Hateful Bully - Logan Fox
Prologue
Candy
“He’s looking this way,” my best friend, Haley, murmurs without appearing to take her eyes from her smartphone. Of course, with her thick, fake lashes, it’s easy enough for her to scan the lunchroom, and not a single student will be able to say she was looking at them. She makes an excellent spy.
“Just looking?”
“Yeah, but with that…smarmy fucking look on his face.”
“That’s his default setting.” I sit back in my seat and push away my plate. I love lunch—the food here is all fresh, and some of it I plucked from the gardens myself…but what little appetite I have is suddenly gone.
No, not suddenly.
I’ve known for the past week that Josiah Bale had something up his immaculately tailored sleeve…and that’s the kind of knowledge that makes a girl lose five pounds without really wanting to.
My gaze moves over the lunch room’s interior. Happy Mountain Youth Center—far-flung boarding school for rich, troubled kids—looks like the inside of a vacation spot. In fact, I suspect that’s exactly what it was before the new owners came along and transformed it into a prison. Most of the walls, floors, and ceilings are wood. Thick Aztec-patterned rugs absorb scuff marks from the ranch’s heavy furniture and the feet that drag reluctantly through each day.
“Going over to the dark side again?” Haley asks, nonchalant as she hunts idly through her salad with a fork.
“I never left.” I push away my own salad and lean forward in a rush, gripping my hands like I’m praying, and stare at Haley so hard that she actually looks up from her phone. “How am I supposed to survive this?”
Haley rolls her eyes. “You get on your knees and thank your lucky stars you aren’t in juvie.”
I snort and sit back. “At least I wouldn’t have to put up with him in juvie.”
She shrugs and goes back to one of probably twenty different conversations on three different social media platforms she’s having. Me? I struggle to type out a message on my damn phone. I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to have a conversation on one, never mind several. And social media? Count me out.
“He’s coming,” she announces quietly in a sing-song voice.
Panic squeezes my heart, which makes it start pounding in my chest. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Wish I was.” Haley presses something on her phone, blacking out the screen. She’s been here eleven months already, so her privileges extend to owning a phone, talking to anyone she wants to, and seeing her parents once a week. Sometimes, they even take her to go see a movie in town. If she wasn’t part of my Happy Mountain family, I wouldn’t even be able to talk to her. But the Center seems to think she’s having a good influence on me, so they were happy to buddy us up together.
In an instant, she’s on her feet. “I’m full anyway,” she says, popping an olive in her mouth as she grabs up her tray and shoves her phone into her school blazer. “Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
The rest of our table of six glances up curiously, but the other girls know better than to stick their noses where they don’t belong. We get lunchtimes to ourselves except for a supervisor.
I scan the room. He doesn’t appear to be present.
So that’s why Josiah thought he could risk coming over to me.
He’s not even supposed to be looking in my direction, never mind speaking to me. Not that the rules have ever stopped him before.
When I first arrived at Happy Mountain Youth Center and was introduced to my new family, they assigned Hayley to give me a tour of the ranch. I’m not sure why, but she took a liking to me after that.
Could have been because I offered to pay her to look the other way so I could steal a horse and get the fuck out of Dodge.
Relief floods me as I abandon my tray and shoot to my feet.
I won’t lie—Josiah scares the living shit out of me. I do my best not to show it, but he’s been tormenting me for the entire two months we’ve been in this hellhole. There’s only so much bullying a girl can take before it all gets to be too much. Where I used to stand up to him, maybe even laugh off his funnier pranks, now I scatter the moment he looks like he’s come up with some new way to humiliate me.
Unlike Haley, I’ve never been blessed