Page 442 of Tis the Season to be Bullied

I push the door halfway closed and start changing, but my eyes keep finding their way back to my computer. Frustration boils in my veins, but there’s nothing I can do—Dad always goes ahead with his threats. I’m surprised he hasn’t given me some lashes with his belt yet...but I know for a fact that’s on the menu when my test results come in.

I’d been praying that Harper would do the decent thing and say she had an assignment or some shit to work on, but she’s in the back seat with me and Rosie because I guess she’s made it her life’s mission to fuck with me.

Thankfully Rosie is sandwiched between us, and she keeps up a non-stop conversation with me about the movie they watched last week...so the car trip’s a real fucking blast.

“You know what, squirt? How about I go see that movie with you tomorrow?” I tell her. “Then you don’t have to keep telling me how awesome it is.”

“I thought you were grounded,” Harper says quietly. But, of course, not so quietly that at leastoneof our parents hear her.

“What’s that?” Diana says, turning in her seat.

“Jude’s gonna watch with me tomorrow!” Rosie pipes up.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Diana says, giving Rosie a smile that cools down to ice when she glances over to me.

“At the cinema,” Harper adds.

Fuck my life. She’s driving me goddamn crazy. I curl my fingers against my mouth and turn to look out the window in an attempt not to reach over and throttle her.

“You’re grounded, Jude.”

“Aw!” Rosie grabs onto the back of Diana’s headrest. “Please, please, please, please, please!”

Diana’s eyes widen, but her mouth is still in a thin line. “I’m sorry, Rosie, but Jude?—”

“Let him go,” Dad says. “It’ll do him good spending some time with Rosie.”

I share a secret little smile with Rosie, and she slips her hand into mine and holds it tight for the rest of the drive to the Liberation diner.

We order drinks and eat our pizzas in relevant peace. Thankfully, Harper keeps her attention on Diana and Wayne and leaves me the fuck out of everything. I’m only too happy—it’s a struggle being civil while the mastermind who devised my destruction is sitting less than a yard away from me.

I’m almost ready to chalk up the lunch to a relative success—seeing as I didn’t kill my stepsister with the pepper grinder—when Alex walks up to our table.

Harper goes stiff in her seat. I swear she’d have climbed under the table if she thought she could get away with it.

I shoot to my feet, my hands in fists and the suddenly vivid image of Alex making out with Harper playing through my mind like the start of a very badly executed amateur porn video.

“Sit down, Jude,” Dad says. The warning in his voice is clear, but it still takes massive amounts of willpower for me to obey. I swear my knees creak on the way down.

“What are you doing here?” Harper squeaks, her hands in a tight bundle in her lap.

“You weren’t answering your phone,” Alex says, running an awkward hand across the back of his neck. “Mr. Dearth, Mrs.Dearth.” He nods at my dad, then Diana, but completely ignores Rosie.

He used to do that whenever he came over, too. A lot of people do. They don’t know how to handle her. I used to think it was fine—I mean, at least he wasn’t condescending—but now it just pisses me off.

“So I hear you were also at the game last night,” Dad says. “Were your parents there too?”

Alex throws Dad a startled look. “Uh, yeah. They, they come most Fridays.”

“Tell your father I said hello.”

Alex throws my dad another wide-eyed glance before turning back to Harper. “Yeah, sure. Uh...could we...could we talk?”

“I’m with my family,” Harper says, snooty little bitch shoving her nose into the air.

I turn in my seat, throwing my arm on the back of the booth so I can stare at her just a little harder. “It looks important, Sis.”

Her blue eyes could have worked as well as a fucking welding torch. “It can wait,Jude.”

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