Chapter 6 #3
All four tires. Slashed. Not subtly—long, vicious gashes ripped through the rubber, the kind that take effort and a good knife and the specific cruelty of a person who wants you to know exactly how much he hates you. My car lists to one side like a wounded animal, rims resting on the asphalt.
“Well,” I say. “That’s thorough.”
Penny stares at the car. Back at me. Back at the car. Her face cycles through disbelief, rage, and something that looks a lot like a woman doing mental math on prison sentences.
“I’m going to kill him,” she says. “Slowly. With my bare hands. And then I’m going to bring him back to life and do it again.”
“Poetic.”
“I’m serious, Cat. This is criminal destruction of property. We should call the cops right now.”
“I’m calling a tow truck. I’m calling my parents. And then I’m going home and lying face-down on my bed until this day stops happening.”
I call the tow company first. Then my parents. My father’s in back-to-back meetings—his assistant answers and promises to relay the message. My mother’s at her publisher’s office in Boston and won’t be back until evening. Of course. The universe has a dark, exquisite sense of comic timing.
Penny has class. She offers to skip—insists on it—but I wave her off.
“Go. I’m fine. The tow truck is on its way.”
“I don’t like leaving you alone.”
“I’ve been alone before. I’m good at it.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she hugs me—hard, brief, the kind of hug that says everything a person doesn’t have words for. She pulls back, points at me.
“Text me the second you get home.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The tow truck arrives eleven minutes later. The driver climbs out, and every nerve in my body fires at once.
He’s thick-necked, mid-forties, with a belly that strains the buttons on his uniform shirt and hands that look like they’ve been used for things other than fixing cars.
He sees me standing by the bench and his eyes do the thing—the thing I learned to recognize when I was twelve years old.
The slow, top-to-bottom scan. The pause at the legs.
The pause at the chest. The way his tongue touches his bottom lip like he’s tasting something.
“Well, well,” he says, walking toward me instead of toward the car. “This your vehicle, sweetheart?”
“Yes. All four tires. I need it towed to Edgewood Auto.”
He doesn’t look at the car. He’s looking at me. At my legs in the school-regulation skirt. At the way my blazer fits across my chest.
“Rough day, huh?” He stops closer than he needs to. Close enough that I can smell the cigarettes on his jacket and the energy drink on his breath. “Don’t worry. I’ll take real good care of you.”
The way he says “real good care” makes my stomach turn over. The emphasis. The smile. The way his eyes crinkle at the corners like he’s sharing a joke that only he finds funny.
I take three steps back. Position myself near the bench. My hand finds my phone in my blazer pocket. My thumb hovers over the only other person I know here– Iz.
The driver crouches by the first tire and whistles. “Somebody really doesn’t like you, sweetheart. Boyfriend trouble?”
“Just tow the car, please.”
He stands and walks back toward me instead of toward his truck. “You know, a pretty girl like you shouldn’t be out here all alone. Bad things happen in empty parking lots.” He grins. “I could keep you company while we wait for the rig to load up. Keep you safe.”
My skin crawls. That specific, full-body revulsion that I’ve known since I was a child—the primal, animal recognition of a threat dressed in friendly clothing. Jack used to smile like that. Jack used to offer to “keep me safe” too.
I’m about to dial Iz when a voice cuts through the parking lot like a blade.
“Hey, Cat.”
Isaac. Leaning against the hood of a matte black Lexus RC F, arms folded across his chest, watching the tow truck driver with an expression that is pleasant on the surface and homicidal underneath.
He’s been here the whole time. I don’t know how long—long enough to have seen the look, heard the tone, cataloged the threat.
The driver straightens. Iz is eighteen but built like someone who’s been lifting weights since middle school—broad shoulders, easy height, the kind of physical presence that makes grown men recalculate their choices.
He pushes off the hood and walks toward us.
Not fast. Not slow. The pace of a person who has all the time in the world and plans to use every second of it making someone uncomfortable.
“You about done here?” Iz asks the driver. His voice is friendly. His eyes are not.
The driver clears his throat. “Just loading up the vehicle.”
“Great.” Iz steps between the driver and me. Doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t need to. His body is a wall, and the message is clear: she’s not alone, and you are no longer welcome in this conversation.
The driver hooks up my car in record time. Doesn’t look at me again. Doesn’t say another word. The truck pulls out of the lot, and I watch it go with the particular relief of a person who knows, intimately, how that interaction could have ended in a different parking lot on a different day.
“How long were you standing there?” I ask Iz.
“Long enough to watch that guy’s eyes go where they had no business going.” He opens the passenger door of the Lexus and nods toward it. “Let me drive you home.”
I hesitate. It’s reflex—the ingrained resistance to help, the calculation of debt and obligation that runs in the background of every interaction I have. Every kindness has a cost. Every favor has a ledger. I learned this young.
But the parking lot is empty, and the clouds are thickening overhead, and the alternative is waiting for a bus or walking three miles in a school uniform, and Iz is looking at me with an expression that contains zero ulterior motive.
I’ve become an expert at reading ulterior motives. His face is clean.
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”
The Lexus smells like leather and something faintly sweet—a car freshener shaped like a pine tree dangling from the rearview that I’m fairly certain is ironic. The interior is immaculate. Carbon fiber trim. Alcantara seats. The dashboard display glows a soft blue.
I run my fingers along the stitching on the center console as Iz pulls out of the lot.
“RC F,” I say. “Speedway edition. V8, naturally aspirated, 472 horsepower. They only made about two hundred of these in matte black.”
Iz’s head turns. He stares at me. Then at the road. Then back at me.
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“My father restores cars. I grew up in a garage before I grew up in a library.” I tap the dash. “This is the 5.0-liter, right? Not the base 467?”
“5.0.” He’s grinning now. A real grin, not the performative smirk the Elite boys wear like a uniform. “You’re the first person at that school who’s known the difference.”
“Most people at that school wouldn’t know a V8 from a vacuum cleaner.”
He laughs—short, genuine, surprised. “Kaiden has a Skyline R34 GT-R. You know what that is?”
“Know what it is? My father would sell a kidney for one. That’s the holy grail—imported, right? Right-hand drive?”
“Shipped from Japan. He did all the work on it himself.”
I file this. Kaiden Monaghan, king of Edgewood Prep, bully, asshole extraordinaire, works on his own car. Hands dirty. Under the hood. The image doesn’t fit the narrative I’ve built, and that bothers me more than it should.
“Who slashed the tires, Cat?” Iz asks, his voice shifting from easy to careful.
“Who do you think.”
He’s quiet for a beat. His jaw tightens. “What else happened today.”
Not a question. A directive. He says it the way a doctor says “tell me where it hurts”—like he already suspects and needs to confirm.
So I tell him. All of it. The breakup. The slap.
The photo—both of them. The hallway. The lockers.
Penny stepping in. Jon’s fist denting the metal beside my head.
The tires. I deliver it all in the same flat, factual voice I use for everything—stripped of emotion, organized into a clean narrative, because if I let the emotion in, I’ll collapse, and Catherine O’Farrell does not collapse. She catalogs.
Iz listens without interrupting. His knuckles whiten on the steering wheel when I describe the slap. His jaw goes rigid during the locker scene. When I finish, the silence in the car is thick enough to touch.
“The photo,” he says carefully. “Anonymous account?”
“Anonymous. But it’s from my mother’s private party. A photographer’s shot. Penny thinks—” I stop myself. “I think it was Kaiden.”
Iz doesn’t respond immediately. Something works behind his eyes—a calculation I’m not invited into. He knows something, or suspects something, and he’s choosing his words with a care that tells me the answer isn’t simple.
“I’ll talk to him,” he says finally.
“Don’t bother. I’m done expecting decency from boys at this school.”
“That’s fair.” A pause. “But not all of us are the same.”
He says it simply. Without defensiveness. Without trying to prove it. Just a statement, delivered like a fact, and left there for me to do with what I want.
He pulls into my driveway and puts the car in park. The engine idles—a low, throaty rumble that I can feel in the soles of my feet. Rain starts to bead on the windshield. The wipers haven’t turned on yet, and the water distorts the world outside into something impressionistic and soft.
We sit in the silence for a moment. Not awkward. Not heavy. Just…present. The way silence feels between two people who don’t need to fill it.
“Cat.” His voice is different now. Quieter.
Stripped of the casual cool he wears like armor.
“You don’t have to handle all of this alone.
I know that’s your instinct. I know you’ve probably been doing it so long you can’t imagine another way.
But carrying everything by yourself isn’t strength. It’s just exhausting.”
I look at him. He’s looking straight ahead, at the rain, giving me the privacy to react however I need to without being watched. It’s such a small, precise act of consideration that my throat tightens before I can stop it.
“Thank you, Iz.”
“Seven o’clock tomorrow. Don’t make me wait. I will honk, and your whole neighborhood will know about it.”
I almost smile. “My father will probably come out and ask you to pop the hood.”
“Then I’ll pop the hood. And I’ll tell him his daughter knows more about engines than half the guys on the lacrosse team.”
I get out. Walk to the door. He doesn’t pull away until he sees me close it behind me.
I stand in the foyer with my back against the door and listen to the engine idle, then rev, then fade down the driveway, and the house is quiet, and I am alone, and the day catches up with me all at once like a wave I’ve been outrunning.
My parents are home by evening. I tell them about the breakup—the sanitized version.
The one where Jon and I simply grew apart and the tire slashing was an immature overreaction.
I leave out the slap. I leave out the hallway.
I leave out the locker dent and the grab and the way Jon’s face looked when he said “you are mine”—like he meant it the way a person means a threat, not a love confession.
I leave things out. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. My parents have already almost lost me once. Loading them with more reasons to lie awake at night feels like a different kind of cruelty—the kind you inflict on people who love you by making them carry the weight of knowing.
My father hugs me for a long time. Longer than usual.
His hand cradles the back of my head the way it has since I was a child, and I let myself stand there and absorb it, and I think about how this man fought a monster on his kitchen floor to protect me, and I can’t even tell him that a boy hit me today.
“As long as you’re safe, princess,” he says. “That’s all that matters.”
I nod against his chest and say nothing, because “safe” is a word that doesn’t mean the same thing to us, and explaining the difference would break his heart.
I head upstairs, close my door, and crawl into my bed. My hone buzzes on the nightstand.
Iz: Goodnight, Cat. Pennington won’t be a problem anymore. Get some rest. See you at 7.
I read it twice. Something warm and unfamiliar uncurls in my chest—not attraction, not romance, just the simple, staggering comfort of someone saying “I’ve got you” and meaning it with no strings attached.
I set the phone down. Take the sleeping pill from the bottle I keep in the drawer beside the bandages—both prescriptions from a doctor who knows what I carry, both evidence of the infrastructure required to keep Catherine O’Farrell functional.
The pill dissolves on my tongue. Bitter, then nothing.
I lie in the dark and inventory the day. Breakup. Slap. Photo. Locker. Tires. Tow truck. Iz. Rain. Home.
The sequence plays on a loop, each frame examined and filed. This is how I process—not through feeling, but through organization. Feeling comes later, in the cracks, in the unguarded moments between waking and sleeping when the defenses drop and the truth seeps through.
The truth tonight is this: I am relieved. I am angry. I am exhausted. And somewhere beneath all of that, buried deep enough that I can barely feel it, there is a small, warm flicker of something I haven’t felt in a long time.
Not hope. Not yet. Hope is a luxury I can’t afford.
But something adjacent to it. Something that looks like Penny’s arm looped through mine and Iz’s engine idling in my driveway and a phone that buzzes with a message that says “see you at 7” instead of “where are you” and “who are you with” and “you’re walking a fine line, Catherine. ”
I close my eyes. The pill does its work. The dark comes, and tonight, it’s just dark. Nothing lurking in it. Nothing waiting.
Just rest.
For now, just rest.