“I do. I’m happy to be friends with you, but that’s it.”
She rolled her eyes. “Comeon, Jax. What’s your problem? We’re good together, and you know I’m a better fuck than any of the other girls around here,” she said, trailing her finger up my arm again. “Besides… you know people like us always end up together in the end.”
“The end of what?” I brushed her hand away. “This isn’t a fucking movie.”
“It’s a figure of speech, jackoff,” she replied, nose wrinkling. “But seriously, my parents are always saying they think we’ll get married one day. They’ve been saying it since we were in elementary school. Don’t you think that’s kind of cute?”
“Your parents are fucking nuts. They’re the kind of people who think a girl should be married by eighteen and pop out two or three kids before most other people have even finished college.”
Cerina sniffed. “You’re making it sound like they’re religious fundamentalists or something.”
“I know they’re not religious. But they’re a bit strange, aren’t they?” I said, lifting a brow.
“You have no idea,” she muttered. She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. “Anyway… forget it. I have other guys on my roster.”
“Good for you,” I said, unfazed by her attempt to make me jealous.
She took a step back. “I’ll get started on the new plan of attack for Kinsey tomorrow,” she said. “I think I might have a few ideas already. If you’re happy for me to go really low, that is.”
“The lower the better.”
“Great. Anyway, see you later.” Cerina gave me a tight smile. Then she turned on her heel and strutted out of the team bathroom like she was on a catwalk, obviously hoping I’d take one look at her pert ass and call her back for a quick fuck against the tiled wall.
I turned away and focused on drying myself, mind still stuck on Kinsey.
I needed and wanted to hurt her. It was consuming me, burning me from the inside out. I had to take that fire and unleash it on her; put all the pain where it belonged.
She should’ve known better. Should’ve known not to cross me. I gave her more than enough warnings at the start, and she chose to disregard every single one of them in order to play her twisted little game.
But it wasn’t a game anymore.
Now, it was war.
11
Kinsey
I thoughtthe two weeks before the homecoming game were bad, but I could only classify the past couple as a waking nightmare.
Things were getting worse by the day.
Last Tuesday, I had paint thrown on me during archery, and when I went to my locker in the gym to get some fresh clothes, I found that someone had tipped piss everywhere inside it, soaking through all my stuff.
Yeah, literalpiss.
After I discovered the disgusting scene, I got in the shower to wash the paint out of my hair along with the urine that had seeped out from the locker onto my hands. Cerina and her minions then sneaked in and stole the only clothes I had left—my paint-splattered sports uniform. I’d planned to get back into it after my shower, because hey, at least there wasn’t some random guy’s piss all over the fabric.
I had no choice but to roam the halls wrapped in a towel until I found a teacher to help me. Everyone laughed at me and hurled insults the whole time, and within an hour, a post about the incident—with a video, of course—was live on the Dirt app.
That was just the tip of the iceberg. These bullies really wanted me in a world of hurt, and they’d stop at nothing to put me there.
Last week, someone managed to slip an emetic into my lunch, causing me to spend the entire afternoon in the bathroom vomiting. After that, a tip was submitted to Dirt describing my ‘tragic history with bulimia’ along with photos that someone had managed to sneakily take under the bathroom stall door while I was on my knees with my head in the bowl, hurling my guts up.
That food-spiking stunt almost landed me in the hospital, but it still paled in comparison with the worst incident. That one happened three days ago, and I only came out of it unscathed due to a random stroke of luck.
I was allowed to leave my math class fifteen minutes early that day because I’d finished the test Ms. Vaughn gave us at the start of the period in record time, and she decided to let me have a break. I headed straight to my locker to put my textbooks away, and I found two bags of pastel-colored pills and another bag of white powder sitting on top of my stuff.
I tossed the drugs in a trash can around the corner just in time. Two cops showed up with Principal Hanover three minutes later to conduct locker checks. They said an anonymous tip had been called in about students dealing on campus, and my name was first on the list of suspects.