Last Stand Page 6

  I shrug. “No big deal. She needs the help. She pays me, too.”

  “Really? That’s cool of her. “ I’m reaching to open the door when Ginger adds, “Some people would take advantage of a nice guy like you in that situation.”

  I turn in the seat to face her. “That’s the second time today you’ve called me a nice guy and implied that it’s a bad thing.”

  “Toby, it’s a great thing!” Ginger laughs, but it doesn’t feel like it’s at me. More with me. “You’re the kind of person other people like to be around. That’s rare. Who else do you know at West Rollins with no enemies?

  Amber might be an enemy now, not that I’m going to point it out. “So why do I feel like there’s a big ‘but’ that comes after your nice guy statement?”

  “Oh, probably because there is.” She shrugs. “I’m not sure being the nice guy always makes you happy. I bet you’d help Keira even if she didn’t pay you.”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Remember back when we were in fourth grade together?”

  “Yeah. So?” Her peanut episode will ensure I never forget fourth grade.

  “You were always the first person to volunteer to help the teacher with stuff. Or to help other kids with their assignments. You’re a pleaser.”

  “Gee, thanks, Dr. Phil.”

  “Eww. Now you’re not being nice at all!” She shudders. “What I’m saying, though, is that you help out no matter what. It’s just who you are. Keira’s lucky to have you for a brother, and you’re lucky she never takes advantage of that. A lot of girls would take advantage of a guy like you. Especially girls who are serious attention junkies. They know you’re the guy who’s going to give them their fix, and that makes you a target.”

  “Can I go now, or do you get to berate me a little longer as payment for the ride?” I can’t help but grin at her. Ginger Grass, amateur psychologist. Who knew?

  She swoops a hand toward the sidewalk. “You’re free to go. Just lookin’ out for you is all.”

  I flick the ribbon that holds the crystal on her rearview mirror. “You keep it quiet that I’m a nice guy and I’ll keep it quiet that you have the world’s most hideous name.”

  “Deal.”

  I thank her for the ride, then hop out of the car. She pulls a quick U-turn, and I wave as she heads off, presumably toward her own house. I wonder where she lives. Not Rocky Knolls, since she was never on my bus when we were kids. Funny that she knew I lived there. Huh.

  My cell phone pings in my pocket. I pull it out, wondering if Amber’s going to do a one-eighty and apologize, or if she’s calling to rant at me some more. Instead, it’s a text from Griff:

  hey toby where r u…u missed c-c

  I text back that I had to skip—I’ll give him the details later—and that I’m standing in front of Fair Grounds. A few seconds later, I have a reply:

  stay put…getting ride

  I let him know I’ll be inside. I open the door to the shop, expecting to see one of the morning girls, but Keira’s manning the counter alone, just as she would on any other weekday afternoon.

  “Where’s Stewie?” I ask after she finishes with a customer.

  “Home napping. Mom told me she’d cover.” At my look of surprise, Keira adds, “I know, I know. But she insisted. I figured just this once I could accept her help.”

  “Speaking of which—”

  “Go home, Toby!” She grabs a large bag of coffee beans and refills the grinder. “Isn’t it enough that you got up in the middle of the night with Stewie? I swear, he yelps, you run. That boy’s no dummy; he knows who’ll bend over backward to make him happy.”

  Did I just have this conversation with Ginger, or what?

  “He was wet,” I argue.

  She reseals the coffee bag and puts it away. “I figured that much out when I saw his pajamas. But you could’ve gotten me when you heard him cry. And you definitely didn’t need to take him to your room when he pulled his fussy routine on you.”

  “How’d you know he was in my room?” I put the kid back in his room just before Keira got out of bed. I was wide awake, so I decided to clean up the crib.

  “When I got him this morning, he said” —she waves her arms in reenactment— “‘Mama, Mama, I sleep Unnca Tobeeeeee!”

  Busted.

  “Go home,” Keira tells me. “Take a nap, do your homework. You’ve helped me enough for one day. Want a coffee for the road?”

  I tell her I need to wait for Griff, but I’ll take an iced coffee with milk. As she preps it, I take a seat alongside the counter and ask, “Has it ever occurred to you that you never want to accept help from anyone, yet I’m constantly trying to help everyone?”

  She takes the milk out of the fridge, then talks to me over her shoulder while she adds some to my coffee. “Put us together and we might balance out to one normal person.”

  “I guess.”

  Griff walks up, as if on cue, and tells me that while Keira has hopes of normalcy, I’m a lost cause. He orders an iced coffee for himself, then we walk back toward Rocky Knolls as we drink. He’s still in his running gear, though he usually changes and showers at school before heading home.

  “You know you’re in trouble with Coach Jessup,” he says once we’re out of earshot of the coffee shop.

  I nod. “Amber. Long story, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Just grovel appropriately tomorrow, all right? I don’t want you to lose your spot on the team.” When I assure him there will be an abundance of groveling, he asks if I want to blow off homework for awhile and come over to his house to play video games. “It’s an anti-Amber treatment,” he explains.

  I shrug and follow him home. For once, I don’t feel like being responsible.

  Chapter Six

  I think every single person at West Rollins hates me. As I walk out of second period and head toward my locker, people either steal peeks at me or turn away and whisper back and forth about how I look—am I angry? sad? happy?

  Do they think they’re being subtle?

  Being the center of attention is makes me twitchy.

  “No need to tell me that long Amber story,” Griff mutters in my ear as he strolls next to me. “If you couldn’t guess from all the stares you got during Spanish, Amber’s been telling her own story.”

  “She didn’t have to,” I reply, careful to keep my voice down and a grin on my face, like Griff and I are talking about some great joke we just heard. “She ensured she had plenty of witnesses yesterday.”

  “Sucks, man. It’ll blow over soon.” When we get to my locker, he asks if I want to meet up for lunch.

  “You pack one?”

  He shakes his head. “Hit the snooze button this morning and had to run. Gotta buy.”

  “Me, too,” I admit. Slept in to make up for the night I spent up with Stewie and reading the Alamo book. I realized on the way to school, however, that I should’ve taken the extra minute or two to pack a lunch so I could avoid the fishbowl of the cafeteria. “I may just buy a sandwich and scoot to the library, though. Don’t feel like eating in the caf today.”

  “I’m shocked.” He smacks me on the back. “Meet me here at the lockers and I’ll run the gauntlet with you.”

  • • •

  Griff’s his usual laid-back self when we get into line for lunch, doing a great job of making it look like the two of us are jabbering away about something interesting and are oblivious to what’s happening around us.

  “Not so bad,” he says, discreetly surveying the room. “No one’s paying much attention to you. They’re all looking at Little Miss He Done Me Wrong.”

  My back’s to Amber, but I saw her when I came in. Couldn’t miss her. She’s wearing her favorite purple V-neck top, one I once told her makes her look fabulous. I meant her eyes at the time, since I was kissing her when I said it, but it also highlights her other assets big time. (So to speak.) And she knows it. “Holding court, huh?”

  “Yep.
The usual minions are gathered at her table. Meghan, Christy, the whole group. And Annabelle Gatskowsky is at the front of the lunch line waving for them to save her a seat. She has another girl with her. Another band type, I think.”

  “Hmmm, wonder what they could all be talking about?” Yep, that was sarcasm in my voice.

  Griff smiles, then adds, “Oh, and don’t look now, but Connor Ralston and a couple of his friends are sitting down at table behind her. She’s pretending not to notice.”

  “Great.” I wonder if part of her hooking up with me was to get back at Connor. For someone with no regrets, she sure doesn’t seem to have him out of her system. I bet Griff’s right. The flirting before band was probably two-way.

  Griff mutters, “For a girl with a broken heart, she sure seems to be loving all the drama and attention.”

  And that’s when it hits me. Serious déjà vu.

  “What?” Griff asks, catching my eye. There’s concern in his voice, but to his credit, he still looks like he’s Mr. Casual. “What’d you see?”

  “Nothing,” I wave him off. “Just realized that you’ve been right all along whenever you’ve called me dumbass.”

  “Well, of course. I’m always right.”

  The first time I had lunch with Amber was this week, last year. We’d just gotten together, and everyone in school was speculating about us. Connor was seated a few tables away. Since the two of them had broken up over the summer, most people hadn’t heard about it. Not until school started and Amber sat with her new boyfriend at lunch and the gossip began.

  She’d been happy and giggly that day, smiling like I hadn’t seen her smile in months. I’d thought it was because she was happy to be with me, that she’d totally forgotten Connor left her for some other girl. Now I’m thinking she was happy for the attention. What was the term Ginger used?

  Attention junkie.

  Guess it should be capital A, capital J. Like a syndrome.

  We get to the front of the line, skipping the trays and hot food choices in favor of pre-made, wrapped sandwiches, apples, granola bars, and sodas we can carry out. I’m about to pay when the basket of candy calls to me. I grab myself a Snickers, then toss it back in favor of a Twix—no peanuts in Twix—and add a bag of Skittles.

  Griff oinks behind me.

  “I owe Ginger some Skittles from lunch yesterday. I’ll give ‘em to her at her locker later,” I explain.

  I toss the food in my backpack, then Griff and I make a beeline out of the caf. I hear Amber’s cheery laughter as we pass near her table—she’s not laughing at me, but it’s definitely meant for my ears—and decide that Ginger was dead-on. Amber wanted me for the attention and the attention only. It’s probably why she was so insistent about sex. If the relationship didn’t escalate—if I couldn’t meet her demand for increasing doses to feel the high—it meant she wasn’t getting her fix.

  If she really wanted me, she wouldn’t have thrown her public fit. And she’d wanted it to be public, otherwise she’d have answered my text asking her to meet me at home so I wouldn’t miss cross-country. I know she got it; she’s obsessive about checking between classes.

  Of course, if I’d have ignored one of her texts for hours, she’d have been pouty. I wasn’t paying attention to her. I didn’t love her if I didn’t jump to answer right away.

  “You know, Amber was a lot of work,” I tell Griff once we’re safely out of the cafeteria.

  “You’re just now figuring that out?” In a girly voice, he adds, “Toooh-beeee, you’re going to walk me home, aren’t you? Oh, Toooh-beeee, why didn’t you answer my text?”

  “No kidding.”

  How often did I do things with—or for—Amber because she expected me to, rather than because I really wanted to?

  Or worse—spending so much on the necklace I got her for our anniversary. I could’ve added that money to my car fund, but now the necklace is probably sitting in a drawer in her bedroom, never to be worn.

  “So how come you never said anything?” I ask Griff.

  “Maybe ‘cause you wouldn’t have listened? You were blinded, man.” Griff cracks up. “Probably by her boobs.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Good thing the hall’s empty except for the two of us.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  We enter the library, give the librarian a friendly wave—eat in the library? who, us?—as we pass her desk, then make our way to the table at the back of the stacks.

  Ginger’s already there. She looks up from her notebook as we approach and raises an eyebrow. “You two officially stalking me?”

  “No way. I was here first yesterday, and the two of you barged in on me,” Griff says. He jerks a thumb in my direction. “And he brought you Skittles. Not stalker behavior.”

  “Hand ‘em over and I’ll consider letting you sit.”

  I drop my backpack into one of the empty chairs, locate the Skittles, then toss them to her. She catches the bag in one hand and sets them in front of her on the table, then reaches down to the floor to pick up the Diet Coke she hid as we came through the stacks.

  “Can’t be too careful,” she says as Griff and I sit. “So how’s your morning been, Toby?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Griff’s voice is filled with snark, which garners him a smile from Ginger.

  “Some.” She leans back in her chair and fixes her ponytail. She catches my eye, and it’s clear to me that she not only heard the gossip, she heard everything that went down in the parking lot—including Amber’s slut comment—loud and clear.

  “She actually witnessed it,” I tell Griff as he spreads out his lunch. “My most glorious moment.”

  “Had to ride in on my white horse to rescue his ass.”

  “Well, in a blue Toyota, anyway,” I explain to Griff. “She gave me a ride to Fair Grounds.”

  “That’s how you got there at mach speed,” he says between bites of his cafeteria-bought ham and cheese. “I knew you couldn’t run that fast.”

  I fake punch him. He smirks, then asks Ginger, “So was it gory? Amber beat the crap out of him and leave him for dead?”

  “Just about.” Ginger’s eyes are lit in amusement. “I swear, it was like watching Custer ride across the prairie. He went into the situation with no battle plan and no knowledge whatsoever of the strength of his enemy.”

  Griff elbows me. “You’d think a history freak like you would know better.”

  “Well, he got out alive and he acted with honor,” Ginger says. “Better than Custer did, on both counts.”

  How much do I like her right now? Not just because she called me honorable, but because she knows about the Battle of the Little Bighorn?

  “You guys realize I’m sitting right here while you talk about me, right?”

  “Yup,” they reply together.

  I crack up, then pull Gatsby out of my backpack. Have to read the last few pages before class. I haven’t been called on yet, which means I’m due. Just what I need on a day where everyone’s talking about me.

  Somehow, though, kicking back alongside Griff and Ginger, I’m feeling no pain. Like I’m looking back at my relationship with Amber from a decade in the future and seeing that I’ve lived and learned.

  Griff leans over to two-point his wadded-up sandwich wrapper in the trash can. As he does, Ginger winks at me. No squinching, no posing against a fence with a hand on her hip. Just a straight-up wink.

  “So you live to fight another day,” she says.

  I smile at her, then reach across the table to steal back a Skittle from the open bag. “You think?”

  She yanks the bag away before I can get one, but her lips curve into a smile. “Positive.”

  About the Author

  Niki Burnham is the RITA-award winning author of over a dozen novels, including Royally Jacked, a Teen People Pick. Originally from Colorado, Niki spent her childhood traveling around the world thanks to her father’s military career. After attending high school in Mannheim, Germany, she graduated from Colorado S
tate University and the University of Michigan Law School. Niki currently lives in Boston. She is also published under the name Nicole Burnham.

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