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“Not defending them, just saying that Joliet is as manipulative as they come.”
“That bitch.”
“What about me?” A new voice chimed. They hadn’t heard the bathroom door open, but the three girls standing there heard them. Joliet smirked and narrowed her eyes into slits, “Don’t stop now. I’d love to hear the rest of your story, Tulsa.”
They hadn’t seen each other since the dance, much less talked. After everything that happened the past week, Tully’s wits were hanging by the world’s thinnest thread. “I’m not going to waste my time repeating what we already know.”
“Like what?” Joliet stepped in and her friends followed. The door slammed shut behind them. “Like the fact you can’t keep your boy toys in your pocket for five minutes before they’re all over me? Don’t blame me for your own repulsiveness.”
Tully’s hand clutched tight around the forgotten apple.Bite your tongue. Don’t let her get to you.
“Maybe if you had a single original bone in your body you wouldn’t have to go after someone else’s boyfriend to get a guy to like you. But,” Tully’s fault lines were crackling. She laughed, sharp and humorless. If she could touch the steaming rage in her gut she would be burned. “He doesn’t even want you. Throwing yourself at him like that was pathetic. No matter what you try, Nathan will pickmeover you and there is nothing you can do about it.”
The acoustics of the bathroom repeated her words back to her, and the girls behind Joliet shared a nervous look.
Joliet clicked her heels across the tile until she was nose-to-nose with her sister. Tully couldn’t read her face. She mumbled, low and quiet. “You’re forgetting something. Nathan is just like every other guy in this school. He’ll love it and eat it and take as much as he wants, but when he’s done, he’s done. He doesn’t care about you. I just don’t want you to get hurt when he gets sick of you too.”
Tully sucked in a harsh, frigid breath and exhaled steam.
Limits were made to be pushed, and lines were meant to be crossed, but Joliet bulldozed through all of Tully’s adjusted marks the second she said Nathan’s name like he was the rotten one. Insult her, sabotage her grades, and steal her boyfriend, butno onecould speak of Nathan that way.
The apple fell from her hand and smacked on the ground.
It harmonized with the crack on Joliet’s cheekbone and gasps around them.
It preluded the cry from Tully’s lips flying across the inches of space between her and Joliet, and the crescendo of screams as she grabbed Joliet’s hair in two unrelenting fists and pulled.
Music to her ears.
forty-seven
nathan
Nathan took a different path than he usually did going from lunch to his next class. Tully told him she was taking her make-up exam during lunch, and since she didn’t come to the cafeteria for lunch, he was hoping to catch her on his way in the hallway.
He got more than he bargained for.
A crowd was forming down the hallway, in front of the girls’ restroom. Whatever was happening was taking placeinside; the crowd was holding open the door and they grumbled in excitement at whatever they saw. Nathan, in curiosity, walked towards it too.
He reached the edge and tried to peer around them but the audience had grown so thick he could neither see nor hear anything. The first piece of action he saw was someone running out—Lisa Abrams. He recognized her from an English class they shared before and because she was one of Joliet’s friends.
She shoved past people trying to make a pathway for herself, but the bodies were as easy for her to meld as metal. They were more interested in asking her what was going on than letting her through. Lisa kept her mouth shut except to say she needed to find a teacher, but by chance, while Nathan was watching her curiously, she caught his eye and abandoned her initial course to charge towards him instead.
“Rondeau!” She yelled over people, and Nathan frowned in confusion. They’d never talked before, so why was she coming at him now? People did start to make way for her now. She was almost to him when she yelled out. “Your girlfriend is attacking Joliet!”
The curious excitement of the gathering sparked like a firecracker as people realized this was much more interesting than they thought. They chittered to each other, and finally, a pathway emerged towards the bathroom, but it was for Nathan.
Good thing too, because he was ready to barrel through dozens of high schoolers to get there if they didn’t. He ran, as best he could, past shoulders and elbows into the girls’ bathroom. Now that he knew Tully was there, and probably in trouble, he moved before he thought.
It was a sight to behold.
Didn’t matter if Tully started it, because they were both in it now.
She had two fistfuls of Joliet’s long blonde hair cinched in her fingers, and she wasn’t letting go. He couldn’t make out either of their faces as Joliet swung her arms around trying to both hit Tully and get her to let go, none of which was working. Tully had the advantage in height and arm length. Luckily for Joliet, she had one of her other friends yanking on the back of Tully’s dark curls so her neck was bent back at an angle that made Nathan cringe.
Unluckily for that girl, Stephanie was there too. She skipped the hair-pulling and went straight for the jugular. She swung at the girl’s face and connected twice that Nathan saw in the blur before the girl winced and let go of Tully.
Joliet got her first scratch in, screaming something incoherent as her nails scraped against Tully’s cheek. Tully screamed something else back and then they both screamed some more.
