day had already been horrific, I didn’t want to make it worse by making her dumpster dive for the very thing that had made her the object of such ridicule.”
Josie could just imagine if anyone from school had seen that. Poorhouse Payne dumpster diving with her own mother? The rumors and verbal abuse would be relentless. “Good call,” she told Shannon.
“We told her to ignore them, to keep her head held high, that it didn’t matter. They were just being cruel for no reason and who would want to be friends with people like that, anyway?”
All things that well-meaning parents told children who were being bullied, Josie knew, but which rarely helped in any situation. Then again, what else was there to say or even to do?
“The next day,” Shannon continued. “She took one of my very expensive bags from my closet without telling me and wore it to school.”
Josie flinched. Although she and Trinity had had similar tastes in high school, their personalities couldn’t have been more different. If it had been Josie who’d endured all that abuse over a vintage eighties bag at fourteen, she would have made the loudest and most obnoxious bully wear it as a hat by the end of the day, and then she would have paraded that person around so all of his or her cronies knew not to mess with her anymore. Then, she would have saved up for an entire collection of vintage eighties handbags and taken a different one to school each day of the week, daring anyone to make fun of her.
She couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been like that because she wasn’t raised by Shannon and Christian. Had her own shitty childhood given her some grit she might not have developed otherwise? Shaking the thoughts from her head, she focused on her parents. “What happened after that?”
Shannon put the mug of tea in front of Josie. “Chamomile,” she said. “It will help you sleep.”
Christian said, “The kids said she stole it. One of them took it from her and said they were going to turn her into the main office for stealing. She said it was her mother’s, and then a group of about four of them destroyed it.”
“Ripped it to shreds,” Shannon said.
“My God.”
“It was bad,” Christian said. “We decided enough was enough and got the principal involved. Shannon even called the police.”
“Over a bag?” Josie couldn’t help asking.
Shannon shook her head. “Not over the bag. I didn’t care about the bag. These kids forcibly ripped this bag from Trinity’s body and destroyed it. Can you imagine walking down a city street and someone coming up to you, tearing your purse from your body and then shredding it right in front of you? That’s not acceptable behavior. We wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior as adults in a world that has consequences. Why should we let high school kids get away with it?”
“True,” Josie conceded.
“Imagine these kids going into the workforce thinking they can act like this? That they can do whatever they damn well please and nothing will happen to them? Assaulting people verbally and physically, destroying other peoples’ property? Grown-ups have to respect the rules of a civilized society, why shouldn’t high school kids have to do the same?”
“Shan,” Christian said.
She waved a hand in the air. “Okay, okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Josie said. “What happened after that?”
Christian said, “Well those particular kids were disciplined, and they didn’t dare come after Trinity again—not physically—but they turned everyone else in the school against her. Don’t go near Poorhouse Payne or she’ll call the cops and say you did something to her. That sort of thing. She still had issues. Lots of them, including getting into a fight with a girl from another school during a school trip. That’s what led to the whole community service thing.”
“But she never found her place in high school,” Shannon said. “It was hell from beginning to end. I still wonder if we should have home-schooled her. If we did the wrong thing by forcing her to go there every day.”
“I don’t know,” Josie said. “It might have prepared her well for the job she has now. She works in a pretty cutthroat industry—and she’s exceptionally good at what she does.”
“Maybe,” Shannon said. “Sometimes in life you just never know if you’re doing the right thing when you’re actually doing it.”
Thirty-Five
The first time Alex saw the black vultures was on one of his adventures with