Page 85 of Hello Stranger

Then, like a man who’d just accomplished something, he said, “And what’s your deal?”

“My deal?”

“With that woman,” Joe said, gesturing with his now-empty fork. “Across the hall.”

That woman. Across the hall.Actually, Parker might come in handy as a distraction. I sat up straighter, ready to shift our focus from his misery to mine. His life might start looking better by comparison.

“She’s my evil stepsister,” I said.

Joe wasn’t the only person here with a past.

“Wow,” Joe said. “Okay. They still make those?”

I gave a little shrug. “Not just for fairy tales anymore.”

Then Joe said, “Can you defineevilhere?”

I thought about it a second. Being vague was always an option in times like these. But why not just tell the truth? If she was going to keepfainting herself into his arms,he should know what he was dealing with.

I took a breath.

“After my mom died, my father married her mother—like, six months later, by the way—and Parker moved into my house, started attending my school, framed me for some vicious bullying that she herself was doing… and then got me kicked out.”

Joe took that in. “Kicked out of school? Or out of the house?”

“Both.”

“Wow.”

I nodded. “The girl she bullied was this sweet kid named Augusta Ross. We’d been friends since we were little. She used to bake sugar cookies with me and my mom. Parker left menacing typed anonymous notes in her locker every morning. Stacks of them. She told Augusta that she was ugly—going into great detail about what was wrong with every feature on her face and every part of her body. She made up lies about how much individual people hated Augusta—and fabricated terrible things they’d supposedly said about her. She was relentless.

“And here’s the clincher: She told Augusta that if she ever told anybody about the notes, she would poison her cat, Cupcake. And then she printed off pictures of cats and cut their eyes out—and started leaving those in Augusta’s locker, too.”

Well. We certainly had changed topics.

Joe seemed to have forgotten all about his ex-wife.

He slurped a forkful of linguine.

I went on. “Her bullying got so bad and was so relentless for so long that Augusta one night tried to swallow a whole bottle of Tylenol—which really will kill you, by the way.”

Joe nodded. “Liver damage.”

“Luckily, she was terrible at taking pills. When her parents walkedin on her in front of a giant pile of capsules, the whole story came tumbling out. The school got involved. An investigation happened. And Parker, who had apparently been typing those notes in a hidden file onmylaptop, went to the administration and handed it over.”

“You got blamed,” Joe said, astonished.

“I got kicked out,” I said. “They sent me away after that. To a thing they called ‘boarding school,’ but it had distinct ‘correctional facility’ vibes.”

“Nobody stood up for you? Nobody helped you?”

“Everybody sided with Parker. Including my own father.”

“How could he do that?”

I shrugged. “He said the evidence was incontrovertible.” I took a sip of water. “That’s actually how I learned the wordincontrovertible.”

“Wow,” Joe said.

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