CHAPTER8
Robyn invitesme to have dinner with her, but I decline. I do head to the café, but I bring my food back to my dorm room. I just want to be alone, but Lauren is there with her boyfriend. The two of them are sitting on her bed, on opposite ends of it, just talking, but when I enter, they at least leave, out to the café, I suppose. How strange it must be to never touch the guy you're dating, but to each their own. Trust me. If I could keep my hands and lips to myself, things would be much better off.
All night long, I debate calling or texting Rob, but I don't know what to say. I texted. A hundred messages, but I sent none of them. At least I finished one of my papers early. I am not in the proper frame of mind to work on any homework.
I do, however, have a test tomorrow, so I try to study for that and end up going to bed early with the hopes of getting up early and studying more then, but I don’t. I hit the snooze so many times that I’m almost late for my first class, and that’s with skipping a shower and then not eating breakfast either.
I have to turn in my paper for my second class of the day, and when I grab it out of my folder, I glance over it real quick.
Shit. What in the fucking world? Either the printer was all fucked up or…
I grab my laptop and check the file. You have to be shitting me. I only have one saved file, and I don’t know how to try to go back to a previous version of the same file because someone went in and changed all of the vowels to y.
Why? Who would do this? Who could have gotten into my laptop?
My father.
He must've done this. I don't know anyone else who would've done this, and even when the guys were bullying me, it was all just verbal shit. Nothing like this.
My password isn’t something he should’ve been able to guess, but maybe he’s able to use some kind of device or something. He does have connections now, doesn’t he? Given that he’s a mobster.
To use that power to fuck with his daughter… wow. Just wow. What’s the point? To show that he can fuck me over to try to force me to give him what he wants?
Bullshit.
“Erika?” the professor calls. “Do you have your report?”
“I do, and I don’t.”
The professor eyes me with disgust. “See me after class.”
I do, of course. I have no choice but to show her the printed pages. "The file somehow got corrupted. I'll find a way to fix this and get it to you today. As quickly as I can."
“You have until five today. Otherwise, I’m docking a full letter grade for each day that it’s late.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
It takes me until three to be able to go to my other classes and then fix the file, which isn't really fixing the file. It's rewriting the entire five-page paper. Some of the words, trying to figure out what they had been, wasn't easy, but I managed, and that test I had earlier? Yeah, I doubt I did well on it at all.
But now that that crisis has been averted, it’s time to deal with the perpetrator.
I don’t call my father. I text him.
Vinnie’s in an hour.
It’s an expensive restaurant, and I go there early and inform them that the bill will be paid by the gentleman who will be joining me. I’m not about to get stuck with the check.
Right at the hour mark, my father enters. I wish I could be twenty-one already and have ordered a glass of wine, but instead, I’m sipping water like I’m a baby.
“A nice place you picked out,” he notes as he sits across from me.
“You’re buying,” I tell him.
“Is that right?”
I nod, lips pressed together tightly.
“Of course. Now, why did you call me here?”