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I don’t know which one of us moved first, but her hand cracked across my face and it stung like hell. Horror flickered in her eyes, but not enough to chase away the rage.
“You don’t like it, fine. Don’t like it. But you still have a few more months here, young lady, and youwillbe respectful.”
Covering my cheek with my hand, I sucked in a breath and then said, “May I be excused?”
All of the fight went out of her. “Frankie…”
But I didn’t capitulate. All she wanted was respect. Fine. If I wasn’t supposed to care about her setting herself up for failure, then I wouldn’t. We’d been down this road, and it wasn’t like she’d ever been married.
She turned away from me and said in a shaky breath, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have slapped you.”
Yeah. You shouldn’t have done a lot of things. But I kept my opinion to myself.
I waited her out.
“Yes,” she said finally. “You’re excused.”
I grabbed my Coke and walked back to my room. I didn’t slam the door—but God, I wanted to. No, I crossed over to the desk and picked up my phone.
No messages.
Tears burned in my eyes, and I unlocked the screen and did a swipe down to check the notifications. Sometimes when it was in do not disturb, it didn’t display them all. There were numerous notifications from their messages. I cleared those—most of them I’d read, but a couple of them were apologies that I hadn’t.
Nothing recent. Not since that morning.
There were—good lord, a hundred notifications from Instagram. I’d been tagged in a bunch of photos?
I’d check that in a minute. There were some Reddit thread updates, and a Snapchat from Cheryl. I hit that first because I had no idea how old it was.
“Hey girl! What color for the dress? I don’t want to match. I want to do silver. I think.”
I literally had no thoughts on that whatsoever, so I just closed snapchat out and went back to my messages. Tabbing into Jake’s, I scanned to where I sent thehey.
Read. The timestamp was for less than a minute after I’d sent it.
But he hadn’t answered.
Okay.
Thumb hovering over the keypad, I debated what I wanted to say. A hundred sentences entered and discarded immediately.
Finally, I went with the truth.
Me:I need to get out of here. Are we still on?
Maybe it was selfish.I’d shut him down the night before, and if he wanted to blow me off, fine. I had my car. My stomach hurt, and I stared at the homework I still needed to finish. The math was mostly done, I just needed to log in and do it online.
I’d take my bag with me.
Flopping back on the bed, I stared at the ceiling. My bedroom door was still open, but it was quiet beyond my room. Tiddles had followed me inside, and he jumped up to demand attention. I stroked his back as I stared at the message.
No read receipt.
The group chat was quiet, too.
I scrolled to Archie’s text.
Me:Hey
