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“What happens after my car is fixed?” I said. “What then?”
“You go back to pretending we don’t exist,” Vincent said, staring up at the ceiling almost wistfully. Then, with a dismissive shrug, he added, “Or keep playing.”
I wanted to tell him we couldn’t play forever, but that was far too scary a declaration to make. Part of me wanted to dive in head-first and forget all theshouldsandshould-notsthat I’d spent so long hung up on. Part of me wanted to cling to this, hold this dirty little secret close.
Another part of me wanted to run away again, because running was easier than introspection. It was easier than acknowledging that maybe I’d spent years forming and adhering to my own lies about myself and who I was.
“Okay,” I finally said. “I’ll pay my debt. I’ll play the game. Until the car is fixed, I’m yours.”
20
Jason
High School - Senior Year
Jessica Martin was a dirty rotten cheater.
Wickeston High School’s resident princess didn’t sit next to me in every class because she liked me, although I’d been foolish enough at first to think she did. There I was, fifteen years old and awkward as hell, sitting next to the prettiest girl in school. She couldn’t keep her eyes off me either. Every time I glanced up, she was looking back, those big green eyes with her long lashes mesmerizing me.
It turned out she wasn’t looking at me at all; she was looking at my tests. Every single one of them.
I got the hint when Kyle cornered me in the hallway one day and “convinced” me to start writing his essays. Jessica was tucked under his arm the entire time, smirking at me like she thought it was funny that her caveman boyfriend could shove me around. I was fresh out of a tiny private Christian school, accustomed to uniforms, tight schedules, and a stringently merciless disciplinary policy. Wickeston wasn’t like that. To a shy, quiet kid like me, that place was the wild west.
Kyle had about six inches of height on me and fists the size of bricks, so I went from being the quiet AP kid to the popularcrowd’s personal homework dispenser. I tried to make a game out of it, convincing myself that I was getting more studying done by doing their work for them.
I cringed when I thought back on it. God, I’d been naïve.
Then I met Vincent, Manson, and Lucas. We were all a bunch of outcasts, but together, we were stronger, accepted by one another. It made me bolder to fight back, to branch out, to explore.
It made me fall in love, too, with this goofy clown of a guy who talked about concepts like free love and sexual acceptance. He gave me words to describe how I felt; he didn’t lose his shit when I told him I was so damn confused because Ilikedgirls, but shit, guys could get it too. Vincent Volkov turned my world on its head.
By the time senior year came around, everything changed.
My parents kicked me out over the summer and Vincent’s family took me in. Adulthood hit me like a ton of bricks and suddenly I was free. Free to act, talk, and dress however I damn well pleased. Free to love who I wanted, free to have sex how I wanted.
I was free to stand up for myself.
I had to be clever. I had to play to my own strengths. I couldn’t best these assholes physically, most of them anyway. But blackmail became my favorite pastime. I learned how to gain access to social media accounts, collecting private information as if it was a sport. It helped that Vincent supplied most of the jocks who bullied me with their party drugs. He got his money, and I got life-ruining information I could hold over their heads.
But there was one person I wasparticularlylooking forward to getting back at — Jessica Martin.
I probably took a little too much joy in planning how it would go down, but really, there wasn’t much to plan. I considered getting her account passwords; a quick phishing email froma spoofed address would do the trick. I imagined going through her DMs, finding the nudes she sent to her boyfriend, threatening to leak them. I imagined it…but I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. It felt too personal, like something I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself for doing. I wanted to get back at her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do something that could very well ruin her.
I couldn’t bring myself to hurt her.
So I was going to keep it simple. If she wanted to use me to cheat, she was going to pay me one way or another.
I waited until after cheer practice, when she was the last one to file into the showers after nearly everyone else had gone home. I had to give her props — she worked hard when she wanted to. She hadn’t become cheerleading captain without reason. She’d practice for hours, long after everyone else was done. The weather was cold, but she was red-faced and sweating when she finally trudged into the showers.
I followed.
“Don’t take the shower at the end, it’s mine!” she called. The door swung shut behind me, a row of lockers separating me from the shower stalls on the other side. My heart was pounding with every step. The girls’ locker room smelled different than the boys’. Not necessarily better, but different.
She froze when I came around the lockers. She was bent over her gym bag, wearing her uniform, a change of clothes clutched in her arm.
“Uh, hello?” She straightened up, staring at me. “You can’t be in here.”
“I don’t see anyone else around to get offended about it,” I said. “I figured you’d want our conversation to be private.”
