Page 112 of Jump on Three

Survived much worse.

It was true, but I had never intended to tell him what had happened at my last school. I liked him seeing me the way he did, not as a girl who was so strange her classmates chose her to torment.

He pulled me from his throat, holding me by my shoulders. “What does that mean?”

This wasn’t a conversation I’d ever wanted to have with him. I had left Spain behind and, with it, all the people who wouldn’t have minded if I’d died.

“It means I was bullied at my last school. That is the reason Delilah and I moved here. What Layla has done pales in comparison, which is how I know I can survive her.”

“Evelyn,” he breathed. “Tell me, angel. Tell me what happened.”

I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to see the pity softening his intense gaze. He wouldn’t drop this, and I didn’t want to get into the habit of keeping things from him. That wasn’t me. More importantly, it wasn’t us.

“Marina didn’t like me for reasons I’ll never know. Her nickname for me began with her saying I was an uncanny valley and evolved into Uncanny Evie or just Uncanny at the end. Since people did like her, they followed her lead.”

“What’s her last name?”

I shook my head. “No. You aren’t going to murder my former classmate.”

“Why not?”

I sighed, patting his scruffy cheek. “Thank you for wanting to commit violence in my honor when I’ve barely scratched the surface of what she did.”

His jaw rippled as he pulled her deeper into his hold. “Last name, Evelyn. I need it.”

“No, Ivan. She lives on a different continent. All I want is to forget all of them existed.”

“All of them?”

“My swim team.”

He hissed, and if I hadn’t been in his arms, I was certain he would have been tearing things apart. As it was, his muscles were so tense he was shaking.

“All of them, Evelyn. I will kill all of them.”

No one, besides Delilah, had ever cared this much for me. Even when the extent of the bullying had come to light, our parents had been furious at the administration for letting it go on but had only done a cursory check on my well-being.

Not one person had ever gone homicidal over me.

I shouldn’t have liked it, but I did.

“Those people will never hurt me again,” I assured him. “I will never cross paths with them. I can’t even picture their faces anymore.”

Except Marina. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, her face was there, screaming at me, shoving me into that small room, kicking me when I tried to escape. Her face was still clear. It might always be.

“Tell me the rest,” he gently ordered. “I need to know what happened to you.”

“Standard bullying, for the most part. The kind of annoying, insidious pranks that belong in a YA book, not real life. Everything escalated when our swim team went on an overnight trip and was assigned hotel rooms. For some reason, I was placed with Marina.”

He muttered in Russian. I did not need to understand to know these were curses.

“She wouldn’t let me in the room with her. When I told her I was going to our coach, she and a few girls shoved me in a small laundry room that was so hot and humid I started sweating the second the air hit my skin. They locked me in there overnight.”

“No,” he said with force, like if he denied it enough, he could make it untrue.

I wished that was so, but nothing could erase that night. Not even Ivan, who I believed would move mountains for me.

“A maid found me unconscious in the morning. Marina and her friends couldn’t exactly hide what they had done after that. Too many people knew.”

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