Page 28 of The Rebel of Raleigh High
“Don’t freak out. He just said he was going to hang at the house with Dad until we get back. Did you forget he was coming over?”
“Oh my god. Oh my fucking god. Nope.Noooooo. No, no. no.” My vision’s blurring. Holy shit, my vision is blurring. I can’t fucking see.
“Windshield wipers, Sil,” Max says.
Oh. The rain’s worsened. I’m not going blind from sheer panic after all. I turn the windshield wipers on, and they beat frantically across the glass, sweeping a river of water aside as I pull into the parking lot of Max’s soccer club. I throw the van into park and snatch my phone from my brother, my hands shaking as I read the message lit up on the screen.
Alex: Just missed you. Ready and waiting for our lesson. Your dad seems cool. Very interested in my ride. We’re gonna hang in the garage until you get back.
Fuck me fucking sideways. Fuck. What the hell is happening right now? How in the name of Celine Dion hasthiscome about? Alex is there? At the house? He’s with my dad, and they’re…they’re hanging out in the fuckinggarage? Dad hasn’t stepped foot in the garage for years. I can only imagine what he’s thinking right now. I can barely feel my fingers as I type out a message to him and fire it off, utterly dismayed.
Me: Sorry, Dad. You can tell Alex to leave. I canceled our lesson. He must have forgotten.
Ha. Forgotten. More like he got pissed that I refused to bow down to his demands, and now he’s trying to fuck with me. I can picture the scene all too freaking well—Alex, leaning up against Dad’s rusting workbench, hands in his pockets, sexy as hell with his ridiculous smile and his ridiculous eyes, and…a cold knot of fear begins to form in my stomach. What the hell are they even talking about right now? Alex and I have barely spoken ourselves, and our stilted conversations have revolved heavily around the fact that I was sexually assaulted.
He wouldn’t bring that up to my dad.
He wouldn’t…
Would he?
Sweet fucking Jesus.
“We can just go back if you want,” Max says. “It’s freezing. At this point, it’s safe to say neither of us wants to be here.”
I sit very still, considering that option for a second. Should we go back? Every part of me is screaming at me to burn rubber back home and roll out the damage control, but there’s also a part of me that’s railing against that option. If I go running back there, panicked and freaking out, I’m giving Alex precisely what he wants. I’ll be reacting the way he’s undoubtedly expecting me to react, and I don’t want to give him that satisfaction. It’d mean he won, and Alex Moretti is never going to fucking win with me. I will sit here in the car, and I will make Max play in the rain if it means I get to be the stronger person.
“Sorry, Maxie. If your coach still thinks you guys can play, then I do, too. Out you go.”
Disappointed, he shoots me a betrayed grimace as he opens the car door and steps out into the wild weather. Before he slams the door closed behind him, in his most serious tone, he says, “If I die of pneumonia, it’ll be your fault. I will haunt you, Silver. And I’ll be really good at it, too. You’ll be so scared, you’ll probably choke on your own tongue and die.”
The threat’s kind of endearing, really. I’m not really worried about it, since it seems I’m being haunted by a real life, living monster now anyway, and he’s dead set on ruining my entire fucking life. Once Max is gone, I open up the message Alex sent, and I tap out a reply.
Me: If you think this is cute, you're sorely mistaken. Do NOT say anything weird to my dad. About ANYTHING.
Max’s coach must be a hard ass because he makes the kids play even when the rain is hammering on the roof of the van like a drum. I sit in the driver’s seat, unable to do anything but nervously sweat and dig my fingernail into the cord to my headphones until I’ve stripped the plastic from the copper wires inside and I’ve ruined them beyond repair.
Max groans and shivers all the way home, smearing mud and mangled blades of grass all over the place. My pulse rises at an alarmingly rapid rate when I pull into our driveway, bracing myself for the scene I’m about to stumble across in the garage, but…the door is up, the lights are on, and there’s no one there.
I was kind of hoping Alex would get bored, realize he’d made his point and leave, but his motorcycle’s still sitting in the drive, so looks like I’m shit out of luck there. That can mean only one thing:Alex Moretti has made it inside my house.
