CHAPTER
THREE
“He’s more myself than I am.
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
~Emily Brontë
PAST
The first time we ever really talked to each other was right outside of the vice principal’s office in fourth grade.
We’d both just been busted for fighting.
It wasn’t the first time we’d met, or even the first time we’d been forced to spend time together, but I remembered very clearly that it was the first time I realized we were alike. That there was another kid like me, someone who could relate to all of the rage, all of the insecurity and anger I carried around with me every second of the day.
On the outside, we were opposites in almost every way.
I was skinny. He was strapping.
My clothes were too small and threadbare; his fit him perfect, and looked so expensive to my young, untrained eye that I’d have been afraid to touch them with my grubby hands.
Even his hair was perfect. Not short like the other boys, but not long either. Styled with gel and parted on the side. No other boys had hair like him, like a grownup tended to it every single day before school.
Mine was a long, tangled mess that I hadn’t brushed in days.
He smelled like soap, fancy soap, something spicy and pleasant.
I just smelled.
He was filthy rich.
I was dirt poor.
But we did have a few, crucial things that matched: Bad attitudes and worse tempers.
I swear I was born with a chip on my shoulder. Full of more hard things than soft ones. And so when there was a soft thing I was doubly defensive of it. Willing to fight for it. Hard and often.
Willing to pull that stupid girl’s hair until I ripped great big hunks of it out to make her sorry for pointing it out.
I looked down at my hands. I was still holding some of the long blonde strands, and I hadn’t even known it.
Glancing around, I gathered it all into a ball and slipped it behind my chair.
Like it mattered, at this point. I’d already been busted.
And I wasn’t sorry. The little brat had deserved it.
But boy was I in for it this time. My grandma would make me sorry I’d lost my temper again, there was no doubt.
“Were you fightin’ again, too?” I asked Dante.
We rarely spoke to each other. I had mixed feelings about him. My grandma worked for his mom and he’d always been standoffish to me and, well, everyone.
His family had more money than anyone else around. I figured maybe he thought we were all beneath him.
I was pretty sure he was probably a snob.
He grunted in answer.
“Why?” I continued. I felt a rare burst of friendliness towards him. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen him get busted for fighting.
It made me like him, maybe even respect him a little bit. I got caught fighting a lot too. So much so I was almost positive I’d get kicked out of school for it this time.
He shrugged, not looking at me.
“Were they makin’ fun of you for bein’ rich again?” I asked him, watching his face.
He shrugged.
“Were they makin’ fun of your nice hair again?” I tried, making my voice soft so he knew I wasn’t trying to knock him.
He finally looked at me. The rage in his bright eyes made something swell in my chest.
I was pretty sure he was mad at me for saying that, but that look, those eyes, the way it made me feel, was thrilling. Magical. Like I’d just discovered something to do. Some bright new adventure. Some task that gave me purpose.
I smiled at him. “I like your hair. I think it looks really nice. Those little shits,” I was proud of myself for pulling out a good curse word for him, “just wish they had your hair. Wish they had anything of yours.”
His jaw clenched, and I thought how handsome he was. No one else looked like him. His solemn face was without flaw.
“Nothin’ they say should get to you,” I continued. “You’re better than them.”
“Same to you,” he finally spoke back. “Nothing they say should get to you, either.”
I was straight up beaming at him. I’d never felt my face move like that, like it couldn’t smile big enough.
“I like your gram,” I said, and it was true. She always gave me candy and told me I was pretty. She was the nicest grownup I’d ever met.
“Gram likes you, too,” he returned. His voice wasn’t how I’d heard it before. Usually he was yelling at people. Now, when he was talking softly, it was really nice. I decided I liked it. A lot.
“Wanna know why I was fightin’?” I asked him. I wanted to tell him the story. I wanted it to impress him.
But the fact was, it didn’t take much to get me fighting.
Grandma always said I was a prickly little thing. She was not one for kind words, but even I knew that was the nicest way you could put it.
I was a mean little ball of hate.
He shook his head. “I know why you were. As far as I’m concerned,” he said, speaking in that way he had, like he only knew how to talk to grownups, “you had every right to do that.”
My heart swelled with pride. Not once, in my entire wretched life, had anyone ever offered me encouragement like that, let alone for doing something that even I knew was naughty.
I really, really liked him when he talked to me like that.
I opened my mouth to tell him something, I don’t know what, but it would have been something good, something encouraging, to try to make him feel how he’d just made me feel.
That was when his mom showed up.
I instantly closed my mouth and looked away. She intimidated me, and I didn’t want to call attention to myself.
I needn’t have worried. She didn’t even see me, her disapproving glare was all for her troublemaking son.
“Don’t start with me; I don’t wanna hear it,” he muttered at her before she could even speak.
I gaped. In my world, grownups were scary and you didn’t talk back unless you wanted to get slapped so hard your ears would ring. Other kids were the only ones you could stand up to.
But she didn’t slap him. She just kept staring at him for a few beats, then her lip started to tremble and she turned away.
I gaped harder. I hadn’t thought I could like him anymore today, but he’d gone and done it.
He was a bona fide badass, and I loved it.
He shot me one quick glance as the vice principal ushered him and his mom into her office.
His mouth had shaped into a small, conspiratorial smile.
I was hooked. I really couldn’t think of anyone that impressed me more in that moment. I wanted to follow him around, learn his secrets.
How had he not gotten slapped for talking to his mom like that? How had he instead made her cry?
Badass.
The vice principal, Ms. Colby, didn’t bother to shut the door, I guess because it was just unimportant me out there, but whatever the reason, I got to eavesdrop unabashedly as his mother and our mean as a snake vice principal attempted to reprimand him.
“Ms. Colby,” his mother began the conversation with a stern voice. The tears were gone, in their place disdain. “I’m not sure you want to do this. Why is my child in this office for fighting? He’s in trouble and this other boy, this miscreant suffers no consequences at all? Do you have any inkling how much our family contributes to this school?”
“The other boy, Arnold, did not fight back.” Mean Ms. Colby could barely choke out the words, she was so close to losing her temper. I knew the tone well. I caused her to use it often. “Dante started it,” she continued, “he hurt Arnold badly, and did you know that your son refuses to apologize? How am I supposed to work with that? He was violent, and he won’t even promise not to do it again!”
Dante’s mom made a big show of reassuring Ms. Colby that no, of course it wouldn’t happen again, and yes, of course Dante was sorry.
She sounded very convincing right up until the part where she asked her son, “Right, Dante? Promise Ms. Colby that this won’t happen again. It’s simple. Say you’re sorry and we can put this behind us.”
I was in a full-on bratty pout by then. It sucked. He’d apologize and get off scot-free, but not me. My punishment would begin soon and end never. Also, Dante was losing all of his badass cred in my eyes the more I listened to his overprotective mother.
“No!” Dante snarled back. “That little shit deserved it, and I’d do it again!”
I grinned, ear to ear, all of my doubts in him put to rest.
“What did that boy do to you, son?” his mother asked, sounding riled. She was grasping at any reason to put less blame on her child.
“It’s the way he talks. It’s the way all of them talk. The teachers hear and don’t care, and they get away with it, with being total shitbags, and I’m sick of it! I’m not sorry, and I’ll do it again!”
“Darling, what did he say to you?” his mother asked him in a pathetic, baby talk voice.
That same voice turned hard as nails, and I knew she was addressing Ms. Colby. “Words can be assault too, you know! I won’t have my son bullied. He has a right to stand up for himself!”
Ms. Colby’s voice was beyond disgusted when she asked, “What are you implying was said to you, Dante?”
“Not to me. I just overheard. And so did two teachers. And instead of calling the little shits out, they laughed! You all suck! What kind of a school is this? The teachers are as bad as the bullies!”
Ms. Colby’s sigh was loud enough to be heard two rooms away. “And what did you overhear?”
“You know,” Dante shouted back at her. “You’re as bad as them. You know how the other kids treat her, and you look the other way. Well, I don’t. I’ll do it again. You mark my words.”
Bad. Ass.
But who was he talking about? Who was her?
“What is he talking about, Ms. Colby?”
Another loud sigh. I really hated her sighs. I had to listen to them a lot.
“I can’t be sure,” Ms. Colby hedged, but even in another room I thought she sounded like a liar.
“Liar,” Dante said to her. To a teacher. The vice principal, no less.
Bad. Ass.
“I need someone to explain this to me!” Dante’s mother exclaimed.
“They were picking on Scarlett again,” he said, voice pitched low now, so low I had to move closer to the room to hear him. “They always do. They call her trashcan girl. It’s messed up. And nobody does anything about it! Not the teachers. Not the vice principal. You all suck!”
His mother sounded like she might be choking on something and then she spit out, “You got into a fight over her? Are you kidding me?”
I felt sick with mortification and light with joy all at once.
He’d gotten into a fight for me.
But then, the pity in his voice.
Trashcan girl. Even he knew me as that.
It was the exact same reason I’d gotten into my fight. It always started with a mean singsong Hey, trashcan girl and ended with me hitting someone, or kicking them, or pulling their hair out, or ripping up their homework.
But this was the first time I’d ever heard of anyone else fighting for me.
It was something.
No. It was everything. Even enough to overshadow my embarrassment that he knew I was trashcan girl.
Of course he’d known what I was called. I shouldn’t have been shocked.
It was his grandmother, after all, that had rescued me.
I’d known the story from the time I could remember. My grandma always said every nasty thing she could think of when she was mad at me, which was a lot, and so it’d come up early and often.
When I was a tiny baby I was abandoned by my parents.
I hadn’t been left on the doorstep of an orphanage or church. I wasn’t abandoned in some frilly basket by a tearful mother.
Even that was too romantic of a story for me.
I was left in a trashcan. Meant to die, I figured. Or rather, Grandma told me I should figure as much when she was telling me the story.
Even my grandma didn’t know who my dad was, but my mom was her daughter, and she explained to me once, after I’d been nagging her for stories about my missing mom, that, “Some women should never be mothers. I’m one of those. And so was my daughter. She won’t come back. I guarantee it. You’re lucky I’m still around. I got nowhere else to go, or I’d be out of here, too.”
That was about as sentimental as we got in my family.
And even I knew that my grandma would have never taken me in if her friend from childhood, Dante’s gram, hadn’t insisted.
I didn’t know her well, but I did know that I owed his gram a lot. My grandma told me so all the time. When she got mad, I often earned rants that started with something along the lines of, “You should thank Mrs. Durant every chance you get. She was the one that talked me into taking you in. You can bet your bratty little ass it wasn’t my idea.”
I’d been found in the trashcan at some point, obviously. No one would tell me how old I was, but I was a baby for sure, a tiny one. Someone had heard me crying, called the cops, and I’d ended up on the news and in the local hospital.
Gram had seen the story on TV, and I don’t know all the details, but she’d put the pieces together and known that Grandma’s daughter had recently given birth, so she’d gone and taken a look at me.
One look, Grandma swears, and it was impossible to deny that Renée Theroux was my mother.
I thought that was weird. All babies looked the same to me.
But Gram and Grandma had been sure, Gram had pressed Grandma, and the rest was history.
Grandma had taken me in, made room for me in her tiny trailer. It did have an extra room. She liked to bring up how she’d liked that room. She’d enjoyed having an extra bit of space to herself where she could sew and store things. We had many, many conversations like that, where she reminded me of all of the reasons why I was a burden to her.
And I wasn’t ungrateful. The place was a dump, but it was a fact that it was better than a trashcan.
Even so, everyone around these parts knew the story, so from my first day of school to present day—I still hadn’t lived down the fact that I’d been thrown away like trash.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was, deep down inside, I knew I was trash. No one wanted me, that was a fact. What was that if not trash?
Needless to say, it was a sore subject, and it didn’t take much to make me lash out when I was teased for it, which was often.
Some days it felt like my life was nothing but one long fight.
But that day was different. That was the day I realized that I just might not be alone in that fight.
When Dante emerged from the office, triumphant from my perspective, considering all he’d gotten was suspended for fighting and then chewing out the vice principal.
I gave him an ear to ear smile.
He returned it with a small one of his own.
And that was it. He was my very first friend. It was that simple.
I look back on that pivotal encounter of ours often, and I always end up asking myself two questions.
Like most things in my life, they are at odds with each other.
Did that meeting save me?
Or did it ruin my life?