“The boy lives to make my life miserable,” I remind her, even though there’s no way she can forget. She’s been on the receiving end of his hostility more than once, as well. “His attitude makes him ugly.”
“Jesus,” she mumbles, unable to hide the appreciation in her voice. “Why does he have to be a dick?”
I shake my head at her antics as she bites her lip, still watching him.
I clear my throat to get her attention. Reluctantly, she turns around in my direction.
“What?” Her eyes widen as she finally gets a full view of me. “I like the color, but I thought they were going to do more with your hair?”
“It didn’t work out,” I mutter. I don’t know why I don’t tell her about his latest assault. No one knows the extent of his behavior. I stopped telling my parents in fourth grade when they gave the ‘boys will be boys' speech and urged me to just ‘kill him with kindness.’ Maybe I’m too embarrassed to lay all of my unwitnessed humiliation at her feet.
“I can braid it,” she offers. “I imagine Vaughn will love it no matter how it’s fixed.”
“I already said I’m not going to the party.”
I guess your plans for the night have changed.
Dalton’s words from earlier begin to make more sense after the hose down. He must’ve found out I was planning to attend.
“I have a bad feeling. Nothing good can come out of me going there tonight.”
Frankie is shaking her head, immediately rejecting my plans to back out. “Vaughn is going to be there. He likes you and won’t let anyone mess with you.”
“He’s a baseball player,” I remind her. She’s smart enough to figure out the implication.
“He’s JV. It’s not the same thing as Dalton’s varsity team.”
“I can’t-”
“Nope,” she says, pressing two fingers against my mouth to shut me up. “We’re going. The jeans aren’t bad, but at least put on a tank or something. You look frumpy in that oversized t-shirt.”
I try for twenty more minutes to back out of the party, so long that we miss graduation, and instead of following a ton of other people to the party, we’re stuck arriving alone. I’d planned to meet up with Vaughn and sit with him at graduation, but he texts to let me know an out-of-town family member had stolen the seat he was saving for me. I inform him that I’m running late, and we decide just to meet each other at the party.
“This is what everyone comes to school and raves about?” Frankie scrunches her nose as she peers out the windshield of her car. “This is just like homeroom only with alcohol.”
I take in the scenery and can’t help but agree. The same people who gather in groups in class are doing so on Kyle Turner’s front lawn. Each person has a Solo cup or a bottle of beer in their hands.
“I don’t want to do this.” I’ve said it a dozen times since Frankie arrived at my house a couple of hours ago, but only now does it look like she’s going to agree with me.
“Ugh.” She cringes. “Bronwyn is here.”
“Of course, she’s here. She’s Dalton’s toy,” I remind her.
Dalton can have his pick of any girl at Westover, and he uses his selection freely, at least from what I’ve seen at school and the comings and goings at his house.
If Dalton is the king of our school, that makes Bronwyn the queen, if only because she’s declared herself as such, and no one has been brave enough to contest it.
“We need to do this,” Frankie says with a resolve she didn’t possess mere moments ago.
“We can just go back to my place and watch Vampire Diaries reruns,” I offer.
“What about Vaughn?” I shrug, unsure if Vaughn is even worth heading into the lion’s den. “I’m leaving first thing in the morning.”
The reminder makes my heart plummet. I’ve known for the last two months that Frankie is obligated to her grandmother’s farm in Utah this summer.
“I want to leave knowing that you’ll have someone who will force you to leave your house more than once a week for church.”
“I’m going to be tutoring Peyton,” I counter.
“At your house,” she clarifies.
It’s true. Going to the Payne’s today was unplanned, and when I tutor her this summer, there’s no chance I’ll be doing that at Dalton’s house. I never would’ve agreed to help if that was the case.
“How does this party have any bearing on my summer?” I look away from the front of the house when I see Vaughn walking up the front lawn. I don’t want Frankie to see that he’s here, or she’ll never let me leave. Just seeing him clap hands with several of the guys from the varsity baseball team makes my palms sweat.
“Vaughn,” she angles her head to the front of the house, having noticed him, “will make you leave the house on all the dates he’s going to take you on.”