''Ian Romero, the person I hate the most in the whole wide world. He turned the entire school against me, and then just left me alone in the hell he created.''
There's no one Cody Walker hates more than Ian Romero, who is the reason he has been bull...
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*Ian Romero's POV
I was painfully aware of how late it was getting, when I kept shifting in my bed unable to fall asleep. I felt like the worry I was feeling for Cody was crushing me, like it was getting too much to handle. If I had been worried about him before the conversation, it was nothing compared to what I was feeling now.
Cody had made us promise we wouldn't go talk to the principal or the teachers about Bryce, Jeremy and Kaleb, but I thought that was exactly what we needed to do. Oat had been right: we should act before they managed to do something even worse to Cody.
Bryce, Jeremy and Kaleb had beaten him unconscious and left him there. What if he had bled to death? What if he had been injured so badly he couldn't get up on his own and it would have taken hours for anyone to find him? He didn't even have his phone, so he couldn't have called an ambulance.
They could have killed him.
In a way the closet prank was even worse. The way he had looked when I found him there, the look of sheer terror in his eyes and how afraid he had been of coming back to school.
Cody's resilience amazed me: if I had been trapped in a small space, facing my worst fear, it would have shattered me into pieces. If I had been beaten up like he was, I would have walked right to a hospital and babbled my eyes out to my mom. I could easily defend myself in physical danger, but I knew I was weak.
Cody might have been an easy target for his small size, but he had the kind of strength only few of us had. Still, no matter how strong he was, even he would have a limit, a breaking point. I prayed we would never get to that, that we could stop things from getting worse before they'd break him.
There was just one little issue: how do you help someone who doesn't want to be helped?
***
"Wow, don't you look horrible." Cody frowned as soon as his eyes landed on me. He did have a point: I had slept like an hour, scarcely, and when I glanced at my reflection from the mirror in the morning, I looked like a walking dead.
"Thanks." I sighed and when I took a good look at him, I noticed he didn't look much better. "No sleep for you too?"
Cody just shrugged and leaned down to dig out his books and pencils from his backpack. I watched how his curly hair fell on his face and how he impatiently brushed it out of the way. He had dark circles under his eyes, making us a perfect match today, and his skin had a bleak shade, but gosh he was beautiful.
Later, when I noticed Cody's gaze on Bryce, Jeremy and Kaleb, who were staring right back at him, I decided we really needed to have that talk. I needed to make him agree with me and Oat, because I too thought those three idiots were up to something. By the looks Cody gave them, I'm sure he thought so too.
When my eyes landed on Bryce Fletcher, I found it hard to believe we used to be friends. He had a smug grin on his thin lips and he had positioned his stocky body on his seat in an I-own-this-place kind of way. He was big and stupid, but he could easily make people follow his lead. He could manipulate everyone around him to do whatever he wanted.
