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Chapter 3
She'd been yawning all day, but her spirit felt lighter than it had in years.
Jo had been met by a note in her locker after her first class:
Meet me behind the stage during your free period?
She'd looked up from reading with a smile on her face as she gathered what she'd need for her second class. Eddie had leaned up against the lockers behind her open locker door, waiting for it to shut so he could roll those big brown eyes up at her. She'd jumped when he'd suddenly appeared, but immediately burst out laughing. A real, loud laugh.
She was glad PE classes kept her father too busy to watch her in the morning.
Now, she only needed a plan to escape the library…
Jo nestled down in the corner with some maddeningly difficult trigonometry. She stared at it in agony before setting her jaw and attempting battle with it. She peered over the top of her textbook, looking for any sign of her father. He'd finally posted a schedule of sorts on his office door, so she knew he was tied to his office for this period before running some poor band of freshmen into the ground during seventh. Which meant he could only spend so much time looking for her…
A shadow hovered over the hopeless tangle of scribbles she'd produced on her graph paper. Slowly she raised her gaze to meet her father, who loomed over her for a second before bending and putting his hands on his knees. He took one look at her work and huffed.
"If you somehow don't fail that," he said, straightening and starting to walk away, "I'll be shocked."
Jo's cheeks burned. She waited for him to round the corner around the bookshelf in front of her before flipping her homework page over with a huff and slamming the book shut. She slid it back into her backpack and stood up, dragging the heavy bag behind her as she peered out into the rest of the library. A few students wrestled with their own homework and a few more perused the shelves.
There was no sign of her father.
Jo slung her backpack over her shoulders and hurried out of the library, a grin bursting across her face. She had a tape to return.
It took her a second to reorient and find the auditorium, which was on the opposite side of the building from the library. She slipped through the big double doors and into the back of the empty room towards the stage, feeling like there were a million eyes on her, expecting her father to come barging through the doors behind her at any second.
He went back to his office. He's not going to find you.
Still her feet propelled her forward into a faster walk, then a short-stepped run as she closed in on the stage. She bolted up the stairs to the stage itself and behind the thick curtains, sighing in relief as the near darkness enveloped her. Nothing made a sound, save for the rickety air conditioning turning on above her head.
He's not going to find you.
Jo started to look around, following the pillar of daylight that shot across the floor and the warm breeze that came in with it from outside. Was that cigarette smoke she smelled?
She stood a few yards back from the threshold. "Eddie?"
Something shuffled on the concrete step outside. The next second, Eddie stuck his head around the corner, grinning. "Hey!" He snuffed the cigarette he'd been smoking out on the concrete next to him as she walked out. "Wasn't sure you were gonna make it."
"I wasn't either."
She met his gaze, and everything she was going to say flew out of her head. All she knew was she had to get it right… but why was she suddenly worried about that?
"I… uh… I'm glad I did."
Did that sound as stupid to him as it just had to her?
The smile on Eddie's face widened. "Me too, Jo." He patted the concrete next to him.
Jo lowered her book bag to the ground and sat with her feet dangling over the walkway they were perched on. There wasn't much to look at, save the crumbling pavement that wrapped around to the rest of the parking lot to the right and towards the football field to the left, and a wall of trees that were starting to turn yellow. But it was quiet.
"I…um," Jo reached for her bag and unzipped the front pocket. "I have something for you."
When she fished out the tape and held it out to him, she realized her heart was beating faster. Not pounding or running off with her like it did when someone mentioned her father, or when she heard his voice booming down the hallways at school or up the stairs at home. For the first time, the fear that squeezed her chest since the day she'd left New York had loosened its grip on her.
Eddie's hand touched hers as he took the tape back, just long enough for the calluses on the tips of his fingers to brush her skin.
"What'd you think?" He smiled at her. "Pretty great, huh?"
Jo nodded.
"So." He rested his chin in his palm and rolled his eyes up at her. "Million-dollar question. You got a favorite?"
Jo stared at her toes for a moment. She certainly knew which track had grabbed her, but how did she explain it without… giving too much away? The last thing she wanted was to scare him off. Besides, she barely knew him. He hadn't given her a reason not to trust him, but that didn't necessarily mean–
"Escape."
"Escape?"
"Yeah. But it was all… wow." She shook her head. "You and Mom were right."
Eddie chuckled. "But Escape really grabbed you."
"It just…" Jo sighed. "I just felt like it was something I needed to hear. Like, a message I needed or something." She laughed nervously. "I don't know. Does that make any sense?"
"I know exactly what you mean."
Jo found herself smiling again.
"Please tell me you've had a better day than you did yesterday."
Jo nodded. "Have you?"
"Well it didn't start with getting cornered by Carver and his pack of pricks, so yeah."
"Carver…?"
"Jason Carver? You know, junior, little bit shorter than me, blond hair with way too much gel in it, thinks he's the king of the world 'cause he starts on the basketball team–"
"Oh." Jo's stomach flipped. "Yeah, I-I know who you're talking about."
"Assholes, all of them. Him, Hargrove, Harrington. Egoes a hundred feet high, and the season hasn't even started yet. Not even close." He sighed. "And the coach is just as bad as they are, if not worse."
Jo squirmed.
"Not to be a dick, but if they got creamed this year like they did last year, I wouldn't be complaining."
"I saw them go after you, Eddie. I'm sorry they did that."
"Definitely not a special occasion," he said, tracing the burn mark from his extinguished cigarette with his finger, "but thanks."
"The coach isn't…" Jo sighed. "He's not used to people standing up to him. He didn't know what to do. I, uh, I think you blew his mind."
Eddie laughed.
"I'm not kidding! He's used to flattening anybody he doesn't like, or anybody that gets in his way. Anybody he doesn't think is–"
"Normal?"
Jo nodded. "And everybody like him thinks he's just the greatest guy. And he's used to everyone else just… just rolling over and taking it. You didn't."
"So I'm at the top of his hit list, then?"
Jo shuddered. "God," she said, her voice shrinking. "I sure hope not."
Eddie's brow furrowed. "You know him or something? Coach Walker?"
"He's…" Jo swallowed hard. "He's my dad."
"Wait, you're Walker's daughter?"
Jo nodded.
"That jerk's your father?"
She couldn't look at him.
"Well, shit. That's… gotta suck."
Jo pulled her arms in around herself, staring at the cracked asphalt sprawling in front of her. "Understatement of the century."
She watched her feet bounce against the wall below her, desperately fighting for a change of subject but coming up utterly short. Everything in her was twisting, and the world suddenly felt smaller. The eyes were watching her again–
"The book dry?"
"Oh." The smile returned to her face. "Yeah, it did. It's, uh, it's safe at home. I didn't want to chance something else happening to it."
"They didn't come after you again, did they?"
Jo shook her head. "They looked like they wanted to at one point this morning. Right before I got your note. But they backed off all of a sudden."
"Yeah, they saw me on the other side of your locker. Most everybody here is scared of me, for one reason or another. Nobody really comes near me or my guys unless they're trying to start something."
Jo shrugged. "Their loss."
"More of me for you, though," Eddie smirked, and bumped her gently with his shoulder.
Jo laughed. "Guess you're right."
"And coming after you definitely would have started something. Guess they weren't up to picking that fight today, 'cause they knew there was no way in hell they were winning."
Jo's brow wrinkled.
"Man, you're really not used to having somebody in your corner, are you?"
"Everybody who is is halfway across the country."
Eddie pursed his lips together and nodded… before slamming his fist into his chest, grunting, and sprawling backwards onto the pavement, a smile still clinging to his cross-eyed "dead" face as he lay unmoving. Jo started, but then burst out laughing.
"Okay, okay! Apparently there's one of you who isn't!"
When he sat back up, his face was much closer to hers than it had been. His brown eyes sparkled as he flipped his hair out of his face and gently smiled.
"You better believe it, Jo Walker."
She better not have been blushing. She thought she heard the bell ring a few minutes ago, but she didn't care. She had no desire to move–
A whistle cut through the air. A coach's whistle.
Jo's heart jumped into her mouth, and before she had a full grasp on what was happening, she'd shot backwards through the open door and into the darkness. Every inch of her body trembled. Was someone calling her name? Their voice disappeared under the ones screaming in her head:
Run! Run! Run!
"Jo?"
Reality poured back in. Jo found herself wedged in a corner. Her backpack had been placed on the ground next to her. Eddie squatted in front of her, looking confused and concerned. Then she watched it dawn on him.
"You're okay, Jo. They were around the corner on the football field. Nobody saw us; nobody's coming this way."
All she could do was stare at him. Everything inside had gone blank.
"Here." He straightened and held a hand out to her. "Let's get you up."
She tentatively took his hand and was helped back up to her feet. Her breath came in short gasps.
"Holy shit." Eddie's hands were on her shoulders now, but she couldn't look at him. "You're shaking like a leaf. C'mere."
She wasn't expecting it when he pulled her into his arms. But the voices in her mind grew quieter the longer he held her. And the longer she clung to him, melting into him as he rubbed her back, she finally started to believe him.
As long as he was there, nothing was going to touch her.
