Breaking Him (Love is War #1)(45)

It was awful for me. I was no more popular than ever. In fact when jealous girls got wind that I was his girlfriend and just how long we’d been an item, and how smitten he was with me, I was more hated than ever, which was saying a lot.

I started getting into fights again. Bad ones. And I was old enough now that I was getting in serious trouble for it. I almost got kicked out of school for one incident with a girl in the locker room (a girl who unfortunately also happened to be the daughter of one of the local sheriffs) that involved her dumping Gatorade on my head and me slamming her face into the locker.

It’d predictably started with the familiar mocking chant of, “Hey, trashcan girl.”

I was resigned to the fact that I would never live this down. It was a part of me. It was a thing I had to own that would always make me an outcast.

I was odd. I had been shaped by uncommon, un-relatable things. This I knew.

And since I couldn’t get into a fight every time I heard that, even with my temper, I ignored the first verbal jab.

We’d just finished gym class. Normally I liked gym. I didn’t talk to any of the girls in my period, but there weren’t many kids I talked to. I was good at being a loner. It suited me. The things I heard the girls talk about couldn’t have interested me less.

All they seemed to do was complain about things they could easily change or things that were so insignificant they sounded like petty brats for complaining about them.

One didn’t like her thighs. One hated her butt. One was too flat-chested, her best friend had huge boobs that she hated.

This one had fat fingers, that one had big feet. One complained for an entire mile that her mom had cut off her credit card when she’d overcharged it. Another couldn’t believe her daddy had bought her a used car.

Oh the humanity.

I had no patience for it. I didn’t feel like humoring them with their petty, wonderful lives with parents that loved them and normal problems.

Some of us had real problems. Ones that weren’t skin deep. A real problem was waking up every day to a world that had cast you aside, a world that had no place for you, with peers that hated you and cards stacked against you.

A real problem was being trash and having everyone around you know it and point it out regularly.

A real problem was being fundamentally unlovable. Struggling everyday not to hate yourself.

So I tried my best to tune them out and apply myself to whatever physical thing they had us doing. Today it had been tennis, which I liked just fine. The smaller the teams the better. I wasn’t the best team player.

I was actually in a good mood before she’d said that. I was a terrible student, so P.E. was naturally my favorite class, and it was last period. Now I was changing fast because I got to see Dante for a bit before he went to practice and I went to drama.

But then, “Hey, trashcan girl.” The words had me setting my jaw, a familiar feeling moving through me.

My mind flashed to that infamous trashcan, my baby self somewhere inside of it.

I had no real idea what it’d looked like, but I’d obsessed about every little detail of it. I imagined that dumpster, lid closed. I don’t know why, but I always imagined that it was only half-full. How else could my mother have fit a baby into it?

I imagined my baby self somewhere inside of it. Sometimes I was wrapped in dirty blankets and set neatly on top of the trash. Sometimes I wore only a diaper, was buried halfway down, and they’d had to dig for me when I’d been discovered. I liked to fantasize that some kindly paramedic had picked me up tenderly, maybe even cried for me.

Some of these imaginings came from nightmares, some merely my imagination, but the taunts always brought it all back.

Still, I was going to ignore her. I wouldn’t let her waste any of my precious Dante time.

“Did you hear me?” the girl said, her hand shoving lightly at my shoulder.

I shut my locker and turned to level an unpleasant look at her. “Leave me alone,” I said simply. It really was that simple. Why couldn’t they just leave me the hell alone?

She sneered at me. I tried to place who she even was. Brown hair, medium height, familiar weasel-like features.

Oh Lord, I was oblivious. I’d been going to school with her since third grade.

Mandy, I recalled. Her dad was a sheriff, I remembered too. Cops made me nervous, so of course I’d made a note of that.

She took a long swig of her red Gatorade, wiped her mouth, and asked snottily, “What’s your deal? Is Dante really dating you?”

“Yes,” I said tonelessly. Maybe if I was as boring as possible she’d leave me alone before I lost my temper.

“Since when?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to answer that even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. I’d been devoted to him since that first fateful meeting outside of the vice principal’s office.

“Answer me, trashcan girl!”

“No,” I snapped back. Hello, temper. If she’d wanted an actual answer, she had a lot to learn about me.

“What the hell does he see in you?” she sneered.

I eyed her, top to bottom, letting her see in my face what I thought of her. Not one attractive thing about her, inside or out. “As opposed to what, you? Keep dreaming.”

She gasped and dumped the contents of her Gatorade bottle over my head.

Loud giggles echoed in every corner of the locker room. Apparently a lot of the girls had enjoyed that. As I’ve said, I was far from popular.