Free Hear Me Now by Melyssa Winchester Page A

that I almost tell her what really happened to me, but just as quickly as it comes, I push it down. It doesn’t matter how hot this girl is, or how much I enjoy our conversation, there is no way in hell I’m telling her the truth.
    When I got to school this morning and people started staring at my face, I thought for sure that shit was about to come falling down around me. People would find out that I hadn’t gotten into a fight the way I’d spread around the night before through texting with Amy and my secret would be exposed.
    So far, it hasn’t happened but it doesn’t mean I’m gonna go out of my way to make it reality. Telling this girl would be exposing myself in a way that I’m just not willing to do. So I attempt to flip it around on her, my ability to be a total jerk coming as easily as it always does and within a couple of minutes, she’s got her nose back in her book and I’m back to being left alone.
    I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I managed to get through all three fights last night. Sure, I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck the way Cadence said but it’s been happening for so long now that I’m used to it. In a few days, the cuts and bruises will fade and I’ll be back to normal. I just hope that he doesn’t schedule another fight before that happens. This time I definitely need time to heal.
    Kicking Rodney’s ass had been easier than I expected. I let him wail away on me for a while, watching as he became winded quickly due to his size and the amount of liquor and drugs in his system. When that happened, it was easy to take him down. It’s only when I got to Mark and Alex that I lost steam and ended up looking the way I do now.
    Bruce had not been happy, but considering what he told me while he drove me home, he should have seen it coming. According to him, Mark and Alex are training to become professional fighters, which means they know what the hell they’re doing and going up against a kid like me is easy as shit for them. Hearing what he told me, I’d been pretty pissed. It’s one thing to throw me against someone my own age or maybe even a few years older like Rodney, but professional fighters?
    What dear old dad doesn’t know is that by the time I got to Alex, I was prepared to lie down and let him get the win. I actually did lie down at one point, praying for it to end. I had sucked all the blood I could stand off my lips and I could barely see out of my right eye with the blood that was pouring out of the cut Mark left me with. By the time I got home and looked in the mirror, my eyes were completely bloodshot and it had nothing to do with me not sleeping. It was the blood that managed to hole up there.
    Most kids, if they went through what I did, would be freaked out going home, afraid their mom would see it and lose her shit on them, but I’m not like that. Between all the fighting I get into at school and then all the shit that went down at Homecoming with Kayden, my mom is used to seeing me like this. She didn’t even bat an eyelash when I walked through the door.
    She also didn’t ask what happened.
    That’s Rebecca for you. She’s so out of it, I’m shocked that she even gets up for work in the morning or knows enough to leave me money for lunch. She’s always been a space cadet, but the last couple of years since she kicked my dad out, she’s gotten worse. It’s the pills. She drowns herself in them so much that the world is completely lost to her. I’m thankful for her being this way though. It means I don’t have to answer any questions about what Dad really does with me during our time together.
    I bandaged up the wounds as best I could and here I am, back at school, earning some looks but nothing I can’t handle. My secret is still intact, my friends doing what they’re good for and spreading the perfect amount of lies in order to make it seem as though all I did was get into a fight after school. The only risk to all of that being one of