Chapter 47 – Clover
Chapter Forty-Seven
Clover
Thomas: where the fuck are you?
Clover: what’s up?
Thomas: sent Kola thirty minutes ago. Get up here. Hurry.
Thirty minutes ago? Fuck. Where the hell has Kola been and what the hell is going on up there?
After thirty minutes, my mind had gone to dark places.
I assumed our plan failed and that Thomas fell into bed with Kola.
She looks great in her costume. I couldn’t exactly blame him if that happened.
I push my dumb thoughts out of my head and I grab Sylvia’s hand.
“We’ve gotta go. Now.”
“What happened? I thought we had a signal set up,” she whispers.
“Sylvia, we can’t always stick to the plan. Something’s wrong. Let’s go.”
Sylvia and I dip and dodge the Fox Academy students dancing around the room, awkwardly flailing limbs to some new Justin Bieber song.
In his drunken state, Kit takes over the DJ booth and luckily for us, he doesn’t even ask for a refund.
His disturbing taste in music is the only bad part about his DJing.
Justin Bieber? Really? My mom loves the Biebs.
She would kick my butt if she knew I ever left a dancefloor with the Biebs playing on the radio.
Once Sylvia and I arrive upstairs, we follow the loud argument spilling out into the hallway to the bedroom where it’s coming from.
I hear Thomas’ booming voice and distinct accent.
The girl talking back is English, so it isn’t Kola.
He’s arguing with a girl. Sylvia gets to the door before I do and screeches out her name.
Our blackmailer shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.
“Molly? Oh hell no!” Sylvia yells, throwing her hands on her hips and looking for the first time since I’ve known her like she can fight.
Why isn’t Kola here? I didn’t see her anywhere downstairs as Sylvia and I escaped the dance floor and according to Thomas, he’s been holding Molly hostage here for what looks like a very harrowing thirty minutes judging by the veins of frustration bulging out of Thomas’ forehead.
“Let me OUT!” Molly shrieks at Thomas, screaming so hard that her eyes turn bloodshot.
The music is still too loud downstairs for anyone to hear her.
Sylvia and I shut the door behind us, closing her ass in.
If by some miracle, a girl a few inches shorter than me can push through Thomas Bainbridge’s wall of muscle, she’ll have to kick my ass and Sylvia’s to get out of this room.
Where the hell is Kola? Why didn’t she come get us…
“You hurt Sylvia, you hurt Clover. You’re not getting out of here.
We’re calling the police,” Thomas says sternly.
The police? I didn’t think that was Thomas Bainbridge’s style.
It’s better than any alternative I would have imagined his sick mind could come up with.
He pulls his phone out, directing his chin towards Molly as if me and Sylvia could consider for a second taking our eyes off the girl who tortured us – the girl who attacked Sylvia.
“What? You can’t call the police!” Molly yells. “Help! They’re raping me! They’re raping me!”
She keeps repeating the phrase while Thomas dials and begins talking to the dispatcher with one ear plugged.
Molly manages the phrase one more time before Sylvia abandons her post at the door and does something that shocks me and Thomas both.
She raises her palm and smacks the shit out of my roommate.
Thomas gives the mansion’s address during the beat of silence in the slap’s aftershocks. 1… 2… 3… Then, Molly screams.
“You bitch!” she yells.
I step between them because there’s no way I’m letting Molly throw a punch at Sylvia’s concussed head without getting through me first. She put up a good fight on the dance studio floor, but without stolen advantages, I can take my damn roommate down.
“That’s for the concussion,” Sylvia hisses, darting around me like a riled up terrier. “Call me bitch again and you’ll find out just how much of a bitch I really am.”
“Sylvia!?” Thomas and I blurt her name out in confusion. This is a side to Sylvia Richards that neither of us have ever seen. She doesn’t let up. Hands on her hips, Sylvia keeps telling off Molly.
“So you thought you could beat my ass and give me a concussion, huh?”
Thomas shakes off his surprise at Sylvia’s outburst and keeps giving the cops details on the phone.
He doesn’t bother to mention to the cops that Kola’s missing.
I don’t know why I think she’s missing. It’s probably not worth mentioning to the cops that she’s been absent for thirty minutes.
She could honestly just be downstairs, but I have a weird feeling about her conspicuous departure.
Without waiting for Molly’s response, Sylvia keeps going off on her. I pull out my phone and shoot off a quick text to Kola.
“You threatened Clover and Thomas, got all freaking weird. Why the hell would you do something like that?”
“I don’t have to answer you,” Molly says haughtily. When Sylvia lunges, I stop her and Molly smirks as if she’s won something. I don’t understand this. Molly never liked Sylvia, but enough to attack her? And what about Thomas? Why the hell would she care this much?
Thomas is still on the line with the police. I don’t think they’ll allow him to hang up until they’re here. He covers his phone’s microphone and addresses Molly. “You’d better answer her.”
“Or what? You’ll do to me what you did to Amelia?”
Thomas glances at me and then at Molly. Who the hell is Amelia? What’s Molly talking about?
Our school isn’t very big, so if there was someone in our grade named Amelia, I think I would know, wouldn’t I?
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Thomas says. “This has nothing to do with Amelia. She’s no one to you.”
“She was my friend,” Molly answers. “I knew her and I knew she shouldn’t have gone anywhere near a psychopath like you.”
Thomas seems bored.
“Psychopath? You stalked me for months – Clover and Sylvia too. Look in the bloody mirror, Molly.”
Molly lunges forward and spits on Thomas.
Her spit lands on his bare chest. Thomas doesn’t even look down with disgust. His eyes harden and a shudder of terror runs through the room.
He can control the room’s energy just with the change of his face, the shift in his jawline or the tightening of his muscles.
“Careful, Molly.”
“Threatening me? You’re on the phone with the bloody police and you’re threatening me. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t, I swear. They were just pranks!”
“Show me your arm,” I snap.
If she wants to prove herself, she can show me her arm. When I attacked that person in the dance studio, I swore I got a slash in. If Molly really wasn’t the person who attacked me, her arm would be bare. She scowls at me and turns red.
“I’m not showing you a bloody thing. Sick psychopath you must be, running around with him.”
“I am so tired of your whining,” Sylvia interrupts. “Show her your arm and give us some type of explanation. Now.”
“I’m not explaining anything,” Molly snaps.
Thomas gets tired of waiting. He sets his phone down and hurries over to Molly who squeals like a pig as he rips the sleeve of her arm up and exposes bandages.
My stomach lurches. I don’t know how she kept those covered up from me, or if I just never expected that my quiet, nerdy roommate could be the same person stalking and threatening me.
Molly might have been strange and troubled by several bouts of the flu, but she didn’t exactly seem like the type of person to cyber-stalk someone or attack someone either. Still, the slash on her arm proves otherwise, doesn’t it? Thomas glances at me and then back at Molly’s arm.
“You almost killed Clover,” Sylvia yells once she has proof.
“I did not! I was teaching all of you a lesson. He’s not a good person. Thomas Bainbridge is not a good person.”
She stomps her foot like a toddler. My stomach churns.
I can’t exactly argue with Molly there. My feelings for Thomas aside, I know he’s done horrible things.
He’s done those horrible things to me. I wince at the thought of his cock pressing into my ass when he captured me upstairs at a party.
That doesn’t justify hurting Sylvia, though.
“He might not be a good person,” Sylvia says, not exactly leaping to Thomas’ defense. “But that doesn’t make it okay to hurt everyone he knows.”
“What happened to Amelia wasn’t fair. You should be in prison for that,” she spits. “It’s not fair boys like you get away with everything.”
The siren sounds grow too loud to ignore. The cops are closing in and I still don’t understand this Amelia thing. Thomas never mentioned an Amelia to me before and if Sylvia knows about this, she never spilled a word of it to me either.
“Go find Kola,” Sylvia says to me. “I can stay up here with Thomas.”
“Got it.”
“Be careful,” Thomas calls after me. I ignore him. I can handle myself.
Good point – where is Kola? We’ll need her to give a statement to the police too. Thomas texts Kit about the cops coming, but the text message must have arrived too late. Either that or Kit’s dunked his phone into some beer… again.
In my attempts to scramble down the stairs and search for Kola, I stumble into ultimate chaos.
“SCATTER!” Kit yells into a giant megaphone. “THE COPS ARE HERE AND THEY’RE LOOKING FOR YOUNG LADS TO SHAG. SCATTER, I TELL YOU. OH, NICE TITS BABE… I MEAN… RUN FOR IT! RUN FOR THE HILLS!”
Kit Barclay cackles as everyone at the party screeches and spills out of the house.
The idiots run out the front door, dodging very confused police officers.
The rest pour out of the windows and back doors, scattering across the manicured lawns to hidden cars or spots in the bushes where they can hide out just in case the party starts up again.
Kit, unperturbed that we all abandoned our DJ booth to Jude Fox’s horrific tastes in heavy house electronic music, polishes off a bottle of gin while greeting the officers at the door in the tattered remnants of his sailor costume.
“Are you the owner of this property?”
“Probably,” Kit says arrogantly. “May I help you?”
I dodge Kit’s interaction with the cops to search every room downstairs for Kola. I even text her again. I circle back to check rooms I checked previously and run into Jude Fox exiting the party bathroom downstairs. He scowls at me and leans in the door, blocking me from looking in the bathroom.
“Looking for Thomas?”
I ignore the implications.
“No, I’m looking for Kola.”
“She’s not here.”
“Wipe your nose, Jude. The cops are here.”
“I’m not high,” he protests. But he wipes his nose anyway.
“I’ll help find your friend, okay? Just… don’t tell anyone about… that.”
“I wouldn’t care if you shoved a ten inch dildo up your nose. But thanks.”
Jude and I split up to search the house. We can hear the cops heading upstairs and then Molly’s loud shrieking. Without music and party guests, sound echoes throughout the mansion without any barriers. Jude and I meet back up on the dance floor.
“Nowhere,” he says.
I shake my head. “She left the room for a second to come get us.”
“Sure she didn’t run off?”
I’m not sure Kola didn’t run off. But if she ran off… Where would she go?
“Perhaps we could check upstairs,” Jude says with unusual kindness. I don’t trust him.
Before I can tell Jude that I’ll go upstairs with him when hell freezes over, my phone buzzes.
From: spicyfreak69@
To: crobinson@
Subject: (no subject)
Hey Clover,
You caught me.
Your band of bitches and that sicko freak won this round.
You just missed one big detail.
KOLA.
Is she a traitorous bitch who sold you out, or one of my victims?
You decide.
One thing’s for sure: you won’t see her tonight.
How does it feel to get the guy, slut?
You did this. Kola’s gone, and it’s all your fault.
– Spicy Freak
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