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“Will you pretend not to know me in school tomorrow?” I ask, feeling surprisingly vulnerable.
“Because you’ve got a target on your back?” She pretends to draw lines under her eyes with her fingers, like a character out of a cheesy action film. “To battttllllleeee!” Then she links her arm through mine. “Trust me, girl. I’m part of a crew that can make things go boom using a bottle of bleach and chewing gum. Those pretty boys don’t fuck with us.”
“So you’re a nerd?” I jest and she nods twice.
“Exactly.”
With a friend like Alice on my side, I might actually end up liking it here.
“Do you want to hang out after this?” she asks, looking at her watch. “I can show you around town from a teen’s perspective.”
I look at Lane and Stanley and catch their attention with a wave of my hand. “I’m going into town with Alice after this. Is that cool?”
“Be back by dark,” Stanley replies and Lane looks positively giddy on my behalf.
“So what inspired you to learn parkour?” Alice asks as she watches me walk on a narrow wall of a low bridge that cuts over a branch of water that leads from the Mississippi River and back.
This town, for all of its people flaws, is really beautiful. It has a lot of character to it. Not to mention all the gators in the river.
“The need to escape,” I reply but that was only part of it.
“So the rumors are true? You spent time in juvie?”
I shrug my shoulders. “I confirm nor deny it.”
“But you are the senator’s niece, right?”
I nod.
“So why are you in foster care? Why aren’t you living with your uncle and his wife? Aren’t they like loaded or something?”
I shrug.
“You don’t like talking much, do you?”
I come to the end of the bridge and drop down, landing perfectly. “I don’t like talking about my past. Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” she replies and starts telling me all about school, who she likes, who she doesn’t, whose dick she wants, whose she wants to chop off. She’s so funny and animated.
We come to the same place that I climbed when being chased by the cops and then pass it too. Just when I think we’re headed for Bowler Mania, we take a sharp left into a gaming store and I’m instantly assaulted by the scent of vaping. The place is cloudy and tastes like grape.
“Umm…”
She grabs my hand and pulls me to the back of the store, past the guy who works there who doesn’t even look up from his comic book.
We head down a flight of stairs into a noisy-sounding basement and I stop in my tracks when I come to the end and see a huge pull-down screen displaying a game that three teens are screaming at as they bounce around on the couch with controllers in their hands.
“Don’t worry, we aren’t stopping.” She moves across the screen and the three teens start cussing her out.
I watch as she grabs an expensive-looking camera and a vape pen from a padded black bag in the corner.
“Are you allowed to take those?” I ask with an amused smile.
She raises a brow while asking, “Do you care?”
Laughing, I shake my head. “Not really.”
“Good, then, let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“You’ll see.”
I groan, but secretly I’m excited for whatever it is we’re about to do.
Alice links her arm through mine, a bright grin on her face. “Yesterday was so much fun, we need to do that again.”
Alice was nice enough to show me where Presley lives and I was surprised to see how huge his house is. Apparently it was one of the first houses built in town and has been in his family ever since. It had to be at least four stories tall but it wasn’t in great condition. It needed a coat of paint and the yard was overgrowing.
We egged it. Or I did because Alice was holding the camera. Then we ran and ran and ran, tears streaming down our faces.
Not my most creative way to get revenge but definitely cathartic to say the least.
We filmed me doing parkour for a little while in a quieter part of town, that was fun, and then we headed back to my house where we sat in my room until Stanley drove her home at nine.
For the first time in my entire life, I felt like a normal teenager.
Nothing can bring my mood down.
Nothing except—
“Miss Oaks, Miss Bonner,” Jefferson barks, drawing the eyes of all the students around us in the hall. “My office… now.”
“Uh-oh,” Alice whispers and we give each other a wide-eyed look. “Do you think he knows?”
“Probably.”
I close my eyes, blow out a breath, and we duck into the office as he holds open the door. We pass his personal assistant at her desk before finally heading through the final door and into his clean office. He paces once, then twice, looks at me, paces again and pushes a hand through his hair.
