Page 6 of Break

Hissing low, so the guys don’t hear me, I whisper shout at her. “That’s not in the Bible!”

She looks up at me again and quickly nods her head, and in the same lowered voice, she tells me, “It’s in Matthew.”

Rolling my eyes, I try to contain my irritation that I have to deal with a goodie-two-shoes trying to quote Bible verses at me. “Okay, Whalemina,” I sneer, ignoring her flinch this time. “I’ll get right on that. Thankssomuch for showing me the right path to follow along with all the other bible thumpers your family hangs around with.”

“But Max-”

I cut her off. “No! I don’t need you preaching to me like you have to save my soul or somethin’. Go home, Mina. Mind your own damn business.” I shoulder my way past her and feel a small sense of relief when I hear her footsteps heading toward her house. Now is the time to plan this shit out with my friends who Iknowhave my back.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Next Day

“You ready?” I whisper through the window to Danny’s bedroom. I take a quick look around to make sure no one is around to see me sneaking through his backyard.

“Yeah, hold your damn horses. Mom just went into the bathroom to take a shower, so we need to go now and get back before she finishes.”

Mina doesn’t know how badly she screwed me and Danny over, but she’s about to.

The little weasel ran to her teachers at school this morning and told them that I was carrying a weapon to threaten another student. A ‘weapon’. It was a stinking two-inch dull blade, but apparently there’s a ‘zero tolerance’ policy, and I got out-of-school suspension for three days. Ofcourse,she told them that Danny gave it to me, so he got himself hooked up with a one-day suspension.

Our moms came to pick us up, and the ass chewing I got from my dad when I got home was bad enough that my mom tried to step in and calm him down.My fucking dad, he…I slap the side of my head to shake off those thoughts as Danny lands next to me, having dropped out of his window.

“Ready?” he asks me, eyeing me like I might be crazy for smacking myself.

“Yup. Let’s go make a mess of that little twerp’s shit.” He snickers as we take off and weave our way through Mina’s backyard. It doesn’t look like anyone’s home, thank God.

Danny picks up the mat outside the backdoor and holds up the spare key. “How’d you know it was there?” I whisper to him.

“Mom makes me come over and water their plants whenever they’re out of town.” I raise my eyebrows at him, surprised that he’s watering plants for a bunch of self-righteous pricks. “Shut up, my parents make me do it,” he mutters under his breath. “Come on, let’s hurry.”

After he lets us inside, we tiptoe through the house, opening random doors until we find Mina’s bedroom.What the hell?

“What the fuck is wrong with her room?” I ask, shocked at the pale walls, pale blanket on her single bed with one pale pillow case. There is absolutely nothing out except a paper dollhouse and a brown stuffed rabbit centered on her pillow. Literally, nothing else at all. No pictures, toys, books… nothing. “Why is she so damn weird? Who would want to live in a room like this?” I ask Danny.

He laughs at me before moving over to stand in front of her dollhouse. “She doesn’t ever do anything. They have a library where all the books are. Mrs. Bardot is super organized and cleans all the time. This right here,” he points at the house, “is all she ever does. Constantly folding little bits of paper into pieces for this freaky paper house. Whenever they come over for dinner, or we come here, she sits on the floor with a stack of paper and just folds it. It’s fuckin’ weird, but she loves it.”

“Loves it, huh?” I ask, eyeing up the house with more interest now. Looking around, I search for something I can use to tear into it, but there isn’t even a sharp pencil I can poke it with. Grabbing the roof, I try to tear through it, but it’s layered with so many pieces of paper, it won’t budge. “Shit, how do we destroy this thing?”

Danny doesn’t answer me, instead he hands me another one of his pocket knives.Perfect.

Grabbing it from him, I flip it open and then drive the knife through the top of the roof and curl my lips as the entire top dips down and caves in from the force. Instead of pulling the knife back out, I pull sideways to slice through the papers until it comes free, causing one side to hang awkwardly.

Chuckling, I grin over at Danny. “Well, this works just fine.”

The two of us spend the next five minutes pulling the house apart while I cut through sections of it. There’s no way she’ll be able to tape or reassemble it. By the time we’re finished, the entire thing is laying in a pile of sliced up slivers of paper that doesn’t show any sign of what they were supposed to be. I stand over it, breathing heavily from the exertion of releasing my anger into this ridiculous pile of scraps. But I still don’t feel like we’ve done enough.

“Give me the knife quick,” Danny orders me, holding his hand out for it. Slapping it into his palm, I watch as he fists it while walking over to her bed and picks up the rabbit. “She’s carried this thing around for years. Wherever she went, she’d be hauling it behind her. Bet she loves it.”

He doesn’t explain anymore as he lifts the knife and stabs it into the center of the rabbit’s chest and drags it downward, spilling the stuffing out all over her bed. Dropping the now empty carcass into its filling, he turns to me. “You ready to go back?”

Looking around the room, I see a full glass of water on her side table between her bed and the wall. “Hold on,” I tell him. Picking up the water, I move back to her desk and empty it over the top of all the paper I’ve just sliced up. I enjoy the sound of water dripping to the floor for just a minute before I grin at Danny. “There.NowI’m ready to go.”

Nodding his head once, we slip out of Mina’s room and hurry back to his bedroom window. I hold my hands together so he can use it as a step and heave his ass up back through the window. Turning back to me, he asks, “Why’d you pour water on it?”

Smirking, I shrug like it’s no big deal, but I won’t lie to myself; I’m proud I had the idea. “It’s paper. She could have tried to salvage some of the scraps to reuse them. This way, she can’t. It’s all warped and will be a pile of mush by the time she gets home.”

Danny snickers and holds his fist out to me. “Badass. Later, dude.”

---