Page 107 of Dare To Fall

Chapter 72

Arabella

“No, wait!” I push my chair back and rush after him before he can leave. “I’m just trying to work out who could be behind all this.”

Eli doesn’t turn to look at me, his shoulders tight. “Kellan is my best friend. It’s not him.”

“Who else can it be?” Frustration swells inside me. “You started at the school years before me. I don’t know anything about your past there. Maybe Principal Warren is right, and it’s linked to your dad.”

“My parents met at the Academy.”

“They did?”

Eli glances at me over his shoulder. “Dad knew she was the one for him after she yelled at him for getting her wet.”

Heat rises in my cheeks, and I have to press my fingers to my mouth to stop myself from laughing, but it escapes anyway. “Oh my god. Too much information!”

The frown on his expression turns into amusement. “Not that kind of wet. There was a rainstorm, and she was walking along the path beside the road. He drove through a puddle and soaked her.”

I toy with the hem of my tank top. “See, I didn’t know they attended Churchill Bradley Academy until you just told me.”

Eli swivels around to face me, flicking his tongue piercing and watching me with stormy eyes. “I don’t think it’s anything to do with my dad.”

I move back to the table and pick up our plates. “Then, who’s your enemy, Eli? Who hates you the most?”

He laughs. “You know what it’s like at the school, Ari. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. Everybody hates me. Even the ones who want to fuck me.”

I scrape our leftover mac and cheese into the trash can. “But what was it like before the accident? What was your life like?”

Eli watches as I place the plates and silverware in the sink. “You know we have a dishwasher right there next to you.”

“Washing up helps me think. There’s also a sense of achievement when you finish.” I turn on the faucet to fill the bowl with water and add dish soap.

Eli refills our glasses. “Life was perfect. Mom and Dad were very social. Hosting pool parties and barbecues for our neighbors and their friends. There was always something going on.”

“So, you had interaction with other kids?” I run a sponge across one of the plates. “I noticed, at Christmas, there were a bunch of students from the school at the Country Club.”

“My mom used to set up playdates.” He takes a sip of wine.

Rinsing off the plate, I stack it in the dish rack. “With who?”

“Tina and Bret when we were small. For a while it was me and Jace. Then later, when I was older, Brad, Garrett, and Evan would always tag along with Jace. We were friends … until we weren’t. But our parents kept putting us all together, and hoped we’d bond. There were a bunch of others, but they didn’t go to Churchill Bradley, and I rarely see them now. When we started at Churchill Bradley Academy, they all joined the football or swim teams. I was just the shy kid who liked to draw.”

Shy Eli.

I try to imagine what he’d been like, but the image is poisoned with the monster I’d come to fear.

Eli sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. “I’m going to bed.”

“Okay.” I don’t try to stop him this time, focusing on the dirty silverware instead.

He drains the rest of the wine in his glass and disappears through the door.

I take my time with the finishing up the dishes, dry everything and then put it all away. My wine glass is still on the table, half-full, the bottle beside it.

We’re no closer to working out who our nemesis is than we were yesterday. Maybe it’s more than one person? Why else refer to themselves as ‘us’ when they text me?

Everything is knotted together like a messy ball of twine. Trying to find the relevant threads to the truth is proving to be difficult.

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