Paper Airplanes (35 page)

And
I couldn’t help but find my girlfriend that much sexier when she talked about comic books. It was so hot in a really weird and twisted way, but it made me want to hug her and thank her for being alive, but of course that would just spark all sorts of questions I wasn’t about to answer.

When we pulled into the parking lot, Cassie opened her car door. “I’ll be back. I’ll get my check and tell Mar that we’re here.”

Then she leaned in through my open window and kissed me, long and hard. “Love you,” she whispered, and I smiled at her.

“Love you more,” I told her, because I was feeling all sappy and gooey in that moment.

“Dude, we have hot girlfriends,” Scott gushed to me as soon as Cassie was out of earshot, a wide smile lighting up his face. “I never thought I’d have a girlfriend let alone one as hot as Marley!”

“You don’t give yourself nearly enough credit,” I told him
as I watched Cassie walk into the restaurant. I turned around once she was inside.

Scott
shrugged, not believing me, but I didn’t think he cared since he was having sex with a girl who wouldn’t have looked twice at him in high school. And she thought he was hilarious. He was on top of the world.

“I need to tell you something,” I said quickly, glancing behind me to make sure Cassie wasn’t on her way back.

“What?” Scott asked, the happiness sliding right off of his face.

He could tell something was up. I didn’t get all conspiratorial on a regular basis.

“Listen, man, you can’t tell anyone. Okay? Not even Marley – especially not Marley.”

Scott’s eyes narrowed. “What is it?” he asked skeptically, and I could tell he wasn’t sure he wanted to agree to stay silent.
He hated secrets.

“Swear to me that you won’t tell,” I insisted, glancing behind me once more.

“Is it bad?”

“Dammit, Scott. Just swear, okay? I’m your best friend
.”

“Fine, I
swear,” he said quickly.

“It was Cassie – the girl on the floor of the dining hall, the one I talked to the night of the shooting
, it was her,” I said quickly, the words tumbling out of my mouth.

“Huh? I thought you said her name was
Jeni.”

I sighed and launched into what had happened that afternoon, hoping it might help me feel better to tell someone.
I wasn’t sure if it did.

“Ho-
ly shit,” Scott breathed out when I was finished.

“Yeah, I know. It’s huge, right?”

“Are you going to tell Cass?”

I shook my head. “Hell no. I don’t want her to know.”

“That you saved her life?” he asked incredulously. “Why wouldn’t you want her to know that? You’re like a real life superhero.”

I shot him a look
that was just shy of rolling my eyes. “No, I’m not, and I’m also not looking for gratification. I’m afraid she’ll remember everything if I tell her, but this whole thing’s been kind of freaking me out all day. I just wonder if subconsciously I knew it was her all along and that’s why I fell for her.”

He shrugged. “Who cares how you got here. You’re together now, and she loves you. Nothing else really matters. Hell, I know that if Marley hadn’t been through everything that she’s been through
this year, she wouldn’t be interested in me, but because of all of it, she wanted a nice, safe, funny guy. That’s me. Things happen for a reason, and you just have to roll with them.”

I gave him a funny look. “When did you get so wise?”

He shrugged. “Always have been. You just never asked my opinion before since you’ve always had your shit together. What happened with Brooke and the shooting and Cassie have made you all wonky, so I figured I’d switch places and keep you sane for a while.”

Damn, he was so right. Somewhere in the past six months I’d gotten lost, and it was no longer me standing up for Scott like it had been our whole lives. He’d been standing up for me, and I hadn’t even realized it.

“Besides,” he said, and then he trailed off, his gaze shifting over my head to something behind the car. His eyes narrowed as a look of confusion spread across his face. “What the hell?”

Following his gaze, I turned around to see Cassie talking to Andre Bolden in front of the restaurant. They were just talking, but I could see from the expression on her face that she was nervous, and I suddenly remembered her telling me how she’d tried to shove his head in a toilet and then had slapped him
a few weeks back.

It was then that Kyle and Brock came out of the restaurant and stopped short. They took flank positions on either side of Andre who was slowly backing Cassie up against the side of the building.

In two seconds flat I was outside the car, and Scott was on my heels.

As we approached I heard Brock say, “
We were friends for ten years, and that’s how you treat Andre?”

“Brock, I was drunk, okay,” Cassie
said firmly, and I wasn’t sure if she could see around them to where we were standing. “I already told Andre I was sorry. Get over it.”

Scott looked over at me, but I shook
my head. I wanted to see how Cassie handled herself. I wasn’t going to interject if I didn’t need to, and she seemed to be holding her own.

“It was a joke, Cass,” Kyle said. “We weren’t trying to be dicks back then. It was just for fun.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think it was funny when I heard about it,” Cassie said firmly. “Scott’s my friend. He’s a good guy.”

“He’s a loser,” Andre joked. “He was back then, and he is now.”

I felt my hands close into fists at my sides, and I didn’t dare look over at Scott. I hated that he was hearing this, but it wasn’t like it was the first time. He wasn’t going to be taken by surprise that those guys weren’t his biggest fans.

“You guys are assholes
,” Cassie said matter-of-factly, not bothering to fight back. We all knew it wouldn’t do any good. “Scott’s a better guy than any of you, any day.”

“
He’s a tool,” Brock chimed in.

Scott looked over at me, probably wanting to repeat the sucker-punch he’d landed on Brock’s face a few weeks back.
I shook my head at him, telling him to hold off. There were three of them and two of us, and although I could hold my own, I wasn’t sure Scott could.

Cassie chuckled then. “I’m sure you thought that when he gave you
that black eye you were sporting after Nicole’s party.”

Scott looked over at me with a smirk on his face and nodded his head once. He knew he’d been a badass that night.

Andre laughed. “Please. That skinny homo barely touched him. He punches like the little fag bitch he is.”

And I about laid him out for calling
Scott a fag. I hated that word.

“Hey, don’t call him that,” Cassie warned, coming to Scott’s defense
before I could react.

Scott gave me a pleading look like he really wanted to hit Andre in that moment, but he’d wait for me to be all in with him.

“What are you going to do about it? Get your boyfriend to beat us up?” Andre challenged back.

It was then that Cassie’s gaze shifted to mine, right over Andre’s shoulder, and her mouth quirked into a small smile.

“Maybe,” she responded. “He’d kick your asses. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s pretty built.”

Brock laughed. “Please, I’m not afraid of that faggot ass punk. We kicked his ass for years, and we’ll do it again. Every time he tried to come to his little boyfriend’s defense, we just put them both in their place.”

“Yeah, and then they probably comforted each other with blow jobs afterward,” Andre chimed in, which caused Brock to start laughing. “Remember that time when we caught them behind the gym? Fucking classic!”

He elbowed Kyle who hadn’t been laughing, and he chimed in halfheartedly. “Yeah, we thought they were gay. It was really funny,” he said flatly
, which was odd to me, but I didn’t spend much time dwelling on Kyle’s reaction since they suddenly had me remembering a day I just wanted to forget.

Unfortunately, I
remembered that day all too well. It was right after my mom had left, and my dad had laid into me the night before when I was trying to study. He’d been drunk and had hit me a few times. I’d left the next morning for school and texted Scott to meet me behind the gym. I’d been barely holding it together, and when I’d seen the look on his face as he registered the bruises and cuts I was sporting, I’d started crying.

Being my best friend and not caring about what people thought, he’d hugged me, because he knew I didn’t have anyone else in my life who
’d care that my dad had hit me. He tried to get me to go to his parents, to tell them what my dad was doing to me, but I’d refused. Instead, whenever I had bruises that I couldn’t hide, I avoided their house completely. But my dad rarely left marks where people could see. He knew my teachers would catch wind of what was up if I showed up to school with bruises more often than any other normal teenage boy.

So Scott had hugged me and told me it would be okay. It was all he could do. And I’d let him, because
I needed to not feel so alone in that moment.

That had been when Kyle, Andre and Brock had come around the corner, having just smoked up before the first bell rang. They had some incredibly choice words for us as they stalked toward us, but before they could touch us, Scott and I took off, running into the woods where we
stayed for most of the day, hiding out, afraid to go into school. After that they called us homos and fags on a regular basis.

“Real original,
guys,” Cassie said, not believing anything Kyle and Andre were saying. She knew Scott and I weren’t gay. “Just leave Jared and Scott alone. High school’s over.”

“Whatever, you’re just the dumbass bitch who
your boyfriend’s using to cover up the fact that he likes to take it up the ass,” Kyle spat back at her.

And that was pretty much the last straw for me. I started to raise my fist to punch Kyle in the back of the head when Scott spoke up.

“Hey Kyle, wasn’t that you I saw making out with that guy that looked like Hale two nights ago in the back of the movie theater?” he asked, and all three guys turned to face him.

“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed at him
, as I lowered my fist and took in the glares on Andre’s and Brock’s faces They’d seen my intent and were about to strike back. But Kyle’s face showed something completely different. He was looking at Scott in abject horror mixed with fear.

Marley chose that moment to walk outside. “What’s going on?” she asked, looking around at the group us, trying to figure out if we were talking or fighting or some weird mix of both based on the look
s on everyone’s faces.

“Hey babe,” Scott said, his face lighting up when he saw Marley. He put his arm around her and pulled her against his side. “I was just telling Kyle how we saw him at the movies the other night.”

“Yeah, that was weird. Why were you making out in the back of a movie theater? Aren’t you a little old for that?”

“That wasn’t me,” Kyle said quickly. “I’m not a fag.”

And I knew in that second that he was lying. Not that I cared which way he swung, but it pissed me off that for years he’d tormented Scott and me because he thought we were gay when it was him all along. What a dick.

“Kyle,
I’ve known you since the third grade. It was you,” Marley said. “Besides, I know all about you and Hale.”

My jaw wanted to drop
, but I kept it firmly in place as Kyle’s eyes got wide and he struggled to find the words to refute what Marley had just said. He couldn’t seem to come up with anything.

“I knew that was Hale,” Scott said, his face brightening
as he solved the mystery.

“It wasn’t,” Marley said quickly. “Hale’s still pissed at him.
He just found someone who looks like Hale, apparently.”

What the hell was going on?

“What the hell, dude?” Andre asked, turning to Kyle. “You’re a fag?”

“No,” Kyle said quickly. “He’s lying.”

Marley rolled her eyes. “Bullshit. Hale told me all about you guys after I asked him if he was with you the other night.”

As soon as she said that, Kyle’s eyes got wide.
“You asked him that?!” Kyle exlaimed, his voice getting all high and squeaky. “Fuck, Marley!”

“Sorry, but I thought it was him, and I wanted to know what was up.”

“What the hell did he say?” Kyle asked, panic lacing his voice.

“That you two
were together for two years. You guys hooked up the summer after we graduated, and you were dating up until Spring Break when you cheated on him with some guy you met in Cancun. And then you came back to school all upset and begging him to forgive you, but he wouldn’t take you back. It’s why you came home this summer, because you knew he’d be here. And it’s why you guys keep coming here to eat.”

From the expression on Kyle’s face, I knew Marley was telling the truth. And I wasn’t sure what shocked me more, that Kyle was gay,
that Hale was gay or that Hale’s taste was so shitty that he wanted to date Kyle Fowler. I also couldn’t believe Marley had just outed both of them to their friends. That was kind of crappy.