Page 25 of The Last Love Song
“No. I want fish for dinner. Preferably a freshly caught smallmouth bass.” Folding her arms, she stared her father down. He loved to fish, damn it. “I’ll even clean it.”
“Honey, you’re sick. No cleaning fish for you.” He frowned. “What if you needed me and I floated out on the water fifteen miles from here?”
“I have the number for the B&B,” she reminded him. “Mrs. Whittaker is always telling me to call if I need anything. Remember?”
Dad staredherdown before coming to sit on the end of the bed.
“You have her number in your phone?”
Excitement thrummed through her, which said a lot about the sorry state of her life. Seriously? Her dad leaving her alone so she could research cyber bullying was the thrill for the day?
“Yes.” She clicked on the screen and scrolled through her contacts. “Do you want me to send it to you so you have it?”
Dad laid a hand on her foot through the quilted coverlet, on the obnoxious yellow sunflowers she’d chosen for her tenth birthday and hated ten months later.
“I have Tansy’s number.” He gave her a level look. “You really think you’d feel up to fish for dinner?”
“Definitely. I’m just run-down today.”
He stared at her so long she thought he was ready to call the whole thing off. But then he straightened.
“Okay. Tiffany McCord got a fishing magazine to cover the event and I know she’s hoping for a good turnout to help boost tourism.” He headed for her door. “Promise me you’ll phone if you feel worse?”
She made the X sign across her heart as if she were a five-year-old.
“Promise.” For him, she swallowed all the unkind words that came to mind about Bailey’s mom, who surely only organized a fishing tournament to sell more equipment and not out of some selfless need to make Heartache a tourist destination.
Then again, what did she know? Maybe Mrs. McCord wasn’t a backstabbing liar like her daughter.
Ten minutes later, her father’s old sedan backed out of the driveway and Meg had the house to herself. She dragged her laptop from under her bed, and then opened a browser window in “private session.” She hoped her dad wouldn’t be able to see it in a search history. Not that he seemed supervigilant about checking her internet hours. True, he might have seen some of the crap that had appeared on her social media accounts a few months ago. But she’d closed most of them four weeks ago when school started, hoping to give her anonymous detractors less means to taunt her. However, ever since she’d received that text about checking her Facebook page, she had worried. What if she hadn’t deleted it properly? She wanted to make sure it was really gone.
A quick scan of her old friends’ accounts showed links to her closed account. Bailey was even “friends” with her on one popular social networking site. What the hell?
Clicking on her old profile picture to see why her account hadn’t been deleted, Megan waited for the page to load. Her iconphoto remained the same as the one she’d used in the past—she held her guitar in last year’s talent show performance. Her name and her school were accurate, but the rest of the page had nothing in common with her old account.
The page said she’d transferred from Slutsville Academy. That her contact information referred to a 1-900 number with a name so foul there were asterisks in between the letters to get past the social media censors. Her work experience had been “on the local street corner,” with more details that were too vile to read.
She slammed the computer shut, heart racing.
“Oh my God.” She hadn’t read the page full of comments from her classmates, though she’d seen them out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t want to look. But of course, she’d have to look.
This morning, she’d had such high hopes of taking control of her life again. Of doing some web surfing to see if she could figure out who would send her those text messages, maybe use a reverse phone directory. The digits were seared into her brain. She’d had visions of reporting the harassment, or at least taking steps to contact her cell-phone carrier in a way that wouldn’t involve her father.
But this…
Water drops sprinkled the glossy blue case of her laptop, and she was so rattled it took her a long moment to realize they were tears. She hadn’t realized she’d started crying. The proof that her classmates had gotten to her was irrefutable—tears on the fucking laptop—and that caused a fury to build inside her like a ten-foot monster bursting at her skin to escape.
“I—” she screamed the word, rocketing out of her bed to swipe her makeup, hair dryer and papers off the dresser “—hate—” she shrieked, kicking the crap on the floor “—you!”
With the last word, she picked up a bottle of nail polish and hurled it at her closed bedroom door. China Girl Jade smashed in a splatter of green and dripped slowly down the door.
Heart hammering, Megan collapsed on the floor in a pile of discarded blankets and displaced homework. She wanted to twist and writhe and continue the tantrum for hours until she’d somehow screamed out all the fear and anger.
Except, was it possible?
All the crying in the world would not fix this. Her father would die if he saw that page. Oh God. It would kill him. How could she ever look him in the eye after he saw something like that about her? She glanced at the cold medicine that she’d carefully positioned by her bed to convince her father she couldn’t go to school.
Too bad none of those over-the-counter medicines were remotely strong enough to make the pain inside her go away. Nothing that would make her sleep until she was twenty-one and past this shit.
