One Eighty (Westover Prep Book 1) Page 8

  “I don’t.” It’s a partial lie, but that’s the thing about accidents—you can’t pick and choose what the suffering will be.

  “Forgive me.” It’s not a question or really a demand, but the repetition of his insistence reminds me why I came up here to begin with.

  Instead of refusing him once again, I turn toward my closet. The box I need is all the way on the top shelf, and just like every other time I’ve needed it down, I head back into the room to get the step stool in the corner of my room.

  “Let me,” Dalton offers, cutting in front of me to stand in the middle of my oversized closet. “Which one?”

  I point to the second box to the left, thankful that he reaches for it and hands it directly over. His efficiency keeps me from staring at the sliver of golden skin that’s revealed when he reaches up.

  My hands shake as I take it from him, but I don’t know if it’s because I’m fixing to attempt to trust him with my secrets or if it’s because of the scent of his cologne and the warmth of his body with our proximity invade my senses.

  I exit the closet as fast as I can and go to stand on the far side of my bed.

  “What’s in there?” Dalton asks as he closes my closet door. “It’s not a weapon of some kind, is it?”

  I huff. “Do you know how hard it would be to get blood out of my carpet? I’d never be able to hide it from my parents.”

  I cringe with the words, remembering all the blood covering his ashen face as he was carried past me and put in the ambulance.

  “You sound like you’ve spent some time planning my death.” He chuckles, but his statement hits a little too close to home.

  “You’re not worth the prison time,” I mumble.

  “Notebooks?” he asks, not bothering to hide the disappointment in his voice when I pull open the top of the box.

  I chose the box that has my journals in it from the end of sixth grade through the summer before high school. This box doesn’t contain the most horrific things that have happened to me, but it will give him some idea of why I can’t do what he’s asking. I can’t forgive him for the things that will leave lasting scars on my soul.

  “I want you to read these,” I tell him as I pull a stack of journals from the box and offer them to him.

  “Read?” He shakes his head. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s in them.”

  The manipulative smirk on his face as he barters is all too familiar.

  “Never mind,” I hiss and shove them back in the box.

  “What?”

  “You want to ask things of me that I can’t give you, but you don’t even want to take the time to understand why. It seems like the same old Dalton to me.”

  “Wait.” He places his hand on top of mine, preventing me from folding the box flaps down. “I only asked you to explain them because my head kills me from the accident. Reading is one of the main triggers.”

  I know he’s telling the truth because it was the same for me the first couple of weeks. I can only imagine how bad his head hurts, considering how extensive his injuries were.

  “No big deal.” I shrug my shoulder as I jerk my hand out from under his. The contact is too much. His fingers are too warm, not cold and calculating like I always imagined they would be.

  Tell me you’re mine.

  I step away as the memory from the other night in my hallway hits me full force. I don’t need to think of his masculine scent or how perfect he felt against me in the hallway. Those things will only lead to more trouble. Trusting him or even believing that he has changed will only make things ten times worse when he reverts right back to the old Dalton.

  “I’ll read them. It may take me a century to get through them, though.”

  Against my better judgment, I pull a stack of journals from the box and hand them over.

  “Now, please leave.”

  Instead of arguing, Dalton turns around and walks out of my room. I don’t breathe easily until the sound of the front door closing echoes through my house.

  Chapter 13

  Dalton

  “This is great,” I lie as I shovel another bite of dry chicken into my mouth.

  Mom smiles at the compliment, but Peyton snorts. I cut my eyes to hers, but all of her attention is focused on moving her food around on her plate. She hasn’t eaten much, and I can tell by Preston’s lack of enthusiasm from being pulled away from his video games that family dinner time isn’t part of the norm for us.

  Do my parents think that changing things up will make me remember faster? I want to open my mouth and remind them that the doctors told me to get back to my normal life, but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

  “Is it okay if I have a few friends over to swim in the pool on Friday?”

  My dad nearly chokes, and I don’t know if it’s because he doesn’t like the idea or if the dry chicken got lodged. Peyton raises her eyes to glare at me, but I keep my eyes on the head of the table. When Dad takes a sip of wine, attempting to get rid of the stuck food, his eyes dart to my mom.

  “Friends?” Mom asks cautiously. “Do you remember the kids from school?”

  Sadness fills her eyes, and I know she thinks that I remember them when I haven’t shown any signs of remembering my family.

  “No,” I answer honestly, “but Kyle suggested it when I saw him earlier this week. I’m hoping it will trigger something.”

  “I don’t like that boy,” Dad grumbles.

  “He mentioned a party Saturday night, but I figured staying close to home would be a better idea, considering what happened the last time I went to a party.”

  It’s a low blow, and I’m well aware of the manipulation, but I’m a teenager after all, and using everything I have in my arsenal to get my way is just second nature.

  “You’re no longer allowed to go to parties,” Mom says, but her tone suggests that she’s gearing up to argue over laying down this rule.

  I feel Peyton’s eyes burning a hole in the side of my head, and even Preston seems tense like he’s waiting for me to lose my shit. I don’t. The thought doesn’t even cross my mind. The last thing I want to do is go to a party. Not counting the fact that I’m certain I don’t even like the people who call themselves my friends, I don’t relish the idea of being away from home. Here, Piper is next door, and I know I’m safe.

  “It’s just a couple of friends. I’ll make sure to clean up after,” I barter.

  “Just a couple of friends,” Dad agrees. “But no alcohol.”

  “Of course not,” I agree.

  Dinner is even more tense after my parents agree to let me host a few friends, but they don’t take back the offer. To make things easier to accept, I help Mom with the dishes and carry on a conversation with my dad about the car. I haven’t seen the wreckage, but he seems to think that the body will be salvageable. I don’t bother to tell him that I have no interest in the car.

  After finishing up in the kitchen, I stop by Preston’s room with the hopes that we can play a few video games, but when I poke my head in his room, he’s enthralled with his own game and chatting with someone on his headset. I leave him to it and go to my own room.

  I pull the stashed journals from under my pillow and resign myself to reading about all the terrible things I did to Piper Schofield. I know that the only reason she gave these to me was that she wants to cement her reasoning for being unable to forgive me, but I see it as an opportunity to get to know her better and for a way to see how bad I was, so I know to never do those things again.

  The inside cover of the first journal I pick up lets me know that it’s from the summer before she began sixth grade. There are hearts and sketched flowers adorning the front page and the name Dillon written over and over.

  I don’t know if I’m friends with this Dillon guy, but I already hate him. The first entry describes in nauseating detail her trip to the park with this jerk. Although mostly benign to my teenage standards, it’s clear that she really likes this guy. He pushed her on the swi
ng and held her hand while they walked up the block to get ice cream. She had about a million hearts on the page when she wrote about him kissing her on the cheek when he walked her home.

  My head is throbbing by the time I make it through the first journal, nauseated by the number of times she mentioned this boy. Not once was my name mentioned, and I can’t help but feel like I wasted the last hour reading about her young love.

  “What are those?” Accusation fills Peyton’s tone when she steps inside my room, finding me with a scowl on my face and Piper’s journal clutched in my hands.

  “Piper’s journals,” I answer before tossing the one I was reading onto the pile with the others.

  “You stole her journals?”

  “I didn’t steal them. She gave them to me to read.”

  “Fat chance. Why would you take her things? How did you even get them?” She continues to glare at me. “Did you break into her house? You were an asshole before, but I’m sure you were never a criminal!”

  “She gave them to me to read,” I repeat. “I wouldn’t steal her things.”

  Even as the words leave my mouth, I wonder if they’re completely true. I don’t think they are. If there was something I could take of hers that would give me some insight on how to make her hate me less, I think I’d take that chance.

  “Seriously,” I tell her when she continues to glare at me.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Probably to get her point across about how awful I’ve been to her.” I look down at the journals. “Will you read them to me?”

  “No way,” she answers immediately. “I already know how big of a jerk you were.”

  “Please?” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “My head is killing me.”

  She watches me for a long moment before sighing and holding her hand out for one of the journals. When she takes it and sits across the room, I stand and close the bedroom door.

  “I don’t want Mom and Dad hearing this shit,” I explain when she gives me a quizzical look.

  “Believe me, they know you’re an asshole.”

  “Was,” I remind her. “They know I was horrible to Piper?”

  Wow, that only makes what I’ve done worse. How do they sit at the dinner table with the Schofields with smiles on their faces knowing that I tortured Piper on a daily basis?

  “I don’t think they know you were mean to her. I don’t think Piper has said anything to her parents either.”

  “That’s a relief,” I mutter.

  “Yeah, isn’t it awesome that the girl has been suffering in silence?”

  Derision fills my sister’s voice, but I guess I deserve it.

  “Can you just read?”

  She sighs before flipping open the cover. “Wow. These are really old.”

  “Sixth grade,” I tell her.

  “The first day of school was worse than I could’ve imagined,” she begins. “Even though I was wearing the same style clothes as the other girls—”

  “Maybe just summarize?” I tell her. It’ll take forever if she reads these damn things word for word. I need to get to the bottom of my assholery quicker than this.

  “Fine,” Peyton huffs as her eyes start scanning the page.

  “Bronwyn is the meanest girl she’s ever met. They made fun of her in the bathroom. Kyle tripped her in the cafeteria.”

  Peyton flips through the journal quickly.

  “Does it mention a guy named Dillon?”

  Her eyes meet mine for a brief moment before she refocuses on the journal.

  “It looks like his dad got a new job, and they moved to Oregon in November of that year. Her parents wouldn’t let her go trick or treating that Halloween.” She continues to flip the pages. “Her and Dillon dressed up as Raggedy Anne and Andy and stayed at her house and watched movies. Oh, shit!”

  “What?” I lean closer on my bed.

  “Her house got egged that night. It says,” she flips the page, and then another, “she didn’t know it was you and the other guys in class until she went back to school on Monday, and everyone was talking about it. Smug is the term she used to describe you when you confessed to it.”

  “That doesn’t seem so bad. Just a stupid prank kids play.”

  “Wait—” She holds up her finger to silence me. “This is worse than I thought it was. Remember, I told you about making fun of her when she started her period?”

  I nod, but she doesn’t see me because her nose is still in the journal.

  “Apparently, it happened during a field trip. No,” she gasps as her eyes snap up to mine. “You didn’t. Please tell me, you didn’t?”

  “I wouldn’t remember if I did,” I remind her. “What does it say?”

  “You stuck pads to her back. She didn’t notice them until the teacher pulled her aside when your class got back to school.”

  I scrunch my nose. “That’s disgusting.”

  “I don’t think they were used, but that’s still a complete asshole thing to do.”

  “How did she know it was me? If she didn’t notice them until the teacher pointed it out, it could’ve easily been anyone else.”

  “Don’t you get it, Dalton? Everything everyone did to her was because you either told them to or because you treated her so poorly; they did it to impress you.”

  “What else does it say?”

  “I almost don’t want to keep reading. It’s awful. I’d be suicidal if even half this shit happened to me.”

  Her words hit me like a knife in the gut. The man I am now would be devastated if something happened to Piper because of me. The guilt of her getting hurt in the crash already weighs me down, but I wonder how the old Dalton would feel if he had pushed her to the point of hurting herself.

  From what I’ve been told and what Peyton is reading in the journals, I’m not so sure he’d even care.

  Chapter 14

  Piper

  I don’t know if Dalton read the journals and realized that what he’s asked of me is impossible or what, but he didn’t show his face once on Thursday. It didn’t keep me from expecting him to pop up out of nowhere and insist, once again, on my forgiveness.

  Today is going to be different, however.

  Peyton dropped the bomb that Dalton was having a few friends over. The information came as more of a warning, letting me know that Kyle was in charge of the invites, and that meant that the worst of the group would be in attendance.

  Dalton must not remember a damn thing because I can’t see him remembering what happened between Kyle, Vaughn, and Bronwyn and being okay with letting them come over to his house.

  “I could kill him,” Peyton murmurs as her pencil eraser flies over the problem she was working on. “I can’t concentrate on a damn thing with all of that noise.”

  I cross the room to the far window and glance down at the source of her irritation. The first couple of hours this morning, it was peaceful. Now that the pool is full of teenagers splashing around, they’re reaching epic levels of irritation.

  From the looks of it, there are more than just a couple of people down there. Every guy from Dalton’s group of friends is in attendance. Even Vaughn is splashing water in the face of a sophomore girl. The sight of him makes me want to spit nails, but he’s not the only person that makes my blood boil.

  Bronwyn is sitting so close to Dalton that she’s practically on his lap. Even without his memories, he’s gravitating right back to the same situations he’d be in if the accident never happened.

  There’s more skin on display than I’ve ever seen, all of the beauties from my class wearing the tiniest bikinis. The guys are all shirtless, muscles for days shining golden in the sun. They’re all beautiful, goldens gods, and every one of them has the blackest hearts.

  “It’s like a party at Hugh Hefner’s grotto,” I mumble as I turn away from the window.

  “Who?”

  I shake my head instead of answering her. She may be almost fourteen, but I’m not explaining porno magazines to this gi
rl.

  “Wanna go down?” Peyton asks as I plop down on the bed beside her. “It’s not like I can concentrate with all the racket.”

  “Not a chance in hell,” I answer honestly.

  “It’s almost lunchtime,” she reminds me.

  “Can’t Preston make his own lunch for a change?” I argue, but then feel bad. Even though I’m not keeping the extra money for keeping an eye on him, his parents are still paying me to do just that.

  “If we left him alone, he wouldn’t eat. I don’t know how his eyes aren’t crossed at the end of the day after playing that damn game for sixteen hours straight.”

  “His fingers are going to curl up with arthritis,” I add.

  She laughs, but instead of staying to work out a few more problems, she closes her book and heads to her bedroom door.

  “Come on, maybe we can make lunch without being interrupted by the idiots in the pool.”

  I follow her out of the room, stopping by Preston’s room to ask what he wants for lunch.

  “You make the best grilled cheese,” he tells me with a smile.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere. Keep it up, kid.” I wink at him before heading down the stairs.

  Peyton is already in the kitchen, standing in the open door of the fridge.

  “What did he decide on?” she asks as she pulls a container of yogurt from the shelf.

  “Grilled cheese.”

  She busies herself, getting out what I need for sandwiches while I grab the skillet from the cabinet.

  “I think he only likes it because he can eat them one-handed,” Peyton says with a grin as she grabs a butter knife.

  “False. He said I make the best grilled cheese sandwiches he’s ever tasted.”

  She snorts. “And he told Mom yesterday that no one makes chocolate milk better than her. He insisted that her milk to chocolate syrup ratio was out of this world.”

  “So, he’s manipulative?”

  “Yep. Dad was getting on to him about playing so much on his video games, but Preston interrupted him to ask if he’d been working out, telling him that his arms seem more muscular than usual.”