A Righteous Love

Chapter Twenty-Eight - You're Kind Of Smart

Chapter Twenty-Eight - "You're Kind Of Smart"

*Trigger Warning*

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Tears prickled my eyes on cue, like his words were an instant burning in the back of them. They left his lips and smacked me right in the face, leaving a stinging sensation to take over my entire body.

An unavoidable nausea suddenly rose up into my constricting throat. I can't believe this is happening.

Although I was, without a doubt, fuming at what Todd just said, I couldn't speak up. I couldn't move either. Everyone looked to me for an answer as I stood frozen in place like a petrified statue.

Ashley was the first to speak up. "What are you talking about?" She asked Todd, knitting her blonde eyebrows together.

He glanced around at all of my friends and sighed, looking oddly sympathetic. "Oh, well, if you guys don't know, then I guess she definitely didn't tell you," he aimed his comment towards Dylan.

"Didn't tell me what?" Dylan questioned. His voice was strained and he held so much confusion in his eyes that I had never seen before.

"Don't do this," I whispered to Todd. I wasn't even sure if he heard me because it was such a small, quiet plea.

But he didn't listen anyway.

"About that summer when she was depressed and tried to kill herself?"

The words came tumbling out of his mouth, and he said it without a problem. Like he just asked us if we saw that we were getting some rain tomorrow. He didn't miss a beat, and brought it up as if it was the easiest thing in the world.

"Todd!" I cried out, looking up at him for help. An answer, a sign, anything to know what was going through that twisted mind of his.

Various pairs of eyes belonging to my friends frantically searched back and forth from Todd to me. No one knew what to say about the bomb that was just dropped. 

"What?" Ashley finally spat out, only thickening the tension between us.

"Yeah, she told you guys that she was staying at her lake house for a little while, you know, going away for a bit. But that's not what she did," Todd explained like it was his problem – not mine.

Her face twisted into somewhat of disgust and disbelief. I felt my chest caving in when her eyes sliced through me seconds later. Never had I gotten a look from her like that in my life, and I knew that this conversation could make that happen. That's why I had avoided it for so long.

But sometimes, promises were broken and you could never control what other people did.

"Please stop," I begged, shaking my head. I felt the tears about ready to spill out as I rolled my lips into my mouth in an attempt to hold them back.

"But don't you think they have a right to know?" Todd said to me, looking like he was the confused one now. "Especially Dylan."

"No, I don't. Not from you," I sneered.

His eyes searched mine for a brief moment, like he was trying to tell me some secret message or something. Obviously, I wasn't getting it. And that fast, he switched back to being an asshole.

"Well, she had to go away because she was at an institution for awhile," he continued to explain my situation to my frightened group of friends. "Just thought you'd like to know."