“You can imagine, they made the Dunnes’ lives hell for a good five months. Kat dropped out of school and never left the house.”
“But she was going to keep the baby and raise it, she was sweet like that, Harley. I knew her in Sunday school and we took tap together from kindergarten to third grade,” Ale told me.
“So Kat drops out of school meanwhile Kresley gets into Stanford, Bradhurst is going to Yale and graduating with honors, and Anders is going to play football for Notre Dame or some crazy shit, while Kat is in a trailer, high school dropout, name tarnished, and like the new pariah of Wexler. Not to mention, she’s got a baby coming with no income and no father.”
“Oh my God, that’s so awful. Of course they did that to her. Those boys are sociopaths.” My eyes pricked with tears as I figured out the logical end to the story. Wyatt’s poor sister took her own life because she didn’t want to live with the shame. No one believed her, no one came to her defense. She was powerless, both through the rape and everything that happened after it.
“So she shot herself. She was like seven months pregnant,” Gianna says matter-of-factly.”
I gasp in response because the story just guts me. No wonder Wyatt is angry, no wonder he despises East Pointers, no wonder he didn’t want to make friends, when it was people just like me who ruined his life and took his sister from him.
“I don’t believe it,” Alexandra pipes up. Alexandra is usually the last to assert her opinion or go against the flow.
“You think she wasn’t sexually assaulted?” I ask her.
“No, I don’t think she killed herself. I think it was foul play.”
I’m stunned speechless. I am feeling rage and nausea and impotence on her behalf.
“They murdered her?” I ask.
“Well, anyone can get their own DNA with a swab nowadays, whenever they want. If Kresley was going to get off scot free, then Bradhurst and Anders probably didn’t want any high school story to mar their boys' futures either,” Gianna agrees. “Kat had the power in the end, because she could do a paternity test on her own kid.”
“Holy shit!” I say. “Gianna, why don’t you blog about this instead of fucking bikinis and macaroons, lip liner made by pop stars?”
“Because, Nancy Grace, my followers are there for things that make them feel good. Not horror stories about pregnant women shooting themselves.”
In that moment, I hated Gianna and all of the Kresleys, Bradhursts, and Anders of this world. I even hated all of the East Pointers, the Country Club and the only community I’ve ever known. I was angry at my family for not stepping up to help the Dunnes. My father was once friends with Kat and Wyatt’s dad and as far as I knew, and, it appeared, he did nothing to help.
I’m surprised Wyatt hasn’t murdered them all, burnt down their houses, and slashed all of their tires. I would if someone did that to my little sister. I’d also get the hell out of dodge. There’s no way I could face any of them, the liars and the sycophants, who’d done nothing to help her.
I stood up and began stuffing things into my bag.
“I’m gonna go. Tell the waitress to put my food on my dad’s tab. I’m going to head home and talk to Wyatt. I just feel so insensitive for not knowing the whole story before today.”
“Just give him a blow job and he’ll forgive you,” Gianna said. She’d reclined again and lifted her shades just a touch to speak to me.
“Go to hell, Gianna,” I said, swinging my bag over my shoulder. “You overfilled your lips again and you look like a porn star,” I tell her angrily.
“That’s what I was going for,” she said and folded her arms across her chest with a smile.
I stormed across the pool patio like a woman on a mission, waving off the people who tried to greet me or ask if my dad was back from Italy. It was hot and sweat poured down my back. My forehead was fried and it felt like I also burnt my chest.
On the way out, I saw Kresley’s younger brother Nate, his spitting image, balancing a hot dog and fries as he walked the edge of the pool. As I went by, I sideswiped him so hard that he and his lunch fell right into the pool.
“What the hell, Brooks?” he yelled as he surfaced.
I stuck a middle finger in the air for anyone looking, and stormed out of Wexler Country Club. Go to hell, mother fucking East Pointers.
Chapter 6
WYATT
Fuck.
I clenched the weight so hard it felt like I could break it. Either that or the bones in my hands would go down first and I’d lose my ability to be self-sufficient.