How to Wreck My Bully's Heart novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Tray
Drake and Teagan tip Maisy's lunch tray in front of the cafeteria, and Drake's phone lights up with the private message Maisy just sent to her online boyfriend.
The tray hit the floor before I saw his hand move.
Mac and cheese slid across the tile. My milk burst open and ran under the next table.
The whole Ridgemont cafeteria went quiet.
"Oops," Teagan Whitmer said.
She was already holding up her phone, filming.
Drake stood over me with his lacrosse bag on one shoulder and his navy blazer open. He did not even look sorry.
"Free lunch is free," he said. "Pick it up, scholarship."
Somebody laughed near the windows.
I had a seat, a fork and thirty minutes. I had been planning to eat my lunch.
It had been eight months of this, since the second week of February.
He had filled my locker with wet paper towels and started a group chat that called me Charity Case.
One morning he read my mother's job aloud in homeroom.
I never knew why he picked me.
I used to hope somebody would stop him.
Nobody stopped him, because his father paid for half the school.
I didn't pick up the tray.
I sat back down on the bench with milk soaking into my jeans, and I took out my phone under the table.
My thumbs were steady. That surprised me.
I had somewhere to put the bad days, and it was not this room.
His name on my screen was Nightcrawler.
He had messaged me every night for three months, after my mother left for her shift.
He was the first person who ever asked what I was afraid of, and then waited for the answer.
I typed fast.
"He did it again. Tipped my whole tray in front of everyone. I'm so tired. Tell me it ends."
I hit send.
On the table in front of me, six inches from my knee, Drake's phone lit up.
He had set it down to adjust his bag. Face up, on the edge of my table.
The screen showed a gray banner with a small moth icon.
The banner said, "Moth: He did it again. Tipped my whole tray in front of everyone. I'm so tired. Tell me it ends."
My handle. My exact words. The comma I always put after "again."
I stopped breathing.
Moth was me. It was the name I used when I sang online with a mask over my face.
A few hundred strangers listened on Sunday nights, and nobody at school knew.
Only one person had ever called me by it every night for three months.
Drake glanced down.
I watched him read it. I watched the color leave his face.
Teagan was still filming. She said, "Drake? What's wrong?"
He snatched the phone and flipped it over. Too late. I had already seen the whole thing.
He was the sweet boy who told me I had the best voice he'd ever heard.
He was the one who said keep going, and the one who said I wasn't alone.
He was standing in a puddle of my lunch.
For one second I wanted to scream.
For one second I wanted to throw the milk carton at his face, in front of two hundred people, and let them suspend me.
Then I saw his hand shaking on the phone.
And something inside me went very still and very clear.
He didn't know that I knew.
He thought he had gotten away with it.
He had been kind to me in the dark for three months, and cruel to me in the light every morning.
I could end it right now. I could say his name. I could take the phone and read his own messages out loud.
It would last one day. People would call it a prank. His father would bury it.
Drake would still be Drake.
But for the first time at Ridgemont, I was holding a secret that belonged to me.
I wiped my hands on a napkin and stood up slowly.
"Teagan," I said, "you can stop filming. You've got your video."
She blinked. She lowered the phone.
I looked straight at Drake.
"I'd say I hope you choke on your lunch," I said. "But somebody already spilled it."
A few people laughed. The wrong people laughed. They laughed at him.
His jaw tightened.
I picked my fork up off the floor and set it on the table.
Under the bench, I typed one more message with my thumb.
"Nightcrawler, are you there?"
I hit send.
Drake's phone, held tight in his fist, buzzed against his palm.
He flinched.
Everybody heard it. Teagan heard it. A boy at the next table heard it.
I picked up my bag.
"You should get that," I said.
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