BETH
Allison owns a Mercedes. Leather interior. Jet-black on the outside. Isaiah would get all hot and bothered about the junk under the hood. She drives fast on the backcountry roads and a couple of times my stomach drops like we’re on a roller coaster.
“You smell like smoke.” Allison wears a red business suit and black stilettos. She’s slicked her blond hair into a painfully tight bun. Maybe that’s why she’s uptight.
While waiting for Allison to drag herself away from the Ladies’ Planning Committee, I smoked one of the cigarettes I bummed from a stoner boy before the incident in Calculus. I hoped it would help me get over the fight I had with Ryan. I don’t know why, but yelling at him made me feel like crap. Kind of like I do after I fight with Isaiah. “Must be in your head.”
“You smell like smoke when you come home from school. Scott may choose to ignore it, but he’s not ignoring your little stunt in class.” Allison pulls into the massive driveway surrounded by woods and notices when I glance at her. “That’s right. Your teacher called.”
Crap. I don’t have any idea how to get myself out of this.
Scott and Allison live in a two-story white house with a wraparound porch. It resembles something you’d see in a Civil War movie full of rich plantation owners. Part of the house is surrounded by woods. The other part faces an open pasture with a barn.
Allison parks the car outside the four-car garage and grabs my wrist before I have a chance to bolt. “Do you have any idea how embarrassed I was to leave the meeting because you called? This is a small town. Your teachers belong to our church. How long do you think it will be before everyone knows what a menace you are? I won’t permit you to ruin our life.”
“Get your hands off of me.” My eyes flicker from her fingers on my wrist to her eyes. No one touches me.
She drops my wrist like she was handling fire. “Why don’t you leave? Even Scott knows you’re miserable.”
I bet Scott knows she’s miserable too. I’d never have imagined him with someone like her. Manicured. Polished. Heartless. “Were you surprised he wasn’t hard to trap?”
“What?”
“When you—” I do the mock quotation marks in the air “—‘told’ him you were pregnant, were you surprised how quickly he proposed? Scott always had a soft spot for babies. Why else would he marry you?”
Blood flushes her collarbone and her hands flutter up to her neck. “I don’t know what you’re even asking me.” She clears her throat, obviously flustered. “Scott doesn’t have a soft spot for babies.”
Has she had a conversation with the man she married? “If it weren’t for my mom, he would have married half of the girls knocked up in our trailer park.” And he wasn’t even the daddy.
Her hands slowly lower to her lap and I swear she quits breathing. “What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
Her lips twist into a snarl. “Get out.”
“Gladly.” I open the door to her car, slam it shut, and repeat the process with the front door of Scott’s house. Before I can even reach the guest bedroom Scott declared as mine, Allison stalks in behind me, slamming the front door with as much, if not more, force than I did.
Scott opens the door to his office—the room across the foyer from my bedroom. He wears his crisp button-down shirt. Shit. He came home early from his “sales job” at the bat factory in Louisville. His eyebrows scrunch together. “What the hell is going on?”
Allison points at me. “Get rid of her.”
Scott places his hands on his hips. “Allison…”
“You knocked up girls in trailer parks?”
In my defense, that isn’t what I said, but even I know when to keep my mouth shut. Scott’s face turns red, then purple. “No.”
Allison clutches the hair on her head and the perfect bun loosens. “Forget the trailer parks. I can’t believe you told her. You promised you would never tell anyone.” One hand descends to her abdomen.
Damn. I was right—sort of. She did tell him she was pregnant, except she wasn’t lying like I’d assumed. She was pregnant, and then she lost it. If I’d known, I never would have said those things. Guilt makes me nauseous.
“Wait. I didn’t tell her.” Scott reaches out to Allison and his hand freezes in the air when she steps back. He extends his hand again and when she remains still he wraps his arms around her, pulling her close to him. Scott lowers his head to her ear and I can tell he’s whispering to her. Allison’s shoulders shake and I feel like a Peeping Tom intruding on this intimate moment.
I slip inside the bedroom and try to close the door without making a sound. Sun shines from the two walls of windows. Crawling onto the middle of the bed, I draw my knees up and curl into myself. I hate this house. There are too many windows. All floor-to-ceiling. All open. All of them make me feel…exposed.