Page 143 of Shattered

She should be wide awake right now.

“Why him?”

Sam tried to focus, but his voice was so far away. “What?”

“It was so easy with the other guys. You know, I think Jared was actually head over heels in love with you, even though you only went on four dates.”

Her brain was so foggy.

It took far too much effort to comprehend what he was saying.

“I thought he was going to be the hardest to convince to back off. But no, you had to go and find Callum fucking Barker.”

Jared?

Jared?

Who is Jared?

Then it clicked.

Jared and Sam had gone on four dates the previous summer. It may have been short lived, but they’d seemed a perfect match, and she’d been more than shocked when he’d stopped returning her calls and texts. They’d gone from spending almost every day eitherstudying together, or getting dinner or coffee together, or going to the movies together, to complete and absolute silence. Three weeks later, when she’d seen him in passing between classes, he had all but run in the other direction.

“I didn’t even have to work at breaking up you and Jackson. By the time I realized you two were getting serious, you went ahead and caused that blunder by telling him everything about you.”

She was so tired.

She could barely hold her head up.

Maybe she should call someone to drive her home.

“You don’t get it. Never have. But I think you will understand more after today.”

“Christian. I need my phone.” It took more effort than she expected to get that sentence out completely clearly.

He snickered. “So you can call your boyfriend?”

“Christian, please. Hand it to me.”

She tried to reach out her hand, but it didn’t move. It was so heavy.

And her brain felt as if it was rushing through a thousand clouds, each neuron firing off into oblivion with no final destination in sight.

“Please.” Her whimper was so low. He probably didn’t even hear it.

She breathed a sigh of relief when he walked over to her purse and dug out the phone. He walked right up to her and reached out as if to hand it over. She felt her fingers move, and her hand inched up just slightly in reach. Right before she grabbed it, he held down the button and turned it off.

“Uh, uh, uh.” He pulled it back out of her reach. “I’m assuming you and your new little group all follow each other in some way. Best not to let them know where you are.” Then he threw her phone on the ground.

“Why would you do that?” She tried to lunge forward to grab it and promptly fell off the bed. There was a realization that the fall should have hurt more than it did. The floor was hard. But she barely registered the pain of the impact over the nauseating weightlessness as she’d tumbled down.

He left her laying there as he kicked the phone further away and under the desk chair.

“You know what is probably the worst part about all of this? It’s that you became the exact thing we hate.”

“What?” Her brain was so foggy, and he wasn’t making sense now.

He bent down so he was now hovering over her. “We are different from them, Sam. They are soft, and weak, and grew up without knowing what a tough life really was. They grew up with a fucking silver spoon in their mouths while we dumpster dived after class. Remember that?” He jerked her chin around, forcing her to meet his gaze. “Remember jumping the school fences every week to see what supplies the rich kids threw out that we could use? It was their trash we were living off of. You and I are just trash to them. Callum doesn’t really love you. Hell, I doubt he even likes you. This is probably some little experiment he will get a good laugh from down the road.”

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