Page 38 of Losing the Rhythm

His whisper left me speechless. He chuckled briefly before climbing to his feet and disappearing into the kitchen.

“Chips and dip!” Toby called out.

“Already on it,” Seth called back.

“Ready to get back to work?” Paxon asked softly.

“Yeah.” I scooted back to the table and tried to calm down my racing heart. Now I couldn’t focus for a different reason.

Five dates with five friends. What was in store for me?

Chapter Eleven

Paxon had become a grinning boy since I saw him in the morning. Every time I saw him throughout the morning, he’d grinned at me and drop little hints.

It became a game as he teased me about our date after school.

“Trying to find what is lost isn’t always easy.”

“A world record is just over four thousand six hundred ninety four feet, but you aren’t allowed to look it up.”

“For the adventurous, there’s some spooky aspects.”

Hints like that were dropped on me from the moment I said hello. I had them all written down, but I still couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t even know how people celebrated Halloween outside of going trick-or-treating or doing Halloween-themed parties.

“Aren’t you overthinking this?” Justin asked as he looked over the sheet of paper I wrote all the hints on. Toby was trying to peek over his shoulder, but Justin was taller than him, so it wasn’t working out too well.

“Am I? Do you guys know?”

“I think I figured it out,” Justin said, handing the sheet over to Toby.

Toby read it before chuckling. “Oh! Yeah, that makes sense.”

“Tell me.”

“No way,” Toby said. “We are hands off with Paxon’s date with you. Though he’s pretty brilliant with it.”

I groaned as we headed toward my locker. Toby gave it back to me, and I focused on stuffing it into one of my notebooks.

“What the fuck?” Justin said. His extreme reaction had me gaping up at him, and then I followed his gaze, realizing we were by my locker.

My stomach dropped as I looked at the chaos. My locker door was open, and I got a good look at what had been done to it.

The first thing I was able to focus on were the words. They were what one would expect. My number was scrawled in big thick writing. There were stick figures of a couple in obscene positions. Other crude drawings of body parts.

“Who the hell did this,” Toby snapped out. I moved closer and looked inside, already preparing myself. And the chaos inside my locker didn’t disappoint.

Everything was destroyed and shoved back inside. Some of it had even fallen to the floor. All my notebooks and binders were practically shredded. Any textbooks I had in there were torn apart, pages written on.

“Why?” I asked softly, bending down at the drawing that Hazel had done of me and the guys. My heart broke finding that it had been torn up and the piece that had the chibi character of me on it had scribbles all over it, while the other faces were fine.

“We can tape this back together,” Justin said, picking up the pieces. But then he stopped when he realized that my chibi character was absolutely destroyed.

“I took a picture,” I said softly, trying to keep all my emotions in. My skin prickled and it felt like something hard and sharp was poking from inside of me, trying to get out. I curled my hands, trying to fight against the need to lash out at someone. Something. Anything.

“Come on.” Toby grabbed my arm and began leading me away from my locker.

“Where are you going?” Justin asked.

---