“I’m not a little kid anymore. You can’t control me, and you can’t put your hands on me. Now it’s your turn to see what it feels like to be helpless while your own flesh and blood beats the shit out of you. I should kill you, right here!”
I black out in a rage, years of suppressing my father’s abuse now breaking like a dam and spilling out of me.
Until Stephen’s hands wrap around my biceps, hauling me up. “Enough, Chance. Enough.”
His calm, deep voice rolls over my skin, snapping me back to reality. My chest heaves as I stare down at my father groaning on the floor.
Fuck.
Emotion lodges in my throat like a thick ball. No one has ever seen the ugliness my father is capable of, aside from me, my mother, and a handful of local cops. I feel vulnerable and embarrassed. Exposed. Stephen wasn’t supposed to see any of that.
I have to get out of here. But before I do, I bend down and dig into my father’s coat pocket, pulling out his key ring and separating the key fob from the keychain before tossing the rest back to him. Then I spin around and storm down the hallway.
“Chance, wait.” Stephen jogs to catch up to me, but I don’t slow down.
“Leave me alone,” I toss over my shoulder. “You shouldn’t have gotten involved.”
“Are you kidding me?” He yanks me by my arm and spins me around to face him. “You’re mad that I stuck up for you?”
“I didn’t need you to!” I don’t know why I’m doing this. My hands are shaking, my skin vibrating. But I can’t stop the words from tumbling out of me. “That shit you just saw? That’s my life, and it’s none of your business. I didn’t ask you to step in.”
“You didn’t need to ask me,” he shouts back. “That’s what friends do. They have each other’s backs, and they’re there when shit gets ugly.”
“When are you going to get it?” I look him dead in the eyes. “We’re not friends, and we’re never going to be friends.”
He should walk away from me and never speak to me again. Hell, he should punch me in the face for the way I’m acting after he defended me to my father.
Instead, Stephen pushes into my space until we’re nose to nose. “I can see that you haven’t had a great life up until now, and it’s pretty obvious you don’t have a lot of friends. So, you can keep trying to push me away all you want, but I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me. If someone disrespects you, I’m going to say something. Every. Single. Time. And if you don’t like it, that’s too damn bad.”
The sincerity in his eyes calms something in my jagged, dysfunctional heart. He’s not looking at me with judgment, and he’s not asking me to talk about what he saw between me and my father. He stuck up for me without a reason to. He could’ve easily stayed back, stayed quiet, and let me handle it. I don’t understand it, but fuck if I don’t like how it feels to have someone on my side for once.
He leans closer, and grips the back of my neck. “You played a great fucking game tonight, and we are going out with the team to celebrate. You are going to forget that your father was even here—in fact, do yourself a favor and erase him from your memory completely. But if you don’t come out? I’ll sit in that damn room with you, bored out of my fucking mind, and you know I’ll annoy the shit out of you, so you might as well just come out.”
I swallow past the burning in my throat, and stuff down all the words I wish I could say to him. “You really are so annoying.”
He grins and smacks the back of my head. “Let’s go get shitfaced.”
“Where is he?”
Principal Sturges holds up his hands to stop me as I charge into the main office. “The nurse is checking him out. Ms. King, I think you need?—”
“What Ineedis to see my nephew.” I dart around him and storm in the direction of the nurse’s office.
“I was going to say, I think you need to tell me more about the kids who are bullying Avery.”
My shoes skid to a stop, and I glance back at Mr. Sturges. “Thought you were going to tell me to calm down.”
He grimaces. “I have a wife. I know better than to tell a woman to calm down.”
I blow out a breath and run my fingers through my hair. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know how to help him. He doesn’t want to be a snitch, and I know that’d only make things worse for him. But I can’t stand by and watch him get hurt like this. I’m out of my depths here. I don’t know what else to do.”
I came running as soon as I got the call from Mr. Sturges that Avery had been hurt. Luckily, my boss let me cancel my last library class and leave early.
“I called the counselor, Mrs. Landry. She’s in there with Avery now. She’ll be able to offer some helpful advice, as she has a lot of experience with situations like this.” Mr. Sturges lowers his voice. “But I need to know who the boys are. I have a school to run, and this kind of behavior is unacceptable. It’s my duty to put a stop to it.”
I nod. “I’ll talk to him.”
I peek my head into the room, and spot Avery sitting in the chair beside Nurse Nancy’s desk. When he turns his head toward me, holding an ice pack over his right eye, I swallow down the bile climbing up my throat. I need to stay calm, for his sake.