Chapter 11 #3
“In here, Bella,” Alex said tersely, and pointed to a chair in the reception area. Lucy scooted closer to her computer, as if doing so gave Alex and this girl any kind of privacy. At least it gave them some space.
With a loud, sneering sigh, the girl flung herself into the swivel chair and sat there sprawled, her tights-clad legs flung out in front of her, her bags and coat at her feet.
She looked up at Alex with her eyebrows arched, a mocking smile on her face.
She reminded Lucy of the mean girls she’d encountered in seventh grade, all acid sweetness and deliberate contempt.
“What, I’m going to sit in here all day?” she asked, spinning around in the chair, and Alex glared at her.
“Yes,” he bit out, “you da—you are.”
“Language, Dad,” Bella mocked, and Alex’s eyes snapped with fury, his mouth tightly compressed.
So this was the other daughter he’d mentioned at the café. Lucy would have expected Alex’s daughters to be quiet and cowed, but then since he didn’t have his dog under control, why should he have his daughter? And Bella Kincaid definitely looked like a handful.
“Just stay here, Bella,” Alex said. “Since you managed to get yourself suspended from school in only the second week of term, you can face the consequences.”
“Which is to be bored out my mind?”
“That’s the first one,” Alex snapped, and then turned to Lucy. “Lucy, I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but I trust my daughter will behave herself and not cause you any trouble this afternoon.”
That, Lucy thought as Alex stalked back to his office, was some incredibly wishful thinking on Alex’s part.
She slid a sideways glance at the girl, who was still lounging in the chair, studying her chipped black nail polish with such obvious boredom that Lucy almost wanted to advise her not to try quite so hard.
She turned back to her computer, the afternoon’s register blurring in front of her. She could feel Bella’s curious and contemptuous gaze burning into her back. How on earth was she supposed to concentrate with this girl staring at her all afternoon?
She might be all right to give a few five-year-olds cuddles and ice packs, but this type of child—this querulous, unpleasant, on-the-cusp-of-adulthood, malevolent force—was something else entirely.
The exaggerated sighs, the narrowed looks, the eye rolls, the lip curls . . . she’d had it all before with Thomas’s sons. And she’d been trying with them, not that it had ever done much good. If anything, those two boys had put her off children completely.
She turned back to the register and tried to work for ten endless minutes, with Bella heaving gusty sighs and spinning in her chair, before she couldn’t take it anymore. She swung around in her chair and gave Bella a sunny smile the girl very obviously ignored.
“So, what you’d get done for?”
Lucy watched Bella hesitate, torn between keeping up her too-bored-to-live act and actually answering the question. She turned so her back was to Lucy.
“Nothing too bad.”
“Oh.” Lucy loaded the single syllable with disappointment.
“I thought you might have set fire to the chemistry lab or something.” Not, she realized, that she should be giving the girl ideas.
Bella certainly looked capable of a major act of arson.
But she’d had quite enough of her too-cool-for-school attitude. She was so over that.
“I just bunked off PE,” Bella said after a moment, spinning round in her chair again to face Lucy. “Teachers overreacted as usual.”
“Hmm.” A suspension for skipping a single class?
Lucy doubted she was hearing the whole story.
She turned back to her computer and continued to enter the register numbers into the afternoon attendance spreadsheet.
She was getting a lot faster at it, thankfully.
“Why PE?” she asked after several minutes had passed.
“I mean, math or physics or something like that I could understand. But PE? It’s fun. ”
“It’s stupid,” Bella said with sudden viciousness. She spun again in her chair, faster, so her hair flew out, and Lucy could see her face properly.
Spinning there, legs and hair flying, she looked very small, very young. Her face still held a puppyish roundness. And instead of reminding Lucy of the mean girls she’d encountered in junior high, Bella Kincaid reminded her of someone else.
Herself, at the same age. Vulnerable, lonely, so very unhappy—and hiding it any way she knew how.
“Some of it’s stupid,” Lucy agreed, turning once more back to the computer. “I hated swimming, for example. Getting wet in the middle of the day is so not fun.”
Bella didn’t answer, and Lucy mentally shook her head at herself. Why was she trying so hard? She didn’t care why Bella Kincaid had been suspended from school. She didn’t care about Bella Kincaid at all.
Except somehow she couldn’t keep from caring, at least a little. Surely Bella’s difficulties had something to do with her mother’s death. The girl still had to be grieving, and that alone, Lucy knew, was enough to soften her already too-squishy heart towards her.
“It was netball,” Bella said in a low voice. Lucy stilled, her hands resting on the computer keyboard; even her heart seemed to have stopped beating for a moment. “Stupid effing netball,” Bella said viciously, and then to Lucy’s shock she burst into noisy tears.
Lucy spun around and saw Bella with her arms over her face, her bony shoulders shaking.
“Oh, sweetie . . .” She tried to pull the girl into a hug, but Bella was no six-year-old Eva, grateful for a cuddle.
“Geroff,” she snapped, her voice muffled against her arm as she cringed away from Lucy.
“Sorry,” Lucy muttered. She felt her face flame as she sat there helplessly, not knowing how to make it better but wanting to. “I hate netball,” she finally said, and then added, “Is that like basketball?”
Bella let out a snort that Lucy hoped was a laugh. With her face still buried in her arms she said, “You don’t even know what netball is?”
“Well, it obviously sucks.”
Bella lifted her tear-streaked face from her arm to peek at Lucy. Her mascara had run and she’d bitten off all her bright lipstick. She looked even younger now, and far too vulnerable. “I don’t even care about netball,” she said, and wiped at her cheeks. “And my dad doesn’t let us say ‘sucks.’”
“Hey, you said ‘effing,’” Lucy answered. “Isn’t that worse?” Actually, she wasn’t sure if it was a really bad swearword, or if she should have repeated it. Leaving the country at six years old had given her a limited Brit vocabulary, especially when it came to curse words.
Bella shrugged defiantly. “He wasn’t here.”
“I won’t tell him.”
She gazed at Lucy, the traces of her tears still visible on her face, along with the streaks of mascara. “Why are you sucking up to me?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “Are you trying to, like, get in with my dad?”
“Get in with your dad?” Lucy repeated with a nonchalance that sounded awful, almost as bad as one of those fake, hearty laughs stuffy adults gave when talking to kids.
Her mother’s friends had laughed like that when she’d been trotted out like some tarnished trophy at her mother’s showings.
Heh, heh, heh, Lucy, well, aren’t you getting bigger?
Then they’d turn away and her mother would give her a little push, indicating that she should make herself scarce.
She’d usually ended up hiding under the refreshment table, her knees tucked to her chest, as she watched all the shoes go by.
“I’m afraid I’m kind of hopeless at this whole receptionist thing,” she told Bella with a shrug. “And frankly, your dad seemed so ticked off at you that being nice to you isn’t going to score me any points, is it?” Not that she wanted to score points with Alex. Or score anything.
Bella’s gaze remained narrowed, as she seemed to assess the truth of her words.
“So if it’s not netball you don’t like,” Lucy asked, “what’s the big deal with PE?”
Bella shrugged, hunching her shoulders and drawing her knees up to her chest. “Nothing,” she muttered, and looked away.
Lucy waited for a few minutes, and then when she’d finally finished logging in the afternoon register, she turned back to Bella, who was still sitting with her knees tucked up. “Why don’t you clean up?” she suggested, and Bella regarded her suspiciously.
“What are you talking about?”
Lucy tried for a kindly smile. “Umm . . .” She gestured to her cheek. “Mascara.”
“Oh.” Bella nibbled her lip and then with an attempt at an insouciant shrug unfolded herself from her chair. “Fine.”
“You know where the bathroom is?”
She gave Lucy an utterly scathing look. So much for solidarity over netball. “I used to go to school here?” she said in the “well, duh” tone that seemed to be a universal language for teenagers.
“Right.”
Bella stalked out of the room, her arms wrapped around her body but her chin held high, and Lucy sank back into her chair. Children were hard work, she thought, then amended that to other people’s children were hard work.
How much emotional energy, not to mention money and time, had she expended on Will and Garrett?
Three years of her life poured into those boys.
Reading them bedtime stories. Showing up at their soccer matches.
Giving them presents, and not just gift cards or the latest electronic toy, but thoughtful items that had taken effort and time.
For Will’s twelfth birthday she’d made him a bird feeder in the shape of the Tardis, which might have been a bit on the bizarre side, but birds and Doctor Who were Will’s two favorite things.
A week later she’d seen it stuffed into the recycling bin.
She hadn’t known whether to burst into tears or clock him over the head with the thing.
She’d done neither, just smiled and pretended she hadn’t seen it. Of course.
Lucy turned back to the computer. Time to log in the amount of lunch money paid this week. Time to stop thinking about Bella or Alex or any Kincaid.
Five minutes later Bella slouched back into the room.
Her face had been scrubbed clean, which made her look about six.
She stood in the center of the reception area for a moment, her expression uncertain, and the pale sunlight streaming through the windows touched her in gold—and shone right through her thin cotton uniform blouse.
The girl wasn’t wearing a bra. And preteen or not, she needed one.
Lucy didn’t think she’d been staring, but Bella must have sensed her gaze, for she abruptly pulled her blazer closed and threw herself into the chair, angling her body away from Lucy so she was all sharp elbows and knees.
“I left my jumper at school,” she muttered, and Lucy sat back in her own chair, her mind spinning. No bra. No mother to buy her one. Skipping PE, most likely because she had to change for it. It came together in her head with an almighty clang.
Bella Kincaid needed a bra.