The Big Boys' League: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 3)

by Tiffany Sala

“I bet you got him to let you look at my marks too, you sadistic demon, so you must know I’m not that stupid.”

  He gave me an eyebrow-shrug. “The thing you should be worrying about right now is whether anyone else will ever get a chance to look at your marks again.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Axel didn’t answer immediately. He just kept walking, forcing me to keep pace alongside him. I had plenty of time to look around and catch curious stares from people I knew all over the place. I was going to have a lot of questions to answer, and the thing was I didn’t think I’d have any answers to give.

  Finally he cleared his throat. “You might be disappointed to hear the board that handles who gets to say they’ve graduated high school in our state has not been doing a very good job of managing security on their databases. Specifically, they don’t have offsite backups at all. Everything is on the one machine… and that’s a bit awkward when that particular machine isn’t well-secured. Someone’s entire academic history could go missing in a crisis.”

  I stopped walking, but he didn’t, so I had to start moving again to keep up with him. I needed to talk fast on this one, anyway. “Are you seriously threatening to make my results disappear entirely? That’s not going to work, I’ve got records of those results, and I’m sure Burgundy has their own database they’ve been keeping track in.”

  His smile didn’t even wobble, which told me he’d predicted this response. “It’s true, even I can’t wave my hand and magically erase you from time. But I can waste your time… rather a lot of it. I wouldn’t expect the same organisation that can’t even secure their critically important system to be quick about re-integrating your data. Is time really something you have to waste at this point in your life?”

  “I can tell you’ve got a point to make here.”

  “Your bank account isn’t looking healthy at the moment, Aileen,” said Axel. “Which would be fine, but nor is your father’s, and the mortgage payments keep on coming out. You need to graduate without incident and move on to something better before there’s a major crisis.”

  Matt had been holding out on me. He’d been looking at my bank statements? Dad’s bank statements? Matt was probably hoping that didn’t get spotted at all.

  “In case you’re wondering,” Axel added, “I have a family friend associated with the bank who was more than happy to look into a few little things for me.”

  “That’s so illegal, and I am going to make a complaint with my bank—”

  “And tell them what? There’s absolutely no evidence that anything happened, as I’m sure you know. Even if there was, a bank is not going to be interested in your cute little complaint. They don’t get that much money out of you as a customer, why should they even take your call?”

  “Oh yes, very silly of me to think that any organisation should treat all of its clients equally in terms of complaints, whether they represent a big or small account.”

  I nearly tripped when Axel clapped me on the shoulder. “It’s okay, we all make these errors in judgement once in a while. What matters is that you can turn this situation around very quickly, if you need to.”

  “By letting you have access to my dad to bully him into handing over his invention to you.”

  He made me stumble with a friendly shoulder bump this time. “You learn fast. Now my availability is usually low, but I’m going to make an exception in this situation and try to work around your father’s schedule. Not that I’m aware of many responsibilities in his life.”

  I had come to negotiate for Matt’s reputation, but I was seeing that I had nothing to offer Axel he would value. My only leverage at this point was to not let him think he could overwhelm me so easily. “You can see him in hell, Axel,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “You really aren’t getting this, Aileen. If hell is the only place I can negotiate this deal from, then I’m quite happy to drag you both there. You should give me your attention while you have a chance.”

  When a laugh burst from me, he was startled, then annoyed. “This isn’t a joke in any sense, Aileen.”

  Well of course he was the one who really didn’t get it. I’d been living in a kind of hell basically all my life, as long as I could remember. It wasn’t like what some friends I knew had gone through, but there was no doubt about it: loving someone you couldn’t help to get his stuff together was a tortured experience. Having your digital identity screwed with by some entitled idiot didn’t really compare.

  If Axel thought he was going to bring me to my knees with these weak indirect threats, he was about to be disappointed. This was just one more setback in my life. “What’s going on between us has nothing to do with Matt. You should fix it… you need to fix it, or I am going to make sure you get messed up with all this dirt you’ve chucked at him.”

  The smile he shot me would have been cute if I hadn’t already realised he was an absolute creep. “It’s funny, I wouldn’t have thought either of you was the other’s type.”

  There was something about the way he said it that had me staring at him closely, trying to figure out if there was a hint behind it. Matt hadn’t told me how Axel figured out about his… thing. Did he also know about what I’d told Matt earlier? I felt fine with telling whoever I wanted, but it was different when someone else was taking this information without my permission.

  Well, if he did know the only thing I could do was go on as if I didn’t care. “It’s normal for people to want to stick up for one another in the midst of injustice, Axel.”

  He snorted. “You make it sound like you’re banding together against the CCP.”

  “If you can’t understand why people might want to look out for one another, I’m not going to be able to help you.”

  “Here’s what I’m going to do, Aileen,” said Axel, his tone all self-important like he really was conducting a business deal instead of annoying the crap out of me. I felt like I was in the middle of a visit with my poor grandma in her nursing home, stuck playing along with what she believed was reality now. The thing was, Axel was able to make almost everyone around him believe in his messed-up world. “I’ll make sure Matt gets off, since you seem so fond of him. A gesture of goodwill. This situation will go back to being between you and me.”

  I offered him a grudging, “Thank you,” even though I was fuming. He acted like he could just switch Matt’s guilt on and off at will. Probably he would call in on a favour from some other friend. Still, I supposed what really mattered was that I got Matt out of the line of fire.

  Axel veered closer to me, so his arm was rubbing against mine as we walked. “And now, it’s time for you to reciprocate with your own gesture of goodwill. Let me visit with your father.”

  I would have dearly loved to slap him, but I had a feeling actually ruffling his feathers would make him walk back on what we’d already achieved, and I didn’t want to have to tell Matt I’d screwed up his chances of getting out of this. “This is not a negotiation, Axel, this was always you putting right what you did wrong. My last offer is still my last offer.”

  Axel stepped sideways. I shivered when his warmth left my arm, then shivered again in a reaction to a feeling of fear I didn’t understand. “Then you will regret your refusal to negotiate in good faith.”

  “Isn’t it against the principles of good business to threaten someone like that?” But by the time I’d said it, he was gone.

  I kept walking a while longer in the same direction, until I paused at the sound of footsteps coming from behind. Callie was running after me.

  “Please,” she said, “even if you think I’m not going to believe you, tell me what’s going on.”

  I had no intention of being secretive, but now it came to it, I didn’t know what I would say.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” I said, “but I’m fairly sure things are about to get worse for me.”

  Chapter Six

  I didn’t trust Axel one bit, so I spent that evening scrounging up th
e printout that listed my year eleven exam results. Dad followed me from room to room until I located it in a pile of papers Dad must have gathered up from the kitchen table at some point and stacked on a nearby bookshelf.

  “You’d do better keeping track of where things are if you spent more time organising your paperwork,” Dad told me when I complained about him messing with my stuff. “There should be an empty drawer in the filing cabinet in my workshop. You’d better take the opportunity to bring some order to your life while I’m in a good mood.”

  Dad probably didn’t remember he’d offered me the use of that drawer several times before, because that would have indicated a certain degree of order in his own life. I decided now might be a good time to accept the drawer before it became filled with bits of broken robots or something else that would just add to our current state of chaos.

  I could smell something off in the little space under our main house even as I was coming down the stairs. Dad had a nerve going off at me when he kept his space like this. I had to wrestle with the little half-window to get it open an inch and claim the tiniest bit of ventilation. A quick search revealed a sandwich that had been sitting on its plate on a shelf long enough to have changed a few different colours. It was hardly distinctive in a clutter of completely uncategorised inventor’s tools and materials: some I recognised, some I didn’t. I would come back to pick that sandwich up when I didn’t have an armful of documents that might actually be important.

  On the way back up the stairs, I heard Dad saying his ‘polite goodbye’ to someone on his phone.

  “If you’ve got another girlfriend you really don’t have to wait until I leave the room, you know.”

  Dad turned to me with such unease in his face I almost thought I’d hit on something by mistake. Sandy had been a fixture for a year but I never really pictured her as his girlfriend. After Marcia, Dad had been making a quick retreat to the next whenever a woman seemed to be getting too serious. Sandy was not going to break the pattern in my view.

  “It was just a weird call,” he said. “Someone from the bank, saying there’d been a problem with my account?”

  This was much more worrying than the thought of my dad getting some action. “What, like fraud or…?”

  “They were a bit vague about it actually, I had to go through this big process to verify my identity and then they just said my balance looked normal and I shouldn’t worry and almost hung up on me.”

  Verifying his identity… which would mean he’d have to give them a whole bunch of details that would give them access to his account. “Dad, are you sure whoever you talked to was from the bank?”

  “Well who else would they be?”

  He sounded aggravated already. I wasn’t going to say this guy from my school who cares far too much about your patent. “People call and try to get your information so they can impersonate you and steal your money. You should call the bank and make sure they really were the ones who just called you.”

  “Aileen, you know I hate using phones. I’m not going to sit around on hold for two hours just so I can get some poor bank employee to tell me yeah, I just talked to some other poor bank employee.” He looked green already.

  I knew better than to think I could change his mind, and there didn’t seem to be any way I could impersonate him well enough to trick the bank. Maybe I was being too paranoid after all. Axel had his friends in the bank if he wanted to spy on us; why would he start directly calling?

  It annoyed me that he’d been so quickly able to turn me into a disoriented mess. I tried to force myself to be logical. If Axel was going to target my dad directly, he wouldn’t have bothered dealing with me at all. With his army of secret dirty contacts he almost certainly had the power to do his bullying for himself without my input… but for some reason he wanted me to broker the deal. Perhaps it was most favourable to him to avoid using his contacts for something like this.

  That didn’t make me feel better about the situation, but what was Axel going to do really? At the moment he was carrying this business on just out of sight of anyone with the authority to come down hard on him, but lots of other people knew. He could see now that threatening other people around me wasn’t going to make me cave. All I had to do was stand firm, and this would pass.

  I knew things had definitely not passed when I stepped onto the bus the next morning, and instead of the smattering of girls from my school saying hi and going back to talking about their plans for formal dresses (which apparently took one’s entire childhood to arrange), they stopped and stared up at me.

  “Hi,” I said for them, a gentle prompt for manners that seemed to shake them into acting mostly like normal. Ebony asked me how my previous evening had been, which got her a sharp look from Fiona. That was the little bit of abnormal that had me worried.

  I would have rather gotten this information from Tamara and Callie, but I really needed to know what I was walking into before I got to school. “Look, I can tell something is going on, so are you willing to let me in on the secret?”

  Fiona, Ebony, and Jen were wincing as they looked at one another. Finally, Jen pulled out her phone, fiddled on the screen for a while, and then turned it towards me, angled carefully so that the guys from the all-boys’ school sitting across the aisle wouldn’t be able to see.

  What she showed me was immediately familiar, but I couldn’t make sense of it in this situation. Was I seeing it wrong? Was this all a dream?

  “It’s been going around all the group chats last night,” said Fiona. “I’m surprised you haven’t already seen it.”

  I was part of several chats, but I didn’t pay attention to them every night. With my dad constantly obsessing over this or that technology, I preferred to keep myself at more of a distance. “Who did it come from?”

  It was a question I didn’t need to ask. The picture Jen was showing to me had been taken on my phone and I hadn’t sent it to anyone.

  Of course, nobody was going to believe that. It was the sort of picture that was taken to be sent to someone else. I knew I wasn’t naked, but my hands and the fall of my hair and the edges of the shot combined to make it look like I was in a more indecent state than a tank top and short shorts. That was the whole point. I’d wanted to take that picture to enjoy for myself, to make me feel sexy. It didn’t seem to me like there should be anything wrong with that whether or not I sent it to anyone, but I was clearly attracting a lot of interest and I had a feeling it would all turn to judgement if they knew there was no target.

  And I knew exactly who’d gotten that photo off me against my will, even if I didn’t have the first idea how. But I wondered what everyone else thought.

  What the girls were clearly thinking, shooting one another little looks, was that it was an unwise question for them to answer.

  “Tyrell, right?” said Jen finally. “He’s the one who dropped it first.”

  “No,” Ebony said, “it was Izzy for sure.”

  “Obviously we have no idea who you sent it to,” said Fiona, staring at me while she spoke firmly like she thought I deserved a telling-off for asking at all. “But that person seems to have spread it around quite a bit.”

  I wondered how much Callie was going to go off when she saw it. She and Tamara weren’t in any of these other chats, and I didn’t think I’d crossed paths with Steven or Lucas much either, even though they were probably in them all. I’d seen Axel post on occasion I thought, mostly all I remembered was wall-of-text diatribes on things I didn’t understand. Of course, there was going to be very little evidence that Axel had anything to do with this at all. Certainly not enough to actually get him investigated.

  Being twisted to face the other girls while the bus was moving was suddenly making me queasy. I turned around in my seat.

  “It’s no big deal you know,” said Fiona, “sending something like that I mean. It sucks that they didn’t keep it private but,” she shrugged, “you live and learn. It could be worse.”

  It was worse
than she realised, but I couldn’t go accusing Axel of this without at least getting confirmation from him. For all I knew, his plan was to lure me into so many inappropriate accusations I was completely discredited.

  “Well the person responsible is going to get some words from me,” I said without turning around again. I sort of liked the approving murmur at my back.

  I didn’t get a chance to confront Axel once I got to school. Mrs. Hitchens was waiting for me at the gate to bundle me off into her office, where she already had our guidance staff member Ms. Miller with a very worn-down coffee.

  I had a grudge against Ms. Miller because she’d dragged my dad in last year in our first few weeks at Burgundy and made this huge deal of my ‘home situation’, asking all these weird intrusive questions about Marcia and my brothers, whether I had a strong female influence in my life. Dad thought it was the funniest thing and wouldn’t stop bringing it up. Tamara had a run-in or two with her recently too. I thought she was getting in a bit of a frenzy in anticipation of all the bad decisions and heartbreak ahead over the exam period and then the night of the formal, which seemed to be getting under my skin as well even though I was actually pretty eager to go and have a nice lowkey time, even if my date was just a classmate keen to have photos with someone on the night.

  I did not want these two to get me on the back foot. “So… what’s this about?”

  “Are you aware there is a rather… inappropriate image of you circulating at the moment, Aileen?” Mrs. Hitchens looked as grave as if there were actually some scandalous parts of me on show in that image. There were going to be dresses at our formal that exposed more flesh.

  “I was informed this morning, yes.”

  Ms. Miller jumped in. “We’re not here to judge the fact of that photo existing, or that it might have been shared with others.” Mrs. Hitchens looked like she might have wanted to do that, but she held her tongue. “It does however seem like a breach of your confidence has occurred, and for that reason we want to put the resources of the College at your disposal. If there is anything we can do in terms of addressing the breach, or providing emotional support, or practically helping you to cope with what might be a very difficult few days until some new scandal rocks the school…”