AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“If our friend Mr. Anderson can keep up with me.” He winked and swapped a small book between his hands. “Well, I’ll be seeing you around.”
“Okay, I totally understand why a lot of stuff has been forgiven,” Tamara whispered. “He gave your dad a job? And like… this tech invention stuff pays really well, doesn’t it? It’s got to be better for him than what he was doing before.”
“As our friend Mr. Bennett was just hinting,” I said, “he has to be able to not flake out on the job.”
“Oh, yeah.” Tamara winced. Her mother was a slightly different type of flake, but she knew enough about the lifestyle to sympathise.
But, Tamara being Tamara, she didn’t get the subtext of this whole deal. I’d given Axel everything he wanted, and he’d used it to conduct a hostile takeover of my life. Excepting whatever I could make at my own job he owned me financially… and he’d proven he could overwhelm me physically too, with his strength if he needed but mostly with the power of what he could do.
Dad had already called his old work to quit. There were plenty of options of people I could talk to about what was happening… but if I disrupted this arrangement we would be even more screwed than we’d already been… and I didn’t even know which of them would believe me now. Mrs. Hitchens hadn’t been pleased to learn I wasn’t honest with her about that photo in the first place. Callie and Tamara had all the incentive in the world to wilfully not believe me. As for Dad… if I’d told him his new friend Axel had murdered someone in cold blood in the middle of the school grounds, he would probably have been able to come up with a reason it was actually the victim’s fault.
I flinched at Tamara’s hand on my shoulder. “You know what I think? You’re getting way too in your head about this, and trust me, that’s a bad thing. You need to just stop worrying and let it happen.” Her smile was a little sour. “You’re not so different from us that you couldn’t be happy getting involved with someone like Axel.”
Being invited to trust Tamara was exactly how I knew my life had all gone wrong… and come to think of it, Tamara was one of the root causes of that. But I was starting to feel a lot more sympathy for her over the choices she’d made, so I didn’t let my fear get in my head and cause me to lash out at someone who was going through her own stuff.
“Hey, Tamara, don’t worry about me. You don’t need to. You know I always work my shit out.”
I had to, when nobody else was around to do it for me.
It wasn’t until my last class of the day, where I sat in the middle of a group of people who were usually a massive lot of fun, that I realised what was going on, why I was so much in my head. I was used to having people to talk to anywhere I went. Like, I’d come in from lunch and hook up with a different group to the one I came out with.
Nobody was talking to me now. That group I was sitting in the middle of were having enough trouble talking to one another, broken up in twos and threes with me in the middle ruining the vibe. I was pretty sure Carly and Jen were muttering about me at one point, too.
I tried to remember what had happened during other minor sexting scandals at the school. How I’d felt, how I reacted. I thought there was one girl I’d been a bit careful talking to for a while, in case I said something that triggered her. Eighteen-year-old culture is full of edgy jokes and a lot of yelling about crazy shit that happened at parties over the weekend… not that I went to the parties. Anyway, it’s got to be hard if you’re in a state of mind where things like that will remind you of what happened… but I still talked to her. Was I just more of a decent human than everyone else in this school? That couldn’t be right.
Now this sudden isolation had me on the edge of questioning the nature of humanity. It really gave me some insight into why Tamara and Callie were the way they were. Both of them spent so much time on their own. Once you started, it had to make it so much harder to get back to where other people were mentally.
Callie ran into me on the way to the bus after class. I was late, because I’d spent some time trying to draw clothing on the poor heap of erogenous zones on my locker door. If maintenance were too busy to deal with that blatant obscenity I was now forced to look at a few times each day, nobody could blame me for taking matters into my own hands.
“Callie, sorry, I’ve got to—”
“I was wondering if you’d like to come out with us for a bit,” said Callie. “Just a few of us hanging out for a few hours. I’ll drive you home.”
And Callie was handing out invitations. I tried to wrap my head around this world where perhaps the only people who would give me their time were the popular buttholes who would turn everyone else off me even further.
When I didn’t answer, Callie shot me a little sideways smile. “We’re going to go out and look at formalwear,” she said, as if that was supposed to lure me in.
Well, on any other day it would have been tempting. I love looking at expensive dresses, running my fingers through rows of them on a rack and trying to pick out the different fabrics, matching necklines to necklaces. But it’s the sort of thing that feels empty without friends, and my friends have the same problem I do: just being able to afford the one dress for that one night is going to be a challenge. I was pretty sure of Tamara and Callie only Tamara even cared, but I was also pretty sure Lucas was going to insist Callie attend and buy her some obnoxious gaudy dress her boobs would look fantastic in so she couldn’t wriggle out of it. And that it was going to be in need of a serious dry-cleaning by the end of that night.
My situation had changed pretty dramatically, though. Okay, if Dad could hold onto whatever work Axel was going to give him, maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about how much my dress cost… but now that he’d pissed on my reputation, I didn’t see any of the guys who might have taken me offering. I wouldn’t be able to pretend I was having the romantic experience of my life with a guy I at least got along with. It might even just be too uncomfortable for me to turn up at all. I didn’t think everyone was likely to forget in the next few weeks that they believed they’d already seen what was under my bodice.
Callie was edging closer. “Lucas says it’s getting really late in the piece to pick out a dress, that all the good stuff ends up going.” It seemed she’d already been brought around to her fate. “I’d like to get Tamara along too, but you know she would hate having to spend time with Ashleigh and Carlene. They’ve already got their dresses but I sort of said I’d let Carlene help me pick something out, and then it just…” She shrugged.
“I’d better get home and make sure Dad’s staying on task,” I told her, which was true actually. “He—”
“Oh yeah, Tamara told me about the job thing with Axel. Good on your dad, I hope it’s a big success.”
“Me too. Hey, maybe you can come out with me and
Tamara and help us pick something after Lucas has inevitably overruled anything you wanted to get.”
Callie scowled at me.
I opened the front door and froze at a soft squeaking noise and a thump.
“Aileen?” Dad’s voice rose above the TV. “Did you knock over my books?”
I was staring at the scattered pile of shiny volumes in front of my feet. Arduino, Raspberry Pi… I’d done some of that stuff in my computing class the year before and hadn’t liked it much. Apparently I was doomed to have it follow me home anyway.
