Shithead One laughed. I was bleeding from my mouth. My jaw was numb, but I felt something hot trickling down my chin.
“And to talk back to your headmaster like that . . . where were you raised? The jungle?”
He kicked me in the gut, and when I folded in two, he kicked my face repeatedly, holding my shoulders to keep me from falling. There was a lot of thrashing after that, but I was only half-conscious at this point. My eyelids were too heavy to keep open, and the noises around me became muffled. Like I was at the bottom of the ocean. I didn’t know how much time had passed. Maybe it was a few minutes. Maybe an hour. But at some point, there was screaming and punching around me—people were hitting one another, not just me—and then there were two pairs of hands dragging me away from the kitchen, their owners barking at one another. I recognized Arsène’s voice first. It remained calm throughout. Chillingly so. Riggs, however, wanted to go back there and hand them their asses.
“You already broke that dude’s nose,” Arsène said, groaning with effort as they dragged me up the stairway to my room. I kept my eyes closed, too ashamed to open them. I didn’t want to answer any questions.
“That asshole looked like a stomped possum to begin with. I want to inflict permanent damage,” Riggs complained, tugging me as they got to my floor and rounded the carpeted hallway to my dorm room.
“The most permanent damage that kid will suffer is having the intelligence of a goddamn Froyo, and that has nothing to do with you. Let it go. They’re chummy with Plath.”
“We should strike Plath too,” Riggs said, giving my door a roundhouse kick. They dumped me on my bed. I cracked one eye open and spotted Riggs hauling his shirt off by the collar, discarding it in my sink, and letting it soak in cold water.
Arsène plopped down beside me, forcing some water between my cracked lips. “No. This Conrad guy has him in his pocket. We’ll have to keep a better eye on Nicky.”
Riggs squeezed his shirt, unbuttoned my uniform, and began pressing his balled wet shirt as a compress against my hot, bruised skin. I groaned in pain, but it felt good.
“Aw, look. The princess is up,” Riggs cooed. “You okay there, sweetie?”
“Eat shit, Riggs.”
Riggs laughed. “He’s okay. Hey, how about I get us some burgers? I can drive downtown.”
I shook my head frantically. “You might get caught.”
Riggs had graduated from exploding random things and causing small fires to stealing the staff’s cars and sneaking into town. He didn’t have a driver’s license. That didn’t put a damper on his big plans.
“Good.” Riggs patted my knee, while Arsène wrote a list of all the things he needed to bring back. Extra-garlic fries among them, no doubt. “That way I’ll get kitchen duty and you won’t. Or better yet—we’ll do it together. The big, fat, dysfunctional happy family that we are.”
“You can’t do that,” I mumbled, too tired to argue.
“We can and we will.” Arsène pushed me back down on the bed. “And you better fucking reciprocate when it’s our turn to fuck up.”
The next day, Arsène got caught buying weed he had no intention of smoking from one of the seniors, while Riggs brought an actual mountain lion he’d somehow managed to get a leash on and declared his new pet. Both my best friends got three weeks of kitchen and laundry duty.
After that day, Riggs and Arsène made sure I would never do a kitchen shift all by myself again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ARYA
Present
I decided to attend the trial during the days and catch up on my work during the evenings. It wasn’t ideal. Then again, nothing about my situation was.
Christian Miller wasn’t wrong. The evidence didn’t leave room for much doubt. Each line of defense Louie and Terrance tried was answered with even more evidence from Christian and his clients. Louie and Terrance couldn’t even deny the harassment. When it was time to present their case, they simply suggested all advances were fully consensual. One of the accusers was twenty-three, for crying out loud. Younger than me, and a devout Catholic. The idea of her flinging herself at my father was delusional. And all of them had been fired by him after refusing his sexual advances.
Still, I came to court every day. Maybe to punish myself, but more likely to punish Dad. I knew how much it killed him that I witnessed all this.
I didn’t do a whole lot of sleeping these days. I mostly cried myself to exhaustion, my mind running through all the memories of Dad’s interactions with his female employees in my head, like a broken record.
Then I’d wake up and drag myself to court again and again and again.