t you hear anything I just said? I didn’t actually quit. I was fired. The boss found out I’d taken a look at his files.”
“Oh. Sorry about that.”
“No problemo.”
