Wild Girl (Slateview High 2)

She rolled her eyes. There was a sharpness to her expression, an almost cruel inflection in her voice that I’d never heard before.

“And what about you, Cordelia? What about that friend of yours that dropped by? Bishop, or whatever his name was? You can’t tell me that his interest in you is just friendship.”

My cheeks heated—but not with embarrassment. With anger.

“That’s. Different,” I ground out. “I care about him. I care about Kace and Misael. I’m not using them. You’re a married fucking woman! You have no business screwing around on Dad and then trying to claim you’re doing it because you want to make life here better for us! That’s bullshit!”

“Well, you can think it’s bullshit all you want, Cordelia.” She pulled away, taking a few steps back and looking down her nose at me. “But after the winter holiday, things around here are going to change for us. I’m going on holiday with Mark—”

“Ah, so he’s Mark to you.”

She drew in a measured breath, pressing her lips together.

“I’ll be going on holiday with Mark. When I get back, I expect this little attitude to be gone.”

“You’re seriously spending Christmas break with him? He has a family—a wife and kids. How do you explain that?”

“I hardly think that’s any of your business, but I’ll be accompanying him on a business trip.” She had the audacity to sound offended that I’d even ask.

I shook my head, stepping away from her, tears of rage gathering in my eyes.

My mom might claim she’d been doing this for us, doing it for me, but for the first time, I could clearly see how little she cared about me. She was looking out for herself. Taking care of herself. That was all.

I was on my own here, more than I had ever realized.

If it weren’t for the Lost Boys in my life, I would’ve truly been alone. They were more like family to me now than my own mother was.

“Whatever. Do whatever you want,” I finally choked out, my voice harsh and ragged.

“I had planned on it,” she said. Before she turned to leave, she paused. “Your father doesn’t need to know about this. You understand that, right, Cordelia?”

I sneered.

“Sure. Why would I make the fact he’s in jail worse by breaking the news to him that his wife is sleeping with another man? That wasn’t exactly the Christmas gift I had in mind for him.”

Fifteen

Mom was gone by the time the first snow of the season hit.

I remembered how when I was little, she, my father, and I would sit in front of the huge bay windows in our largest sitting room, watching the soft sheets of snow fall and blanket the lawn. Mom was never fond of the cold, but Dad, before I got “too old for childish things,” would occasionally go outside with me and build snowmen and make snow angels.

It was a memory that I couldn’t help but question now. Had any of it been real? Or had it all just been the illusion of a loving family?

Because there wasn’t a damn thing I could think of to reconcile that version of my family with the one I was currently faced with. A father in jail, a mother having an affair that she tried to justify, and me—just trying to figure out where I fit into all of this.

I was certainly no longer the innocent little girl who’d played in the snow with her father, any more than my mom was the dutiful wife who stood by her husband’s side.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mom had said, about how I was doing the same thing she was by getting involved with the Lost Boys just like she was hooking up with Mark.

But that wasn’t true. She didn’t understand what the boys and I had been through. She didn’t understand that my relationship with them—

Well. It had started out pretty similarly, hadn’t it? I had agreed to be theirs in exchange for protection.

But I didn’t have a husband sitting in jail. I wasn’t doing this to make myself feel better and pretending it was some selfless act. Mom was using Mark, and he was using her right back. But the Lost Boys and I weren’t using each other. We were… giving ourselves to each other.

What I felt for them was real. More real than anything else in my life had ever been.

Maybe what Mom felt was real too… but it wasn’t love. She’d said it herself