Page 15

I scoff. “You’re blackmailing me?”

“That feels too harsh a word,” he says, “I’m negotiating with you. You do something for me. I do something for you.” He mimics zipping his mouth shut and throwing away a key.

“You’re joking.”

His face loses its usual mischievous expression. “Honestly, this is a little beneath me, but I’m serious. Begging didn’t work, and I can’t get kicked off the team. Some universities only take you if they scout you; it doesn’t matter what school you go to or what grades you get. I can’t miss a single game if I want to get into a school with a good team. If this is what it takes, then I’ll have to be an asshole.”

“You’re doing such a great job at that,” I say through my teeth.

He rolls his eyes, but there’s a smirk playing on his lips. “So, I’m assuming we have a deal, Lopez?”

“You’re bluffing,” I say. “You can’t be serious. You’re going to tattle on me?”

“I don’t bluff,” he says, “and you’re not in a position to call it. We both know you have no other option. So, let’s just pretend we did this little back and forth and that you almost got me to back down, if it makes you feel better.”

I let out a harsh laugh, hoping it masks the humiliating red spots now appearing on my skin.

Again, again, some spoiled asshole, with no idea how hard it is for other people, is in my face, toying with me because they think they’re in a different league.

Time and time again, these people, people like Theo, make me feel small for simply existing in their rich, perfect presence.

“You guys are all the same.” I can’t keep it to myself.

He points a finger at his face. “As in men? I think there are many worse out there than me.”

I don’t correct Theo that I mean him, his wealth, Rachel, and every other jerk who goes to this school and looks down on me. Just like Rachel, he thinks he has the upper hand. He thinks he can control me, and I can’t do the same to him.

Wrong.

I’ll show him just how wrong he is.

I glare at his outstretched hand. The parent-teacher conference is in two months, but we won’t have another one for the rest of the year. I’ll just have to keep him quiet till then.

Sure, I’ll take on his case.

And I’ll be a thousand dollars richer after I sabotage it.

“Deal,” I say, reaching my hand out for a shake and trying to hide my smirk as he looks at me triumphantly. Let him think he won this battle. The war is mine.

“Deal.” He smiles as he shakes my hand, and I can’t stop my lips from pulling up at the image of wiping the smug look from his face.

CHAPTER 6

The early-September air has a tinge of cold, but the bright sun makes it hot enough. I don’t mind that I forgot my sweater in my morning rush to get to school after being too lost in my history notes. It’s not too bad as I sit on the top of the bleachers facing the empty football field.

I had my physical over the weekend, and my doctor told me if I don’t see the sun more than once a year, I’ll be at risk of becoming anemic like my mother. Now I’m downing iron every day, and my dad has pushed my desk against the wall with the largest window so the sunlight can hit me more often.

I wish I could spend the end of the day studying, but instead I’ve begun building my file for Theo’s case.

Luckily, when I went back to Rachel and Chloe, Chloe was too busy being grateful for Rachel to gloat about me coming back after talking all tough. But the reality is that a thousand dollars is nothing to turn my nose up at, so if Rachel did give me any patronizing stares, I only replaced the image in my mind with the fantasy of the money hitting my bank account.

Maybe if Theo had offered me a grand I’d have taken his side. Instead, he pissed me off and put me in a humiliating corner. His own fault that he doesn’t realize a corner is a perfect place to fight back without worries.

The case, though, is tricky.

I have to do enough that he doesn’t realize I’m sabotaging it, but not enough to actually help him win. It has to be detailed enough, as all my other files have been, so Ms. Cortez isn’t suspicious when she does her biweekly examination of our progress, but vague enough she won’t expect specific arguments for Theo’s side I won’t bring up during the mock trial.

Once Lexie is finished with the detention she earned after telling her teacher she’d rather “fling herself into the ocean than do any extra credit to bump up her grade” because the course is “as overwhelmingly boring as watching bread rise in an unplugged oven,” she’ll drive me home.