Bitter Kisses (It's Just High School #3) - Thandiwe Mpofu Page 0,18

I know is that my father did this to me.

“She needs to remember how she got into this to begin with,” someone says.

“But—”

“Do you want a fucking turn in that freezer, bitch?” Sean threatens the girl. I guess she shakes her head or something because Sean says, “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Now shut your fucking mouth. You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“Are you in pain, Ice Queen?” he says with a laugh, enjoying my distress.

“I doubt it, Sean,” Shane says as he comes to sit on the other side of the springy, old bed. “She doesn’t feel pain. Or feelings in general, isn’t that right?”

Tears of frustration and silent horror at what my father did fall down my cheeks and I try to recall what happened this morning.

This morning…

“You know, why don’t you cool off while you think, huh?”

“No!”

“Put her stupid, naïve ass back in the freezer. We have shit to take care off.”

Before I can start fighting, I feel another pinprick on my arm. Almost immediately, darkness claims me.

This time, I go in fighting.

Chapter Five

Mia

Earlier that morning

Something’s going to go terribly wrong today.

It’s the first day of senior year and I’m a mess in more ways than anyone can handle. Everything is murky, dark and makes zero sense but the feeling of dread in my bones? It doesn’t seem to be lifting anytime soon.

Maybe it’s because the past couple of weeks have been shit, or maybe because there’s so much riding on this day, but I don’t feel so good.

It’s been two long, horrible, torturous weeks.

Two weeks since Julian held me in his warm embrace on that beach in Europe and declared his love for me that I felt in my soul, warming all my frozen parts and mending all the pieces of my heart that I thought would be forever lost.

Two weeks since I started to feel like everything was going to be all right and now, two weeks later here we are.

I try shaking off the heavy melancholy feeling that has settled in my gut as I stare at my reflection in the mirror, but the feeling only settles in deeper. I can barely recognize the girl in the mirror. She looks like a racoon going through a serious accidental meth withdrawal. There are bags under my red-shot eyes.

Julian believes I sided with my father to set him up and destroy his future and me, I’m broken over that. How could he believe the lies and not me, after everything we’ve been through already?

I haven’t forgotten the look on his handsome, perfectly chiseled from the finest marble, god-like face the moment he decided to dismiss me and hate me all over again.

I’ve been trying to piece everything that happened from the day my fractured family moved into the Fitzgerald mansion, but nothing makes sense. Not in the freaking slightest.

All I know is, I’m playing in a high-stakes game with players so cunning and ruthless they don’t mind sacrificing their own children.

I yank my perfectly ironed Clintwood senior long-sleeved shirt from the hanger with hostility I can’t restrain and put it on, covering the shameful cuts on my wrists and arms.

I feel empty.

I feel crashed and hopeless but still, I have to go on like nothing happened, like the world isn’t currently attacking me. On social media, the news, everywhere I look, my face and Julian’s are everywhere. Everyone has something to say apparently.

But the thing about my current dilemma is it’s gone from worse to freaking catastrophe in a span of days and in all that shit, I’m livid, but I can’t show that to anyone but myself because of the deal I made with Courtney and my father.

A deal that can go sideways if I so much as make a move wrong.

But that doesn’t lessen the chaos in my heart and in my mind.

I’m the villain and enemy in this latest chapter of an unending nightmare, all thanks to my father.

But most of all, I hate that I’m all alone in this. But to be fair, what the fuck did I expect?

“Knock, knock,” my previous aunt—who’s actually my biological mother and trying desperately to assume the role, especially now that Nancy is six-feet under—says as she taps the door to my walk-in closet, an uncertain look in her eyes. “May I come in?”

I see her shifting on her feet nervously through the large floor-ceiling length mirrors of my old walk-in closet, the one I grew up playing dress up in and love