The Big Boys' League: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings 3)

I just kept walking. Axel followed me for a while, throwing desperate insults in my direction, but when I didn’t feed him he eventually peeled off, so quietly I didn’t realise until he had actually disappeared.

I didn’t know if he was hiding somewhere watching me, but I couldn’t help a little triumphant pump of the fist. That was how you handled an arsehat bully from that squad.

Chapter Three

Walking from the bus stop to my house was as much as I could take. I pushed through the screen on the back door, staggered past Toby and Tim, who were already setting up a small city across the kitchen bench, and found my way to an available seat in the lounge.

Dad saluted me with his beer bottle. He looked like he was still ninety percent with us, which was about the best I could expect when Marcia was going to be around in an hour or so to pick up the boys.

In the early days, just after she left him, she’d show up and drag them out of there squirming and begging for a kiss goodbye, not even meeting my eyes. I sort of thought that was because she was afraid I might beg her to be allowed to come too… and some days I would have, off the slightest encouragement. For a while I didn’t actually think I’d be able to get Dad pulled together enough to survive. I expected him to do something stupid one day and leave me with nobody who even wanted to want me around. But he gradually started putting his pants on in the morning and being functional more and more days in a row, and after a while Marcia actually started honouring their ad-hoc custody arrangement.

I didn’t blame Marcia for any of what she’d had to do before then of course, but I was sad she decided not to come back to us after Dad got his shit together. I understood, though. Sometimes people just go too far and you can’t see them the way you used to. I didn’t blame Elizabeth, my mum, for leaving, and when she came back to meet with me a few years back I accepted her explanation that she’d been in a bad place and unable to care for herself, let alone me, but I never bothered trying to make up for lost time or whatever. That moment had passed.

It just sucked that my brothers were only with us a quarter of the time at most now. They might be just half-brothers technically, but in a practical sense, two six-year-old boys feels like a whole lot more than two whole brothers. Tamara had recently found out she had a teenage half-sister, and I hated it a little when she mentioned how they were getting to know one another, finding out strange things they had in common that didn’t seem to make sense. Not that I was going to find out I liked trains as much as the twins if I got to live with them full-time as they grew older, but they were more and more like real humans as the years went on, and I was obviously going to miss out on the friendship I might have been able to develop with them otherwise. Tim had explained to me just that weekend, cheerful like he’d come up with something absolutely genius, that he’d been telling his friends at school I was sort of like a cousin, not a big sister.

I don’t cry a lot, but that made me cry. Later, when the kids weren’t around to see.

“Want one?” Dad was still waving his beer at me. I shook my head. “I cracked open one of those flavoured ones Sandy left behind last time, absolutely wretched stuff, left it in the fridge for now. You’re more than welcome to take it out of my sight forever.”

“No thanks,” I said. At least it was more appropriate now I was eighteen than it had been when he was offering me drinks before I was legal, but having someone in your family who was an utter mess with alcohol had a way of turning you off things like taking a sip before dinnertime. “Do I really look that wasted?”

“Let’s just say I wouldn’t be that shocked to hear you’d already stopped off at the bottleshop on the way home.”

“No need to do that when we’re so well stocked up here already.” It was a joke, but also a jab. I could tell he’d gotten it too, so I moved right along. “There was this dumb glitch at school today. The computer decided I wasn’t a student and refused to give me a practice exam to complete.”

“Sounds like a lucky break to me,” commented Dad, who was always happy to find a way to get out of anything.

“Not really. I had to come in and make it up over lunch. My teacher and I both disliked that.”

Dad grimaced in sympathy, then glanced at his smartwatch: a new toy he’d been saving up for since the start of the year. “Hey, would you like to—Look, just gather up the boys and bring them into my workshop, I’ve got something really cool I’d love to show you all.”

After the day I’d had I almost wanted to just do it, but I knew how this would end. “Marcia’s going to be here soon, Dad. You know how she gets when the boys aren’t ready on time.”

“Oh yeah.” Dad adjusted back into a reclining position in his seat. I tried not to look like I was so obviously slumping in relief. Sometimes when I pretended it was so unreasonable of Marcia to expect to not be screwed around when she came to get the twins, he would just fall in line. Sometimes he would throw a tantrum about equivalent to what Toby and Tim were going to pull on me when I told them they had to pack up their current game.

Marcia was strangely buoyant, even when the boys weren’t quite ready to get in the car because Dad kept interrupting while I was packing them up, distracting them with silly games and jokes. It reminded me of how things were when she and Dad were still together, when she was so confident she could keep him together.

When she beckoned me off into a corner away from Dad and the boys I knew a bit ahead of time I was not going to like the explanation.

“I thought you should be the first to hear about it.”

I could still remember too clearly when she wouldn’t have needed to justify my being the first, because I would have just been there when something happened. It wasn’t like I went out of my way to embrace her as the mother I’d never really gotten to know, but I was mature enough at that point to understand my dad needed a different kind of relationship to the one the two of us had, and I respected that Marcia seemed to be in it for him and not what he could offer her, which was nothing. So she’d probably come to trust me very quickly.

“I’m moving to the mainland,” said Marcia. “I’ve been offered a really good position at my company’s head office in Brisbane, something I can’t possibly pass up. We’ll be out of here in six weeks’ time.”

“But…”

Marcia looked over at Dad, giving Tim a ride on his back and roaring at Toby like a dinosaur instead of helping them pack all the drawings they wanted to take with them. “I know this is going to be hard on you and your dad, obviously I can’t just fly the boys over every few weeks, but I want you to know you’ll be welcome to visit any time you like.”

She was shuffling her feet a lot and I thought I knew exactly why. Of course she couldn’t just pack up the twins and move all the way across the country and tell Dad to lump it.

At the moment they had an unofficial custody arrangement Marcia had come up with where she had them at her new place most of the time ‘for stability’, and I’d encouraged Dad to go along with it at the time, because I was terrified he’d mess up so badly with them during his drinking episodes he’d lose them entirely. But Dad was a lot better now, and even if I understood Marcia’s reluctance to change things, he deserved more time with Toby and Tim going into the future, not less.

Marcia was getting in ahead of time with me to get me on side. She wanted me to break this to Dad, to make him okay with it. But there was no reason I had to do that. I could just as easily encourage him to kick up a fuss. Tell her she couldn’t just drag his kids off somewhere he would hardly ever see them. Go to court—

Yeah, and that would play out so well for him, wouldn’t it? Marcia had always been good about everything she’d seen in those bad months. She’d never held it up to him after, I didn’t think it was her way… but I bet that would all change if he tried to stop her from doing what she wanted to do with her career. Marcia was ambitious. I think that was what attracted her to Dad, back when she thought he was kind of the same. I bet she would turn up to court with a lovingly handwritten and dated list of all the times Dad had been a flake who didn’t deserve to see his sons.

I had to appreciate she was doing me a good turn though. If she’d just told both of us together, I would have had no opportunity to figure out how to deal with Dad’s inevitable bad reaction. Or maybe even convince her to change her mind.