Page 66 of Better Than Revenge

“Deja hates me,” he said.

I practically choked on the bite I’d just taken, but managed to chew and swallow without incident. “Hateis a strong word.”

“So I’m not wrong,” he returned.

“She doesn’t know you. Doesn’t trust you.”

He narrowed his eyes and then gave a slow nod.

“What?” I asked.

“You haven’t been talking about me with your friends. Telling them…anything.”

“No, I have…” Hadn’t I? In my haste to prove him wrong, I blurted out, “I told them we hugged for a long time on the first day of spring!”

His brows popped up.

That was the wrong thing to say. “I mean, just because I was trying to…I was embar— I didn’t want you to…See, I talked about you,” I finished in an unspectacular fashion.

“So based on what they now know, they think I’m the cocky jerk who hugs you?”

I smiled. “Yes.”

He shook his head but gave a breathy laugh. “Great.”

“They know you’re helping me. That’s gone a long way with Max and Lee.”

“But not with Deja.”

“She’s wary. Doesn’t understand why you’d want to helpme.”

“She doesn’t…oryoudon’t?” His question was accompanied by a hurt expression.

I hesitated before I said, “Her?”

“Ouch,” he said.

“I have trust issues. Big ones. I’m sorry. I’m really trying to work through them. I want to work through them. I like you. I mean, not like…It’s not that…As a friend.”

“I’m helping you because I like to right wrongs,” he said. “And Jensen has racked up a lot of wrongs.”

“Do you go around righting all the wrongs at school or just this one?”

“Just this one…for now.”

Chapter

twenty-two

“IT’S TIME TO TALK ABOUTdate two with Andrew, Grandma. The people want to hear it,” I said a couple days later. The last episode was now at two hundred views, and I was getting daily messages on my social media asking for the next part. People loved my grandma. I understood. She was lovable.

“They’re going to be disappointed with how underwhelming it was,” she said.

“I doubt it.”

The blinds on the window in my room were open today, and she was distracted by some kids who were riding scooters on the street outside. But she wasn’t playing with the cord to her headphones, so that was good.

Despite her distraction, she answered my question. “In the summer, on the first weekend of the month, a band would come to the beach and perform. It was free and I went a lot, but this time,Andrew asked me to go with him. He picked me up in a convertible he’d borrowed from his grandpa, and we drove it to the packed parking lot by the rock.”