Breaking Him (Love is War #1)(7)

“Darling, what did he say to you?” his mother asked him in a pathetic, baby talk voice.

That same voice turned hard as nails, and I knew she was addressing Ms. Colby. “Words can be assault too, you know! I won’t have my son bullied. He has a right to stand up for himself!”

Ms. Colby’s voice was beyond disgusted when she asked, “What are you implying was said to you, Dante?”

“Not to me. I just overheard. And so did two teachers. And instead of calling the little shits out, they laughed! You all suck! What kind of a school is this? The teachers are as bad as the bullies!”

Ms. Colby’s sigh was loud enough to be heard two rooms away. “And what did you overhear?”

“You know,” Dante shouted back at her. “You’re as bad as them. You know how the other kids treat her, and you look the other way. Well, I don’t. I’ll do it again. You mark my words.”

Bad. Ass.

But who was he talking about? Who was her?

“What is he talking about, Ms. Colby?”

Another loud sigh. I really hated her sighs. I had to listen to them a lot.

“I can’t be sure,” Ms. Colby hedged, but even in another room I thought she sounded like a liar.

“Liar,” Dante said to her. To a teacher. The vice principal, no less.

Bad. Ass.

“I need someone to explain this to me!” Dante’s mother exclaimed.

“They were picking on Scarlett again,” he said, voice pitched low now, so low I had to move closer to the room to hear him. “They always do. They call her trashcan girl. It’s messed up. And nobody does anything about it! Not the teachers. Not the vice principal. You all suck!”

His mother sounded like she might be choking on something and then she spit out, “You got into a fight over her? Are you kidding me?”

I felt sick with mortification and light with joy all at once.

He’d gotten into a fight for me.

But then, the pity in his voice.

Trashcan girl. Even he knew me as that.

It was the exact same reason I’d gotten into my fight. It always started with a mean singsong Hey, trashcan girl and ended with me hitting someone, or kicking them, or pulling their hair out, or ripping up their homework.

But this was the first time I’d ever heard of anyone else fighting for me.

It was something.

No. It was everything. Even enough to overshadow my embarrassment that he knew I was trashcan girl.

Of course he’d known what I was called. I shouldn’t have been shocked.

It was his grandmother, after all, that had rescued me.

I’d known the story from the time I could remember. My grandma always said every nasty thing she could think of when she was mad at me, which was a lot, and so it’d come up early and often.

When I was a tiny baby I was abandoned by my parents.

I hadn’t been left on the doorstep of an orphanage or church. I wasn’t abandoned in some frilly basket by a tearful mother.

Even that was too romantic of a story for me.

I was left in a trashcan. Meant to die, I figured. Or rather, Grandma told me I should figure as much when she was telling me the story.

Even my grandma didn’t know who my dad was, but my mom was her daughter, and she explained to me once, after I’d been nagging her for stories about my missing mom, that, “Some women should never be mothers. I’m one of those. And so was my daughter. She won’t come back. I guarantee it. You’re lucky I’m still around. I got nowhere else to go, or I’d be out of here, too.”

That was about as sentimental as we got in my family.

And even I knew that my grandma would have never taken me in if her friend from childhood, Dante’s gram, hadn’t insisted.

I didn’t know her well, but I did know that I owed his gram a lot. My grandma told me so all the time. When she got mad, I often earned rants that started with something along the lines of, “You should thank Mrs. Durant every chance you get. She was the one that talked me into taking you in. You can bet your bratty little ass it wasn’t my idea.”

I’d been found in the trashcan at some point, obviously. No one would tell me how old I was, but I was a baby for sure, a tiny one. Someone had heard me crying, called the cops, and I’d ended up on the news and in the local hospital.

Gram had seen the story on TV, and I don’t know all the details, but she’d put the pieces together and known that Grandma’s daughter had recently given birth, so she’d gone and taken a look at me.

One look, Grandma swears, and it was impossible to deny that Renée Theroux was my mother.

I thought that was weird. All babies looked the same to me.

But Gram and Grandma had been sure, Gram had pressed Grandma, and the rest was history.

Grandma had taken me in, made room for me in her tiny trailer. It did have an extra room. She liked to bring up how she’d liked that room. She’d enjoyed having an extra bit of space to herself where she could sew and store things. We had many, many conversations like that, where she reminded me of all of the reasons why I was a burden to her.

And I wasn’t ungrateful. The place was a dump, but it was a fact that it was better than a trashcan.

Even so, everyone around these parts knew the story, so from my first day of school to present day—I still hadn’t lived down the fact that I’d been thrown away like trash.