Paper Airplanes (36 page)

Andre turned to Kyle. “Is that why you always want
ed to come here?” he asked Kyle in disgust. “You told us it was because you wanted to nail Cassie.”

Cassie’s jaw dropped when he said that, but she didn’t say anything.

Kyle was glaring at Marley. “Why the fuck would you tell them all that?” he yelled at her, completely ignoring Andre.

“Because you’re an asshole, and I’ve heard too many stories of how you tortured my boyfriend for years, and I’m over it. You’re a dick, and now you know what Scott had to put up with for too long. See how you like it.”

Holy shit. That was harsh, but she was kind of right.

“Just because I was a bully in high school doesn’t mean you can tell my p
ersonal business to my friends,” Kyle growled at her. “Fuck, Marley, my family doesn’t even know.”

“Dude, you’re really gay?” Brock asked in disbelief.

“Yeah, I am,” Kyle sighed.

“
And you were really dating Hale? He’s gay too?” Brock asked.

Kyle’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah, and I fucked it up because I was pissed that he couldn’t go to Mexico for Spring Break because of baseball, so I got really drunk and hooked up with this
random guy, and Hale found out, and that was it. My life’s been shit since then, so go ahead and beat my ass for being a fag if you want to. Whatever. I don’t care.”

All the emotion drained out of his voice to the point that if Andre or Brock tried to hit him, I’d probably
have come to Kyle’s defense. I felt bad for the guy. Regardless of what he’d done in the past, I didn’t think it was fair for him to be subjected to the same kind of torture he used to inflict. Cassie was right, high school was over.

“Dude, I’m
gonna beat your ass,” Andre threatened, but Brock’s arm flew against his chest to stop him. Andre tried to push forward. “What the hell, man?”

“Don’t touch him. He’s our friend.”

“But he likes dick.”

“So what?”

Andre turned to Brock. “Why are you defending him? Are you a fag too?”

“No,” Brock replied, rolling his eyes at Andre. “But he’s like our brother. Let it go.”

“Seriously?”

Kyle was standing there watching everything unfold with slumped shoulders and a dejected expression on his face.

“Yes, seriously,” Brock said, putting his arm around Kyle. “Stay or go, Andre, it’s your choice.”

“What the hell is going on out here?” a voice asked from behind us then, and all of us turned to see Hale standing there.

“Fuck,” Kyle hissed as he ducked out from under Brock’s arm and marched past Hale toward his car.

“Seriously, what did I miss?” Hale asked, looking at each of us in turn.

“Marley
outed you and Kyle, and now Kyle’s upset,” Scott said softly, and Marley smacked him in the arm. “Ow, sorry.”

He never knew when to just keep his mouth shut.

“Seriously?” Hale questioned, looking at me, usually the voice of reason in any conversation.

“Yeah, man. I’m sorry.”

Hale looked over his shoulder to where Kyle was sitting in the front seat of his Tahoe, his head in his hands. “Fuck,” he hissed before he turned on his heel and walked over to the car.

We all watched as he knocked on the window. Kyle looked up in surprise before he unlocked the passenger door and Hale climbed in. Kyle was shaking his head and looking down when Hale pulled him into a hug.

“Ugh, that’s sick,” Andre grumbled.

“In or out, Andre,” Bro
ck said, repeating what he’d said about being with Kyle or against him. And Brock may have been a huge dick, but I had to give him credit for being a loyal friend. I didn’t think I could give Andre the same consideration.

“I’m out,” Andre said, and he started to walk away.

Brock let him go, just shaking his head as he watched Andre walk over to his Camaro, get in and drive way.

“Ok
ay, so should we go?” Scott asked then, and the four of us looked at each other.

Cassie raised an eyebrow at me, so I nodded. I was time to go.

“I want to make sure Hale’s okay,” Marley said then, her eyes still on the conversation Kyle and Hale were having.

Kyle was wiping under his eyes as Hale talked to him. Then Hale
grabbed his arm, and Kyle turned to face him. Hale said something, and then he leaned forward and kissed him, taking us all by surprise.

“Whoa!” Scott said, covering his eyes with his arm. “I did not need to see that.”

Marley smacked him again.

“
Jesus, stop doing that!” he yelled at her.

“Stop being an idiot!”
she yelled back.

“Mar, I think Hale’s going to be okay,”
Cassie said then, coming to stand next to me, lacing her fingers with mine.

“Yeah, I
guess so,” Marley agreed, as she tucked in under Scott’s arm. “I’ll just call him later.”

With that
we filed back toward Scott’s car and piled in wordlessly, leaving Brock standing on the sidewalk alone, but it wasn’t like we were going to invite him along. Even if we hadn’t come to blows, and I had a smidge more respect for him, we were never going to be friends. He was still a jackass.

“This is kind of great news,” Scott announced as he back
ed out of the space.

“What do you mean?” Cassie asked from where she was tucked under my arm in the backseat.

“Well, now that Kyle’s out and so is Hale, everyone will stop calling us fags. It was seriously getting old,” he said, turning around to look at me. “I mean, you’re not even my type, Jared.”

He winked at me, so I shoved him in the shoulder.

“And,” Scott continued, “I don’t have to worry about the fact that my girlfriend is friends with a guy who’s so much better looking than me, because he’s gay!”

Marley rolled her eyes
and looked at Scott adoringly. “Baby, even if he weren’t gay, I’d still want you. You’re adorable. And you make me laugh.”

Scott crossed his eyes at her as he rolled to a stop at
a light, proving her point as he made her giggle.

Cassie looked up at me, so I met her gaze and smiled before I kissed her. I knew we were both thinking the same thing, so neither of us needed to say a word.
Then she settled her head on my chest and twined her fingers on one hand with mine.

“Were you really going to beat down
all three of them?” she asked me a few minutes later.

I shrugged. “I
would have tried. It would have been sweet retribution to years of bullying.”

“I didn’t think fighting was really your style.”

I smiled. “You forget that I’m an ace with a samurai sword.”

But she was right. I fought in video games, but I’d never
initiated a fight in real life. It wasn’t my style. It was why I’d hesitated in throwing the first punch, even though I’d really wanted to.

Cassie laughed
lightly. “That is so true. You would do well if this was ancient Japan.”

“You know it,” I said, grinning at her.

Chapter
Twenty-Three

Cassie

“So how you doing, kiddo?” my dad asked one morning in mid-August, taking a seat at the breakfast table across from me.

I looked up from the magazine I was reading while I sipped a cup of coffee. “I’m good, Dad.”

He nodded. “You seem happy.”

“I am,” I said, feeling like things were starting to get back to normal for real.

I’d wanted them to for months, but this was the first time I felt like it was actually happening. Classes were over, and I’d gotten an ‘A’ in psychology and a ‘B’ in chemistry, which was as good as I could hope to get with my inability to memorize the periodic table and anticipate chemical reactions.
But aside from that things with Jared were awesome, and work was going well. I felt really settled.

“I’m going to guess that Jared has something to do with the smile on your face I’ve seen for the past two months?”

I smiled when he mentioned Jared. “Yeah, he has. Totally. I’m not going to lie. He’s amazing. You like him, don’t you, Dad?”

“I do,” he said, and I knew he was being honest.

Jared had come over for dinner a few times, and he was always quieter around my parents than he was when it was just the two of us, but he was polite and he talked to both of them since he knew how important it was to me that they like him. And what was not to like, really?

“He’s
a smart boy with excellent taste . . . in books,” my dad teased.

Jared
and my dad had actually ended up having more in common than I’d ever realized when they’d gone off on a tangent about literature the week before. My dad had been barbequing, and Jared had been ‘helping’ him at my insistence. Somehow the subject of what they were each reading had come up, and then it was like we couldn’t shut them up. My mom had leaned over to me and said, ‘I think you’re dad found a new friend.’ I’d laughed and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon. I’d never been so serious about a guy before, and I wanted my parents to feel okay with me dating Jared.

I
rolled my eyes at my dad’s attempt at a joke.

“Okay fine, he also has excellent taste since he picked you. But I’m not biased or anything.”

“Dad, be serious,” I chastised him. “He’s a good guy, right?”

“Honey, you don’t need my validation. Yes, he’s a good guy, and I’m glad you found someone as grounded as him.
I can’t say I was as big of a fan of Dylan. He was a little arrogant.”

“Dad!”

“Hey,” he said, throwing his hands up. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” I said sheepishly, remembering what an ass my high school boyfriend could be.

He wasn’t as bad as Brock or Andre or Kyle, but he’d been a star baseball player and had gone to USC on a full ride. He’d thought a lot of himself back then, and he hadn’t apologized for it. I was glad when I’d heard he’d stayed in California for the summer. We hadn’t kept in touch after we broke up the summer before college, and now I knew why.

“Yeah, Jared’s definitely nothing like Dylan,” I mused as I took another sip of my coffee.

My parents hadn’t met anyone I’d dated at Coleman since there hadn’t been anyone of note since I’d been in college. I wasn’t even sure they would have met Will. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be up for dinner with the parents. But maybe he would have surprised me.

“So what’s the plan?”
my dad asked then.

“What plan?” I asked, looking around the kitchen
as if there was something I was missing.

I didn’t really have a plan for my day off, per se.
I was thinking about laying out and reading as soon as Marley got her lazy butt out of bed. She’d been out late the night before with Scott. He’d wanted to take her to a comic book art gallery in the city, and so they’d gotten home around two. Jared and I both had to work, so I’d gotten home around one-thirty, opting to sleep in my own bed for a change since I’d started spending more and more nights at his place. I couldn’t seem to stay away.

“
You and my adopted daughter,” my dad said, pointing toward the ceiling.

“Today or in the larger sense?” I asked slowly, and my dad gave me a pointed look.

“The larger sense. Tom and I talked the other day about the letter we both received from your leasing office asking if you were going to renew or not. Have you and Marley talked about your plans for when school starts? Tom wasn’t sure if she was going back this fall. I guess she said something to him about taking time off this semester when they talked last week. Were you thinking the same thing? Or did you want me to renew the lease?”

I tried as hard as I could to mask the look of shock on my face as my dad told me what Marley’s dad had told him. I had no clue she was considering taking time off. We hadn’t t
alked about what our plans were for when school started in the fall, but I was already planning to live at home and take more classes at the community college. I’d even gotten a second job as Andrea’s research assistant, which I was really excited about. I’d talked to her two weeks earlier about possibly majoring in child psychology, and she encouraged me to spend more time researching the field before I made a final decision.

So I
’d signed up for two other classes in psychology to see if I liked them, and I’d also be able to earn credits helping her with her thesis. I figured after a year working with Andrea and a few classes I’d know for sure if psychology was the way I ultimately wanted to go.

All in all it seemed like a
solid plan. And I had about seven classes left before I finished my AA, so the timing would line up perfectly. Maybe in a year I’d be ready to go back to Coleman, but I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I wasn’t ready to go back yet.

Jared and I were driving up for
Evan’s graduation that weekend. It was just going to be a quick trip, but even that had me unsettled. I couldn’t imagine being back on campus for any real length of time. The dining hall where the shooting had taken place was right smack in the middle of campus. I’d walked past it multiple times a day on my way to and from classes for two years. I wasn’t sure when I’d be brave enough to walk by it again, so going back to school there wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

I swallowed hard. “I think you can go ahead and cancel the lease,” I said softly
to my dad.

He nodded
. “I had a feeling you’d say that.”

“Dad, I just don’t think I ca
n go back right now,” I said, biting my lip as I watched his face to see if he was going to be upset.

It was one thing to take classes over the summer, but I knew my parents, who’d worked so hard to make sure I went to a prestigious
college, wouldn’t love the thought of me finishing my AA locally. They were concerned about how it would look on a law school application since that had pretty much always been my plan. We’d had many conversations about choosing the right school for undergrad a few years back when I’d been sorting through colleges, trying to figure out where to apply. My mom had gone to Coleman for undergrad, so I knew she was secretly happy that I’d chosen to follow in her footsteps. I hoped she wouldn’t be upset that I might not finish my degree there.

“I understand,” my dad
said, his tone all business, but there was a softness to it that told me he really did understand how I was feeling. “It makes sense. I’ll cancel your lease. Are you going to take time off like Marley and work? You know you don’t need to do that. Tom and I talked about you girls maybe taking a semester to travel. You had fun in Europe the summer after high school. Would you want to go again?”

My face morphed into a look of confusion. I couldn’t help it. Was my dad seriously suggesting that I take time off
from my degree to bum around Europe? Hadn’t I taken enough time off earlier in the year? But I knew he was worried about how I was rebounding from everything that happened. He was protective, and I couldn’t fault him for that. He didn’t want me to do anything before I was ready.

“Dad, that’s a generous offer, and I’m sure Marley and I would have a great time, but I was sort of thinking about just staying here. I can work at Dawson’s and take the classes I need to finish my AA.
And I’m going to be working with one of my teachers, doing research for her thesis, so I don’t think taking off for Europe is the best idea.”

“Which teacher?” he asked, and I was dreading talking to him about this.

“Um, Andrea French. She taught my Intro to Psych class this summer. I’m, uh, actually, well, after everything that happened, I’m, uh, I guess, I’m exploring my options for what I want to get my degree in.”

Jesus, it was like I couldn’t spit out what I wanted to say.

My dad raised his eyebrows. “You want to be a Psychologist?” he deduced, and I shrugged.

“Maybe. I don’t know, but possibly.”

He nodded. “I think that’s great. I want you to do what makes you happy. I know being a lawyer was always the plan, but plans change. I was going to be an accountant.”

I smiled, unable to imagine my father sitting behind a desk crunching numbers for hours. It would drive him crazy. He loved the drama and the intensity that came from working case law.

“Yeah, so anyway. I need to take some pre-requisites and finish my core classes, but I should get my AA by the end of next summer. Maybe then I’ll be ready to go back to Coleman. I don’t know.”

He nodded, surprising me. “I think that sounds like a good plan. See how things go, and then maybe in a year you can go back
to school.”

“
I hope so.”

“And at that point, Jared can go with you.”

He caught me off-guard when he said that. “What do you mean?”

“Cassie, I’m an observant man, and I have pretty good intuition when it comes to my only daughter. I see how you look at him and how he looks at you. You like him a lot, don’t you.”

I bit my lip. “I love him, Dad.”

He nodded
, as if he already knew I was going say that. “And he loves you?”

“Yeah, he does.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, then, I’m glad you found each other. I know what you both went through wasn’t easy. I’m sure it must be less difficult to get through each day with someone who knows what you’re dealing with.”

I nodded. I wasn’t honestly aware that my parents knew Jared had been a victim at Coleman. We’d n
ever talked about it before, even though they’d met him a dozen times, but it didn’t surprise me. They would have paid more attention in the aftermath of the shooting, watched the news reports, remembered his name.

“It does make it easier
,” I told my dad. “But there’s so much more to Jared and me than what we went through. He’s this incredible, sweet, caring guy who loves me for me. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“And you don’t want to leave him, do you?”

I hesitated before shaking my head, wondering if my dad was going to be upset that I was putting my life on hold for a guy, but that’s what I was doing. I knew I could do what Reese was doing and change schools. I could go to school at Northwestern or the University of Illinois. My parents had connections at both schools, and I had no doubt that with a large enough donation, they could pull enough strings to get me admitted at the last minute. But I was happy where I was. I was happy with Jared. I didn’t want to go anywhere without him, and if that made me a stupid girl for choosing a guy over college, than I was an idiot in love, because I was doing just that. But I couldn’t leave him. I wouldn’t do it.

“Dad, I know that wasn’t the plan we talked about. I know I should be looking at
other four year schools if I’m not going to go back to Coleman, but I can’t leave him.”

My dad nodded in understanding, which surprised me. He was the strongest advocate for a solid education, and I was sure he’d chastise me for finishing my AA at a community college
.

“Cassie,
did I ever tell you how I got your mother to marry me?”

I shook my head. “I know you guys met in law school at Illinois, but that’s it.”

He nodded and smiled. “This is a good story. I think you’ll appreciate it.”

The gleam in his eye made me smile, and I tried to imagine him and my mom twenty-five years younger, back when they were dating. It was hard to
visualize.

“When I met your mom, it was at the end of our second year of
law school. I’m pretty sure I fell in love from the first second I laid eyes on her. I asked her out on the spot, and she said yes. And that was it. I was hooked. But I had an internship lined up in Chicago that summer, and she had an internship back home in Boston, so I made the last minute decision to follow her. My dad just about came across the country to kill me after he found out I’d turned down interning at one of the biggest firms in the city, but I didn’t care. I knew your mother was the girl I was going to marry, and I wasn’t letting her out of my sight. She thought I was crazy, but she didn’t tell me not to come with her. Financially, things were pretty bleak for me since my parents had cut me off. The only position I could get was as an unpaid clerk at the DA’s office, but I didn’t care. I took it, and then I worked a night job as a valet so I didn’t have to sleep in a cardboard box. I shared a two bedroom apartment with five other guys. It was sad, let me tell you, but every night off I had, I took your mother out. I asked her to marry me the night before we went back to school. I couldn’t even afford a ring, but at that point she didn’t care. She knew I’d go to the ends of the earth for her, and she was right, I would.”