Unspoken (The Woodlands) (25 page)

AM

W
E
DID
MANAGE
TO
GET
in some studying that afternoon, and Bo thought we should reward ourselves by going out.

Ellie and Ryan suggested going to the party house. The party house was a big house rented out by six or seven guys on the opposite end of campus near Greek Street. They charged a cover and made you pay for premium alcohol, but unlike the fraternities, there was no list to get in, so it was a good mix of Greeks and non-Greeks at any one time. The only downside, of course, was that you had to pay for decent liquor or be content with drinking really watered-down keg beer.

I hadn’t been to the party house since freshman year, first semester, but emboldened by the large friendly crowd in my apartment, I capitulated. Bo looked worriedly at me.

“She’s stronger than any of us,” Ellie assured Bo, and I blushed as he nodded his agreement.

Bo reached over and kissed me on the forehead. “It’ll be all good, Sunshine.” I’m not sure if he was reassuring himself or me.

Ellie beamed at Bo’s endearment for me, like she was my proud mother.

I
WALKED
INTO
THE
PARTY
house with Ellie, Bo, and Ryan. We paid for the shots of Jager that they poured and made everyone drink as part of the admission. No one seemed to recognize me, and the ordinariness of it, along with the shot, gave me a false sense of security. The rear rooms of the party house weren’t entirely full yet. The party seemed to be in its early stages.

There was no DJ mixing music, only a playlist of hip-hop, pop, and dance music cycling through. I guessed the DJ came later. We moved through the room toward the back deck and saw a few hardcore smokers blowing rings into the cold night air. I shivered just looking at them.

My back was to the room so I didn’t see
him
approach, only heard him stupidly mocking me in front of Bo.

“So you’re going for the easy pussy now?”

I turned and saw Clay in a long-sleeved t-shirt, faded Greek letters stenciled in artful decay across the front. Bo turned on him immediately.

“Did I hear you wanted to be sucking your own dick?”

I grabbed Bo’s arm before it could jettison into the stupid asshat’s face. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before, and it was one of the reasons why I stayed away from the campus party scene. There were plenty of bars and other places to go that didn’t involve everyone who thought they knew my business.

“Come on, Bo,” I whispered. I wanted to get out of there before we were in the middle of a scene. God only knew what rumors would develop from a fight between Bo and Clay with me standing right here. Bo looked at me and flexed his fist. I silently pleaded for him to let it go. He unfisted his hand and mouthed, “For you.” We turned to walk out.

“You know she’s called Typhoid Mary, right,” he called after us. “Because you never know what kind of disease she’s carrying.”

The girl next to him chimed in. “I bet your crotch could sustain a semester’s worth of laboratory study. Is that why you took biology this year? So you could test out exactly what kind of diseases you have?”

My cheeks burned. The name-calling and jeering should’ve been expected, but it was just so humiliating and unfair to have the untruths half-shouted in a large room. I wanted to
leave
. Hot tears pricked at my eyes, but I wasn’t going to let those motherfuckers see me cry. I stiffened my spine and walked determinedly to the door, not caring at this point whether Bo was with me or not. I couldn’t see the cluster of people around me, only felt the quietude of the crowd, as if they were all settling in to watch a drama.

“Who are you?” Ellie advanced on the girl and got right up into her face.

“R-Rebecca.” She shrank back despite the height difference. Ellie’s ferocity made up for her lack of size. Rebecca wasn’t so brave in the face of my tiny dragon.

“Rebecca who?”

“Anderson.”

Ellie gave Rebecca a long look and spoke so confidently it was like she could see into the future.

“Rebecca Anderson, ten years from now you’re going to look back on this year, and it will be the pinnacle of your life. You’ll be married to some douche bag who’s cheating on you with his secretary. You’ll have no friends. Everyone who calls themselves your friend will be regaling each other with how you’re being shit on by your husband, that your kids don’t like you, and that the last plastic surgery you had done in Palm Springs was so botched it makes you look like you’re wearing perma-surprise.” Ellie’s tongue was so vicious I was vaguely surprised Rebecca was still standing upright. She burst into tears and tried to get comfort from Clay, but he was too busy looking warily at Bo.

“You want to fight me, little boy?” Bo taunted. He had stopped next to by Ellie, and they were both trying to fight for me, but what was the use? Put out one fire and five more would pop up. It just wasn’t worth it. “Put up. Otherwise, you’re just some blowhard who tries to compensate for his tiny dick by making girls who’ve turned him down feel small.”

I closed my eyes. The whole situation was spiraling out of control. Bo strode toward me, and this time instead of feeling protected, I felt like a target. I had no doubt that Clay would be making good on all his threats. Roger would be getting a phone call this weekend about the fact that his daughter was the campus whore. I choked down the bile climbing the back of my throat.

“Come on, Bo, he’s not worth it. No blowhard is.”

“Ah, honey, I’ll fight even dickheads for free, and frankly we both know he’s all talk and no action. I’m thinking the only time he forms a fist is to jerk it at pictures on the Internet.”

Perhaps if there hadn’t been so many people around, if the taunting wasn’t so public, Clay would have been able to leave the challenge unmet. But with all the avid eyes and ears here, there was no doubt that this would spread like wildfire across the campus; he had to accept.

“No problem, bro,” he said, faux swagger front and center. “I’ll take you right here.”

Bo took a giant step from me and held out his arms. “Come at me then,
bro
.” Clay launched himself at Bo, but even though they were about the same height, he didn’t have the experience fighting that Bo did.

Bo didn’t step to the side. No, he leaned forward and as Clay was bringing up his right arm to swing at Bo, Bo blocked it with his left, brought his right fist up and rocked it into Clay’s face. Bo followed up the crack to the cheek with an uppercut left under the jaw and one more right punch.

Clay’s head snapped back and he stumbled, trying to grab for something to hold him up, but the crowd, even Rebecca, stepped back. His cheek looked like it had caved in, and he fell to the floor. The music had stopped and the sound of Rebecca’s screams were about the only thing I could hear.

I took one look at the scene and ran out of the room.

Chapter Twenty-One

AM

B
O
FOLLOWED
ME
BACK
TO
the apartment, but I didn’t stop. He kept saying I shouldn’t run, that it made me look weak.

“I’m not weak. I don’t need to be saved from anything,” I yelled at him.

“You aren’t standing up for yourself,” he yelled back.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“What did you call me, the campus vampire? You’re the campus ghost. That’s not standing up for yourself. That’s hiding.”

“Just because I’m not in everyone’s face, punching their lights out whenever they piss me off, doesn’t mean I’m not standing up for myself.”

“You’re running away.”

“I am not!” I screamed.

“I know all about running away. I’ve been doing it for years.” Bo’s suddenly quiet tone broke through my madness and my anger. “Why don’t you just fucking transfer, AM? I’ll go with you. I hate this fucking place anyway.”

My anger gave way to frustration, and the tears I’d battled all night spilled out. “I didn’t do anything wrong. Even if I’d slept with the entire lacrosse team, I still deserve to go here without a bunch of assholes calling me names.”

“You live in an utopia. This is the real world!” We were back to screaming at each other, the tension of the night overwhelming me so much I couldn’t control my tears, my hurt. I couldn’t keep it in one minute longer.

“Running away doesn’t solve anything,” I yelled.

“You’re so wrong. It does. Sunshine, let me take you away from here.” He’d switched from shouting to cajoling, but I wasn’t having any of it.

“I don’t want to go anywhere.” I wasn’t just hurt or humiliated. I was damn angry. I was angry at myself for being so stupid in the first place, for allowing the rumors to fester. I’d been wrong to stay off campus and let the lacrosse team control my image. I was angry at the other students for not standing up for me. And I was angry at Bo for not understanding all of these things.

Bo let out a bellow and turned and smashed his fist into the plaster right by the front hall closet. The sudden shift from calm to violent action shocked me. For a moment there was no sound but our heavy breathing. He looked at me, and then his hand, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d done. When he slowly pulled his hand from the wall, plaster pieces fell to the floor, creating a tiny plume of dust. White chalk or dust coated his fingers and when he uncoiled his fist more detritus fell to the ground and onto our jewelry and makeup.

His gaze swung from his fist to my face, and his expression made me catch my breath. My palm went to my throat as my anger was subsumed by the pain and horror in his own face. I reached out my other hand but Bo whirled and left before another word could be said, the door swinging open behind him.

I hesitated a moment too long and by the time I’d reached the door he was gone. Sasha’s door was open and she and Ellie stood in the doorway with Brian hovering behind them.

Brian spoke first. “Dude, that was some argument.”

“What happened there?” I asked, knowing they couldn’t give me an answer. They tumbled into my apartment and took in the mess.

“He didn’t hit you, did he?” Ellie asked anxiously.

I shook my head. “No, he’d never hit me.”

“That’s some hole,” Brian said, poking a finger at the edges and making more plaster tumble to the floor.

“You’re only making it worse.” Sasha grabbed his hand and pushed him away.

I went into the kitchen to grab a broom and proceeded to clean up the dust and drywall on the floor. “Guess we’ll have to fix this before the landlord sees it.” I sighed.

Ellie brought over the wastebasket. “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a home improvement store. Maybe hook up with a handyman.”

“What about you and Ryan?” I dumped the stuff in the wastebasket and brushed my hands on my jeans. I realized I hadn’t even taken off my coat yet.

“He should’ve stood up for you,” Ellie snarled.

“Was he even there?” I asked. At the end of the confrontation, the faces of the other students had just been a blur.

I walked over to the sofa on unsteady legs and threw myself into the soft cushions. “Maybe Bo’s right. I’ve been a fool to hide my head in the sand. I left the field totally open for Clay and his crew to say whatever they wanted about me. If I had fought back instead of hiding out here, adopting the pretense that I could ignore everything that was going on around me, maybe it’d be different.”

“So now what?” Sasha asked. She handed me a glass of orange juice I hoped was liberally laced with vodka. I took a sip and shuddered as the alcohol hit my tongue. Inside, I saw a few gummy bears.

“What are these?”

“My emergency stash of frozen gummy bears soaked in vodka.”

“Really?” I rolled one in my mouth and nearly broke my tooth trying to chew it.

“Yup, I only break them out in dire times.”

“Hey, when I was dogged by Tim a thousand times last semester, I should have gotten one of those,” Ellie exclaimed.

Sasha rolled her eyes. “Not every dating disaster warrants frozen vodka-soaked gummy bears, or else they wouldn’t be special.”

“Are you saying we have too many dating disasters?” I joked lamely.

“Besides, I have to get these giant gummy bears from a special candy store at home, and they aren’t cheap.” Sasha ignored my comment but she did ask me, “Are they making you feel any better?”

“Not sure if it’s the gummy bears or the vodka, but I am feeling better.” I smiled at her.

“How are you still able to generate a smile? If it was me, I’d be in a fetal ball in the corner, sobbing.” This came from Brian.

“What? Didn’t you see the ugly crying and shouting I did in front of Bo?” The tears had washed away my anger and shame and left only regret behind. I regretted making my friends have to stand up for me. I regretted allowing Clay to have so much control over my life. I had told myself I was being so strong, but I hadn’t ever stuck my neck out. I had made so many mistakes, and letting Bo storm out was only one of them. I sighed and took another sip.

“Who says that shit to someone else’s face, though?” Ellie asked, disgust evident in her voice.