Crash (9 page)

“You feel shitty?” I said, stepping forward. “You feel shitty?” I repeated just because it felt good. “I was almost burnt to death by a couple of your acquaintances I never would have had the honor of meeting had it not been for you. My dog
was
burnt to death. I had two feet of hair go up in flames, was choked, gagged, and dosed in gasoline thanks to your friends. I’m officially an honorary Southpointe High slut because somehow everyone knows I know you, so that must mean I’ve slept with you six ways to Sunday.” I was giving the audience exactly what they wanted, a damn show, and they weren’t missing a hot minute of it.

“There it is, there’s your answer,” Jude replied, his jaw popping. “That’s why I didn’t call. That’s why I didn’t show up on your doorstep the second I was released from juvy like I wanted to. I’m cancer, Luce. And not the kind that you can kill off with radiation. The kind that kills you in the end.” That vulnerability I’d caught glimpses of before was there again, drowning in his eyes.

I was too pissed, or too hurt, to let those eyes affect me. “Well, thanks for nothing.  Have a nice life.”

Quite possibly the hardest thing I’d done to date was turn my back on him in front of a wide-eyed cafeteria and walk away.

I didn’t know where to go, but I couldn’t march angry circles around the cafeteria unless I wanted to add mentally unstable to my laundry list of titles. So, swallowing my pride and my opinion that Taylor might be the most manipulative female to have ever walked the earth, I marched my butt right back to her table.

“I didn’t expect to see you again,” Taylor said, crunching into a carrot stick and giving me a look that would have flattened a lesser woman.

“Why’s that?” I said as nonchalantly as I could. “I told you I just wanted to say hey to an old friend.”

“That was one hell of a hey,” Taylor said, all snarky like, before taking a sip of diet soda. The group of girls sitting around her, not nearly as genetically blessed, but still pretty enough to turn their surgically molded noses up at me, snickered into their own cans of diet soda.

“What that was, Taylor,” I said, pulling a chair out and sitting down. I didn’t need an invitation if they weren’t going to issue one. “Was one hell of a goodbye.”

“Doesn’t look that way,” she said, staring over my shoulder.

Turning in my seat, I found Jude standing in the exact place I’d left him, watching me with an intensity I’d never experienced before, staring at me like he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him doing so.

Flipping back around, I tried on my glare for size. “Ah, Taylor, I don’t know. I’m sure you of all people know that looks are deceiving.” Pulling an apple from my bag, I sunk my teeth into it and gave her a challenging smile.

“Meaning?” she said, leaning forward.

I was pissing off the wrong person, I knew that, but I’d been through enough in life to recognize petty bullshit when I saw it, and this chick was the queen of petty. “Let’s take you, for example. Someone like you, pretty in a conventional, surgical,”—a combined inhalation spread around the table—“put-together way, can say and use in a sentence words like mitigate”—I was doing cart wheels inside, letting this girl have it—“well, someone like that you wouldn’t expect to be such an insufferable, nasty, b—”

“Hello, ladies,” a newcomer interrupted, nudging a couple of the open-mouthed girls before stopping behind the chair next to me. “This seat taken?”

I shook my head, giving him a once over before pulling a bottle of water from my bag. Smile too bright, streaks too blond, tan too fake, shirt too ironed. Handsome in a very vanilla way and definitely not in a handsome to me way.

“So you must be the girl everyone’s talking about,” he said, taking a seat.

Snickering circled around the table.

His face turned red, realizing his mistake. “I mean, everyone’s talking about in the sense that you’re the new girl,” he clarified, which did nothing more than earn another round of laughter from the table.

“Of course that’s what you meant,” Taylor said under her breath.

He shot her a give-me-a-break look before turning in his seat towards me. “I’m Sawyer,” he said, smiling that artificially white smile. “Sawyer Diamond.”

Oh, man. Even his name was too . . . annoying. If dad found out I went to school with a guy whose last name was Diamond, he’d try to shove an arranged marriage down my throat. His Lucy in the sky . . . a Diamond.

“Lucy,” I said, taking a sip of my water, reminding myself that making rash decisions in the heat of anger was always a bad idea. Next time I found myself marching away from someone, I’d march a million circles before sitting down at this table again.

“Lucy,” he said, pulling a sandwich from his lunch bag. “A pretty name for a pretty girl.”

I was mid-eye roll when I felt an ominous figure hovering above me.

“You’re in my seat, Diamond.”

I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to. I’d recognize that voice if I heard it in my next life too.

“I didn’t realize this seat was spoken for.” Sawyer twisted in his seat, squaring his shoulders.

“Your mistake,” Jude said, gripping the back of Sawyer’s chair. “You make a lot of those, don’t you?”

Sawyer rose to a stand, turning on Jude. He wasn’t quite as tall as him, but close, and he was nowhere near as filled out as Jude.

“Care to expand on that, Ryder?” he said, crossing his arms.

“Not really,” Jude said, staring down at Sawyer purposefully. “You and I both know what I’m talking about.”

I had a premonition I was about to add an all-out cafeteria brawl to my list of things that should only happen on reality television list, and whether or not I was pissed beyond repair at Jude, I couldn’t stand watching him dragged away in cuffs again.

Popping up, I slid in between the two of them. “I’m leaving. You can have my seat if you want.” I didn’t look him in the eyes. I didn’t want a reminder of what I was turning my back on.

Without another word, I stepped away, exiting the cafeteria one beat shy of a jog.

I wasn’t sure what was required for home schooling, but I’d take ten hours a day, seven days a week, with no bathroom or lunch breaks if it meant never returning to this cesspool of suck again.

Dodging around students, I didn’t stop until I found an empty hall. Ducking into the closest locker alcove, I slid into a corner, curling my head into my legs. I wanted to cry so badly right then, I wanted to let every tear I’d held back for years have their moment, but something wouldn’t let them form. Some mental block inside me would not allow the release I needed so badly.

“Dammit,” I muttered, slamming my fist into a locker.

“Luce?”

So not what I needed right now. So just what I needed right now.

Why did he have to be everything I did and everything I didn’t need at any given moment?

“How did you find me?” I said, keeping my head ducked.

“It was easy,” he said, taking a seat beside me. “All I did was follow the cursing.”

I laughed. Hard. I was always emotionally unstable in these kinds of moments when I needed to cry and couldn’t.

I was an emotional wreck next to a man that defined wreck and who, if I let into my life, would turn me into the same. He scooted close against me, hitching his arm around my neck, and pulled me into him. I should have resisted, at least put up some fight given I still knew nothing of Jude’s past, present, and future, but I didn’t.

“So?” he said, his voice muffled by what was left of my hair.

“So,” I said, as a herd of boys shuffled by us. They didn’t say anything while they were in view of Jude, but they were elbowing each other so hard down the hall I could hear it. Sitting here alone, snuggled up to Jude, was likely to do wonders on my pristine reputation.

“Explanation time,” he said, like there wasn’t a choice.

“Explanation time.” Now was better than later, although sooner would have been better than now. Oh well, I’d take what I could get when it came to Jude.

“Ready when you are,” he said.

Then, finding myself swimming in carte blanche in Q and A with Jude, my mind went blank. Like no question or answer would change anything I felt for him. This was an insane thing for a girl to conclude when it came to someone like Jude.

If it wasn’t already confirmed, I had a screw loose.

“Come on.” He nudged me. “You can ask me anything and either I’ll answer it or I won’t.”

“How very forthcoming of you,” I said, smiling into his shirt.

“We’ve only got a few minutes before the bell rings, so you better get started. I’m not the kind of student that cares about being tardy, but I’m guessing you’re the kind that does.”

In fact, I’d had my fair share of tardies. At my straight-laced, blue blooded private school, I’d been something of a rebel because I wasn’t afraid to wear a mini skirt, or slick on an extra layer of lipstick, or skip class every now and again. However here, at Heathen High, my once rebel ways were going to qualify me for sainthood.

Oh wait, I forgot I’d already been labeled a slut by the student population.

Jude nudged me again, so I tore into it, not easing into the questioning.

“You’ve been to jail before.” It wasn’t a question, I already knew, but I guess I needed him to confirm it.

“Yep,” was his clipped response.

“How many times?”

“Eleven or twelve. I lost count.”

I knew Jude was well known in the police circuit, but I’d underestimated just how well.

“What for?” I asked, working to keep my voice even.

My head lifted as Jude shrugged. “Mostly for getting into fights, and one time for having drugs on me.”

Holy crap. “What kind of drugs?”

He didn’t pause giving his answer. “Meth.”

Holy shit. “Were you using it?” Was it wrong to pray he was giving it to someone else?

“Nah,” he said. “I was trying to sell it. I was a dumb and greedy son of a bitch at thirteen. Didn’t work out well for me, so I quit. I haven’t sold drugs in four years.”

“And you know those three boys because you all live at the same boys’ home?” Other than that first morning after that night of chaos, I hadn’t spoken of them. I’d tried not to even think of them, but I was willing to bust open that locked door to unveil who the real Jude was.

For the first time during our question and answer session, he stiffened. “Yep,” he said, shifting his beanie down lower.

“And Uncle Joe works there?”

Jude laughed one low note. “If you call lounging his fat ass on a couch while a few dozen kids go ape shit, then yeah, he works there.”

“How long have you lived there?” Sitting upright, I looked over at him and he was someplace else. Somewhere dark.

Like a switch had been turned on, he flinched. Giving his head a swift shake, he cleared his throat. “The cops didn’t give you all this information?” he said, working his jaw. “They’re usually chomping at the bit to divulge what a screw up I am.”

This was land mine territory I was tip-toeing through, and I wasn’t sure how much farther I’d get before it’d all blow up. “I kept hoping I’d hear it from you. But someone seemed to have forgotten my telephone number. And my address.” I smiled over at him, and finally, he softened.

“Five years,” he said.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“It’s all right.” Another clipped, nothing-to-write-home about answer, which meant, I guessed, there were a million dark secrets hiding beneath that rock.

“Why did you wind up there?” For as desperate as I’d been to ask him all these questions if I ever got the chance, each one was making me squirm in my seat.

“My mom left. My dad went to jail.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. God I felt like the worst kind of person for thinking bad things about him. “Is your dad getting out anytime soon?”

“Nope.” I was waiting for the wall across from us to burst into flames from the way he was looking at it.

“What did he go to jail for?”

“For the kind of crime that jails were invented for.”

A cold chill tickled up my spine. “And your mom? Why did she leave?”

“Because she hated being a wife and hated being a mom even worse,” he said, the corners of his eyes creasing. “Because she was selfish and wanted her freedom and didn’t have any sense of loyalty.”

I lifted my hand and weaved my fingers through his. “Do you think she’ll ever come back?”

Jude snorted. “Nope. Mom’s long gone,” he said. “Although I’ve got this lovely parting gift she left for me I carry around in my pocket,” he said, sliding a piece of wrinkled old paper from his back pocket. “Well, this, and the ratty old hat on my head she knit or crocheted or some shit for me.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it, in fact I was sure I didn’t, but I couldn’t say no when Jude handed it to me. I couldn’t say no when a person was handing me the only thing they had left someone they’d loved. I took in a breath and unfolded it. “These are the lyrics to
Hey, Jude
,” I said, puzzled.

“Right you are,” he said, his voice tight.