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

“I can’t right now.” It just figured I would be offered exactly the help I needed and my life would be too complicated to receive it. “I’ve got to be able to get the bus home, if I miss this one—”

“I can take you home,” Mr. Henderson said. “Or… Matt?”

“Yeah, I could do it,” Matt said. Mr. Henderson blew out a sigh. I resisted joking about the potentially awkward situation he’d nearly gotten himself into there. It was hard to keep my sudden rush of elation in check now that someone was actually on my side.

I pushed through my uneasiness at getting into Matt’s shiny expensive car by continuing to talk. “Is it just me who is starting to feel like this is not even real life any more?”

Matt concentrated on twiddling about a hundred knobs on his dash to get the air conditioning running to his specifications. “That’s what it’s always like with Ax. Drama, drama, drama.”

“I didn’t realise you were friends.”

That turned Matt to me for a second before he started the car. “I would have thought you’d assume enemies from that intro.”

“Nah, I get it. Best friends, right? From years back?”

“You’ve had one,” he said, really bleakly the way you’d expect someone to if they were talking about a romantic relationship that ruined them.

I shook my head. “I’ve observed a lot of them close up though.” Everything about this situation—the low-level misery, the single-minded and petty dedication to retaliation—reminded me of what I’d been seeing with Callie and Tamara of late.

“We started out going to school together,” Matt said. “In primary school. We were really tight back then. Paired up for projects all the time, got one another into all sorts of crazy detention-making schemes.

But we almost never got detention even when we deserved it, because we were such smart little bastards. Teachers can’t wrap their heads around punishing their most-loved kids. If you’re destined for great things you’re not going to need discipline, right?”

I was surprised he sounded so bitter about it. I’d noticed that little feature of gifted-dom and I’d always envied it. I was pretty smart but it had taken me years to learn to keep my mouth in check about things less personal than my dad. Maybe needing to keep one big secret had made me weak when it came to restraining myself anywhere else. At my old school I’d spoken my mind about religion, about the curriculum, about politics… and it had meant my teachers were always on the alert for what I might do next. “I guess you didn’t need that discipline, but Axel probably did.”

Matt shrugged, his eyes on the road. “I wouldn’t have thought he did, in the old days. His parents divorced in our last year of primary school and then he went to a different high school to me, and we didn’t see one another so much for a while. I think his family had money issues. His dad moved into my family’s street just before we both started going to Burgundy, and he’s around most of the time as far as I can tell. We don’t go to one another’s places quite as much as we used to when we were kids. He’s happy to drop me an IM even if we’re just a hundred metres down the street from one another.”

Divorced parents: I had never expected to find something Axel and I had in common. It probably wasn’t the same, really. I’d grown up with the concept of divorced parents being such a part of my life it hadn’t been a part of my life. I didn’t even know what it felt like to have a mother and father who could stand to be in the same room as one another. It had to be very different to think you had that proper family and then for it to suddenly not be true. As for money issues… I knew how a breakup could cause those all right. I didn’t remember how it happened with Elizabeth and Dad, but Dad and Marcia’s breakup had been devastating for us.

I wasn’t going to let myself get caught up in those thoughts to the point where I felt sorry for him, though. So he’d lost some things in his life that probably meant a lot to him. I’d lost things too, but I was mature enough to understand that it didn’t mean anyone owed me something, or I was entitled to take things from other people to compensate.

“To be honest,” Matt said, “Axel and I aren’t really friends any more, I think. It’s not a friendship any more once it’s all about what the other person can get out of you.” His grimace was so intense I sort of wanted to pat him on the shoulder, or maybe shoot him a thumbs-up, but it seemed like the sort of pain where you just had to feel it. “I mean he used things I’d told him in confidence against me, threatened to blow up all my hard work if I didn’t do terrible things for him… and he never even fucking had the decency to tell me what any of it was about. And then he just comes up with some bullshit explanation for what I did to you, a glitch in the state system, and it’s no longer got anything to do with me any more?”

It seemed right that he was more outraged by the fact of Axel’s power than actually having been caught up in it. There was definitely more to Axel’s recent history than Matt knew, though. How did a guy whose family fell into financial hardship have that much influence with anyone still? His dad’s fortunes had improved, at least… but that didn’t really explain everything. “Why did you go along with him? You could have reported him to the police for blackmail, you… I’m sure there were other options. It’s not like you’re completely without social standing yourself, if this is something we care about here after all.”

Matt shot me a shy grin as he turned into my neighbourhood. “I don’t think we’re friends any more. But I guess I still have some of the same feelings I did when we were friends. Wanting him to do well, to rise above his past mistakes.”

“Yeah well, sometimes the best way to help someone is to let them make mistakes that really hurt them, Matt.”

“You’re right,” he said. “But that’s still hard to do. It’s hard to know when you’ve crossed that point beyond which the only thing you can do is let him sink. I’m sorry, Aileen. I did something really awful to you for selfish reasons. If it were me, I’d find that very hard to accept, never mind forgiving.”

Strangely, I was thinking about Dad at that moment. Was I following the advice I’d just given to Matt when it came to him? I put so much of my mental energy into figuring out how to protect him from upsetting things he had no control over, but it wasn’t making him stronger. If anything, it might be making him more of a mess.

I wasn’t going to just roll over and let Axel take what my dad had worked hard for once, but maybe I wasn’t doing him any favours by helping him guard it so obsessively. I tried to picture how it might go down if I sat Dad down to tell him about this situation with Axel and I was completely honest about the circumstances. Would he at least feel some shame, that I was fighting for his idea more than he ever had?

I didn’t think I would ever know, because I didn’t have it in me to do that.

“I get it,” I told Matt. “Once you attach yourself to someone, it’s hard to stop trying to help them.”

Matt pulled up alongside my house. I was glad he seemed to be looking at me and not our mangled overgrown lawn or Dad’s half-rebuilt car in the driveway. “Well, I just hope you’re not going to end up needing a lot of help. Because I’m going to fight alongside you on this, you can count on it.”

“I just wish I could have gotten in a stupid intellectual property fight with someone as reasonable as you,” I said as I opened his car door.

Chapter Nine

The house seemed deserted when I walked in, but I just kept on moving and by the time I’d crossed the tile of the kitchen, I could hear Dad calling me from downstairs.

His workshop contained all the energy he’d sucked out of the rest of the house. There were three coffees on one corner of his workbench, none of them even sipped. As for what he was making… he seemed to be working on at least four projects simultaneously.