“Well don’t bring it up to him.” A sudden genuine flash of panic was stirring me out of the drowsiness that had settled as I grew more comfortable being around Lucy. “That was sort of what set off all of this. He got so mad that I remembered it at all, though how he managed to forget when you seem to remember…”
I shut my mouth so hard I bit my lip. Why had I brought it up at all?
“Honestly,” Lucy said, “I don’t mind reminiscing about being kids, but I want to stay the fuck away from whatever is going on present tense. But I’ll say one thing. Whatever you had going on with my brother back then, years ago… it’s got absolutely no connection to anything that might be happening now. He was a different kid back then. I mean he’s always had his issues, always been a bit of a brat, but everything changed at a certain point. And I don’t want to talk about that any further either, because I think you can guess… it has a lot to do with me.”
“I’m sorry to be bringing all of this up again for you,” I muttered.
“I’m not,” Lucy said. “But this is between the two of you now. I’ve got my own issues to take care of.”
My parents were more relaxed than I expected they would be when I banged on the front door at about seven in the morning and made them come open it in their dressing gowns. It probably helped that I had Lucy by my side, who was just as slick as her brother when it came to charming the way through awkward situations. It definitely helped a lot that she didn’t look enough like Lucas for either of them to guess she was his sister. It just looked like I’d sneaked out of the house to muck around with a friend, and since I was sober-looking and not covered in blood, there weren’t a lot of questions to ask.
Lucy didn’t say anything to expose herself as being related to Lucas, either. “I’ll see you later, Callie, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, even though I didn’t think she meant it. She was just keeping up the ruse of us being friends.
I waved her back off down the driveway and shut the door on her before my parents could notice we seemed to have the same car. They were so sleepy still I don’t think they even bothered looking.
“Well since we’re all up,” Dad said, “how about coffee?”
“It’s nice to see you with some other girls, Callie,” Mum commented. “I mean, it’s not like we don’t like Tamara, and there’s that other girl you see a lot of at school… Aileen, right? But it’s good to have a few other friends to turn to.”
I thought she was trying to be nice, in her way, but after everything Lucas had said to me before the accident, it just made me feel sick. I slumped in my seat at the kitchen table and put my face in my hands.
Lucas was still wrong, but he’d said a lot of things that I could take something from. Unfortunately, all I was able to take right now, in my current state of exhaustion, was how much of a failure I must seem to my parents. I had hardly any friends, and I wasn’t even a star student to account for it. And I certainly wasn’t getting better at having a social life at my current job, where the men either wanted to have at me or avoided me out of fear they would end up caught in a sexual harassment lawsuit or trouble with their wives.
I hated to admit it, but I thought Lucas had been completely right about that. They would never let me get ahead.
Okay, so that meant I was fucking up school, social life, and job. What else was left?
I took a couple sips of the coffee Dad put in front of me just to be polite, then I pushed my chair back from the table.
“Sorry, I just don’t think this is going to cut it. I’m going to go sleep until I have to head in to work.”
“You need to learn to pace yourself for these all-night parties, Callie,” Mum called after me. “Got to have your coffees earlier in the night, or find somewhere to nap, or—”
“I don’t think I want you telling her what I think you’re about to tell her,” Dad interrupted.
“Oh come on,” Mum said, “when have I been to that kind of party in the past decade?”
I was pretty sure I’d made it clear to Lucas I wasn’t going to just let him move me around as he pleased any more, so I didn’t really expect to hear from him again. And as I’d expected, once he returned to school, he kept his distance. I didn’t so much as glimpse him until Wednesday that following week. Of course he’d always been pretty sketchy with when he decided to bug me, but I would have at least expected him to try to make me drive him home from school if he’d been still interested in messing with me. I might even have been open to considering it.
And that was the problem right there: I was starting to feel bad about the way I’d spoken to him in the hospital. He had done something awful to me, and he deserved to face the consequences, but my timing had been terrible. I’d hit him when he was in pain and scared. Right or wrong, I was struggling to deal with having done that.
There was no way I would approach Lucas at school by myself, and showing up at his house seemed like the sort of escalation he was likely to be able to use against me, if he was inclined to do so. I’d never before appreciated just how vast the gulf between us was. Unless he chose to recognise me, I had no power to force an engagement.
By Friday afternoon I was distracted by a different problem: everyone in my classes was paying attention to me.
Outside of the Lucas Incidents in my life, I had never attracted much attention at school. I wasn’t particularly unpopular, or particularly smart, and though I had the ‘chigger’ strike against me, I didn’t act bogan enough for anyone to hold that against me. I guess the situation with Lucas had proved I wasn’t particularly unattractive either, by high school standards. So there was nothing about me to make me a target. I was pretty sure the majority of the kids who had come in at year eleven from other schools didn’t even know my name.
Now, all the glances and muttering told me that state was entirely over.
My friends weren’t in any of my Friday afternoon classes, but I managed to run into Aileen on the way to my final period of the day. I grabbed her before she could just wave and skip on, and dragged her sideways into a secluded row of lockers.
“Do you know anything about everyone pointing and gossiping about me today?” I asked.
Aileen shrugged out of my grasp. “Just that Ashleigh is pissed enough to punch you, and everyone else is talking about you either being a nasty gossip or beating Lucas up.”
“What?” Aileen had been far too gleeful in conveying the details to me. “He was in a car accident! And I was nowhere near his car at the time—”