Chapter 6
“Okay but you have to admit that my burgers are better,” Cleo said, “especially with the whole cheese and pickle core thing I do sometimes...”
Cleo and Bee had been arguing playfully for over an hour over who should be cooking what, and while it was lighthearted and fun, Abigail had ended up feeling very much like the third wheel. She was happy for them, that they were getting closer, but she couldn’t help but feel like all her effort she had put into rejuvenating her friendship with Cleo and trying to start one with Bee was a little wasted if the result was going to be them two paired up and her smiling awkwardly to the side.
“Listen, I’ll try them at some point... But not tonight.”
Cleo clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes at Bee, “Coward!”
“Hey, I have to go to work!”
“Mmmhm,” Cleo said, exaggerating each syllable so that it came out remarkably sarcastic.
“And I have to go to work, basically now,” Bee said, winking at her and walking backwards away from her.
Bee kissed Abigail’s cheek as she departed, promising that next time she would stay longer, before hurrying past Byron, who was making his way up the steps.
“Bee here again?” he asked.
“Yeah...”
“Hmm,” he said, leaning down and planting a kiss on her cheek in exactly the same spot Bee had done.
The electric thrill that ran through her at the touch nearly gave her shivers—he’d certainly never done that before.
“Uh, hi?”
“Hello,” he replied seriously, “I brought cake.”
“Cake? Just... Cake?”
“A fancy cake,” he corrected. “Apparently, it’s an Earl Gray and lavender with violet icing, I think. No idea… it looked good and I figured why not give it a go.”
The pair moved back into the house and towards the kitchen.
“Oh, right, so you didn’t like—bake it or anything?” Abigail teased, still a little tingly from the kiss he’d planted on her cheek.
Byron placed the cardboard cake box onto the kitchen table and pressed his hand to his heart. “No, I didn’t. How can I ever make it up to you?”
He was looking up at her from underneath unfairly long lashes and Abigail found herself unable to formulate a witty retort.
Cleo, however, had no qualms about butting in, “you can start by clearing the table so in six minutes when these are ready there’s somewhere to eat!”
He made a point of rolling his eyes at her before getting to work and clearing the dining table. “So, tell me what’s been going on?”
Abigail knew that he was probably asking in general, but she didn’t want to talk about the general nonsense... She’d been thinking hard about what Mrs. Foggarty had said.
“So, actually I have a question—how...” she trailed off, wondering how she could make this as polite as possible, “How... reliable is Mrs. Foggarty’s memory? I recognize it’s a bit rich coming from me...”
Cleo barked a laugh and shook her head as Byron turned to look at Abigail.
“Steel trap, that woman,” he said, tapping his temple. “She gets tired a lot these days but she’s all there upstairs. Why?”
Abigail moved to help Byron clear the clutter. “Well, you know the other day when I asked you to call her and check in about the door? Well, she mentioned some stuff to me...”
Clearing her that, Cleo raised a hand and interjected. “She gave you the hottest gossip I’ve personally ever heard, you mean...”
“About what?” Byron asked, looking between the two women.
“About Jacob’s mom and... Mrs. Foggarty’s brother,” Abigail said, “she hinted... heavily, that Jacob’s real father was not Mr. Givens. She also heavily implied that Mr. Givens beat Jacob up on the regular.”
She saw Byron grit his teeth. “Some people don’t deserve kids... Did she have any evidence?”
“I agree, and not really… she said she patched him up a few times but he wouldn’t say anything.”
The room fell silent as the three of them digested their own thoughts on the matter.
“I just... I know everything isn’t always as it seems, but I really didn’t suspect anything,” she said guiltily, “I just didn’t like them because they didn’t really like me—didn’t approve of us being friends, let alone dating.”
“That’s completely dumb,” Byron said with a grin, looking from Cleo to Abigail.
The two women looked awkwardly at one another and Abigail noticed the amused look on Byron’s face falter.
“Isn’t it?” he asked.
“Well...” Cleo said trying to suppress a smile.
Abigail shot her a dirty look, “don’t say it like that! It makes it sound so much worse than it is!”
“It’s pretty bad, Abby...” Cleo replied, giggling, and hiding her face behind her hand.
“Hardly!”
“All right, you’re going to have to explain because I’m starting to think you were a delinquent teen!”
Abigail glared at Cleo and pointed at her accusingly, “this is half the problem, right here.”
“Hey!” Cleo exclaimed, feigning offense.
The food was ready so Cleo held her hands up in surrender before moving the trays burger toppings to the dining table. Abigail turned back to Byron.
“It’s not that bad,” she said, “I went through a small phase of skipping school—”
“Three months!” Cleo chimed in.
“Barely!” Abigail shot back, “the long and the short of it is that I would skip school once or twice a week and hang out with a group of people I met at a few places in town and... They may have gotten in some trouble for...”
“Shoplifting!”
“I didn’t steal anything!” Abigail exclaimed loudly, before dropping her voice when both Byron and Cleo jumped, “I didn’t!”
“I know that!” Cleo said defensively.
Byron’s eyebrows rose as he watched the exchange and Abigail felt her face heating as he watched her.
“Shoplifting?” he asked, and Abigail couldn’t tell if it was amusement or judgment in his voice.
“Yes,” she replied, “we would go into stores and just look around. Then one day, the security guard stopped us and half of us had stuff in our bags. One of them had slipped a rose quartz heart into my bag. We got taken to the police station and my parents got called... But apparently, they had done stuff like this before to new people in their group and so I didn’t get in trouble. Well, with the police anyway, my parents were another story.”
Cleo snorted, “yeah, a horror story! They were so mad, I only saw her through the window for a month. She wasn’t even allowed into class at school. Her parents had to convince the teachers to give her all her assignments in the detention room.”
“Wow,” Byron said, “the school agreed to that?”
“My mom was... Kind of a force to be reckoned with.”
“So that’s where you get it from,” Byron said with a smile quirking one side of his lips.
Her stomach flipped as he focused it on her and she felt her face growing even warmer than before. She wasn’t sure why, but she found that she couldn’t look away even while she was internally screaming at herself to stop standing there like a blushing idiot.
A cough broke the silence and they turned to look at Cleo as she cleared her throat; she was hovering awkwardly next to the deconstructed burgers.
“Don’t want it to get cold,” she said, pointing to the table.
“Right, yes,” Abigail said, snapping back to reality but still cringing and questioning her own sanity, “anyway, yeah. So, it eventually got out why I was in there but because it was high school, the rumor was that I’d actually been arrested and charged. Jacob’s parents were not pleased despite my parents explaining to them that I actually hadn’t done anything.”
As she took her seat at the table and reached for the toasted buns, a thought occurred to Abigail and she paused with her hand in the hair above the bread.
“What?” Cleo asked, “you look lightbulb-y.”
“That’s not a word,” Abigail replied, “and... Kind of. It’s just that Jacob was convinced his dad was cheating on his mom—again—but Mrs. Foggarty was adamant that it was his mom who had an affair. I don’t know but it just feels so weird to me that they’d be so worried about their son being friends with me based on a rumor but they were both cheating on each other and his dad was violent towards him. It’s... I don’t know.”
Byron shrugged as he joined her at the table. “Maybe they didn’t want anyone looking too closely at their family.”
Abigail nodded. It sounded logical but there was something about it that prickled at her brain. She shook the feeling and the thought away, trying to turn her attention to the dinner in front of her and actually enjoy the time with her friends.