Caught Between My Bully and My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Napkin

With the uncropped video in her hand and both boys in trouble, Joni writes her terms on a diner napkin, and Crew asks what happens if she ever asks.

I spun around on the lawn.

The street was full of parked cars and dark windows.

Somebody on the porch was laughing.

Somebody else was throwing up in the hedge.

Any one of them could have been holding the phone.

Crew took mine out of my hand and looked at the photo.

Then he looked up at the house, at the cars, at the porch.

"Closer than you think," Corey read over his shoulder. "Cute."

"Go home," Crew said to me.

"Don't tell me what to do."

"Fine. Stay out here in the dark in that dress. See how that goes."

I took my phone back and walked to Jordyn's car.

I didn't look behind me once.

My hands didn't stop shaking until four in the morning.

By nine, the clip had sixty thousand views.

I lay in bed in Room 214 with the blinds down and watched the number climb.

Saylor Sheffield had posted a story at eight.

It was a photo of her and Corey at some formal, his arm around her waist.

Over it, in pretty white script, she'd written, "Some people never learned boundaries. Praying for her."

Four hundred girls had liked it.

At ten an email came from the scholarship office.

"We have been made aware of a possible conduct concern involving you. Please keep this weekend free in case we need to speak."

I read it three times.

My transfer scholarship needed a 3.3 and a clean record.

Without it I was back in Bell Creek, pouring coffee at the diner for the rest of my life.

Somebody knocked.

"It's me," Jordyn sang through the door. "I come bearing caffeine."

She came in with two iced coffees and a paper bag of donuts.

Her red curls were piled on her head.

She hugged me hard before she put anything down.

"I'm so sorry," she said into my hair. "I swear to God they weren't supposed to be there."

"It's not your fault."

"It feels like my fault. I'm the one who said wear the dress."

She sat on my bed and took out her phone.

"Okay. Don't freak out. I filmed it."

"You what?"

"From the drinks table. In case. You know how guys lie after." She turned the screen toward me. "It's all of it. Sound and everything."

I watched myself get caged on the dance floor.

Crew's hand on my wrist.

Corey's mouth at my ear.

Every word, loud and clear over the music.

Crew's finger running along my hem, and me trying to pull away.

Jordyn had caught all of it.

"Send it to me," I said.

"Already did." She squeezed my knee. "You're going to get them, babe. And I'm going to help."

I worked my shift that night like nothing had happened.

The Night Owl was a chrome box of a diner on the last corner of campus, open twenty-four hours, smelling of bacon and burnt coffee.

I wore the brown apron and wrote orders on a pad and smiled at drunk sophomores.

At two in the morning the bell over the door rang.

Corey and Crew walked in and sat at my counter.

The cook looked at me through the pass-through window and raised his spatula like a question.

I shook my head.

"Coffee?" I said. "Or did you just come to call me a hooker again?"

Corey didn't smile.

He looked terrible.

Crew looked the same as always, which was worse.

"The account posted his bar fight," Corey said. "From last spring. With his full name on it."

Crew turned his phone around.

The video showed Crew in a parking lot, his fist going into a guy's face.

"Conduct opened a review this afternoon," Crew said. "I'm on probation. One more strike and I'm out."

"And Coach saw your little clip," Corey said. "He wants to know why his quarterback is in a scandal with his own stepsister."

"My little clip?"

"Whoever runs that account is coming after all three of us," Corey said. "We want it dead. You want it dead. So we help."

I almost laughed.

Then I took out my phone, set it on the counter between their mugs and hit play.

The volume was all the way up.

Corey's voice came out of my phone.

"Would you like that? Me to fuck you?"

A girl in the corner booth turned around.

Corey's face went gray.

Crew didn't look away from the screen.

He watched his own hand go up my thigh all the way to the end.

"That's what happened," I said. "Uncropped. I've got it. If I send this to the conduct office, Crew's expelled. If I send it to your coach, you're off the team. If I send it to Saylor, you're single."

"You wouldn't," Corey said.

"Try me."

I pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and took the pen from behind my ear.

I wrote while they watched.

One. Until I unmask the account, you two do what I tell you.

Two. Nobody touches me unless I ask.

Three. When it's over, you apologize. In public. In the quad. By the fountain.

I turned the napkin around and slid it across the counter.

"I keep the video. Sign it or leave."

Corey stared at me like I'd grown a second head.

"You're blackmailing us."

"I'm hiring you. The pay's terrible."

Crew picked up my pen.

He signed his name in neat, small letters, like an engineer.

Corey swore under his breath and signed under him.

I signed last.

Crew slid the napkin back to me with two fingers.

His gray eyes held mine across the counter.

"Rule two," he said. "What happens when you ask?"

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