CHAPTER
SEVEN
“Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you.”
~Loretta Young
PAST
I was waiting outside the vice principal’s office again. For fighting. Again.
I’d actually been doing pretty well lately, so this was now a rare occurrence.
There had been some major changes in my life.
After that day when I found out Dante was fighting for me, we were near inseparable.
We just fit together, he and I. Not necessarily in a sweet or romantic way. We were both thick skinned and sharp tongued. A tad too jaded, a touch too sarcastic. Hotheaded and stubborn to an extreme.
Dante was just as prickly as I, just as jaded, more sarcastic, more hotheaded, but thankfully, not as stubborn.
Which meant that when we clashed, as we invariably did, I won more.
I needed more wins.
We both knew it, and he was kind enough to let me have it. It was one of many reasons why we fit so well together. Despite all of his flaws, his sullen moods, his tempers and rages, he showed me an enduring compassion that no one else ever had.
We were in our early teens. It was that age where the sexes had separated to a polarizing degree. Boys hung out with boys. Girls played with girls. Those were the rules. There was some general flirtatious banter, some note passing, and lots of brief, teasing interactions but other than that, there was a clear segregation of the sexes.
We didn’t care. We ignored that rule completely. We were each other’s only friends, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
We spent a good amount of time over at his gram’s house. Her huge mansion of a place was a five-minute walk up the hill from my grandma’s trailer, a walk I hadn’t known I was welcome to take before, but now, like magic, I was. She’d told me I could come over any time I wanted, and since my grandma was gone a lot, I took her up on the offer almost every day. And Dante, who lived on a huge property between, almost always met me on the way and went over with me.
Now I didn’t have to be alone so much. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Things were so much better, in fact, that I wasn’t as angry anymore. Wasn’t fighting every kid over every insult they sent my way, and, miracle of miracles, there even seemed to be less insults these days.
No one was much intimidated by a little skinny girl like me, even a vicious one, but plenty of the kids had learned to be wary of Dante.
He fought like a demon, and word had spread that he’d pound anyone that messed with me.
It was wonderful.
But it was not absolute. Today was a case in point.
This time it’d been a boy I’d been fighting with. I’d decked the asshole right in the chin, and when he’d decked me back, I’d kicked him so hard in the balls that he’d fallen to the ground and cried like a baby.
The rest of our class had watched the whole thing with varying degrees of disgust, exasperation, and horror, but of course none of them had tried to step in or help.
I was used to all of it.
I’d always been the indisputable outcast. Other kids were very comfortable uniting against me.
Flu going around? Trashcan girl.
Lice outbreak? Trashcan girl.
Even though neither of those had been pinned on me for sure.
Lucy Hargrove, who had four brothers and two sisters and lived in a dump of a house no better than mine had started at least one of them.
Still, Lucy was sweet. Lucy had friends. Lucy didn’t make a good target because other kids liked her.
So Scarlett it was.
And today it was: Does something smell bad? Trashcan girl.
That one was maybe true in the past, but since Gram had taken me under her wing, I’d learned how important it was to bathe and how to do it properly. I didn’t smell bad now, I was sure of it, but it didn’t matter. I’d never live down the stink of the dumpster I’d been left in.
And even though the dynamic had changed and things had shifted a bit in my favor, I was still the butt of many jokes, and I still took strong exception to it. It was just that usually now kids had the sense to make the jokes behind my back.
Not today, apparently.
I’d been minding my own business, which was actually what I usually tried to do, when Tommy Mann had started in on me.
The teacher was out of the room and we were supposed to be working on an assignment.
I was not a good student by any stretch of the imagination but I had been trying to stay on task.
And here came asshole Tommy with his, “Does something smell bad?” right into my ear.
I gritted my teeth and still tried to ignore him. It hadn’t been a big enough insult to be worth dealing with my grandma if I made her angry again.
“Does anyone else in here smell something bad?” Tommy asked loudly. “Something that reminds them of garbage?”
There were some loud snickers around the room, but no one outright answered him.
Like a coward I wished, for at least the thousandth time, that Dante and I had been placed in the same class. We never were. He was across the hallway, but at moments like these, it may as well have been a world away.
“Shut up,” I muttered at him darkly.
I didn’t even see it coming. He was behind me, and though I heard some rustling, some movement, I had no idea what he was doing until the classroom’s full trashcan was being dumped over my head.
It didn’t have much other than paper in it, but it didn’t matter. It was more than enough to bring my temper out to play.
I threw the trashcan off my head, shook away all of the papers, and went after him.
I only stopped when he was a crying ball on the floor.
And of course that was when the teacher walked back into the room.
And now there I was, waiting for the vice principal to call me in.
Tommy was still in class. He hadn’t even been reprimanded.
I hated this part. It wasn’t even that I cared what they punished me with. Getting kicked out of school was a gleeful fantasy of mine on days like this.
I just didn’t want to deal with how my grandma would react.
Also, I hated verbal confrontations. I fought exclusively with my fists for one very important reason.
My voice was a coward.
Ms. Colby made me wait a good hour before she called me in. I’d known she would.
It wasn’t an exaggeration on my part to say she didn’t like me. More so than any kid in this school, I did nothing but make her job harder, but it felt to me like it went beyond that. She almost seemed to get a strange kick out of putting me in my place.
She was a thin, middle-aged woman with steel gray hair that she kept so short that a lot of the kids had taken to calling her Mr. Colby. At least that’s why I thought they called her that. I wasn’t friendly enough with most of the other kids to ask if that was the reason for it, so I just assumed.
“As usual, your grandmother couldn’t be reached,” she began with. “And knowing her, it doesn’t matter. She hasn’t shown her face here once, no matter what you’ve been up to. So your punishment for this is, clearly, going to be at my discretion. Before I begin, do you have anything to say for yourself?”
"I-I-I—, h-h-he—" was all I could get out. I never got much farther, especially with Ms. Colby. My stutter was particularly vicious with me when it came to her. The injustice of it, the fact that I could never voice my side of things out loud, only seemed to make the problem worse.
“There’s nothing you can say that will excuse what you’ve done. You can save your pathetic, stuttering breath today, Scarlett.”
My shoulders hunched up, eyes pointed at the ground. The pathetic comment really got to me, but it was more or less in line with the things she usually said to me after I’d gotten into trouble.
I resigned to just stand there and take it. It usually lasted awhile. She’d basically find several interesting ways to tell me I was troublesome, worthless, and a nuisance to the school.
And with any luck, she’d kick me out.
But something happened. Something pretty amazing. Before she could get any further, a furious Dante came storming into the office.
He went off on her and it was a glorious thing. He was foul-mouthed and surly when provoked, and he was plenty provoked just then.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Dante raged at her. “A boy attacks her, she defends herself, and she’s the one that ends up in your office getting reamed out? Are you even kidding me?”
He was the opposite of me. I stuttered hopelessly, and he seemed to have a talent for saying what would make everyone around him shut up and wait in stunned silence until he was finished.
Ms. Colby seemed to be no exception. She was just staring at him. I didn’t think she could believe what she was hearing. Kids did not talk to her this way.
“He threw a trashcan on her head!” Dante screamed. “He’s twice as big as her and he punched her in the face! What the hell is wrong with this school that she’s the one in trouble for that?”
I watched him without blinking; my heart so full, I felt it would burst.
The entire terrible day had been worth it for this moment.
Without looking at me he grabbed my hand and started to tug me out of the room. “You know what?” he snarled at a still mute Ms. Colby. “We’re done here. I’m fed up with this shit. This school is out of control. Whatever you’re going to try to pin on Scarlett, you can just go ahead and take it up with my gram.”
Something moved on Ms. Colby’s stunned face. Something that I liked. Dante had clearly struck a nerve.
Dante saw it too, and he smiled unpleasantly at her. “Don’t like that, huh? Well, like I said, you can take it up with my gram. I just called her from the reception desk and let her know what happened. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Good luck.”
He gave her a mocking little wave and tugged me out of the room, then the building.
“Where are we going?” I asked him when we’d crossed off school grounds and had moved into the forest. I was pretty sure I knew. This was a familiar path.
“Home,” he replied. He stopped suddenly, turning to me.
I was looking way, way up at him, thinking that he was the most beautiful boy in the world, and it was only as he touched my cheekbone that I remembered I’d been punched pretty hard earlier.
“Are you okay? Does it hurt?” he asked.
“It’s fine. I was so pissed off I barely felt it. And I did punch him first.”
“Yes, I know, tiger, but he attacked you first.”
“Who told you about it?”
“Nate Becker. He got a hall pass and got himself into trouble flagging me down in the middle of Mr. Jameson’s history lesson.”
I tried to keep my face impassive. Nate seemed like a nice enough kid, but I was savagely territorial where Dante was concerned, and I hated the idea that he might be making a friend aside from me.
“And then you got yourself into trouble storming Ms. Colby’s office,” I said, smiling up at him, my heart in my eyes.
“Well, yeah, but that was after.”
I blinked a few times. “After what?”
“After I stormed into your classroom and gave Tommy Mann the pounding he deserved.”
My jaw dropped. “We’re both going to get expelled,” I breathed, but not like I was sad about it.
He shrugged. “Either we will, or Gram will take care of it. My money’s on Gram.”
I squinted at him. “She’s the sweetest woman on earth. Ms. Colby’s going to chew her up and spit her out.”
He threw his head back and laughed and laughed. “Oh, you haven’t seen her when she’s mad, Scarlett. And you know she has influence over the school board. She donates a lot of money, money they won’t want to lose. Just you watch. There’s finally going to be some justice at this stupid school.”
He grew serious again, his eyes, then his fingers going to trace softly over my injured cheek. “We need to get you home and put some ice on this.”
I made a face. “It’s nothing. Stop making a big deal of it.”
But he didn’t listen. Instead he leaned forward and pressed a soft, chaste kiss on the tender flesh.
When he straightened, I took a deep breath. I’d been struggling not to say anything sappy to him, but I just couldn’t hold it in.
I squeezed his hand really hard, looked down at my feet, and said, “I love you,” for the very first time in my life.
He squeezed my hand back. “Love you, too.” His voice was quiet, but he hadn’t hesitated.
I swear I didn’t stop smiling for three entire days.