Page 67 of A Vicious Rumor

I blushed bright red at the insinuation as the rest of the girls giggled. Scissors grabbed my hand, hoisted my overnight back onto his shoulder, and swiftly pulled me out of the room without another word to the rest of the girls.

"Um, bye," I called out behind me as we made our way down the stairs quickly and out to his car. When the doors were finally shut and he was pulling away from the house, I finally was able to catch my breath to ask him what the heck had just happened.

"Oh," he replied. "There was no way in hell I was going to leave you alone with those girls overnight. This is how they operate. None of them trust one another, so the entire night would have turned into trying to get dirt on the other for blackmail purposes."

I scrunched my face, realizing that that had already started by the time he'd gotten there.

"So, why have me go in the first place?"

"You had to go," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. "You were invited. To not show up would have risked being kicked out of the Zoo, and we seriously cannot have that."

"The girls are awful," I muttered.

"I know," he laughed.

I gave him a weird look. It seemed like he thrived off of their attention, and yet he didn't mind agreeing with me that they were awful. I didn't really understand Scissors or his motivations.

"Besides," he continued. "This way you got the best of both worlds. They can't be mad at you for not coming, but you also don't have to stay. Oh," he added. "You also got to get whisked away by a super dreamy guy."

I put my hand up. "Slow your roll,” I said. "You've still got a lot of work to do before you're considered Prince Charming."

"Really?" Scissors asked. "I already stole a kiss, isn't that basically what Disney princes do? Force advances on their counterparts, but it's okay because they're the love interest of the story."

I gave him another curious look. I just shrugged my shoulders, because I didn't know what to say. Zachary King continued to surprise me.

20

TYSON

"Don't you think we could have skipped tonight?" I asked as I pulled the Jeep around to Scissors' mansion for what felt like the millionth time this year.

"You're on the football team and you guys won the Homecoming Game. Why do you think you don't have to show up?" Kitty answered in her haughty and super annoying voice.

"Simple, because I don't have to show up. No one is forcing me to come here. It's just weird social pressure," I said, closing the door to my Jeep and waiting for her to do the same.

"You live and die in this town by your social status," Kitty said, joining me on my side of the Jeep. "You should know that. You are a member of the Triad, after all."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah," I said, trying not to sound too exasperated by the whole thing. "Come on, let's get this over with."

Kitty all but ran ahead of me to meet up with her friends. Her and I were an item basically in name only. It's what I had thought would happen if I'd ever dated her. She only wanted the status of being with me. She never actually had a thing for me or had any interesting in learning about who I was as a person.

No, the only person that had been interested in that was Lily.

My phone buzzed, and I looked at the screen. It was another unlisted number. I knew who was on the other end. It was the crew I'd run with this summer. They'd been calling me non-stop for the last few weeks. I answered once more and tried to plead my case with them that I was in school now and it was only a summertime deal, but they didn't seem to care about any of it.

So far, nothing had happened, but I was more and more on edge everyday. I spotted Lily out of the corner of my eye and it was another reminder of why I needed to stay away from her. But that, too, was getting harder and harder to do every single fucking day.

Because every single fucking day Scissors would hang off of her. At school, after school, before school. It was as if he knew where I was going to be and made sure that just before I got there he had his arm around Lily's shoulders or worse. I felt completely torn about how to handle the situation. For the moment, I was keeping my distance, but I wasn't sure how long that would last.

More than that, I could see the way she looked at me. She tried to hide it, but she couldn't. She watched me as I walked by, pretending like their little show didn't bother me. I could feel her eyes on me the entire length of the hallway. In class, I'd catch her stealing looks when she thought I wasn't paying attention.

That was just the thing. I was always paying attention, especially when it came to Lily. Like right now, I could see her off in the distance with a group of Scissors' friends. She was sitting on his lap, and he had his hand wrapped around her waist. My fists clenched and unclenched as I tried to calm my rapidly increasing heartrate.

"Don't," came a familiar voice to my right. I turned. It was Paper.

"Don't what?" I asked him.

"Don't do what you always do at these parties and pick a fight with Scissors," he said.

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