The Revenge Artist - Philip Siegel Page 0,12
to her eye level. “I’m so sorry.”
I’ll save my Monday-morning quarterbacking for tomorrow. I guess I should be there for her and stuff. I reach out and pat her shoulder. But she snaps back, and I jump. That’s what I learned about Bari last year. Her anger is like a svelte jack-in-the-box.
“Spare me, Becca. I know it was you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re too smart to play dumb. I know it was you. You broke up Jay and me.” She lets out another sinister laugh that makes the hairs on my neck stand up. “It looks like the Break-Up Artist is back.”
“Excuse me?” I ask again, still feeling the sharp pain of her accusation stabbing at my chest.
“I can’t believe you, Becca.”
“What happened?” I go around and get in on the passenger side. Thankfully, she lets me in and doesn’t run over my foot. “Bari, look at me.”
And when she does, eyes singed with red glare back at me. A tear falls down her cheek. I think back to my Break-Up Artist days and imagine this is how my past victims looked once I was done. Knowing Bari and her, ahem, rough edges, she probably caused her relationship to implode all on her own. I can bring a horse to water, but I can’t make her stop being a bitch.
“Let’s talk. If I know what happened, then maybe I can help fix it.”
“You already know what happened.”
“So, humor me. I know you didn’t drive to my house to admire the landscaping.”
She rolls her eyes at me. Big surprise. But then she turns to the middle console, and yes, we are making progress. Some people just want to roll around in their drama like a pig in filth. I’m one of the few girls at my school who finds drama stressful. I’d rather work on the solution.
“Jay’s in a fantasy football league with his friends,” she says.
“What’s that?” The Williamsons don’t do sports. My dad would prefer to talk about the stock market over game scores, which he admits hasn’t garnered him many friends in town.
“It’s like you make up your own team out of NFL players and you get points if they score? I think?”
We take a moment to look up the answer on our phones.
“See,” Bari says. “I can barely explain it! How could I screw it up?”
“That’s what he thinks?”
“Someone went online into his account and made all these trades and basically ruined his team. In the notes section, they wrote, ‘This’ll teach you to ignore me, Jayby.’”
“Jayby?”
“That’s my nickname for him.”
A laugh bursts out of me. I can’t stop thinking of Jay Wolpert, intense guy’s guy sports maniac, being called Jayby. And liking it.
“It’s not funny. He thinks I did that. I would never mess with his fantasy football! I love how into sports he gets. It’s so hot.”
“Really?” I blurt out. Of the few games I’ve gone to, I always get stuck next to the loudest person in the arena, the guy who bellows out comments like he thinks the people on the field are listening. One of my dad’s friends winds up throwing his chips at the screen and storming out of the room during every Super Bowl.
“He gets so worked up watching a game.” She leans in for a whisper. “The sex afterward is amazing.”
“Oh.” How did we get here?
“Seriously, whether his team wins or loses, I always score.”
“Got it, got it, okay.” That’s a visual I do not need. You’d think with all of the sex Bari was having, she’d be in a better mood.
“I would never do this,” Bari says. “I know how much fantasy football means to him.”
“Guys and their sports.”
“And their money. Jay put in four hundred bucks to join this league, which is a lot of money for him. Me, too.”
Me three. Even with my, ahem, after-school job, I couldn’t come up with that type of cash. And I couldn’t imagine having it yanked from me by a saboteur.
“He saved up for weeks to raise the ante money. Jay’s a pizza delivery driver, but he’s been out of work since his Jeep died over the summer, and he hasn’t been able to find anything since. He wanted to win fantasy football so he could buy a new car.”
I don’t have anything to say back. Chills creep up my arm. I would never have bankrupted a guy in the name of anti-love. That’s a line you don’t cross, not unless you want to inflict real pain.
“At first, he believed me. Maybe another player