Butterfly Kisses | ✓

21 | hawthorn

"Ren," he began, the lilt of his voice clearly designed to take my mind off my previous thoughts. "About my stepbrother's party."

"Yes?" Uncertainty speckled my tone. "What about it?"

He paused, and I was afraid he was about to deliver bad news. But instead he asked, "Do you think I could maybe tell some people that you're my girlfriend?"

"No." I snorted, enjoying the terror that flickered through his eyes. "Tell them you're my boyfriend."

WHEN WE GOT to my house, I left my skateboard by the door and led Isaac into the cramped living room. I was marginally less ashamed of it than I had been the last time he'd been here.

A lone cardboard box still lived by the fireplace, and our furniture was still second-hand and ratty, but we had more important things to worry about. Like our math exam.

I curled up on one end of the couch, pulling my hair into a knot on top of my head. Isaac unzipped his backpack as I leaned back. "Got everything with you?"

"Yup." Isaac plucked a few things out of his backpack: his textbook, his notebook, a pencil case and a small white container inside a plastic bag. Once I noticed the last item, he made a move to put it away, but I made a split-second decision to slide it out of his hand.

It was just a regular sandwich bag, but its contents caught my attention. The bottle's blue label read Adderall XR and another sticker on top informed me that Isaac had been prescribed it two weeks ago.

He took the bag from me gingerly. "What's this?" I asked.

"It's for my ADHD." He chewed his lip, slipping the medication into the front pocket of his bag. "I take it in the morning."

I had long suspected that Isaac's issues with school stemmed from something other than his supposed delinquent lifestyle. I heaved my own textbook onto my lap. "How come I've never seen it before?"

He shrugged. "Everyone knows now, but it used to cause problems when people found about it at school."

That only vaguely made sense to me. The subject of antidepressants had come up once with my parents in the immediate aftermath of the fire. But that was the full extent of experience I had with drugs, besides the ones we took for coughs and colds.

"What?" I scrunched up my nose. "Would people would make fun of you for having them, or ask you for pills, or...?"

Isaac laughed, and I hoped it wasn't because of my naivety. "Something like that."

Still insecure about my ability to navigate this kind of conversation, I opened my math book to chapter nine, eager to dive into some problems. Despite that I was pretty good at algebra, I was nervous about taking the exam early, and even more nervous about what my parents would say about our plans. Luckily, though, neither of them were home.

Which contributed at least in part to the bravery that surged through my veins a few minutes later, when Isaac got tired of hearing me explain a question to him. I cleared my throat and dropped my pencil into the gutter of my textbook, swivelling slightly so I could look him in the eye.

"You know the first time we talked at school? Like, really talked?"

Isaac nodded. I added, "And you told me you were a drug dealer?"

"That was a joke," he protested, but a moment later his smirk morphed into something more sincere — and more suspicious. "Okay, so there was this one time..."

I covered my face with my hands. "No."

"Wait," he broke in. "Shit. I just remembered."

He shot me a sidelong glance, which I only caught through the spaces between my fingers. "It was back when I first moved here. They put me in special ed to see how I would do."

Pausing, he leaned back against the cushion on the couch. "Once I bombed grade eleven and proved I was a lost cause, they kicked me out. But before that, Jackie Merritt was put into the class too."

I uncovered my face once he spoke that name, our matched intensity sparking electrical currents between us. "No," I repeated, because I could see where this was going. "Why?"

"Hell if I know," he answered. "We tried to be friends, since there were only a few of us in that room each week. Anyway, she wanted to know where I got Adderall. And I told her not to mess with it."

"And?"

"And nothing. That's it. I didn't even remember it had happened until now." Isaac tilted his head towards the ceiling and I did the same, wincing at the dust that was ever-present in this house. "It's the earliest incident I can think of that could've pissed Doug Merritt off."

"He hates you because you gave his daughter a D.A.R.E. speech?" The disbelief in my voice made him chuckle, though there wasn't any humour in it. I sat up straighter, practically on the edge of my seat. "Jackie's in regular classes now."

"Yeah." Isaac's mouth became a thin line, and I thought back on all the times I'd overheard Jackie's father give her a hard time about her performance at school. He dragged in a long breath.

"They spread rumours about me. Doug has so much power, Ren, you don't understand." Even though I did kind of understand, I let him continue. "At first it didn't matter; he'd just tell other parents stuff at PAC meetings to make them paranoid. But he started blaming stuff on me. Stuff that's way worse than stealing. Graffiti, breaking and entering..."

"Drug dealing," I filled in. My leg was beginning to cramp, but I couldn't move. "But you've never been arrested for any of that stuff, or even caught in the act, right? It should be obvious to everyone that Doug is full of b —"

"It doesn't matter," he said, every syllable burning with an emotion he'd long kept snuffed out. "This is a small town. Justice isn't always served you way you think. People don't need warrants for arrests, they just need a scapegoat. And a tiniest bit of proof can convince them they're right."

"That's stupid," I blurted out. "They don't have any proof of anything."

"That's the problem," he said, more quietly this time. "They have proof of me stealing."

"Shoplifting from a 7-Eleven," I snapped, "does not make you a drug dealer."

He went very quiet, and dread carved a pit into my stomach again. Nothing with Isaac would never be easy, but I was already in too deep to quit. "It's crazy," he said, "how I keep digging up stuff about you, but you've never even tried to google me."

He chuckled softly, resting his head against the top of the couch. "Doug has a video. And it's worse than you think."

A/N: BAM. So apparently this is now a Wattpad featured story? Which is not only crazy and ridiculously cool, but also hella motivational because this is my first timely update in quite a while. To be honest, though, I've been wanting to share this chapter with you guys for ages now :-) Thanks so much for reading ♡

The cover at the top was made by @calloipe. Thank you again!