Chapter Four
Then
It was a bitter January afternoon – the kind where the wind whips icy rain into your face and the crisp air bites against your exposed skin like it has actual teeth. My jacket was from two seasons ago, so worn out it barely shielded me from the elements or retained any warmth. The ripped-out knees of my skinny jeans sent chills racing up my legs.
I always laughed lightly to myself whenever I saw the wealthy girls at my school wearing pairs of $150 designer jeans that had been purposefully ripped to shreds with the help of a manufacturer. They were paying good money to look like war-refugees, while I would’ve just liked to own set of pants I didn’t have to patch or turn into cut-off shorts when I grew too tall for them – ironic, wasn’t it?
I kept my head down against the spitting rain as I walked along the side of the road. I’d missed my bus again, which meant I was in for either a long wait in the rain until the next one rolled around at five, or a lengthy, drizzly trek through muddy puddles. I opted to walk, hoping it would get me there faster.
Ms. Ingraham, my spring session advanced Latin teacher, had kept my entire class after school today because she was convinced no one had done the mandatory reading – or maybe it was just because she was a lonely old cat lady with no one to spend time with other than the students she coerced via detention sessions. Regardless of her reasons, I knew she was going to be a pain in the ass, and it was only the second day of classes.
The old bat was not only responsible for the hand cramp I had after conjugating approximately 17 million Latin verbs, but was also to blame for me missing my bus and being late to see Jamie at the hospital. He’d been there for almost three weeks this time, recovering from a particularly rigorous surgery on his left femur where more cancer had begun to grow.
He was supposed to start physical therapy any day now. The doctors were hopeful that he’d walk again within a few months of recovery, so long as the cancer didn’t return. Unfortunately, their optimism was likely unrealistic. The sad fact that everyone knew but didn’t say out loud was that with a cancer this aggressive, regrowth was an inevitability rather than a possibility. It was only a matter of time before Jamie was back at the hospital for another bone graft or, if things got really bad, a full amputation of his left leg.
They’d wanted to amputate this time, but Jamie had begged them to try to save his leg. It was riskier, but worth it, according to Jamie.
“No risk, no reward, Lux,” he’d tell me, smiling through his pain.
I felt my numb lips twitch up into a reluctant grin, and pressed on through the downpour.
He wasn’t responding to his chemotherapy drugs anymore, so the surgeons were taking a more aggressive approach. Limb-salvage surgeries weren’t always effective, but since Jamie was young and relatively strong, they said it was his best option. They didn’t say out loud that it was hisonlyoption, but I was smart enough to read between the lines of their sugar-coated prognoses, worried expressions, and hushed whispers.
So was Jamie.
He hated being at the hospital alone, cooped up in bed and unable to move, so I tried to visit as often as possible. I didn’t like the thought of him lying there contemplating death or the possibility that his surgery wouldn’t be a success.
My parents had picked up double shifts to pay the rapidly accumulating medical bills, so they weren’t around much to visit him. Even if they hadn’t been working, though, I wasn’t sure their presence would’ve done Jamie any good. We’d never been as close to our parents as we had to one another — perhaps because they’d never seemed too interested in getting to know us. But I couldn’t complain – not when they’d both been working nonstop to keep our house out of foreclosure and to cover Jamie’s basic medical care.
Truthfully, it was silly for me worry about him getting lonely. With Jamie’s handsome features – he pulled off the bald look really well – and sense of humor, he’d charmed the nurses within days of his first hospitalization. They all checked in on him and fussed over him like a son, bringing him extra pudding cups and sharing all the hospital gossip whenever they stopped by. It was hysterical and mildly inappropriate, but I was grateful he wasn’t alone.
Caught up in my thoughts, I didn’t hear the car approaching until it was far too late to move off the road. It whizzed by on my left, careening through a puddle at nearly forty miles per hour and dousing me completely with a torrent of dirty rainwater. I gasped, startled by the sudden icy downpour, and immediately began shivering as the chilly winds plastered my now-sodden coat and jeans to my body.
“Asshole!” I screamed after the car, shaking a fist in the air as it drove away.
My eyes widened when the car abruptly slammed to a halt about fifty yards up the road, its red brake lights brightly illuminated in the overcast sky. It was a nice car – a two-seater Mercedes hard top convertible, from what I could tell at this distance. I watched in horror as the white reverse lights flipped on and the car began backing down the vacant roadway, toward me.
Shit. I was so going to get beat up.
Here I was, walking alone on an empty roadway with no cellphone and no means of escape. Come to think of it, I was pretty sure this was the exact plot-line from the beginning of a horror movie I’d watched last Halloween…
Defenseless, isolated, idiot girl? Check.
Overcast, dark, stormy day? Check.
Psycho-killer in an expensive automobile? Check.
Dammit. Jamie was going to be so pissed at me when they found my body in an alligator-infested swamp somewhere in bum-fuck Florida.
When the Mercedes came to a stop next to me, I held my ground and stared menacingly at the darkly tinted passenger window. Whatever thisjerk thought, I wasn’t going down without a fight. I was Lux Kincaid – badass bitch extraordinaire, albeit in a five-foot-four, blonde pixie-like package.
Ha!I was so dead.
The window slid down silently, sending beads of water streaming off the shiny black passenger door and ultimately revealing the asshole’s face. I had to clamp my lips together to keep them from falling open when the driver came into view.
Better than a road-ragey psycho killer, but not by much.
Sebastian Covington sat behind the wheel – honestly, the last person I’d expected to see. He was the most popular guy in the junior class, in part due to his looks – which even I had to admit were gorgeous, in an Abercrombie model sort of way – but mostly because his father was aU.S. Senator. I may have been the Typhoid Mary of my class, but even social rejects would recognize him on sight. Plus, I’d noticed today that he was in my Latin class. It had been hard to miss him, as there were only about twenty students enrolled, but since we sat on opposite sides of the room and had never previously interacted in the three years we’d both been attending Jackson County High, I very much doubted I’d crossed his radar.