Tempting the Bully: The High School Bully Collection

by Bella King

  “Stop,” I said, my eyes welling up with tears. I couldn’t control the flow. Years of pain were leaking out of me, and there was no off switch.

  “Your mother is the reason why my dad drinks now. Did you know that? He can barely keep this company together, and now you’re here to finish destroying my family. You want to finish what your mom started, don’t you?” Atlas yelled, reaching peak anger levels.

  I had never seen him in such a rage. I could tell this had gotten very personal, and I wasn’t in a state to argue back. I was crying uncontrollably, in big ugly sobs, mascara burning my eyes as it smeared on my face.

  “Crying about it won’t make me hate you any less, Virginia,” Atlas said coldly, taking a step back.

  I wiped my eyes and nose onto his jacket, sniffling and sobbing pathetically. I couldn’t even respond to him. I was wrecked by what he had told me. All I wanted to do was to curl myself up in a ball and die.

  Atlas stood there in front of me for a minute, listening to my crying. He didn’t attempt to say anything more, but he also didn’t leave. He just stood watching me.

  I lifted my head once my tears began to slow down. There was only so much a girl could cry. I had been through the loss of my mother once before, but the new pain was bringing those days back to me, just when I felt things were getting better. “Why are you still here?” I asked Atlas.

  He pursed his lips in an attempt at a smile. “You freaked out on me. I wasn’t done.”

  “I think you are done,” I said, my eyes blurred from the tears.

  “So that’s it? I tell you all of this about how your family is ruining my life and you just want to cry about it? What are you going to do?” Atlas said, looking desperate.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said, anger returning to my voice. “Nobody can change the past.”

  Atlas grimaced at my words, like it hurt to hear the truth. It probably did. I imagine he had been pouring all his resentment toward my mother into me, and now he was realizing that none of this could be pegged on me. The woman who had killed his mother was dead too. There was nobody left to blame.

  He was defeated, and I could tell he had nothing left to say to me. He wanted to vent his frustrations, to take this all out on me, but he couldn’t. I was innocent. He balled up his fists and stormed out of the room, leaving me shaken, confused, and upset. My father had a lot of explaining to do.

  Chapter 16

  The truth is often somewhere in between.

  The mood I returned home in was a far cry from the previous day. As usual, my father was in the kitchen, poking his head out the minute I stepped inside the house.

  “Whoa, what happened? Is everything okay?” He said, rushing up to me when he saw the mascara smeared across my face.

  “I need to talk to you about mom,” I said.

  “Mom? What happened?” My father asked, his voice getting shrill at the mention of her.

  I sighed and walked into the kitchen, sitting down at the table. My father followed me in like a duckling chasing after it’s parents.

  “I was talking to Atlas today,” I said.

  My father nodded, his eyes wide and eager for me to continue.

  “He told me that the person mom hit was his mother. Is that true?” I asked, searching his face for any hint of the answer.

  His expression dropped. “I didn’t think that was important to tell you. We didn’t even live here when it happened.”

  “Then why the hell are we living here now? You wanted to move to the town where mom killed someone?” I asked, my voice climbing louder with every word.

  “Calm down,” my father said. “It’s more complicated than that. I was offered a job here and I was aware that the Montgomery family lived in Granite Hills. I met with Mr. Montgomery. I wanted to make amends.”

  “That’s stupid. Why would you do that?” I asked.

  My father frowned. “Watch your tone with me. I did what I felt was best for us. Mr. Montgomery is a good man. He was happy to see me and to talk about the tragedy. I think it helped him to see that he wasn’t the only one hurting from the accident.”

  “Some accident,” I grumbled. “Atlas told me that mom was drunk.”

  “She wasn’t,” my father barked, his shoulders curling inward as though to defend from a physical blow. I knew he was lying.

  “She was drinking, dad,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me.”

  My father shook his head. “Atlas told you that nonsense? She had alcohol in her system, but not enough for it to be pegged as a drunken accident. The road conditions were to blame.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, hoping that what he said was the truth.

  “I promise. The authorities found it to be an accident.”

  “Do you think it would have happened had she not been drinking?” I challenged.

  “I don’t know, Virginia. I don’t know,” my father replied. “I wouldn’t blame anything on her. We don’t know enough about the crash.”

  I felt a little better from his words, but I was still shocked by all this. I was angry at my father for not telling me the truth, but I understood why he hadn’t. Knowing about it wouldn’t have helped me at all, and I would have refused to move to Granite Hills.

  Now that I was here, I just needed to finish one more year, and I was almost finished anyway. Finding out now wasn’t enough to change my mind about what I needed to do. I would still be getting a scholarship, but right now, continuing to work for Mr. Montgomery’s company seemed impossible.

  I knew I would have to suck it up and go back tomorrow, but I genuinely wondered if Atlas was going to allow for that. Would he leave me alone after this, or would he continue to try to drive me out. Maybe he would take me staying at work as a personal attack. Before, I didn’t know about his family, but now that I did, working there seemed insulting.

  He knew that I was paying for school with that money now, though. Maybe he would have mercy on me. That wasn’t the only reason why he might ease up. He also seemed to have developed a physical attraction to me, and that weirded me out more than any of this had.

  The fucked up thing was that I also was starting to be attracted to him. I was still wearing his jacket as I discussed my mother at the dinner table. I found comfort in the way he smelled and the power he had. Maybe all of this stemmed from his defense of me in the locker room when Jared had tried to attack me.

  My father looked at me with such intensity that I grew concerned his head was going to explode. I looked up at him. “Did you make dinner?” I asked, slicing through the tension that hung in the room like thick smog on a rainy London morning.

  “I did,” he said. “Your favorite.”

  “Are you going to give me some?” I asked when he didn’t move.

  “Right,” he replied, moving away toward the stove. “I’m sorry I never told you all of this,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Not the best time for me to be finding this out, but okay. It’s fine,” I said, wanting to be done with this conversation.

  My father came back with s heaping bowl of fried rice and placed it down on the oak wood in front of me. “I hope you still have an appetite.”

  “A bit,” I said.

  “Good.”

  Chapter 17

  Life is difficult. That never changes.

  I had a lot of information to process, but I surprised myself with how quickly I was able to turn the pain around and stomach it. I had been through this before. It wasn’t like my mother had died twice. I only had to mourn her one time. The new information changed very little.

  My head was pounding by the time I got cleaned up and was ready for bed. Crying always gave me a headache. I didn’t have any pain medication left in my bathroom, so I had to run to the store in the night to get some. The only problem was that my father didn’t like me leaving the house at night.

  That didn’t stop me from defying him. I was an adult, and I didn’t let anyone tell me how to live my life. It was no longer his call
if I was out late or not. So, I waited until the light in his room went off, then I climbed out of my window and snuck off to the store in my black hoodie and pajama pants.

  It was a quarter past midnight when I finally arrived. The nearest 24-hour shop was a big grocery store down the road. It took me twenty minutes to get there, but I wasn’t going to sleep very well when my head was pounding. I walked through the crisp night air quickly, breezing through the automatic doors into the bright lights of the store.

  There weren’t very many people there. Granite Hills was like a ghost town after midnight, with the only nightlife happening on Friday night. Saturday was considerably less busy, and Sunday through Thursday was completely dead.

  I rushed to the pharmaceutical section, my sneakers squeaking on the freshly polished floor. The store was in pristine condition like everywhere else in Granite Hills. There was something about that which bothered me. Not everything should be so clinical. It was like I was in a hospital.

  The hospital would have been a fitting place for someone in my condition, teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown with a head-splitting headache to top it off.

  I snatched a box of off-brand painkillers from the shelf and headed back toward the front of the store to check out and return home. I pulled a bottle of water from one of the aisles as I went down it. I intended to take these the minute I got outside.

  I was almost to the register when I saw Jared enter the store, wearing dark clothes and a leather jacket. He looked like he was up to no good, so I held back to watch him. I hid next to a shelf of diapers, knowing he probably wouldn’t be coming down this way.

  He moved in an odd way, limping around like he was still in pain from the beating Atlas had administered earlier that week. I guess he got pummeled really hard, but I was curious to know what he was doing in the store this late at night when he should have been home to rest. I didn’t think he was in any condition to go out partying.

  I only had to wait a moment for him to return to the front of the store. He had a few things in his hands. One of them was a hammer, and the other looked like a rope. Home improvement? Unlikely. It honestly looked like he was doing something he shouldn’t be with the way his face was hung low, like he was trying to hide it.

  Jared was an idiot, so if he was doing something illegal, buying the instruments of his crime in a store with this many cameras was a sure-fire way to get caught. But that was just it. Jared was not right in his head after we broke up, and he only seemed to be getting worse. I wondered if his parents knew what he was doing.

  Whatever it was, I was concerned enough to be watching him. Once he checked out and left the store, it dawned on me that he had just been bullied out of the school by Atlas, and he might be enacting some kind of morbid revenge.

  It may have been an unlikely event, but my gut was telling me to protect Atlas, even if it meant following Jared. I looked at the water and medicine in my hands and said fuck it. I ripped open the box and popped a few pills in my mouth, washing them down with an unpaid-for bottle of water. I left both of them on the floor of the diaper aisle and walked out of the store after Jared.

  I hoped that he didn’t come here in a car. There weren’t many in the parking lot when I got outside, and taking a quick peek left and right gave me all the information I needed to know. Jared was heading down the street back toward the residential area.

  Granite Hills was neatly arranged into shopping, work, and residential areas. Everyone who went to the local high school live close by. The University was actually in an entirely different town because it was built much more recently than everything else. There wasn’t room for it in Granite Hills.

  Jared was heading in the same direction that I needed to go, so I technically wasn’t following him until we got closer to my home. I would wait to see if he veered off toward the Montgomery residence before deciding to follow him. If he went somewhere else, then there was no need for me to be concerned.

  I trailed behind him a few hundred feet. The street was one straight path home, so I could see him from a long distance. I hung back with my hood pulled over my head, hoping that he wouldn’t recognize me by my walk. I wanted to look like another stranger in the night.

  The crickets chirped in the night air, having finally come out from their winter break. I wondered where they all went when it got cold. Did they hide underground and sleep, or were they all dead by them, eggs laid to hatch in the spring?

  Nature was a beautiful thing, and I didn’t forget that in the midst of all the trauma in my life. My mother had taught me the importance of having a connection with the natural world. Sometimes I felt like I could hear her voice in the wind when it blew late into the night. I used to wake up to it, thinking she was in my room.

  Now, all I had was the memories. Even the sound of her voice had faded from the wind. I only heard it occasionally, and I was scared to let it go. I knew it was my imagination, but part of me wanted to believe she was still out there, floating through the air and helping to guide me. I liked to think she would be proud of how strong of a woman I had become.

  My headache had quickly faded into a dull throb in the center of my head, something I could deal with now. I assumed it would be completely gone within the next fifteen minutes, but I would be alright even if it wasn’t. I had dealt with a lot of headaches in the past.

  Jared was already in the residential section of the neighborhood, but we hadn’t needed to part ways yet. He was heading along the same road that I usually took home. Another fifty feet and he would arrive at the intersection to go to Atlas’s house. I watched him, holding back for a moment to see what he did.

  To my surprise, he kept going straight. He wasn’t going to Atlas’s house, and I knew he lived to the left on that intersection, so where was he going? I frowned, quickening my pace as I realized that Jared could be heading toward my house. I got a sick feeling in my stomach seeing the hammer and rope in his hands. What the fuck was he trying to do?

  Chapter 18

  Luck plays a larger part in our lives than we care to think.

  If Atlas had never told me the truth about my mother at work, I probably wouldn’t have lived through that night. Once again, he had saved me from Jared, but he didn’t even know it this time. Jared went straight for my house, and when he was close enough for me to confirm his intentions, I called the police.

  I watched in horror from the neighbor’s yard as Jared circled my house, searching for the ideal entrance. My phone rang twice before a woman at the police station picked up.

  “911, what’s your emergency?”

  “Hello, I’m calling about a guy from my school, Jared Bradly, who is trying to break into my house right now.”

  “Alright, and what is your name?”

  “Virginia,” I blurted into my phone. God, enough with these stupid questions. I wanted someone here right now to stop Jared before he killed my dad.

  I blurted out the details of who I was and where I was located, giving more information than I really felt was necessary. The woman on the phone told me that someone was one their way, and that I should stay on the line with her instead of going to the house.

  I couldn’t listen to her though. I saw Jared use the hammer to smash open a window on the side of the house and decided to intervene. I hoped the police would be here in time to stop him. If they weren’t, both my father and I could very well be dead.

  I dashed toward the house, through the wet grass covered in nightly dew, and jumped up onto the porch. I banged on the window, hoping to distract Jared from what he was doing. Maybe he would run if he thought someone had spotted him.

  I yelled as I banged on the window, hoping to wake my father and some of the neighbors so that we could catch Jared before he did anything violent. I looked through the porch window to see if anything was going on inside, cupping my hand over the glass and peering in.

  The deafening crash of glass pierced my eardrums as a hammer came crashing through it right next to my he
ad. It flew past me, sending a thousand shards of glass exploding out toward my body. I put my arm over my face to block the glass, stumbling backward instinctively.

  Jared had thrown his hammer at me and was now running straight toward me. I leaped to the side as he swooped through the broken window, knocking the dangling glass from the top of the frame. He didn’t attempt to confront me, instead, he booked it through the lawn as blue lights flashed down the street.

  A siren erupted into the night air, squealing down the quiet road as Jared attempted to make an escape. The police car radioed out to him, demanding that he stop, but he didn’t. He tried to take a turn into the neighbor’s yard but was met with a fence.

  I stopped watching after that, rushing into the house to check on my father. He was already barreling down the stairs, wearing a robe, his face white with fright. “What the hell?” He exclaimed.

  “Jared broke into the house,” I shrieked, pointing outside to the flashing lights of the cop car now parking in the neighbor’s lawn.

  My father rushed outside, and I trailed behind him, hiding behind his large frame and peeking out into the cool night air.

  Jared was already in handcuffs, pinned to the ground, and an officer was jogging toward us with his hand on the gun in its holster. “Stay right there,” he demanded, and my father and I froze.

  Chapter 19

  The people you see every day are the ones who define who you are.

  “Atlas.” My voice rang out louder than I had intended it to, bouncing down the hallway until it reached Atlas’s eardrums.

  He swiveled around immediately at the sound of his name, his eyes wide and his posture aggressive. When he saw me, he relaxed, stopping in the hallway and waiting for me to come to him.

  I shrunk a bit as I walked to him. I was always intimidated by Atlas, even though I had no reason to be now. This was a casual setting, so why was my stomach in knots all over again like it was when he ripped my shirt open and exposed my breasts to him?