Beauty and the Beat

Beauty and the Beat (29)

Being suspended really sucked.

It’s definitely not as fun as you might think it’d be. I might have been out of school for a week, but it wasn’t much better at home, especially since I was on complete and total lockdown. I was starting to get a little batty toward the end of the week from lack of contact.

No one in my house would talk to me. Riley and our mother were still ridiculously angry, and my father decided he wasn’t going to deal with it anymore. My parents wouldn’t even talk to each other since they had different views on the matter, and the only time I ever heard their voices was when they fought with each other.

I was going crazy. I couldn’t talk to Ethan, and I couldn’t even talk to my friends. It felt like I was the only person on the entire planet and it drove me absolutely insane.

I could only imagine what people were saying at school. I didn’t know if it had died down at all over the week or if it was still a discussed topic. I could just imagine Freya talking crap about me to everyone and just making it worse. I could imagine Katarina thinking she won. But she definitely hadn’t.

It was hard for me to hear Maxxon’s truck come and go every day. I knew he was angry at me, and for some reason, it hurt even more than it did when Freya was angry. I knew she’d be mad at me, but I wasn’t expecting Maxxon to be.

I thought we had been becoming friends. But I guess I ruined it. I ruined a lot of things.

The fact that I had no idea what was going on at school really bothered me. I didn’t know what people were saying, though I was sure it was bad, and I didn’t even know who had replaced Ethan. I could just imagine how awkward that class was going to be when I came back.

When there was suddenly a knock on my bedroom door, I was hesitant to answer it. No one from my family knocked, and it wasn’t like anyone could visit me while I was in prison.

When I opened the door to see who it was, I wish that I hadn’t. My stomach immediately dropped when I saw Freya scowling back at me from the other side of my doorframe.

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at her. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you,” she said, as if that much wasn’t obvious. “Your mom let me in, but she said I couldn’t stay long.”

I was surprised my mother let anyone up to see me. She didn’t let Bennett see me when he came over to give me the assignments I was missing, and Bennett was the only friend I had left. I wondered if Freya made her dislike for me evident to my mother or not.

“What do you want?” I questioned now, letting her in my room and closing the door behind us so my mother couldn’t overhear our conversation. “You’re definitely the last person I ever expected to visit me.”

Freya continued to scowl at me, her arms crossed over her chest as she said, “I just have a few things to say to you.”

“Didn’t you say you were done with me?” I reminded her now, since that had been the last thing she said to me. “You didn’t want me to talk to you anymore.”

This only made her scowl deepen. “Well, I have one more thing to say to you, so I’ll just be done with you after this, then.”

I made a face at her and stopped myself from rolling my eyes at her again. As long as she was here, I might have as well heard her out, even though I was sure it was going to be rude and mean.

“Everyone at school hates you,” she informed me, but if she was expecting any kind of reaction from me, I wasn’t going to satisfy her by giving her one. “They all think you’re just a dirty whore who had sex with a teacher for a good grade.”