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“You are absolutely insane if you think I would ever—”
Lucas pulled out his own phone, a type I’d never even seen before which left me in little doubt as to how much it had cost. “I’m really getting worried about you, Callie. I know you must be upset you dropped your phone out of the car, you can’t just afford to replace these things like I do, but going back to that old paranoid shit about how I’m doing you harm…” He shook his head. “Maybe I should call your parents, an ambulance…”
Even my father was not going to be able to keep standing behind me if I seemed to be continually having these meltdowns. I sighed, scooped up my broken phone, and threw myself back into the car, slamming the door.
“Seatbelt on,” Lucas said. I clipped the belt. Lucas started the car again and rolled it to a more appropriate parking spot, just as another car came too fast down the street. “Now. Are we good?”
I kept my head pointed into my lap because I did not want to look at him. “What do you want, Lucas? What can I do that will make you just leave me alone?”
“That’s the only thing I don’t want to do,” he said. “The only thing I want you to do for me. Just give me a chance, actually come hang out with me when I ask you to. I don’t want you to do anything other than that you wouldn’t normally do. I seriously just want that chance.”
“Why should you be allowed to bully me into spending time with you?” I asked. “Isn’t that already too much?”
“You have to spend time with me anyway,” Lucas said. “All of us, we’re stuck seeing one another five days a week until we can graduate high school forever and move on to some situation where we have a bit more choice.”
He sounded completely serious about that, which made me look up at him to confirm he actually looked serious as well. It was not the sort of thing I would have expected to come out of Lucas Starling’s mouth. It wasn’t even the sort of thing I would say. I’d expect to hear it from one of the kids we’d grown up with who had been seriously bullied: the really smart ones, or those who otherwise hadn’t fit in well enough to get left alone. Hailing from Chigwell aside, I’d always fit in well enough to at least be seamless and invisible, so had most of my friends. Someone like Lucas? He got to decide the shape and size of the puzzle pieces.
I wondered if school was genuinely the only thing in Lucas’s life where he didn’t get his own way, if that was what pissed him off so much about it.
Well, I wasn’t going to just roll over because he found the notion of an authority higher than Lucas Starling offensive. But it was clear to me I wasn’t going to get myself out of this situation by getting into a fight with him while I was sitting in his car and he had plenty of plans for how to make me look like I was growing increasingly unhinged.
“Okay,” I said. For now, I was going to go along with him. I would make my own plan later. “Let’s get to school, okay?”
Lucas shot me that big smile, now perfectly seated in his face, and a shiver ran through me. Staying around him for even a minute longer was a dangerous plan when I found him that attractive. There was fear in it as well as excitement, but it wasn’t that I was afraid of him. I was afraid of what could happen to me because of him, but that was a very different thing to my head.
“Let’s go,” he said, and dragged my scream from me again with the speed at which he rejoined the traffic.
Chapter Six
“What am I supposed to say?” I spoke up when Lucas pulled the car into a parking spot in front of the school. He’d been trying to engage me in conversation the whole several minutes it had taken to get to school, and I hadn’t ignored him, but I’d kept my contribution minimal. It hadn’t seemed to bother him, so at least he’d been honest about not caring about more than my presence.
Now he was looking at me more suspiciously than I ever remembered before. “About what?”
“To everyone who asks me why I came to school with you,” I said. “Someone is bound to have already noticed, it’s not like we’re travelling incognito. I guarantee everyone will be talking about it by the time we get to second period.”
“Oh.” Lucas grimaced. “What’s that thing the celebs say when the media bug them about something they don’t want to talk about?”
“Are you seriously suggesting I can respond with no comment when everyone asks me what I was doing in a car with you?”
“Why not?” said Lucas, and climbed out of the car. He strode towards the school building leaving the doors locked with the top down. I was forced to climb over the side of the car in my school skirt. At least Lucas had already walked off without looking back, so I didn’t have to worry about him trying to catch a glimpse of something I didn’t want to show him.
Following him through the gates into the Burgundy College grounds at a much slower pace, I knew exactly what was happening. I was being set aside for the day so Lucas could play with his other little school friends. That was exactly how he worked in these situations. That was what it had been like the first time, before I’d known better. When he was ready to play again, he would show up and it would be as if that cold little walk-off hadn’t even happened.
And he wondered that I wasn’t interested in that. Were there girls in our class who did go in for that kind of arrangement? I couldn’t actually think who Lucas had been going out with in the past couple of years. I hadn’t been paying much attention. I didn’t care that much, but also at some point I had realised that the meaningless ‘going-out’ relationships being formed and broken at will by ten-year-olds had turned into teenage relationships where the participants were probably having sex, and I really didn’t want to think about people I’d known as kids having sex. It was actually worse than thinking about my parents having sex, because I’d had to accept that was a thing that happened since I knew what sex was, and I doubted they were having much of it now anyway.
Well, the main point was I was probably going to have to start paying attention to Lucas again.
Tamara and Aileen joined me outside our first class for the day. Obviously both of them already knew how I’d made it to school, and crowded in asking so many questions I couldn’t actually focus on any one of them.
I waved my hands in front of their faces. “No comment. No comment, okay?”
Aileen fell over laughing. “Is that what you have to say when you start dating a school celebrity?”
I winced at the thought of dating Lucas. The guy didn’t even want to hang out with me at school. I’d have a boyfriend who spent more time with Ashleigh than with me.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “That’s all I’m going to say.” I definitely wasn’t going to tell them it was Lucas who had said I should no comment everything, or they’d never let me forget it.
“Friends with benefits, yes,” said Aileen. “You sly dog.”
