Games Boys Play: A Dark High School Romance (Troubled Playthings 2)

I couldn’t just run off and leave her now. No matter what, she was my sister. I might be the only person she had to look out for her.

I tried to keep glancing over at Jess and smiling as the three of us crossed a dirt carpark to a café that felt mostly in the middle of nowhere. Acting like the only thing making me nervous was wanting to get to know my sister.

Maybe it wasn’t concern for anyone I might know that made him want to take us all the way out here where there wasn’t much company. It had taken me a while to work out why there was something weird about the way Jess was sitting in the

car, and then it had hit me as I dared unzip my bag to check the time: she didn’t pull out a phone of her own once. Did she even have one? Most kids I knew had gotten their phones when they were old enough to be allowed to walk or bus to school on their own, or stay late for activities and get picked up. But maybe Jess had been homeschooled from that critical age—and I knew it had been hard enough for me to get Mum to agree to get a phone for me when she just made Ryan take me to and from anything.

What a fucking mess if both of us had been prisoners, in a way, because the parents who had control over us were messed-up in different ways.

I was worried Brad wouldn’t leave the two of us alone for a second, but after we were seated and he’d ordered our lunches from the girl with a clipboard who came to our table with water, he announced he was off to the bathroom before our food arrived.

Jess’s eyes widened at me a little as he sauntered off. I couldn’t help feeling this was strategic on Brad’s part too: he had to take a piss sometime, so he was going to do it while we were still awkward with one another.

My lips were quivering. I wanted to forget about the whole thing, ask Jess if she had any hobbies or what her favourite music was. Something that kept me safe from the horror I thought might be coming for me.

I couldn’t have done that to a girl who meant nothing to me, let alone my own sister.

Still, it was a struggle to even start to talk. “Jess.” She started and looked at me more directly. “We don’t have a lot of time to talk, just the two of us, so… I’m sorry if this is… well, totally off-base. But I— You can trust—”

There was no good way to ask quickly. I started again. “Jess, is your dad doing… something to you that he shouldn’t?”

She didn’t say anything, but I saw more emotions cross her face than I could even identify. And that was enough to give me the courage to go on. I really didn’t need to know the details right now, after all.

“Jess, you can trust me. If you need me to help you get away from him, to tell someone…”

“No!” It was the first she’d shown she could even speak with such force. She put her fingertips over her lips as if she’d surprised herself, too. She didn’t move them away as she kept talking. “I can’t trust you. You’re… Don’t get angry, but I can’t trust that you can really help me. You don’t even really have anywhere to live at the moment, do you?”

Brad had been happy enough to go on about the possibility of setting a home up for me. I winced.

“I know I’m not much. You don’t know me, and you’re scared. But I’m here. I want to help. That has to count for something, right?”

She shook her head hard enough to scatter her fringe to either side of her face. There was a strange fascination in seeing her uncovered forehead for the first time. I hadn’t realised before then just how young she was. There were a few years between Ryan and me and it didn’t seem to make much of a difference, but between fourteen and eighteen was a big deal.

“Please. Now I know you exist, I can’t just—”

“You can’t do anything.” Jess kept glancing behind her, checking the doorway to the toilets. “He’s ahead of you. He’ll always win. He’s the guy who was almost a star footy player, and I’m just his badly-behaved daughter. A proven liar.” She rose partially out of her seat, on the edge of getting in my face. “And if you try to get in his way, you’ll be exactly where I am.”

Her fear was a little bit contagious—and it made me very angry. “No, it doesn’t have to be like that. Jess, we have to expose him. He—”

“Why?” Her initial excitement seemed to be fading, like she’d finally convinced herself she couldn’t take me up on my offer too. “Look, you don’t have to worry about me. He’s not— He leaves me alone now most of the time, like he knows it’s wrong, he even told me he was sorry once and he wouldn’t do it again. I don’t believe him for a second, but he’s trying… and anyway, in a few years maybe I’ll be able to go live somewhere else. It won’t matter if he makes everyone else think I’m fucked-up because I’ll be old enough to be responsible for myself.”

“I could be responsible for you,” I said. “I’m eighteen, I could apply to be your guardian. We could live together, you could go to—”

Jess was giving me a look that would have made me realise just how stupid I sounded, even if my own words weren’t doing it for me. I didn’t even have my own life under control: how could I convince anyone to make me responsible for a girl with an apparently troubled history on paper?

“Just forget me,” Jess said. “Like… if you really want to know me? Look me up in five years, see if I’m doing okay or still in the same damn place. Maybe then it’s time to come in and try to fix things. But right now, I just can’t take that risk. I can’t get myself any more messed-up than I already am. I just…”

Brad had just stepped out of the bathroom. Jess put her head down, but he’d been halted from returning to us for the moment by some people at another table. At first I thought they were friends… then I realised they were trying to get an autograph off him. He was grinning as he scribbled on a menu.

This creep had been doing things I didn’t want to think about to my sister, and apparently there was nothing I could do about it. He’d done—

I didn’t know what Mum had found out that made her leave. But I understood now at least why she’d lied about the exact reasons. Hitting a child, especially a young one who had done nothing to provoke it, was awful… but we’d all seen what that looked like. What I was trying to get my head wrapped around now was unthinkable. Utterly sick.

And someone who could do something like that to their own daughter wasn’t stupid. Brad had let Mum go because she must have been too much trouble to him to keep around, but she hadn’t been able to bring him down. I knew her: if she’d been able, she wouldn’t have held back.

This was probably why Mum was so vicious with other men. She’d failed to get Brad, so she wasn’t going to let anyone else get past her.

Brad had finished up with his admirers and was sauntering back over to us, a little smile on his face I would have thought was cute if I didn’t know his game now. What an absolute piece of scum. He’d fucked up his own career for himself—I guessed Mum might have had no choice but to let her accusations lie without good proof, but he must have known letting her see him on TV all the time playing games would send her into a rage that might be bigger than self-preservation or, indeed, common sense. But there he was, still perfectly happy to act as if he was a hero deserving of worship even now.