Page 457 of Tis the Season to be Bullied

“What now?” Jude turns in his seat and does a double-take when he sees the blood gushing from my cut. “Shit, Harper, what the fuck did you do?”

He grabs my backpack from me and shoves his hand inside. I yell out, “Careful!” just in time. He slowly retracts his arm, frowning at me.

“Broken glass,” I manage. I have my wrist in a death grip, hoping it will somehow stem the bleeding.

Jude lifts the bag and watches a drip of alcohol fall to the Impala’s carpet. “Christ.” He grabs the rest of the napkins he got with the coffee, snatching my hand and pressing the wadded-up tissues against the cut.

I grit my teeth, squeezing my eyes shut in pain. But Jude keeps applying pressure to the cut until my flesh starts aching.

“You might need stitches,” he says with a sigh. “This time of night, we’d have to go to the church clinic?—”

“I’m fine!” I try to pull my hand away, but Jude holds on tight.

“No you’re not, Harper.” When I look up, it’s obvious he’s not talking about my wound anymore. “And neither am I.”

We stare at each other for the longest time. Then it’s as if he comes to. With a shake of his head, he looks down at my hand and slowly peels away the wadded-up napkins.

A sullen ooze of blood creeps out of the cut, but it’s definitely not gushing like before. He presses the napkins back and takes hold of my other hand, forcing me to apply pressure.

“Let’s get home. We can use the first aid kit there to patch you up.”

“I don’t want to,” I whisper.

“We don’t have a choice.” He stares at me in the rearview mirror as he locks his seatbelt into place. “Harper, if we tell them everything, if we come clean, then maybe...”

…Then maybe he won’t be expelled. But what about me? He ruined my reputation with that video. I’ll never be able to show my face at Cinderhart again.Hemight get his life back, but mine is over.But that’s not the only reason. When I was sitting on that rock out at the lake, I kept replaying the conversation I had with my mom in the pool house. Even after all this time, her words still cut like knives.

“She hates me,” I mumble as Jude puts the car into gear.

He pulls into Cinderhart’s main road without looking back. “Who?”

“My mother.”

He sighs and shrugs his shoulder like he’s trying to work out a stiff muscle. “No she doesn’t.”

“She probably wishes I was dead.”

Jude laughs. “Why would you say that?”

I look out the window. It takes me a minute or two to muster up enough courage before I can tell him the things my mother accused me of.

There’s a heavy silence after that, like Jude’s surprised my life is even shittier than he’d imagined. “Then she’s a really good actress,” he finally says, “because she was in a fucking state when she found out you were missing.”

“She was?”

He shrugs. “Wayne too.” He sounds tired now. “They even tried calling the sheriff to report you missing.”

We pull up to Dearth Manor’s gate a moment later. He takes something out of his pocket, and the glow from my cell phone fills the cabin.

There’s no point in getting angry. As soon as he’s opened the manor’s gates with my smart home app, he hands the phone to me.

“You left this behind.”

“On purpose.”

The Impala’s engine grumbles quietly as he parks the Impala in the drive. We sit there in the quiet, in the dark, for a full minute before he turns in his seat to look at me.

“I told them about your drinking,” he says.

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