Page 11

Lauren

“ So, what happened?” Taylor asked.

Love Island was paused, and she, Ryan, and I sat facing each other on the couch, mimosas in hand.

Taylor made a face at me. “The long version, obviously .”

I dragged in a steadying breath. “There was a boy a year ahead of me in school that I was obsessed with.”

“The aforementioned Junior?” Taylor asked.

I nodded. “He was your standard bad boy type. Tattoos. Family had mob ties. Was once suspected of putting the principal’s car on the cafeteria roof.”

Ryan snorted. “How?”

I shrugged. “Crane? Helicopter? There are many theories. None have ever been proved.”

Taylor crossed her legs and leaned closer. “Say no more. I’m invested.”

“We went to the same church,” I told her, “so we kind of grew up together, but we were never close. Junior was so cool , and I was this shy, quiet bookworm. Back then, I could hardly bring myself to speak in his presence. Then, one weekend close to the end of my junior year, our church had its annual fundraiser. It’s this big fair with booths and face painting and donkey rides for kids, all to raise money for the diocese. I looked forward to it every spring.”

I dropped my gaze to Walter, splayed out beside me, as my mind went back in time.

“I was a volunteer that year. My friend Kelly and I ran the ring toss booth. Across from us, Junior and his brothers were in charge of the bean bag toss, but they did so much goofing around that I don’t think they even remembered to take people’s tickets.

Kelly and I got dragged into their shenanigans at one point, and it was the first time I remember Junior looking at me.

Really looking at me. We flirted a little during the day, nothing wild, just some light teasing that still sent my pulse into the stratosphere because oh my god, Junior Trocci actually talked to me . ”

Ryan shuddered and drained the rest of their mimosa. “Teenage hormones were hell.”

Taylor nodded. “The absolute worst.”

“Refills?” Ryan asked.

Taylor and I slugged back our drinks and handed over our empty glasses.

“There were fireworks that night,” I continued while Ryan padded toward the kitchen.

They’d already heard this story; I was telling it mostly for Taylor.

“I was sitting on a blanket, watching them with Kelly, when I saw Junior hanging out near the back of the church. He motioned me over, and I made some excuse and got up and went to him. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t for him to drag me into the shadows and kiss me. ”

Taylor’s eyes widened. “Hot.”

“Understatement,” I said. “I still can’t smell cotton candy without getting turned on.”

“Then what happened?” she asked.

“Junior spun me around, slipped his hand into my shorts, and got me off while the fireworks exploded overhead. Anyone could have seen us if they’d looked in the right spot, but they were all too busy watching the display.”

Ryan returned with our drinks, their grin wicked as they handed mine over. “And you’ve liked it kinky ever since.”

I clinked my glass against theirs. “Guilty.”

Taylor frowned. “But that sounds awesome?”

My smile faltered. “It was. And so were the next few weeks. We fooled around every chance we got. I used to slip him notes of where to meet and what I wanted to do with him, and this is where my fanfic obsession comes into play.”

Taylor cringed. “Tell me a parent or grandparent or teacher didn’t find one.”

“They didn’t,” Ryan said.

Relief swept over Taylor’s face.

I crushed it with a single sentence. “My friend Kelly did.”

“Okay, and?” Taylor asked, looking wary.

“Well, she was obsessed with Junior, too,” I explained.

“I didn’t tell her about hooking up with him because I knew she’d be upset—we’d always had this weirdly competitive edge to our friendship, and she would have seen it as losing to me, which she couldn’t stand.

One night during a sleepover, I think she got bored or something while I was showering and started snooping through my room.

She found my diary, read the entries about everything I’d done with Junior, and confronted me about it.

I apologized for not telling her, but she wouldn’t hear it.

She actually refused to believe it was real.

Said I was lying and it was all some freaky fan fiction I’d written about him like a total stalker.

She stormed out of my house afterward, and I didn’t realize until she was gone that she’d taken the diary with her. ”

Taylor gasped. “No.”

I nodded. “She took pictures of all the entries and posted them to Instagram, and they took off like wildfire from there because no one could believe that shy little Lauren Marchetti was secretly such a slut.”

Taylor covered her mouth, her eyes wide. “Oh my god.”

“Yup,” I said, taking a swig of my drink.

Her hand fell. “That’s like something out of a nightmare.”

“Oh, it was,” I told her. “I think Kelly must have regretted it pretty quickly, because she took the posts down, but it was too late. People were already sending screenshots to their friends. It was all over school by the time Monday rolled around.”

“What did you do?” Taylor asked.

“Pretended to be sick so I didn’t have to go,” I said.

“Nonna Bianchi must have known something was up,” Ryan said, having met my grandmother enough times to get a good read on her.

“I’ve never asked,” I said. “But she let me stay home all that week, and that wasn’t like her at all.

If my sister wasn’t the one to tell her, one of the neighborhood moms must have.

” I turned back to Taylor. “I tried going in the following Monday, but someone had printed copies of the posts and stuck them up all over school.”

Taylor looked like she might puke. “Did the principal do anything to shut it down?”

“No,” I told her. “In our neighborhood, everyone grew up knowing that snitches get stitches, so no one ever ratted anyone else out. Plus, our principal was one of those hands-off administrators who let way more shit go than he should have.”

“Bastard,” Taylor muttered.

“Yeah, well, karma’s a bitch,” I said. “He got in a car accident not long after and wound up in the hospital with more broken bones than you could count.”

Taylor frowned. “So how does Junior come back into play?”

I sighed. “He denied that we ever hooked up.”

Rage swept over her face. “Are you fucking serious?”

I nodded. “As a heart attack. I looked like the stalker Kelly had accused me of being, and she was quick to blab all over school about how she had seen it coming because I secretly wrote fan fiction under a pen name—because apparently my humiliation wasn’t complete enough before.”

And that was why it was so hard for me to trust people.

The bonfire of my social and school life only exacerbated my unresolved feelings about being abandoned by my parents.

It was the darkest time in my life. Nowadays, I lived by that Maya Angelou quote: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” It had become my mantra because I had learned the hard way that if you give people second chances, they’ll only use them to hurt you more.

I dropped my gaze back to Walter, scratching him between the ears.

“People thought I was crazy. The bullying got so bad that my nonna pulled me from the last few weeks of the year, and I did all my homework and testing from home. I spent that summer so isolated and depressed that she even let me change schools in the fall.”

Ryan pulled me into a one-armed side hug. “Where she met me and began her healing journey.”

I smiled up at them. They might have been teasing, but it was the truth.

I would be forever grateful for Ryan’s empathy, because they’d taken one look at broken seventeen-year -old me and known that I needed someone by my side.

They’d also sensed that I was skittish, so being the introverted genius that they were, they didn’t try too hard to befriend me or get me to open up.

Instead, Ryan was just...there. Quietly beside me at the lunch table, loitering near my locker in between classes.

Eventually, I started coming out of my shell, started talking more, and our tentative friendship was born.

A decade later, Ryan was no longer my friend; they were family.

“So what happened with Kelly?” Taylor asked. “Did she ever apologize?”

I shook my head.

Taylor set her drink aside and started to stand. “We ride at dawn.”

Ryan yanked her back to her seat. “Calm down, weirdo. Karma got her, too.”

“How?” Taylor asked. “I’ll need details to determine whether it was enough punishment.”

I grinned and shook my head. God, I loved her. Even in the middle of recanting the worst story of my life, she found a way to make me smile.

“Kelly got busted for having drugs at school,” I said.

“She was actually top of our class, headed like five extracurricular groups, and had already been pre-accepted to her college of choice. Then she got caught with, like, half a pound of pot in her locker, and it all went to shit.” I frowned, thinking back.

“It was so weird. She seemed as straitlaced as they came. Kelly swore the drugs weren’t hers, but when the cops searched her bedroom at home, they found more, so there wasn’t really a way to keep claiming innocence after that.

In the end, I think she had to take a plea deal to avoid going to juvie. ”

Taylor shrugged. “Just goes to show that sometimes you don’t know people as well as you think.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But even now, after everything, it’s still hard to believe she hid a drug operation that large from me. Everyone else was shocked, too.”

“So what happened today?” Taylor asked. “Did you get an apology from Junior?”

I huffed a humorless snort. “Hardly.”

She started to stand again. “At dawn.”

It was my turn to tug her back down, laughing. “He’s not worth it.”

Ryan didn’t share my amusement, instead, studying my face. “He did something to you, didn’t he?”