Being McKenzie Prince ✔

Chapter Seven

We have spent the last few weeks trying to avoid Goliath. Since that night he kissed me and beat up Skye. It is a lot harder than it sounds. The only time he is not at the house is when he goes to the bar. A part of me is starting to think that maybe running away is not that bad an idea. On the other hand maybe it is time to speak up. To get help.

Why is it drilled into my mind that no one will believe us?

My mother is busy looking for work. She has either not noticed the tense atmosphere between us or she just does not care. She saw the bruises the Sunday afterwards but said nothing about it.

Today was a Wednesday. I had another date with Harper at his house. It has almost been two months since I started the stupid extra lessons. We met up once a week. Always at his house. Never at mine. Not in a million years. Skye told me that he had plans with Natasha his afternoon so I did not have to worry about him being alone with Goliath. I still did not like her, but I had to start accepting it. Skye was absolutely crazy about her.

The thing was though that Natasha was that girl in High School who everyone referred to the female version of a Player. She would date guys for a few weeks and then she would leave them just like that. In school everyone called her a S*&^%. They also said that she partied allot and that she hung out with older men. She was in Matric, which made her two years older than Skye.

Skye kept telling me that maybe she was like that woman from The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. That she was some innocent victim in all of this.

I do not believe it for a second. She was no innocent bystander when she tried to steal Brain away from me last year. She knew exactly what she was doing when she pushed her tongue down his throat. Maybe I am biased, but she is on my hate list along with Ashley Castles, Harper Brown, Brian Montgomery and Barney. Barney is just too happy. No purple dinosaur can lead a normal and happy life. He was probably the black sheep in his family, or literally the purple dinosaur.

I know that I should give her a chance but it is not that easy. They have been together for almost two months. She is clearly a bad influence. I can already see the change in his behavior. He is extremely agitated followed by moments where he is almost completely comatose. I can barely get him out of bed in the mornings. Sometimes when I talk to him it is like he is not even there.

Harper's mansion looked exactly the same as it always did. I still find it huge and remarkable. The whole structure made me think of those old Cape houses in Cape Town. It is a mixture between modern and vintage.

I googled Cape houses for an assignment in Grade Eight. It was actually kind of fascinating what you could find on Google Earth. I used Google Earth to see what Stephen Chbosky's house looked like. I will however not tell anyone how I came to find out that information in the first place.

It was a secret.

It was not stalking.

Precisely the same as how I happened to know that Natasha and my brother was on a date in the Red Flag at this very moment. The latter was not that difficult. Tyler just sent me a text message and told me that they were there. He knew that I disliked her and he had his own personal reasons for disliking her.

"Are you going to stand there and daydream the whole time or are you coming in?" Harper stood by the front door. He impatiently slammed his foot against the tiled floor.

"You know. The fact that you are slamming your foot against the tiles is not going to make me move any faster."

"I know, but it is making me feel better." He stepped back so that I could enter and smirked.