Total pages in book: 155
Estimated words: 152045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 760(@200wpm)___ 608(@250wpm)___ 507(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 152045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 760(@200wpm)___ 608(@250wpm)___ 507(@300wpm)
“I thought the clocks didn’t fall back for another couple of weeks.” I joke. “Am I early?”
He turns his head. “It’s Ditch Day.”
He says that as if I should know what he’s talking about.
“Ditch Day?”
He twists around, tossing his papers on his desk. “It’s a Rivalry Week thing. Most of the school ditches,” he tells me. Then he smiles to himself. “Nobody told you, did they?”
I arch a brow and walk in, taking a seat at my desk. “But the teachers still come?”
“In case students show up.” He leans down, working his mouse and looking at his laptop. “It’s still technically a school day, and we are their care while their parents work, after all.”
I take in his jeans and a tan and blue plaid button-down. His sleeves are rolled up. His forearms are tan and thick, like he didn’t always have a desk job.
“You went to high school here?” I ask.
He was insulted by my comments on Monday. At first, I assumed he was defensive of his students, but I don’t think many people are willing to move into Weston. Most are just stuck staying.
He nods. “About twenty-five years ago.”
Before the storm. The flooding. Her.
He was here when the town thrived.
I remove my bag and set it on the floor. “Was the rivalry the same back then?”
He scoffs. “No. Not everyone had a cell phone. There weren’t cameras everywhere. No Internet in every house to spread news like a fire, and no social media to wrangle a posse.” He looks at me, and I can see the happiness as he remembers. “You didn’t go to jail for anything, and the only consequence was someone dying. It was a lot worse.”
Sounds exciting.
“Did you do anything you’d go to jail for if someone had caught it on camera?” I inquire.
He shoots me a look, and I’m shocked to hear him say, “Yes. You?”
I look away, biting back my smile. “Fair enough.”
I’ve done a lot I could’ve gotten arrested for, if not for my dad and my uncles.
I peer up at him. “You knew my father.”
“I knew of him,” he says. “Saw him race a few times when the Loop was young.”
He comes around the front of his desk and sits on the edge.
“What did you think of him?” I ask.
“Initial impression, I thought he was a little shit.” He smiles, combing his brown hair back over the top of his head. “I thought, here was this kid who comes and goes as he likes and answers to no one. No one’s on his back, making demands. Why the chip on his shoulder? Why’s he always pissed off?”
“Pretty much.”
Mr. Bastien locks eyes with me, his smile softening. “And now, I think, here was this kid, answering to no one,” he pauses for a moment before continuing. “No one on his back, caring where the hell he was or what he was doing.”
I fall silent. I know my dad’s history, but I guess I know my grandma as she is now, and it’s hard to picture anything different. He was on his own a lot, wasn’t he?
“Your parents were around?” I ask Bastien.
“No.” He shakes his head. “I still couldn’t come and go as I liked, though. Siblings.”
“Did you know the people who lived in the house where I’m staying?”
He holds my gaze. “What have you heard?”
“Nothing.” I shrug. “Just that the only Pirate girl to trade to Weston twenty-two years ago stayed there. She never made it back home. Drowned in the car you can still see on the bottom of the river when the water level is low. But we don’t have a record of any student deaths that year. Or the year before or the year after.”
He folds his arms across his chest. “But I’ll bet she doesn’t show up to any of the class reunions, does she?”
Does she? I didn’t think of that. I’ll have to ask Hawke.
Bastien seems to believe the story, though.
“I don’t know anyone who was in school with her,” I admit, “and happenings back then are hard to track online.”
He exhales a laugh. “Winslet MacCreary,” he tells me. “I was a few years ahead of her in school. Our version is that she was dead before she was put in the car that went over the bridge.”
That would be a blessing. What a terrible way to die otherwise.
“Her body was washed away,” he explains. “Her parents probably held out hope for a while, which is why there was no memorial before the end of the school year or mention in the yearbook or school paper.”
“What does your version say happened to her here?”
He draws in a breath, bowing his head for a moment.
“Twin brothers.” He meets my eyes again. “One in love with her to the point of madness, and when she refused him, he stood on the bridge, with rocks in his pockets, and swallowed the key to the handcuffs around his wrists.”