Boys And Their Toys: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings 1)

I had some vague ideas about hiding the new phone from my parents to avoid further drama, but I realised pretty quickly that would be impossible. I’d have to keep my old one around, and once they saw the condition it was in they would probably start harassing me to accept their help in buying a new one. Not to mention how much worse it would look when I finally had to come clean to them and they realised I’d been lying about it for so long.

So I tackled the problem head-on in the end. I explained to my parents over dinner that night that my old phone had fallen out of the convertible and gotten smashed, and Lucas had felt bad enough about it that he’d bought me a new one. It seemed like it was all going well until I took out the still-boxed phone and showed them. Even though I pretended I had no idea what it had actually cost, they weren’t too fooled.

“You can’t accept this sort of gift from him, Callie,” Dad told me. “It’s too much. That’s not just a replacement in any sense of the word.”

“Well he did hit her car before,” Mum pointed out, “and now this. I’m sure he’s just feeling very guilty about the whole thing.” She was frowning in a state of extreme thoughtfulness, which was a very bad state when it came to my mother. “You know, I remember his mother used to be really nice, back when she did the odd parents’ group event with us in primary school. We should see if we can have the whole family over for lunch or dinner, make it clear there’s no hard feelings over this.”

I couldn’t remember Lucas’s mother any more than I could remember his sister, but I was certain this would be a terrible idea. A whole family of people who could just replace cars and phones at the drop of one, squished up around our dining table while my dad glowered at Lucas and my mother assured his parents repeatedly that anything their son had to buy me was just fine with her?

Someone was doing burnouts along our street right that minute. I couldn’t even imagine the awkwardness of that happening with

the Starlings over for dinner. It could only get worse if there was a drug bust or a major street fight… and neither of those was a completely outside possibility.

“Mum, please,” I said. “That would be a bit uncomfortable.”

“If you’re not official, I suppose,” Mum muttered.

“We’re not even unofficial, Mum. He’s just helping me out to make up for a few things that were his fault.”

Mum stiffened. “If he’s not going to make it official with you, your father is right. You can’t accept those sorts of expensive gifts from someone who thinks of you as just someone to have fun with.”

I would have banged my head down on the table if there’d been any room between the plates for it. “Do you really think we’re—I’m not doing anything like that with him, I swear. Not that it would be anyone’s business because we’re both more than old enough to make that decision, but it really is just him helping me out. Nothing else.”

And I really did believe that after the phone shopping trip. It had seemed for a second like he was being flirty with me over that girl from the shop, but he’d hardly had anything to say once we got in the car and he drove me home. He didn’t try to touch me and he even unlocked the door properly so getting out without exposing myself didn’t have to be a big challenge.

Maybe what he’d done in the hospital had been an impulse thing, just something that happened what with all the adrenaline and general craziness of that event. Maybe it was just me wanting to believe… but maybe it really had been an accident that he’d run into me in the first place. I hadn’t seen anything, after all. Maybe I hadn’t been paying attention and he hadn’t been paying attention… maybe he’d just been looking for me after my work to bother me again, and he’d accidentally taken it too far. As far as I knew he hadn’t been injured in the crash, but I didn’t really know if he’d let anyone check him out either. He must have been in a strange mental state afterwards, at least.

If he genuinely thought I was being paranoid in accusing him of running into him, maybe he really had thought I might be stashing a knife or something in my pocket when he’d thrown my phone on the—

I was definitely losing it if I had managed to convince myself Lucas was completely innocent in all of this.

“Are you saying this guy isn’t making any sort of overtures at all?” Dad said. “Because those are the ones you need to watch out for most of all.”

“I think your dad is right,” Mum said. “You need to have a talk with him, confirm where this relationship is going.”

“That’s not what I was trying to say at all,” Dad grumbled.

“There is no relationship!” I said. “And, I swear, everything is fine. He just feels like he owes me a few, I guess. There won’t be any consequences from me taking this thing, and once I have another car sorted out there won’t be any need for us to spend so much time together.”

Mum and Dad were both shaking their heads at me, albeit probably for slightly different reasons.

“You have to trust me on this,” I tried again. “I know it isn’t the way things would have been done when you guys were my age, but things have changed a lot now.”

“We’re not dinosaurs just because we were born in a year that didn’t start with 20, Callie,” Mum said. “Most things are probably very similar.”

But they both seemed to have lost any enthusiasm for talking about it at that moment, which was just fine with me if I could get on with dinner and get to unpackaging that phone like I really wanted.

I was pretty sure they discussed ‘the situation’ further when I was in my bedroom wrangling with homework I could barely even remember receiving, what with all the excitement of the day. I heard a lot more raised voices, and voices at all, than I was accustomed to hearing over the noise of the TV. But if they were happy to keep it to themselves, I was perfectly fine with that.

There wasn’t much for them to discuss after the day of the phone-shopping date. I kept the shiny new device out from under their noses where it couldn’t provoke them, and Lucas didn’t seem interested in… well, anything to do with me. He came and picked me up each morning looking sleek and gorgeous as ever, and drove me home after school, but he didn’t try to talk to me. When I tried to take advantage of the usual ‘how are you?’ as a conversation starter, he would respond to my nervous babble with a grunt, as if he couldn’t even be bothered shutting me down.

It went without saying, but he ignored me at school as well, leaving me to face the continued questions and speculation of everyone else in our class. It was even worse than it had been when we were kids. At least then I’d thought it was real most of the time, and if everyone else had known better than me they’d at least acted like it was real, so I wasn’t hanging my head in shame from the first moment.

I knew this wasn’t real, and everyone else knew it too. They were all laughing at me for the possibility that I might think differently… and no amount of insisting I got it would have stopped them, even if that had been something I could do.

Then by the third day of the week everything about our car accident had come out, and the going theory—gleefully shared right in front of me—was that I’d threatened Lucas, or my parents had threatened Lucas, and he was stuck carting me to and from school until I decided to liberate him from the arrangement. Never mind how ridiculous it was to think that my family could ever threaten Lucas’s. I bet nobody was bothering him asking questions about me when he was just going about his business.

I dreaded having to deal with whatever car he’d organised for me, because it was bound to start up a whole new round of questions. But at least I would be free to drive to and from school myself, and steel myself for whatever crap the day had ahead for me without having Lucas’s unsettling silence to contend with. Without having to wonder if he really had hooked up with that girl from the phone store, or how much he was thinking about what had happened between us when we were kids, or what he was telling his actual friends about me. Because surely they were asking. Surely I was the reason he wasn’t leaving school with a whole bunch of them piled up in the back of his sister’s car.