“Hello?” I called quietly and closed the front door behind me.
“I’m in the living room.”
I bent to untie my mud-splattered boots, kicked them off, and trudged into the living room.
I paused in the doorway, taking in the sight in front of me.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
Eli was curled up on my chair with the blanket I’d given him last night spread over his lap and a book in his hand. He’d also lit a fire, and the soft crackles and pops made the room feel cozy.
It was a strange thing to feel about the house. I’d lived here for five months, and I still felt like I was in a museum. The big, empty rooms and antique features were impressive, but they were cold and sterile and made the house dark and dreary.
“Of course not. It’s nice to come home to a warm room.”
“Is it bad out there?” He closed his book.
“Not too bad. Some downed branches and broken windows, but our properties are all fine, other than your place.”
“Did you get the water cleaned up?”
“Yeah. The damage is extensive, but at least it didn’t spread too far outside the laundry area.” I looked down at my clothes. “I should change.”
“Do you have to go back out later?”
I shook my head and peeled off my jacket. “Not unless I get a call from someone.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Starved. I’ll grab something when I’m in my comfy clothes.”
He gave me a small smile.
I hurried up the stairs and into my room. Well, into the room I was using as mine.
The master bedroom was massive and took up the entire left side of the upstairs. A big walk-in closet connected the room to the master bath, which was the reason I’d chosen this room over one of the smaller ones. That and the fireplace.
I tried not to think too hard about the pile of Eli’s stuff on the corner of the bed and grabbed some sweats, a hoodie, and a clean tee out of my dresser. I tossed my dirty stuff into the hamper hidden in my mostly empty closet and headed back downstairs.
“Eli?” The living room was empty.
“I’m here.” He appeared at the door to the dining room, a plate in one hand and a bottle of Propel in the other.
“I didn’t know what you’d want to eat, but since we can’t cook, I figured this might be okay.” He shoved the plate and bottle at me.
“Thanks.” I took them, and he scurried back into the living room and practically dove onto the chair.
“Almond butter, cinnamon, and banana slices.” He busied himself with spreading the blanket over his lap. “The cinnamon is new, but I remember you used to like those.”
I nodded, my throat tight. “They were my fuel food. I’d always eat one an hour before the start of a meet.”
He smiled softly. “Yeah. You athletes love your superstitions and routines.”
I sat on the couch and took a bite of the sandwich. The familiar taste brought a barrage of emotions and memories to the surface, but I pushed them aside.
“The cinnamon is a good addition.” When I was done, I put the plate on the coffee table. “Gives it some depth.”
“It’s a versatile spice.” He rubbed his hand over the blanket.
“We need to talk about the elephant in the room.”
“Which one?” He snorted.
“The biggest one.”
“Which one is that?”
“I’m not sure. Which one is the biggest for you?”
He drew in a deep breath and looked up at me, his expression blank and guarded. “What happened that night?”
“What do you know about it?”
“Not a lot. Only what Gray told me. I know there’s more to the story. There are too many missing pieces and things that don’t make sense.”
“What did he tell you?”
“There was a party at Mason’s house. You were both there. He said things started to go sideways, his words. Then the cops showed up, and he ran. The two of you somehow got caught, and the cops arrested both of you when they found weed in your pocket.”
“That’s the gist of it.”
“Fill in the blanks for me. Tell me your side.”
“You trust my side?”
“There are always three sides to every story. His, yours, and the truth. I know his. Now I need to know yours so I can find the truth.”
I leaned back and stuck my hands into my hoodie pocket. Time to own up to what I’d done.
“I didn’t even want to go to the stupid party, but Mason made such a big deal about it, so I went. It was fine for a while. Then someone brought out pills and weed. That wasn’t exactly new, but we had a meet in a few days, and I was worried they’d drug test us. I said no, but people kept bugging me. I took the joints to shut Mason and his stupid cronies up. I never planned to smoke them.”
“Then what happened?” he asked softly.
“One of the neighbors must have called the cops because they showed up, and everyone panicked and scattered. It was chaos. I ran but ended up getting cornered by a cop in the side yard while I was trying to jump the fence. I didn’t even see Gray behind me until the cop was screaming at him to hit the ground too.
“He patted us down, and he found the joints in my pocket. He cuffed us, and more cops showed up. They arrested us, and the next thing I knew I was in an interrogation room.”
Eli nodded slowly. “Then what?”
“I honestly don’t remember a lot of it. I asked for my lawyer. He came. I answered some questions. Then my dad was there, and they let me go.”
“Why did you try and pin things on Gray?” he asked quietly.
“What?” I gaped at him.
“Why did you tell the cops it was Gray’s weed and you were holding it for him?”
“I… I didn’t. He thinks I did?”
“They told him you did.”
“The cops?”
He nodded.
“I never said that. I told them it was mine. I told them Gray was there at the wrong time and we weren’t even friends.”
“That part of the story has always bothered me. It didn’t make sense they’d let Gray go without charging him if you’d blamed him. I mean, you’re you. If the son of the most prominent businessman in town points the finger at a poor kid from the east side, then why didn’t they jump all over that?”
“Because they didn’t have anything on him. I swear I never even considered trying to pin it on him. My lawyer and my dad told me to, but I said no.”
“I believe you,” he said softly. “But you have no idea what they did to him in there. They eventually let him go, but the damage was done.”
“What do you mean?”
He blinked at me. “What do you mean, what do I mean?”
“What damage?”
“You didn’t hear about what happened after?”
“No. I figured he’d gone home and everyone was pissed at me for getting arrested.”
He let out a burst of bitter laughter.
“What?”
“People were pissed, but not at you. They blamed it all on him.”
“But it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t touch anything. He said no to everything they tried to get him to take.”
“I know. But that didn’t matter to people. You were gone, your father was running around town threatening to put people out of work by shutting down his businesses, and Gray became the scapegoat.”
“What do you mean, the scapegoat?” The last word came out as a croak.
“They kicked him off the swim team and stripped him of his scholarship.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he broke the student-athlete code when he was arrested. It didn’t matter the charges were dropped and you were the one holding. He’d gotten the star swimmer and the son of the richest asshole in town kicked out of school. And not only that, but you left without a word. You really think people wouldn’t have blamed him? The scholarship kid from the east side? The only reason anyone at school treated him like a person and not a pariah was that he won meets and broke a shit-ton of records. As soon as he didn’t have swimming to protect him, they turned on him.”
“I… I had no idea.”
“He lost everything. Swimming for Hopewell Academy was his chance to get out of this place.”
My chest squeezed as a pit formed in my stomach.
“But he lost that chance, and now he works whatever jobs he can while moving from place to place because his asshole landlords keep jacking his rents up.”
“I… Fuck.”
“What happened to you?”
“What do you mean?” I croaked, my head spinning as the reality of the situation hit like an anvil.
“Why did you leave town without saying a word?”
“I… I didn’t have a choice.”
“Why not?”
“When I got home from the police station, Dad was livid. He shipped me off to an all-boys boarding school the next day and told me I wasn’t allowed to contact anyone from school or town ever again.”
“And you obeyed? You never looked up the school’s records and saw he wasn’t on the team?”
“I couldn’t.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t?”
“I didn’t just go to boarding school. It was basically military school. I guess the big difference was it was for rich troubled youth, so they dressed it up with fancy titles and a pretty campus. They controlled everything we did. We didn’t have phones or internet outside of the supervised times they allowed, but even then, it was only on school computers so they could track everything we looked at.”
His mouth dropped open as he stared at me.
“I had no idea any of that happened. I swear. I know it makes me sound horrible, but it never occurred to me that Gray would’ve had to deal with the fallout. I thought it ended when they released him. I truly thought that was it.”
“It wasn’t. Not by a long shot.”
“I’m so sorry,” I choked out.
“I believe you. But sorry doesn’t erase the damage. It can’t give him back his life or restore what he lost.”
“I know. God, I wish I could change so many things. I wish I’d never gone to the party. I wish I’d told Mason to fuck off. I wish I’d run in the opposite direction or hadn’t stopped when the cop told me to.”
“You were sixteen, West. You made a mistake.”
“And that stupid mistake fucked everything up.”
“It doesn’t sound like things were all sunshine and rainbows after you left. Everyone said you and your sister went off to some fancy private school and you were rubbing elbows with kids of celebrities and tycoons and living the high life.”
I snorted. “Lexi was, but not me. I spent the next two and a half years at that school playing the game. I had to follow the rules, but not too well or they’d get suspicious and punish me. But I couldn’t break too many because then I’d have to deal with worse punishments. It was all mind games, a power play. They didn’t want to rehabilitate us. It was about punishing the bad behavior out of us. And you can imagine how well that went over with a bunch of teenage boys who didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone.”
“It sounds like you suffered too, only in a different way,” he said.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
My head was still reeling from what he’d told me, but I knew there had to be more to the story. I’d fucked up his brother’s life, but his anger went deeper than just being mad at me for what had happened to Gray.
“What do you mean?” He turned his attention to the fireplace.
“Something happened to you.”
He swallowed hard, his unblinking eyes on the fire. “Things weren’t easy for me after that night.”
His voice was hollow and devoid of any emotion or inflection. It was eerie, but I kept quiet.
“People mostly left me alone because of who my brother was. They tolerated me because they tolerated him. As long as he kept winning, they were happy to leave us alone. When he got kicked out… I lost that protection. Then you left, and I had no one to protect me.”
“Protect you from what?”
“Everything,” he whispered.
Both Eli and Gray had gotten scholarships to Hopewell Academy, the private school in town where the kids of the well-to-do families went, starting in seventh grade. We’d all been in the same class since Eli had been skipped ahead two grades.
Gray and I had been on the swim team, and we’d immediately been pitted against each other, since our stats and skills were matched. Instead of encouraging us to work together, Coach had made us compete against each other for everything. He’d probably thought the created rivalry would make us work harder because we’d want to be number one.
Gray’s swim stats and Eli’s intelligence should have protected them from bullying and bullshit, but rich, entitled kids were nothing if not assholes. Gray might have been a star athlete, and Eli might have dominated academically, but they’d never been accepted because they were scholarship kids from the wrong side of town.
“Do you remember when I started tutoring you?” he asked in that same blank and hollow tone.
“I remember. You’re the only reason I was able to stay on the team in eighth grade.”
“Do you remember how you were nice to me before that? How you’d say hi to me in the hall and tell your stupid friends to leave me alone when they talked shit about me?”
“Yeah.”
“And how you’d sit with me at lunch when my brother couldn’t?”
“I remember.”
“You were the only person other than Gray who was nice to me. He told me not to trust you. But I told him he was wrong about you and you were my friend.”
“I was your friend.”
“Maybe. But you being nice to me made people leave me alone. They still hated me, but they were quiet about it.”
“And then I left…”
“Then you left. And Gray left. And I was alone. You have no idea how hard it is to be different. How much shit you have to deal with when you’re not like everyone else.”
He looked at me, his eyes unseeing and unfocused. “And I’m really different. Not only was I a poor kid from the east side, but my older brother was the reason Weston Daniels got kicked out of school and the swim team went from being state champions to barely making the regional semifinals.” He turned back to the fireplace. “I was also the weird kid who was two years younger than everyone in our class. The kid who didn’t know how to talk to people and fucked up everyone’s grades.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you know the teachers at Hopewell graded on a curve?”
I nodded.
“You can’t grade on a curve when someone aces an assignment or test. A lot of people depended on that curve to inflate their grades, and that couldn’t happen if they were in my class. Parents put pressure on the school, the school put pressure on the teachers, and they hated me for it. The other kids tried to get me to stop trying so hard and get lower grades on purpose. They threatened me, taunted me. They pushed me around and shoved me in lockers and stole my books.”
I stared at his profile, my heart aching for him. Eli had been weeks away from turning fourteen when I’d left town. That meant our classmates had bullied a child because he was smarter than them.
“I lasted a year before I transferred to Lisgar.”
Why would he choose to go to the public school on the east side of town?
“You transferred?”
“I tried to stick it out, but I couldn’t. Not after what happened at the game.”
“What happened? What game?” My heart pounded in my chest. He sat there, staring at the fire. “Eli?”
“The last football game of the year. The team didn’t make the postseason, and people didn’t like that. I forgot a book in my locker and knew the school would be open because of the game, so I went to get it. I figured I’d avoid the stadium, get my book, and go home. A bunch of guys from the swim team saw me cutting across the quad to get to the main doors, and they swarmed me.”
His jaw worked as he clenched his teeth and swallowed. It wasn’t much, but it was the first show of emotion since he’d started talking about this.
“They were drunk. I could smell it on them. They were yelling about Gray and grades and a bunch of other stuff. They pushed me around, shoved me back and forth between them. Like a game of hot potato. They laughed when I begged them to stop. They laughed harder when I started to cry.”
He drew in a shaky breath. “They weren’t exactly hurting me. I mean, it hurt every time one of them would shove me, but it was too much. The laughing and the smell of alcohol. They were so big, and there were so many of them. I was scared, but they wouldn’t stop. I fell, and they just kept laughing at me. One of them kicked dirt on me. Then they were all doing it and having a grand old time as they covered me with dirt and laughed. I was on the ground, sobbing and curled up, and they wouldn’t stop. I started hyperventilating and must have had a panic attack because I passed out. I guess they freaked out because I woke up alone.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but no words came.
No wonder what had happened last night had triggered such a strong reaction.
“And I can’t forget it. My stupid brain won’t let me forget even a second of it.”
“What happened after? Did you tell the school? Did they get in trouble?”
He snorted. “Yeah, right. Like the school gave a shit. I passed two teachers while I was walking to the back parking lot, and they just looked the other way.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I called Kai to come get me and made him promise to never tell Gray because he would have lost his shit and hunted those guys down. I got cleaned up and pretended it never happened. I told my mom I wanted to transfer to Lisgar but couldn’t tell her why because she was pregnant and already stressed the fuck out.”
“Did things get better after you left?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “But better is relative. I was still the weird smart kid who couldn’t talk to people. No one outright bullied me because I had Gray to protect me, but I didn’t have any friends. My teachers weren’t as bad, but they still hated me. I thought things would be better when I got to college, but they weren’t. Not until this year at least.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a townie with zero people skills. And I was still the youngest person in any given room, so I couldn’t really relate to anyone. I went to class and kept my head down. The big difference was that my professors loved me, but that put a new target on my back because no one wants to be the professor’s pet. And I threw off the bell curve again.”
“What’s different this year?”
“My roommates. Last year I lived with party kids, and I hated it. When I moved into this house, I thought it would be the same thing. I live with a baseball player and two former jocks. One of my roommates is a science nerd, and I thought maybe we could be friends, but every time I tried to talk to him, I ended up being weird. So I hid from all of them for months. But they’re nice. They make a point to include me and treat me like I’m one of them. They’re the first friends I’ve made since you adopted me back in seventh grade.” He turned to me. “How sad is that?”
