Page 54 of Leo
“Huh?”
Bethany sniffed, following me into the office and flopping hard on the guest chair.Fiddling with the end of one of her plaits, she opened and closed her mouth a few times, weighing words on her tongue before she managed to find the ones to let out.“I hate it here.I thought it was getting better, but it’s not.And the one stupid thing I was looking forward to was applying for this journalism internship junior year but I keep fucking up!They’re not going to want to let me do it if I keep getting ISS or skipping.”
“Then why’d you do it?”I sighed.“Why did you go back to my house?”
“Because I needed to get my bag” She sighed.“Going back home was too far and…” She wilted a bit into her seat.“And I just wanted togo.I hadn’t really planned it until this morning.The thought of facing Taylor and Bennie and just, ugh, all of them again… Mika tried to talk me out of it, but I lied and told her I wasn’t skipping but ditched at the first bell when she went to the theater corridor and I was supposed to go to homeroom.”
“Bethany…”
“Taylor—he pretended to like me earlier this year then tried to make it sound like I was stalking him or something—he started in on me about how Ambrose is too busy with you to give a shit about me and that’s why I look like this.”She waved one hand at herself.“He kept saying things like if Ambrose really cared, he’d get my fucked up, crooked teeth fixed, or make me get weight loss surgery, or buy me clothes that didn’t come from Walmart.”
“So, you decided to run away?”
“It wasn’t just that,” she groaned.“It’s everything.Ever since we moved here, I’ve felt like a freak.Back home, I had friends that liked me.I knew people who were… they were weird, too.Not plastic-weird but just… like me, I guess.”
“It’s hard,” I murmured.“Being new, being different even when you’re not new somewhere.I’d love to tell you it gets easier as you get older, but people can still be jerks.”
“Yeah, well.”She sank down in her seat, reaching for her backpack and rummaging around until she came up with a bright yellow sheet of paper, torn nearly in half and showing signs of crumpling.“Do adults do this?”
I smoothed the paper on my desk and managed to hide my wince when I saw what was on it.Someone had made a very detailed, cruel drawing of Bethany, making her a monstrous sort of creature rather than a teenaged girl.The monster was drooling over a young man, who looked horrified.A word balloon over his head read:Stop stalking me, Bethany!
“And here,” she said, shoving a hot pink sheet of paper at me.This one had the same two characters, except this time the monster was clinging to the boy’s leg, drooling on him, while he tried desperately to get away.
“They were all over the lockers when I came in this morning,” she muttered, face bright pink as she stared at her lap.“Mika helped me tear a lot of them down, but Taylor had put them in the boy’s changing room, and there were copies taped up on the counselors’ doors and…” She trailed off.“Fuck this place, you know?”
“Bethany,” I said gently, setting the pages aside.As much as I wanted to tear them to shreds and burn them for her, Ambrose might need to show them to the principal and who knows who else.“Where were you going to go?”
“Pendelton,” she said immediately.“To stay with Aunt Sharon again.”Then she wilted back down.“But Aunt Sharon’s off on some road trip with her partners and she said she loves me a lot but she’s not my mom and… and that Pendelton isn’t my home anymore.”Her words ended on a small hitch, her eyes squeezed shut as she tried not to cry in front of me.“But I was going to go anyway.Just… go.”
I made a face.“Aunt Sharon’s not really the nurturing type, is she?”
“I love her,” Bethany whispered, “but she doesn’t like to hang around in one place for too long.She stayed in Pendelton for twenty years, first because she decided to open a bakery there, then because she took care of me when Mom and Dad died and Ambrose was getting Nice Buns started.”
Christ, the thought of her trying to get across two states on her own was terrifying.And heartbreaking.“What were you going to do there?”
“Move in with Aunt Sharon,” she said stubbornly.“Or into her house, since she’s not using it now.My house.”She sighed.“I mean, it’s totally hers but it’s the only place I know, other than here.I don’t remember our house before Mom and Dad died,” she said, breath catching on the words.“Just the place Aunt Sharon had.I mean, it’s not perfect but I know the town and I’d still go to school and everything.And I know it’s up there empty while she travels and—”
“It’s not.”
I hadn’t even heard Ambrose come in.He was standing in the doorway, his own eyes red and face drawn as he stared at his sister.“She rents it out,” he said quietly.“She asked me a few years ago if I minded, if I might think about moving back up there with Bethany, but the bakery was just getting started so I said no, I’d rather someone be in it than it just sit there empty on the off chance I might decide to go back to Oregon one day.She has an RV she stays in when she’s back in town, but the house is occupied, Bethany.”
She glared at him, her lips a thin white line of pain and anger, then broke into a thousand sobs.“That’s not fair!That’s our house!That’s where Mom and Dad lived!”
Ambrose hurried to kneel in front of her, and I slipped past him, catching his eye as I went.He raised a brow—Is it okay if we use your office?
I nodded.“Take your time.”
With no other clients on the books for the afternoon and embalming done for the next day’s services, I went to sit with Edward and let the white noise of my own chaotic thoughts bubble over.
CHAPTER18
AMBROSE
Bethany was in a deep,quiet funk by the time we returned home.The vice principal for her grade doled out a week of after school detention and, despite my strident arguments supporting Bethany’s actions and demands that the other kids involved also receive punishment, we were shunted out the door with a firmwe have rules for a reason.For a moment, I worried the asshole was going to slap on more punishments when Bethany snarled, “Yeah, but why are they only being applied tome?”but we made it out with only the week of detention and a sternly worded speech about her future involvement in afterschool clubs if she “decides to keep up with this sort of behavior.”
“I feel like I fucked everything up for her,” I told Leo much later, after I was sure Bethany was asleep, and after I’d had time to vent my anger at the situation on a stack of cardboard boxes I’d been meaning to break down for recycling for months now.“I wanted to help her feel comfortable here.When we moved down here, I chalked up some of the problems then to being the new kid in a bigger town.I mean, Gaynor Beach isn’t huge, but neither is Pendelton.”
“You shouldn’t blame yourself, Ambrose,” Leo murmured.“You were trying to get a business started, be a brother and a parent at the same time, deal with having a kid to take care of as well as a house and bills and—” he broke off on a yawn.“Shit, sorry.I didn’t mean to do that.I’m lying down and it’s like my brain just wants to turn to oatmeal right now.”
