Page 44 of My High School Rebel Boyfriend
THE PRE-SEASON WINagainst Gainsville High put Coach Cairns into a spectacular mood, taking to heart our suggestion that he should take the team to Peter’s Ice Cream Shoppe to celebrate, à la Coach Barber. Coach Cairns was not averse to treats, his generous belly size evidence of that. The ageing process had slowed his metabolic rate, he liked to tell us.
However, even a Triple Chocolate sundae could not perk me up. Now that the game was over I allowed myself to focus on things other than the game, but ice cream was not doing it for me.
Yeah, I’d been a coward all week.
Since I woke up in Harper Dent’s house, in a room with flowery walls and a bed with pink sheets. No, it wasn’t hers, but her sister’s.
Too many things had happened and they were all so complicated that I’d put on my basketball game face and refused to acknowledge anything else in the world existed. Basketball, the be-all and end-all of my life.
Or so I thought.
Okay, first I’d seen Harper while working at the Country Club. Dressed in a movie star gown, she’d looked like a million dollars. Heart stopping, gaping eyes, ridiculously beautiful.
Second, we’d gone to a Covington party together.
Third, I’d gotten drunk.
Fourth, she drove me back to her place.
Fifth, she’d put me to bed. (That’s an assumption—I don’t remember walking into her house).
Sixth, she’d given me a special cream and told me it could help. No mention of what it could help, no mention of the bruises that she’d seen for the second time, no mention of the beast who had given them to me.
You see, she met him and instinctively I knew that she knew.
It killed me, because you don’t endure a lifetime of hiding things to have it unravel by someone you barely know. The difference with Titan was that we had a bro code, he knew Wade could get aggressive, he’d witnessed his vile temper in younger days, he knew our friendship demanded his silence. He turned the blind eye that I begged of him. Because he knew about my mother.
But Harper Dent and I had no such code, and she knew nothing about my mom.
Until she turned up on Thanksgiving Day, dressed in skinny black jeans and a tight green sweater that amped my heart rate up into the training zone—whilenottraining.
With a pie.
Yeah, Harper Dent miraculously appeared at the doorstep with pumpkin pie. And suddenly Wade was acting like a human being, and being nice and giving Harper and mespace.It was like the beast had transformed.
Neither of us spoke as Mom and Wade retreated to their room, not even as their door closed with a distinctive click. I had cleared the table, tidied the kitchen (both beating-worthy offences in the past), and now stood in front of the couch she was perched upon. My mother’s geriatric exit had affected her, I knew that.
“Is your mom okay?” A mere whisper, afraid of being heard by the wrong ears.
I sat next to her again, so close her leg touched mine. “She has rheumatoid arthritis,” I said. “It makes her joints stiff, and it’s hard for her to walk and move. And stuff.” I addedAnd stuffto make it sound less daunting.
“Is it like an old person’s disease?” she asked with genuine curiosity.
“There is a type of arthritis that old people get, but this is different. This is an auto immune disease.” I paused, swallowing a choked breath as I risked revealing my stalkerish ways. “Like your diabetes.”
Harper turned to me, eyes bursting with a contradictory combination of outrage and joy. But all she said was, “Oh.” And she didn’t move, making me nervous that I’d said the wrong thing. Even though it wasn’t. I’d done the research on diabetes and Harper had to have Type 1, an auto immune disease. No rhyme, no reason, just sheer bad luck—your own body destroying your own insulin-producing cells, or in Mom’s case attacking the lining of her joints.
“Let’s go,” Harper suddenly said, leaping up from the couch.
“What?”
“Let’s get out of here. Drive someplace.”
I grabbed a few things, phone, card, jacket and followed her out to her car.
“Where do you wanna go?” I asked, shifting her purse off of the passenger seat, and pushing the seat back so my legs wouldn’t be jammed in.
“I don’t know,” she said, but she drove towards the river, conversation impossible with pop music blasting on the car radio. I hadn’t pictured her as someone who wanted to burst their own eardrums.
