Page 101 of Dark and Dangerous

I sit at the front of the classroom now, so I don’t have to look at her, and I eat my lunch in my van.

It’s been two weeks.

Harlow’s been taking the bus to school. I see her riding her bike down the driveway every morning. Jonah said he offered to take her,but she declined. The only time she gets in his car is after work when he drives her home. He didn’t ask what happened between us or the reason we broke up. He probably knows better than I do.

Harlow and I don’t speak. Not at school or at work.

She doesn’t go to the open practices, and she doesn’t come to my games.

I’ve learned to play through the pain of her absence.

“Jace,” my computer science professor calls out, pulling me from my thoughts. “Can you hang back a minute?”

I nod, and around me, the rest of the students pack up their things. I’d been in such a daze that I hadn’t paid attention in class, so much so that I didn’t even realize it was over.

Backpack over one shoulder, I make my way to the front of the classroom, stopping in front of my professor, who’s no doubt about to question my lack of attention today.

“What’s up?” I ask, and he sits on the edge of his desk, handing me back my test from two weeks ago. In big, fat red marker is an A+.

“Hundred percent,” he states. “Not one question wrong.”

I lift my eyes from the paper to him.

“Jace, you’re the top student in my class by far. You’re a high school senior surrounded by twenty-somethings, and you’re killing it.” He slaps my arm, the same way my coach does when I perform well on the court. “If basketball doesn’t work out for you, you have a pretty decent plan B here.”

“Thanks,” I tell him. “But I plan on accomplishing both.”

I leave the lecture hall and immediately take out my phone, ready to text Harlow the news. But then I remember… and I wonder how it is I could ever forget.

I had goals before Harlow.

Dreams and aspirations that weren’t limited to basketball and her coming with me. I pushed back offers while I waited for her to tell me whatshewanted.

I realize now that was my mistake. Now, most offers are off the table. I walked away from them as easily as Harlow walked away from me.

Lesson learned.

63

Harlow

True to his word, Jace never told my dad about what he saw, and regardless of how it may have appeared at the time, I didn’t ask him not to because I didn’t want my dad to know. I asked him not to because I wanted to be the one to tell him.

The day after I broke up with Jace, I called my dad in tears and begged him to come home. He was in Mississippi, but right away, he found someone else to take over the job and got on the next available flight.

Revealing my truth to him was one of—if notthe—hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. My dad’s life was already a mess. He’d just found out his wife was sleeping with his brother, ruining their marriage for good, and the only family he had left was—technically—not even his. And then his daughter, the one he raised as his own, had to sit him down to tell him that she was self-harming.

Again.

It started when I was fourteen. There were no major triggers that I could think of, but I just… I hated myself and the skin I was born in, and I found that physically harming myself helped lessen my psychological pain—even if it was momentary.

For a long time, I was able to keep it a secret. It never scared me—doing what I did—and there was never any intention of ending my life, so I didn’t think it was a big deal.

I was drinking a lot, doing drugs, acting way too dumb, yet way too grown for my age, and then along came Bryce Lynn. I didn’t care that he’d taken my virginity, because I wanted him to. I didn’t even care that he discarded me like trash when it was over. Nor did I care about the rumors he spread about me afterward. But… my mom did. She’d heard about it from a friend of a friend, and it embarrassed her to no end. She told me so herself. “Did you even think about how this would affect me?” she yelled. “How this would affect your brother?”

I took things too far that night. There was so much blood. Too much of it. And I don’t know if it was my heightened emotions or my inability to clean the liquid crimson off my flesh, off the floor, but my cries must’ve been loud enough that my dad heard. He knocked on my bathroom door—the one I shared with my brother, who was out that night—and the only thing I could do was cry harder, beg him not to come in while I failed at hiding the evidence.

He kicked down the door.

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