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

“Lucy said to me, a while ago, that I shouldn’t connect the things you did back then to the things you did now. She said you were a completely different person as a kid, basically.” Lucas shrugged. “I figured she was just, you know, well, anyone who went through the shit you did in your family would be changed forever from the experience. Until this moment, I never thought that she could have meant you literally didn’t remember who you were back then.”

“She probably didn’t,” Lucas said. “Or maybe she did… who knows? Being a twin is strange shit, Callie. There’s this person who came into the world by your side and no matter how your lives go in different directions the older you get, they always seem to know things about you that other people would have to be told to understand. But Lucy definitely would have remembered if I was different back then. I think she has the opposite problem to me. She remembers a hell of a lot more than anyone would want to.”

It seemed guessing Lucas’s secret had entitled me to full disclosure. “Can you remember nothing from back then?”

“Well I don’t think most people have really strong memories from their first ten years or so,” Lucas said. “Not based on what other people have told me, not at our age.” I thought back over my own childhood and nodded. Some of the strongest memories I had were from that whole time Lucas had been messing with me. “But it’s a bit different for me. I literally have almost nothing. This one flash of my family going to Disneyland for summer holidays, which is fucking stupid because I’ve never liked Disneyland, the odd little thing that comes to me now and then with no context whatsoever, and other than that I might as well have not existed at that time at all. And there was a specific moment it happened too, not long after Lucy’s diagnosis got really dire. I just woke up one morning and my parents, my sister, they were like complete strangers to me all of a sudden. I knew their names, I understood who they were… but that history was just gone, except for that one fucking stupid roller coaster.”

“What did the doctors say?” I asked.

Lucas’s perfect nails left creases in the tablecloth. “I didn’t fucking tell anyone to take me to a doctor, did I? I mean how the fuck could I? At first I was just kind of shocked, so I went around with the parents and Lucy

and didn’t say anything, just tried to quietly figure out who the fuck I was and why all this weird shit was happening. Then, once I had it clear how bad Lucy was, I wasn’t exactly going to start butting in saying I needed this or that. My parents were spending every fucking moment they could on Lucy, or trying to keep the money coming in so we could get Lucy whatever she needed. My stupid problems couldn’t be a priority.”

“It wasn’t their fault,” I said, as softly as I could. “But they neglected you. That must have been hard.”

“Ah, Callie,” said Lucas, “what you call neglect I prefer to refer to as a really impressive product of my absolutely incredible ability to hide what’s really going on with me.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, but Lucas clearly felt no need to fill in the silence now that we had entered into this game. He put his hands together and watched me while I consistently failed to come up with any way to deal with this situation, until rice arrived along with the first of our dishes for sharing, when he took great pleasure in putting himself forward to help me make sense of the whole setup. For a while, we just enjoyed sharing the meal.

I suspected his thoughts, like mine, were anything but the dignified tinkling we made of our forks and spoons as we ate. (I also had a feeling Lucas would have been perfectly comfortable with the originally offered chopsticks, but he asked for cutlery after I did.)

I now had a lot of pieces of information that seemed to come together to answer some questions Lucas might not have been able to consciously answer himself if asked. There was the way he treated me, the insane scenes he dragged me into…. was it all a product of his fear that all the memories he cared about could be taken from him at any time?

That rollercoaster… If it had been me, and I couldn’t tell my parents what was happening to me, I would have gotten on the Internet and looked up information about memories, about how to hold onto them. That would have led directly to the idea of making memories as interesting as possible to convince the brain to hold onto them: novelty and emotion and, yes, adrenaline. Things I knew about already, not because I had many precious memories to preserve, but because I’d felt the need to employ every studying trick in the book when I was working as many hours as I possibly could at the same time.

I was pretty sure I had the right trigger, but the scenario was off. Someone like Lucas would never have researched his situation like that. But if he had the memory of that rollercoaster, he didn’t need to: he would know exactly which feeling he needed to go back to, again and again… and maybe he would also get the feeling that it wouldn’t keep working so well unless he kept raising the stakes the longer he had to do it.

It made me sad, watching him placidly arranging chunks of some very brightly-coloured chicken in his bowl, to think that he might remember me screaming at him to get away from me after our car accident, but not whatever was making him smile when he looked up at me and saw how much I was struggling with my cutlery.

“Lucas.” His eyes focused on mine. “Have you forgotten anything since you were really young? Like, recently?”

His expression had shifted to extreme annoyance. “How the fuck am I going to know if I forgot one or two things here and there? Everyone does that, right?”

“I just think… maybe you’re letting something that happened because of a traumatic time in your life dictate how you live your life now, when that traumatic time is over. And that’s really sad.”

I thought he was going to get even angrier that I’d said that, but he just shrugged. “It’s hard to not be someone who is all you remember being, Callie. And it’s never over, either. Most of those memories never came back, but I’ve gotten a few, over the years. They come in flashes, like—” He gestured at me. “I know a little about what it was like back then. The feeling. And I’ve never had that again. It must have been so good back then, but we fell hard. Once you fall that far, I don’t think you can ever get even close to where you were.”

It made me remember my own slowly sinking realisation, as I grew older, that my family was not quite stable. That we weren’t going the same places as other families of kids at my school—and Lucas was a big part of that realisation. Because after he’d started to notice me, even after he’d stopped, I kept noticing him. I saw him go from expensive toys at Christmas to more parties and holidays and outings than I could imagine even enjoying… to big cars and not even living in the same world as the likes of me, because why did he need to?

But I hadn’t seen everything. I’d chosen not to see him with other girls. I never knew about Lucy either, because in my own way I lived in my own world too. I thought I knew what I was seeing so I didn’t really see what was under the surface.

Well, maybe we both needed to change the way we looked at the world. But I could only make the decision to do that for myself. Where Lucas was concerned, I could only tell him what I thought, and he had to do the rest on his own.

I couldn’t help being curious, though. As some of our dishes started emptying, I broke our easy silence.

“Lucas, am I allowed to ask what you remembered about me, at least?”

“We’re in a classroom, I think,” Lucas said. “Lots of kids. And I…” He gestured towards my hand.

“Yes,” I said. “That happened. It was kind of at the end of your run of bothering me, just after you went back on that dance invitation… which, for the record, I’m not bothered by at all these days, even if I made it seem otherwise.”

Lucas just shrugged.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting to get anything more from you at all after that, figured whatever you’d been doing was completely done with… and then you just came up to my desk at school—can’t remember what you said, Tamara was sitting next to me though—and you got my hand at some point, and then just bent over really gentleman-like and kissed it, and you were straight off back to your own desk before our teacher could tell you off or anything. Not that I think she had the faintest idea how to handle that.”

“Huh,” Lucas said.

“It was really embarrassing,” I told him. “A whole bunch of kids kept coming up to me after and asking if we were dating, or laughing at me from a distance, and I didn’t know what was happening so I didn’t have anything to say to them. You did just leave me alone after that, except for this one time… but never mind that.”