Rebel at Spruce High (Spruce Texas Romance #5) - Daryl Banner Page 0,3

this week?”

“There isn’t any damn grease on my face,” the man scoffs at my back as I depart the kitchen, but I know he’ll check his face in the refrigerator’s reflective surface anyway. And that thought is almost satisfying enough to mend the wound his little jab tried to open, as I make my way right out of the house.

Besides, seventh grade was ages ago. I was someone else. The bullies had their worst with me, and they won, and I crumbled like a sugar cookie. I failed four of my classes and had to repeat that year while all of my friends advanced to eighth grade without me. And now, they’ve all graduated, and I’m left to fend for myself all on my own this final year of school—as if I needed another reason for my stomach to turn this morning.

I have to keep telling myself that in the end, I get last laughs.

Those bullying boys grow up some day, and they become men like my stepdad—dissatisfied, jealous, and full of worthless steam. As dark as the notion may be, I have to take solace in the fact that I will not allow myself to turn out like them, no matter what they do to me. I have to be better, and I have to do better.

Just when I’ve got one foot out the front door ready to make an early departure for school, Winona appears at my legs, panting. I crouch down and give her a moment’s love and a scratch behind her big brownish ears, right where she likes it. “At least someone in this old house loves me,” I murmur to her, smiling. “Bark away the baddies from my shed out back while I’m gone, you hear?”

Winona’s adorably tongue-lolled face is my response.

I’ll pretend she understands she’s my unpaid bodyguard.

It’s a minute later when I’m halfway to the curb that my mom calls out from the front porch: “Toby, wait for your brother! He’s just finishing up in the bathroom! Five minutes, sweetie!”

I stop, suppress a groan, then turn. “Mom, I’ve got to get to school. There’s this …” The lie doesn’t come quick enough. “… this, this thing in the theater … this thing with, with my friends …”

“You can wait five dang minutes,” she sings from the porch with a light laugh, not buying a word of it. Perhaps suggesting I actually have friends was taking it one step too far.

And twelve minutes later—not five—my stepbrother emerges from the house to join me, but not before getting a goodbye kiss on the cheek from my mother. “You two have a great first day back!” she calls out, nearly giddy. “Watch over each other, boys! I already can’t wait to hear how your days went!”

My stepbrother somehow manages to make his deep, droning voice sound halfway cheery when he calls back: “Thanks, Marly!”

Then I’m finally off, making my way to Spruce High—with my dull-eyed telephone pole of a stepbrother Lee. He towers over me by a whole foot, has broad shoulders off which a curtain could hang, and feet that seem to crush the pavement with every step. Despite his arms being noodles comparable to my own, his father boasts of his son’s skill on the football field and insists he’s Coach Strong’s star player. I couldn’t even tell you what position he plays, only that from the one or two games I was forced to attend, Lee looks more like a misplaced wall painted the school colors than an actual player. And that’s not even counting how he looks in the spring when he hangs up the football uniform to don the baseball one. Talk about an awkward cluster of limbs guarding first base …

The morning sky swells a dark, bitter blue with the not-quite-risen sun by the time we finish our twelve-minute trek down the winding roads, across Main Street, and onto the school grounds. All the usual popular cliques are gathered by the trees and on the front steps leading up to the front of the school. The fuzzy noise of chatter sends my stomach turning over with expected anxiety. Did I mention how much I hate first days back?

That’s when Lee stops and faces me. “You know the drill.”

Neither of us have uttered a word to each other the whole way here. “Yes.”

“You don’t know me,” Lee goes on anyway, “and I don’t know you. Keep out of my way, I keep out of yours. Got it?”

“It’s weird that you call