“Yeah, you and Ryder…you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” I growled.
“He put Percy in the playpen, am I right?” Reese scoffed.
I could feel my cheeks burning, but it wasn’t from embarrassment.
“It’s a pity that’s not a video camera,” I growled, pointing to the device in his left hand. “Because that would’ve been the only piece of evidence to record what I’m about to do to you.”
“You offering to go twenty-toes with me, too?” He still wasn’t amused. What was this guy’s problem?
“I was thinking something more along the lines of a Colombian necktie.” I closed the gap of space between us, and he stepped back, but that stupid smirk of his wouldn’t subside.
“You’re a little hostile, you know that?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear, but I was the one in the car with him—”
“I know.” His jaw was set unnaturally tight as his eyes bore down at me.
It wouldn’t do me any good starting up a full-fledged fight with him, so I stepped backward. “Just stay the hell away from me,” I growled.
Reese’s gaze redirected over my head. “Careful now.”
I suddenly spun at the sound of leaves crushing beneath someone’s boots directly behind me, and Carly and I collided into one another.
“Holy hell!” she yelped as we both stumbled to the ground.
Brushing the mess of hair from my eyes, I looked back behind me at the tree, only to find no one in sight. “What the hell?”
“You okay?” asked Carly.
I shot back up to my feet and rounded the oak, finding nothing on the other side but more tombstones. “Where did he go?”
Car just looked at me perplexedly.
“Did you see where he went?”
“Babe…”
“Did you see him?”
“Kat, nobody else was out here,” she finally muttered.
Chapter 4
People Are Strange
When Monday morning rolled around, I was forced to face the inevitable. I had to return to school. After the accident, I stayed home during the whole next week to recuperate from my injuries, which unbeknownst to anybody but my immediate doctor, were purely superficial. The trauma I suffered was mainly localized across my chest and abdomen from where I’d been wearing my seatbelt. The bruising was so bad that all the doctors working in the ER were certain that I had internal damage of some kind. There was also swelling over the center of my chest which prompted everyone to keep mentioning the distinct possibility that I had a “sternal fracture”.
By some sheer miracle though, I was given a clean bill of health. My absence from Belleview High was admittedly for emotional recovery. Sadly though, isolating yourself from the world while wearing your comforter around the house and pigging out on Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t remedy heartache. If anything, it put me into a deeper funk. I needed to reintroduce myself to society.
Anxiety hit me though as I observed my fellow classmates pulling into the school parking lot come 7:23 a.m. Everybody congregated around their cars, and all eyes were on me as we drove into our designated space. Indistinct whispers circulated, and I couldn’t tell by their grim expressions if everyone pitied or blamed me for what happened. Desperate for a distraction, I finally tuned into Carly and Vanessa’s conversation. Since they picked me up this morning, they’d been giving me the lowdown on all the steamy gossip I’d missed out on over the past week, but I admittedly checked out of the conversation a whole thirty seconds into it. Thankfully, by the sounds of it, Carly’s rant about unfair school dress code violations was done as she was now talking about her boyfriend. Given her proclivity for over sharing however, it may not have been a much better subject matter, as the conversation risked taking a sharp turn into an NC-17 rating.
“My mom’s going postal about me being out at night now, even if I’m with Daniel,” moaned Car.
“Your mom should be worried if you’re out with Daniel, especially alone,” Vanessa cracked.
She laughed. “True. But after everything that’s happened, she’s trying to turn the house into Fort Knox. Got a new alarm system, put up cameras around the property, and she’s calling in these guys to reinforce all the doors and windows. Seriously, we could survive The Purge if it came down to it.”
“After everything that’s happened?”
“Yeah, you know. With Hersey.”
“What about Hersey?”
Vanessa and Carly both exchanged awkward glances.
“Okay, what am I missing here?” I demanded.
“You seriously don’t know?” asked V.