She’s wrong, Harper repeated silently, over and over again.
Beth didn’t know anything about Harper, and she didn’t know Adam as well as she’d thought, and that should be enough to make her words powerless. Words can never hurt me, she sang to herself, as if this were a Very Special Episode of Sesame Street: “B is for Bitch.”
Beth was just lashing out, feebly trying to make herself feel better-and it was only an accident that she’d struck a nerve. But Harper couldn’t help wondering whether that mattered. A stopped clock is right twice a day; maybe every once in a while Beth’s bitter, nonsensical babbling stumbled into the truth.
She considered ditching her meeting with the principal and escaping in search of some way to clear her mind. And maybe she would have, if she’d had Miranda by her side, ready to ply her with cigarettes and chocolate chip cookies and assure her, with the certainty of someone who knew from personal experience, that soon enough, Adam would fall prey to her natural charm.
But since she was on her own, as usual, she strode down to the principal’s office, her step steady and with a hint of a bounce so that no one watching would guess the truth. And the truth was that Beth’s words still echoed in her mind:
He ‘s done with you.
Forever.
And every time she thought of them, it felt like her bones were snapping and her muscles dissolving, so that it soon took all her effort not to crumple to the floor.
“Congratulations, Ms. Grace!” the principal boomed, meeting her in the doorway with a hearty handshake. “How does it feel?”
Harper returned the smile, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and looked the principal straight in the eye. “It feels great,” she said, wishing they offered an Oscar for Best Performance in a High School Hallway. “I couldn’t be happier.”
Suspension wasn’t all bad.
In fact, as it turned out, it wasn’t bad at all.
Adam slept late, ordered pizza, watched TV and, in other words, did whatever the hell he wanted to do. It’s not like his mother was home enough to care. She hadn’t even noticed he wasn’t going to school. (And, since he’d successfully forged her signature on the suspension form, there was no reason to think that she ever would.) It wasn’t a bad life. And the coach was right: It gave him plenty of time to think.
That’s what he did all morning, whether he was gnawing cold pizza or flipping aimlessly between ESPN and The Backyardigans. He thought about what had been done to him, and how he’d been wronged, and he thought about how there seemed to be no way out. And when the thoughts built up inside his head and it felt like the pressure would cause his eyes to bulge out, that’s when he finally threw on some clothes and a pair of old sneakers and shambled down the street to a dark bar where they wouldn’t bother to check his ID or ask why an eighteenyear-old local basketball star would want to waste his afternoon slouched over a mug of cheap, stale Bud Light.
Like father, like son, a voice in his head chanted.
After only a few days, he’d settled into a comfortable routine-and would be almost sorry when the suspension was lifted. Traipsing from class to class-facing his teachers, his ex-friends, his failures-was no match for long, lazy afternoons that turned into long evenings, hidden away in the dark, cozy recesses of the Lost and Found.
Sometimes he struck up a conversation with a regular-they were all regulars, here-and sometimes he kept to himself, his glowering expression keeping the prying strangers away.
“Hey, honey.”
Today, apparently, wasn’t going to be one of those days.
“What’s a nice kid like you doing in a dump like this?”
Adam looked up from his beer. The pickup line was almost older than she was, though not by much. The woman who’d scraped her bar stool over toward him and was now curling a stubby finger through a lock of her platinum blond hair was probably a couple of years younger than his mother. She wore a garish flowered blouse whose neckline plunged far lower than you might have wanted it to, and her nails were painted a bright pink that clashed with her red pants. Each had a little decaí painted on its tip. On the nail of her index finger-which she was using to trace the rim of his half-empty glass-there was a tiny butterfly.
“How about it, hon, you got a story you want to tell?”
“Not really,” Adam mumbled. But he gave her a half smile. She’d been pretty, once-and at the moment, he had nothing better to do. “How about you?”
“Oh, sweetie!” She threw back her head and laughed, and he could see the blackened enamel fillings lining her molars. “I got about a million of them. Let me tell you-”
“Here I am, Adam.”
He froze as a pair of arms wrapped around him from behind, cool hands pressing his chest. Which might have been a good thing, were they not hands he knew.
“Have you been waiting long?” a too-familiar voice asked.
The older woman’s face reddened-though it was hard to tell, thanks to the several layers of pale pancake and blood red rouge. “I-I didn’t know you had company. I, uh, I’ll get out of your hair.”
“She’s not with me,” Adam protested weakly as the hands traced their way up his body and began doing something unspeakably pleasurable to the tips of his ears. And the woman disappeared into the shadowy recesses of the bar-there were plenty of other men drinking alone.
“What do you want?” Adam asked Kaia dully, without turning around or pushing her away. He hated her… but he had never been able to push her away. “I was busy, in case you didn’t notice.”
“I noticed,” Kaia said. She let go of him-Adam tried to feel relief, but couldn’t-and pulled up a stool next to his. “So, aren’t you going to thank me?”
“For what?” Now that she wasn’t touching him anymore, Adam’s feelings were uncomplicated. He just wanted her to go away.
“For rescuing you from”-Kaia looked off in the direction the older woman had disappeared-“that.”
“I can take care of myself, thanks.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Kaia, if you’ve got something to say, just say it. I don’t have time for your games.”
“Fine. You want the short but sweet version? You’re screwing up.”
Yeah, thanks for the news flash.
“Beating people up? Getting suspended? Walking around half-drunk all the time? It’s pathetic-you’ve got to get it together.”
“What do you care?” he growled, trying to push away her words before they could do any damage. Kaia never said anything without an ulterior motive.
She also never said anything that didn’t sound at least partly true. It’s why she was so deadly effective.
She shrugged.
“Good point. I don’t care. I’m just telling you what I see.You want to ruin your life, that’s your business. I’m just bringing it to your attention. Always good to make an informed decision.” She flagged down the bartender and ordered a seltzer with lime. Adam suddenly wondered what she was doing here, in this dead-end bar in the middle of the afternoon, but forced himself not to ask. With Kaia, curiosity was just another form of weakness.
“I’m ruining my life?” he said instead, pouring on the sarcasm. “That’s a good one. And I suppose you’re just here for the show? You had nothing to do with it?”
“Very mature, Adam, blaming me for all your problems.” She remained infuriatingly serene. Suddenly, she seemed to spot someone in the back of the bar, and she abruptly lifted her drink and stood up. “I’ve got better things to do than babysit you, Adam. Enjoy your beer.”
“Like I really need someone like you looking out for me,” he spit out.