ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(15)
Fuck.
I raised my clenched fist to the sky and retrieved my bag back out of the storage compartment of my scooter, slinging it over my shoulders.
“You got me?” Smoke asked.
Puffing out my cheeks I blew out a breath. “Yeah, yeah. Friends. Help. Uncle. Please. Got it.”
“But if the shit f*cking hurts you in any way, you let me know, and I’ll gut him in his f*cking sleep. I need this info, but I need my right-hand girl more,” Smoke said, breathing fire through the phone.
“Yeah, I got ya. Tries anything. Gutted. Duly noted.” I squared my shoulders and set off down the beach. “Don’t worry about a thing, Smoke. We’re gonna be total besties. What’s his name, anyway?”
“Nolan. Nolan Archer.” Smoke said. I clicked the call to an end.
Dread consumed me as I stopped short of the small shell driveway. The old house looked even more decrepit from my new position on the ground. I’d done some shit in my few years. Things most people couldn’t even conceive, but I could do those things as easily as going outside and checking the mail.
What I couldn’t do was old and dirty. I looked back up at the house and cringed. I also didn’t do FRIENDS.
I’d only had one other friend and that hadn’t exactly ended well. But then again, this friendship wasn’t going to end well either. For one of us at least.
Remembering the look on Cody’s face the last time I saw him still makes me cringe.
It was for the best. I reminded myself. He’s happy now. He has a girlfriend. One who probably doesn’t like to kill people or blow shit up.
I shifted my bag from one shoulder to the other and told myself that this wasn’t the same thing and that this fake friendship wouldn’t be anything like how things were with Cody.
For one thing, I wasn’t having sex with this guy. Like ever. Or anyone else for that matter. Secondly, regardless of what happened in the interim, I was going into this job knowing exactly how things were going to end.
Smoke had plucked me out of a life I hated and handed me the life I’d always wanted. We’d been through so much and he was right, I did owe him. I wasn’t going to let him down.
Moving forward, the only thing Nolan Archer would need saving from…was me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hope
Sixteen years old
It was my sixteenth birthday. All I’d wanted was to hang out with Cody and not have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t for a few hours. Instead, my parents paraded every relative I sort of knew through the house, and much to my horror, invited the entire junior class over. They meant well. They wanted a daughter who liked surprise parties and who had friends and who could join group activities, so that’s how they treated me.
Dress for the job you want, not the job you have and all that.
When I walked in the door to the shouts of SURPRISE! and stared into a dozens faces of people I’d barely every spoken a word to…I felt the burn spark to life. The onslaught was sudden; like a free-fall I wasn’t expecting. There wasn’t much I could do but stand there in complete horror as my mom shuffled me proudly through the crowd.
“Moe,” I said, trying to grab her attention as she talked over me, introducing me to “Uncle Yan from the old country who I hadn’t seen since I was in diapers,” and “Aunt Marianne, who sent you that children’s bible when you were three, don’t you remember?” And Lee, “your genius cousin who just got back from a year of traipsing around the world.”
The front door burst open, slamming against the wall and almost coming undone from the hinges. The crowd turned toward Cody as he dashed into the room, cutting through the party-goers on his way to me. When he reached me he spun me around by my shoulders. With one look understanding of what was happening inside me flashed across his face. He led me away from my mother, parting the crowd and pushing me forward toward the stars. “GO!” Cody screamed over the music. I bolted, leaving behind my parents who called out to me as I escaped, and Cody who’d acted as a human barricade, stopping them before they could come after me.
They still couldn’t see the signs. They still didn’t understand.
No one did.
No one but Cody.
It didn’t need to be a party. Or a crowd. Or anything, really. Sometimes the anger came on like an attack and sometimes it simmered under the surface until it exploded. That’s when I did things like push a desk at a teacher, or throw a rock through my gymnastics coach’s windshield. The worst was when I attacked the quarterback of the football team after he’d made some sort of comment toward me about being a frigid bitch, which resulted in me choking him out until his coach had to pry me off of him.
Surprisingly, that particular incident one was handled in private because apparently, the coach didn’t want news getting around that the reason for the bruises around his star player’s neck and the popped blood vessels in his eyes were caused by a girl half his weight, who he couldn’t shake off. I didn’t get kicked out of school, but instead got put under a forty-eight-hour mental evaluation hold at the hospital and afterwards was ordered to cross the hall when I saw Donnie coming my way.
Once I was up in my room with the door closed, I tried to take a deep breath but I couldn’t pull in enough air. The pink flowery walls mocked me. The noise from the party floated up the stairs and seeped under the crack in my door and that’s when it happened.