Page 44 of The Bully's Dare

My vision is blurring. I can’t pretend to be okay anymore. I halt in my place, whip around, and face her. “You hate me,” I state bluntly. “I get it. And now you’ve got a boyfriend and you’d rather spend time with him and that’s fine—just stop rubbing it in my face.”

Kenzi’s panting lightly. She lifts her arms and then drops them. “Jesus Christ, I don’t hate you, Donovan.”

I blink and then blink harder. Trying to clear the blurriness from my vision. “You don’t?”

“No! I was afraid you’d hate me!” She waves her hand in my direction. “I mean, can you blame me?”

“I don’t hate you. I could never.” I pull my lips together. “Are you and Jason dating?”

“Would you stop being friends with me if we were?”

I don’t even have to think about it. “No,” I say. “I wouldn’t.”

She lets out a big sigh. Then she sits down on the grass and tosses her backpack in her lap. She opens it up and pulls something out.

“Here.” She holds it out to me. It’s a plain CD case. “You need variety in your scream-o.”

“You made me a CD?”

“You’re damn right I did.”

“This is really cool. Thank you.” I swallow hard. I don’t want to give away the massive lump in my throat. “I’m sorry.”

She bumps her shoulder against mine. “You should be. Because I’m a really good friend and, frankly, you’re blowing it.”

A relieved laugh escapes my lungs. I open the case. Kenzi’s loopy handwriting scribbled in sharpie on the CD, listing each track. I snort on a chuckle. “Fiona Apple?”

She drops her head against my shoulder. Her long hair tickles my neck. “Even a heartless bastard like you will love it,” she says. “I promise.”

She’s right. I do love it. I put her CD on repeat and listen to it over and over until I fall asleep.

21

Jason

I don’t get it.

One second, everything’s fine. The next…

Donovan is acting like I shot his dog.

He won’t look at me. Won’t talk to me.

I’m good at a lot of things. I’m good at school. I’m good at swimming. I’m good at finishing a fight. I’m even good at cooking, believe it or not.

I’m not good at pretending things are okay when they’re obviously not.

The next time I see them, Kenzi and Donovan are sitting together on the field that overlooks the marina. They’ve made themselves comfortable on one of the picnic benches and it looks like they’re enjoying lunch together.

When I get closer, I see they have a whole taco-building station set up. Little tin boxes filled with shells and toppings: cheese, shredded chicken, beans, sauces. They even have little plastic cups with jalapeno peppers and cilantro. You have to go off-island to get decent Mexican food, so I’m going to go ahead and guess this setup is the work on Kenzi’s mom.

Kenzi and Donovan are sitting side by side. Donovan is focused on picking apart his taco. Kenzi’s eyes meet mine, but she quickly adverts her gaze and looks away.

Okay. Enough is enough.

I walk over to their picnic table. When Kenzi sees me, her eyes get wide.

“Hey,” I say. “What’s up?”

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