Twisted Read Online Free Page B

of having it run through the KDH mouth breathers’ PA system?”
    Images plowed into Bex’s mind. She was eight years old and dressed in an itchy navy dress with a thick, lacy collar, her grandmother dragging her by the hand as they dodged a maze of reporters. The flashes from their cameras were blinding her, snapping like the jaws of hungry alligators, one after another after another. People shouted her name—strangers who knew things about her, about her family.
    “Beth Anne! Do you know where your mother is?”
    “Beth Anne, is it true your father gave you jewelry and presents from his victims?”
    She could feel her grandmother’s hand tighten on hers, her grandmother’s jaw going hard.
    “Shut up, you miscreants!” Gran had yelled. “She’s only a child!”
    Beth Anne had had to look up the word “miscreant.”
    “Come on, Beth,” Zach prodded. “Inquiring minds want to know.”
    “Shut up,” Bex said between gritted teeth. “Shut up, shut up, shut up !” Each one louder until she was yelling, hands fisted, fingernails digging into the soft flesh of her palm.
    “Hey.” Zach dropped the camera to his side, the little red light flicking off, but Bex couldn’t stop herself. Every synapse was firing, her blood roaring through her ears.
    “Shut up!”
    She didn’t know when she started crying.
    She heard the body slamming against the locker first, Zach’s shoulders hitting the slick metal, his head lolling back.
    “Leave her alone, asshole. No one wants to be in your stupid movies!”
    She could see Trevor, his outline blurred through her tears. He stood a whole head taller than Zach and leered down at him. His mouth was moving so she knew he was talking, but her head was filled with the same buzzing static that she had felt before. She saw Laney and Chelsea pushing through the halls, students parting for them without so much as a word, and it was like Bex was out of her body, suspended above the whole scene. She saw herself standing there, looking wooden and hollow as Trevor yelled at Zach and Chelsea threaded an arm through wooden Bex’s, Laney stretching a protective arm across her shoulders.
    They tugged at her and she was back in her body. Zach looked at her, eyes wide, slightly fearful, completely apologetic.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out, Beth.”
    “ Bex ,” Trevor spat out, bits of saliva landing on the collar of Zach’s polo shirt. “Her name is Bex.”
    She watched Zach, a tiny triangle of his pink tongue darting out and brushing over his bottom lip. “I’m sorry, Bex. I didn’t mean anything. I was just joking around. I’m a documentary filmmaker.”
    Laney narrowed her eyes into sharp slits, stabbing Zach with a look. “You’re a joke.”
    Bex wanted to stay angry but she saw the crushed look in Zach’s eyes even as he tried to avoid hers. She felt the same hot stripe go up her neck—the one that she had felt so many times before when she was the joke, the stain, the kid that no one wanted to play with.
    “It’s okay,” she said, but Zach had already turned around.
    Trevor shot her a grin, and Laney nudged Bex’s hip with hers. “Don’t worry. You can tell us all your deepest, darkest secrets when you’re ready.”
    Bex made it through her next class without incident, and when the lunch bell rang, Chelsea and Laney were waiting by her locker. Bex found herself glancing around for Trevor and then gave herself a mental head slap. Not even through the first day, and she was already crushing on someone.
    Bex’s cell phone chirped. She glanced down at the readout, the sounds of her new friends and her new school going weird and tinny when she saw the area code preceding the strange number: 919.
    Raleigh.
    In her mind, she heard the muffled sounds and clicks that preceded a collect call, the robotic voice that informed her that she was receiving a call from a speaker who held the phone too close and mumbled his name. She remembered the one and only time