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I take a step. “Get out.”
This time I’m looking at him. I don’t know him as well as Farrow knows him, but I know enough, and he treats everyone like shit. He’s not taking her anywhere alone.
“Go,” I bark.
Dylan moves around him, addressing me. “Are you kidding me?”
But this isn’t her decision.
“Out!” I growl at Constin.
He swaggers past me, throwing me a look, and I know I probably can’t make him leave, but he’s not going to be left alone with her like he planned now.
He walks out the front door, and Dylan throws out her arms. “Why do men suddenly think women didn’t survive at all before their arrival into their lives?”
I close the distance between us. “He just walked into your house?”
“He could’ve come in any time while we were both asleep last night!”
“And that’s probably true!” I shout. “It doesn’t seem like you know how to lock a door!”
He could get past a lock if he really wanted to, but that’s not the point.
“Go get dressed!” I yell down at her.
She scowls back up at me. “I need a shower!”
She marches past me and stomps up the stairs, and I glare at her back as she goes.
She disappears into her bedroom, and I cross my arms over my chest, standing in the foyer below. When she comes out again, she’s wrapped in a towel, and I watch her cross the hallway and throw me a glower as she kicks open the door to the bathroom.
I stand guard the entire time.
She pouts all the way to school. She glares at me in Forensics. Ignores me in the hallway. Snarls on her way to P.E.
Every time I look at her, she looks away, and I struggle not to laugh, because it reminds me of when we were kids. The little spats we’d get into that always bummed me out because I hated her being mad at me. Now I realize if she’s mad, she cares. I can still piss her off. Good to know.
“You want to go to the homecoming dance?” someone asks during lunch.
I turn back to the lunch table, seeing Arlet in Farrow’s abandoned seat, except she sits on the table with her shoes propped up in his chair.
“You didn’t ask anyone else.” She peels an orange, her red hair swept over to one side of her head. “I’d like to go with you.”
I glance over at Dylan, sitting at a long rectangular table to my left. She’s alone, acting like she’s preoccupied with her phone and that I can’t see her periodically looking up to watch me.
“You don’t need to babysit your cousin that night,” Arlet tells me.
A couple sits at the end of Dylan’s table, the girl dressed in a makeshift Pirates cheerleading uniform as she bounces on top of her boyfriend.
I narrow my eyes, hearing him chant, “pirate girl, aw yeah, pirate girl” as the young woman laughs.
“She’ll be back in the Falls by then anyway,” Arlet goes on. “To her own homecoming.”
Another guy comes up, pawing the cheerleader’s breasts while she moans, as if Pirate Girls love to be sexually harassed.
I start to stand, forgetting Arlet, but then a guy is behind Dylan, emptying a bottle of water into her lap. She flies up from her seat and shoves him in the chest, and I throw my chair back, running over.
The whole room erupts into cheers and chants as Dylan attacks and the dude grabs her by the collar. I’m there, pushing him away from her as the teachers rush in.
