Page 79 of Revenge At Raleigh High
If I’ve survived all of this, and Alex is freed…but then he doesn’t want me anymore? I don’t know how the fuck I’m going to handle that.
“Okay, Silver. Stop frowning, baby. Seriously, it’s nowhere near as bad as you think. Here, use this.” Mom hands me a piece of doubled-over toilet paper, miming the action of blotting her lips as I take it from her. She’s been here a lot. Nearly every day. She and dad came to some kind of agreement between themselves which meant they weren’t running into each other in the hospital hallways, but occasionally it couldn’t be helped. They’d both have to come in for the results of one of the eleventy billion tests that have been run on me over the past three weeks, and I’m giving them credit where credit is due. They haven’t made it awkward or weird. They’ve been polite and considerate around one another. They were even laughing in the hallway together three days ago.
Their behavior might give other people hope that they might attempt to repair their relationship, but I can feel the change in them now. There’s something missing, and by the way they look at each other when they think I’m sleeping, they both know they’re never going to get it back again.
“I have three different shades of eye shadow if you wanna use it. Eighties make-over?” Mom asks hopefully, holding up the palette so I can see it.
“I don’t wanna walk out of here looking like some kind of Halloween sideshow. A little eyeliner and some mascara’s fine.”
She pretends to be disappointed. I’ve never worn much in the way of make-up, though, so she can’t be all that surprised. “Okay, then. Are you ready? I have a paper bag in my purse just in case. You can put it over your head and make a run for the car—”
“Oh my god. Just give me the stupid mirror.” I’m not a vain person, but I feel a little light-headed as I snatch the hand-mirror from my mother, lifting it gingerly until I’m holding it in front of my face.
“Breathe, sweetheart. In and out. Just rip the Bandaid off and look.”
I look, and…there I am.
My face.
My completelynormalface.
There’s a tiny, pinkish scar below my bottom lip, and a very faint scar on my left cheekbone where they operated to repair a few fragments of bone, but aside from that…
“I didn’t use much foundation,” Mom tells me, perching on the edge of the hospital bed beside me. If you use something a tiny bit heavier, then you won’t be able to see those marks at all. Dr. Rami said they’ll be practically invisible in a couple of months, so…”
Huh. I tilt my head, studying myself from different angles, searching for the hideous disfigurement that I assumed was going to have marred my face for life, but I am almost exactly the same as before. The bruises and the swelling have gone. Aside from the fact that my nose isn’t even slightly turned up at the end any more, I am just…Silver.
Mom clears her throat. “I was going to wait for your father before I told you this, but I knew you’d want news about Alex as soon as I had it, so—”
I nearly drop the mirror in my haste to spin around. “What! What is it? What’s happened? Have they convicted him?” I’ve been having nightmares every night for weeks. Every time I’ve closed my eyes to fall asleep, I’ve been haunted by the fact that Alex was lying somewhere, on a hard prison cot, trapped in one of the shittiest, most terrible places on earth, and all because of me. Because he had to come to my aid.
His current predicament is all my fault, and I haven’t even been able to speak to him. Tell him how sorry I am. Those text messages were a sign. I decided that being strong and not letting anyone fuck with me was more important than anything else, and I didn’t heed those signs. If I’d shown Alex all of the spiteful messages I received, then perhaps things would never have reached the point they did with Jake. With a little outside perspective, I might have seen that the situation was worsening, and it was time to take steps to end the cycle of hatred and abuse. Instead, my stubborn refusal to seek help resulted in my own kidnapping and brush with death, as well as Alex’s incarceration.
Mom quickly shakes her head, taking my hand and squeezing it. “No, sweetheart. There was a closed session this morning at the courthouse. They haven’t released the news to the local press yet, but Alex was tried as a minor this morning.”
“What? Aminor?” The lawyers Dad hired to defend Alex told us right out of the gate that there was no chance that was going to happen. They said it has been a miracle that he’d been treated as a minor after the graveyard incident, and because of his previous misdemeanors he was definitely going to face whatever charges were brought up against him as an adult. To find out that they were wrong is kind of shocking.
“I know. I’m as surprised as you,” Mom says. “The Mayor shouldn’t have even let me sit in. I guess she felt bad for me, knowing you were still stuck in here.”
“Wait, you were inside the court? Mom, you’ve been here for forty minutes. You sat here and applied my make-up like we were having a fucking sleep-over.What happened?”
She gives me a disapproving look. She forgets and curses around me and Max all the time, but it appears I’m not allowed to do the same. “What happened is Alex’s social worker is some kind of hotshot ninja, that’s what. Marion, or Mary or something. I can’t remember her name, but she was on fire in that court room, Silver. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Maeve?” I’ve only seen her from a distance, and I can’t remember a single thing about the woman. That was the day I saw Alex for the very first time, in the hallway outside Darhower’s office, and I was far busy persuading myself that I needed to stay the hell away from the sexy motherfucker with all the black ink to notice some woman in a pantsuit. Alex has told me plenty about her, though, and from what he’s said he didn’t think she was anything less than ill-equipped to do her job.
“It was quite something to watch. There was this DEA agent there. Detective Lowell? She made some sort of closed deal with the prosecution team. The Mayor told me once the court had cleared that Caleb Weaving agreed not to peruse Jacob’s shooting as attempted murder if they knocked some time off of his sentence. I mean, what kind of parent does that? I’d never throw my kid under the bus for my own personal gain, and that’s essentially what he did. By agreeing that Alex acted in self-defense, Caleb’s agreed that Jake is guilty.”
Mom’s having difficulty wrapping her head around the fact that Caleb would be so mercenary, but I’m not. He’s a Weaving, after all. It’s in their DNA to be selfish, evil, cold-hearted pricks. “I don’t care about any of that right now. I’m going out of my mind, Mom. For crying out loud, just tell me what happened! Was Alex remanded, or—”
“Wow, I’m an idiot. I’m sorry, I should have lead with that part, shouldn’t I? My head’s all over the place. No, Alex was not remanded,” she says. “The charges against him were dropped, baby girl. He was released a couple of hours ago.”
Released?
A couple of hours ago?
What the…
“What’s wrong, Sweetheart? I thought you’d be thrilled?”
