Page 17 of Revenge At Raleigh High
I have zero experience dealing with parents who actually care about their kids. Honestly, seeing the raw emotion on Mr. Parisi’s face is freaking me the fuck out; I have no idea how to react to it. I doubt he’d be stoked if I waltzed up to him and gave him a hug, so I do the only thing I can think of and pretend I haven’t noticed the way his eyes are shining a little too brightly. “She knows you care about her. She knows you’re there for her. She came to you in the end, when she was ready. She’ll give you the missing pieces of the story, too. You just need to be patient with her.”
Mr. Parisi seems to think on this. I’m stunned when the guy sighs heavily and collapses down onto my sofa. I’ve been waiting for him to charge through the rest of the trailer, continuing on his mission to track down all of my illusive hookers and blow, but it appears that mission has been abandoned for the time being.
“You love her,” he says. A statement.
I set my jaw, lifting my chin. “Yes.”
Mr. Parisi glances at me out of the corner of his eye and laughs bitterly under his breath. “No need for the posturing, Moretti. I’m not here to tell you to stay away from her. I do want to know one thing, though.”
“All right. Ask.”
“If you love her, then…” His voice cracks. He has to take a second before he can finish his sentence. “What didyoudo to those motherfuckers when you found out what they’d done to her?”
Fuck.
It feels like he’s just landed a right hook right to my gut.
I growl, banging the back of my head against the wall behind me. “Nothing. I didn’t do a single thing.”
“What?” Silver’s father looks like he’s about to leap up from the sofa and fasten his hands around my throat. I wouldn’t blame him, either. “She trusted you with that information…and you didnothing? How the hell can you say you love her if—”
“She made me promise.”
“I don’t give a shit! If you care about someone—”
“If you care about someone and you make them a promise, you keep it no matter what. How many promises haveyoumade to Silver? And how many of them have you broken? Because I’ve only made the one so far, and I don’t intend on breaking it. Not Ever. She made me swear to her that I wouldn’t use violence against them or break the law. She tied my fucking hands. Right now, all I can do is bide my time. Therewillbe justice for the people who hurt her, believe me. I’m not going to just let them get away with it. But I’ve earned your daughter’s trust. It’s the most valuable fucking thing in the world to me, and there’s no way in hell I’m breaking it.”
The poor fucker’s taken his gloves off, and his hands are balled into fists on the tops of his knees. I can see it written all over him: this man needs to hit something. Or someone. He’s been through hell and back recently and he’s had no fucking release from any of it. If he doesn’t hit me right here and now, then it’ll only be a matter of time. At some point, he’s going to snap, he’s going to hitsomething, and when he does there are going to be some real fucking fireworks.
He’s a tall guy, the same height as me. I doubt he’s really worked out in a long time, but he’s fit. In relatively good shape. I’m sure I’d be able to take him in a fight, but it’s a really bad fucking idea. I can’t let things get that far. Silver would be devastated if I ended up trading blows with her old man, but more than that, I bear him no ill will. Fighting with him wouldn’t do anyone any real favors, even if it did help him temporarily blow off some steam.
Time to enter peacemaker mode, then.
I sigh, pushing away from the wall and crossing the living room to join him on the couch. He flinches when I sink down next to him, as if I’ve suddenly jarred him from a waking nightmare that had taken him over and clouded his mind. His fists unclench reflexively.
“When I was ten, I was staying at this group home for boys. It was bad there,” I tell him. “We slept in dorms. I can’t really remember how many kids were in my dorm but there was a pretty big group of us. Must have been between fifteen and twenty kids or something. I can’t remember when it started, but there was this guy who used to come into the dorm at night and take one of the kids away with him. The boy had been dropped off at the home when he was six. Hadn’t even known his own name, so one of the nicer female attendants decided to call him George. This one guy, Mr. Clayton? He took a shine to George. At one in the morning, nearly every morning, George would take Mr. Clayton’s hand as he pulled him out of his bed, and he would pad barefoot with him in silence out of the dorm—”
“I don’t think I want to hear this story, Alex.”
Unblinking, I stare at the clock by the television, waiting for the bright, glowing number five on the end of the digital display to change to a six. “You’re right. I don’t need to go into details,” I mutter. “We both know what was happening to George. I knew back then, too. I convinced myself I didn’t. Told myself George was being shown special treatment. That Mr. Clayton preferred George to all of us other boys, and he was sneaking him out in the middle of the night to give him candy and let him watch T.V. in his private apartment instead of in the drafty, damp home room where the rest of us were sometimes allowed to hang out. I’ve felt guilty about that for years. That I didn’t stand up and say something that might have stopped Mr. Clayton creeping into our dorm like some sinister fucking shadow after midnight.”
“You were a child, Alex.”
“I wasafraidis what I was. I’m not afraid anymore, though. I’m not hiding under my bedsheets, pretending to be asleep now, okay? I swear toyouthat I’m not gonna let those pieces of shit get away with what they did to your girl. The wheels are already turning. It might take a little while, but a day of reckoning is coming, I can promise you that.”
The man stares at the clock on the wall, too. He seems to simmer on what I’ve just said for a very long time. Eventually, he says, “I suppose I’m just going to have to be satisfied with that then, aren’t I?”
“For the time being, yes.”
He sucks in a long, slow breath, closing his eyes, and it’s as though a wave of relief has just washed over him. “Fine. But I’m her father, Alex. I should be the one carving up those sick little fuckers. It’s myright.”
I don’t respond to that. He needs to sit in it for a second, to ruminate on what he’s just said without me adding anything to it. Eventually, he grimaces, shaking his head. “That was a stupid thing to say. I have no right to anything. It didn’t happen tome. I know that. I’m sorry.”
“Hey. No need to be sorry, man. You’re fucked up. You’re fucked up because of what went down. I’m fucking up because of it, too. Ironic, really, that Silver’s the only person with any realrightto anything, and yet she’s the least fucked up out of all of us.”
He smiles sadly, his eyes roaming around the room again, taking everything in for a second time. He’s not pretending to look for drugs now. He’s just…seeing the place. “She’s always been like that,” he says absently. “Really well put together. Mentally. Even when she was a kid, she handled every upset, big and small, with this weird kind of understanding and…just this resilience that always blew us away. She’s so damn strong. I think that’s why her mother and I kind of forgot we were her parents for a second there. Before all of this, it hadn’t occurred to me that Silver might actuallyneedanything from me in a very long time. She’s just so unshakeable.”
She’s broken down in front of me before. Just that once, outside the cabin. I understand what he means when he says that she’s unshakeable. I know how people tick. I can see when they’re about to snap, and I never thought Silver might break down the way she did. I went up to that cabin in the middle of the night, and it didn’t occur to me for one second that it might be a bad idea, because she’d been vulnerable and hurt before. Because she hadn’t known I was coming, and she might have been scared by an unexpected vehicle pulling up out of the dark, down that long, winding driveway. I’d just assumed it would be fine, because she seemed…so well put together, as her father just said.
