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João chuckled at the guys and hiked his thumb back to me. “Blaise over here has a little crush on nerdy Vera Rodriguez. Who would’ve thought?”
Tired of his shit, I grabbed his fucking thumb and pulled it back, so fucking close to snapping it if he hadn’t reacted. He yanked himself out of my hold, his laughter turning to fury. He shoved me back against the front entrance and hurled a fist at me, but I sidestepped it.
Once I tossed my backpack on the ground beside us, I pushed up my sleeves. I hadn’t been in a fucking fight since last week, and my knuckles had been aching to slam into João’s arrogant fucking face for a long time now.
I threw a fist and collided with the side of his face. João stumbled back a few feet, spit up some blood, then faked a left and hit me in the gut with a right uppercut. It hurt like a motherfucker, but I wasn’t backing the fuck down. I wanted him to know that I was fucking serious.
After I landed another punch on his jaw, he lunged forward and grabbed me by the collar. I hit him again, and he used his grip on me to pull me down Redwood’s front stairs. My foot slipped down the first step. Before I completely lost my balance, I snatched his jacket and yanked him with me.
We tumbled down the concrete steps until we landed on the sidewalk. Blinded with rage and the need to feel fucking something, I slammed my fist into his face over and over as he hurled fist after fist at me too.
His knuckles collided, but I couldn’t feel anything.
“Hey!” someone shouted from across the quad, running toward us. Probably fucking Principal Vaughn, wanting to get on our shit.
Suddenly, someone grabbed my shoulders and yanked me back as Jace Harbor, Redwood football star, grabbed João’s shoulders and pulled him back.
“The fuck are you doing, João?” Jace asked. “We had a fucking de—”
“Get your fucking hands off me, Harbor,” João said, ripping himself out of Jace’s grip and wiping the blood off his chin on his hand. “We have a fucking deal, but that doesn’t mean you can get into my other shit.”
“Stay the fuck away from her,” I growled at João, not giving a fuck about whatever business that football star had with Poison.
“You think Vera Rodriguez would ever like you?” João asked, spitting up some more blood and chuckling at me. “You’re nothing but a rich, arrogant brat who leeches off his daddy’s money. She’ll see right through you.”
I lunged at him again, but Jamal, Jace’s best friend, stopped me.
“I don’t give a fuck about how she sees me. She doesn’t need to be in your fucking business.”
“You sound jealous as fuck, Harleen. Does Vera know how much you like her?” João continued, pulling another cigarette out and shoving it between his lips. “No, she doesn’t because she’s been too into me lately.”
Landon and Kai shot him a glare that I couldn’t quite understand fully, but I could tell that they didn’t like the last bit of what he had said. Which meant that he was either lying or had a different girl he was into … or maybe both.
He was trying to get under my skin, and it was fucking working.
“Just leave her the fuck alone,” I growled, tossing my backpack over my shoulder and grabbing my skateboard. Glaring at the ground, I stormed down the sidewalk, away from them and toward the student parking lot.
“Where the fuck are you going?” someone said to my left.
I expected it to be Jace Harbor, trying to get me to go back to school, or João Rocha, wanting to pick another fight with me, but it was Mr. Avery—teacher of some shit subject here and my fucking uncle, who had ties to Redwood’s mob.
“Home.”
Before I could slip past, he grabbed me by the shoulder. “Get your ass back to class.”
“I should say the same thing to you. Why the hell are you in the student parking lot?”
Avery guiltily slid his tongue across his front teeth, then released me. “If you don’t get out of my sight in two minutes, I’m calling your father.”
I ripped myself away from him, wondering why he was really in the student parking lot, and grumbled under my breath, “It’s not like he’d actually do anything about me skipping anyway.”
ChapterTwelve
VERA
Despite needing to go buy another stupid freaking pill because Blaise couldn’t keep his dick in his pants today, I had to work at the library at two thirty p.m., and I didn’t have time to head to CVS after school. I needed the money, especially if this was going to keep happening.
I slipped into the old three-story building that housed thousands of books and pulled down my hood. Droplets of water dripped onto the thin black carpet, and the usually relaxing scent of paperbacks drifted through my nose. Except today … I couldn’t relax.
