Bullies Sla-pped New Girl Cheerleader — Unaware Her Father Is A Hell Angels
Chapter 11
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She didn't say anything yet. She just looked at him the way you look at something that's made its choice and doesn't yet understand the weight of that choice. Then she turned back, placed the wet items in the trash, and walked to class.As she passed Tyler, she said it quietly, almost gently. Like she was offering him something rather than warning him:"You still have time to stop."Tyler's smile didn't waver. "Stop what?"She didn't answer. She kept walking. Brandon said something under his breath to Tyler. Tyler laughed. But for just a half second before the laugh came, something moved across Tyler Greer's face. Something that wasn't quite comfortable. He didn't have a name for it. He should have. It was recognition, the animal kind. The kind that lives below words. The feeling you get when something you've underestimated turns out to be something else entirely.It left as fast as it came. He shook it off and went to class.And Amber Cole, who had been standing near the water fountain when the whole thing happened, slipped her hand into her jacket pocket, felt her phone, thought about the video still sitting there in her camera roll. She thought about it for a long time.That night Cass sat on the edge of her bed in her small rented room. The broken bracelet was on the nightstand beside her. She'd found a safety pin to hold it together for now. A temporary fix. Her father would do it right on Saturday.She picked it up. She read the inscription again: "Ride true."She thought about her old school. She thought about a girl named Haley who had been on the cheer squad there, who had been slowly taken apart by the team until she quit, until she changed her lunch period, until she stopped coming to games, until she almost stopped coming to school. She thought about how Cass had watched that happen for 3 months before she said anything. How she told herself it wasn't her problem. How she'd looked away like everyone else because looking away was easier and safer and nobody had asked her to get involved.And then she thought about the morning she'd walked into the captain's office and said clearly and with no uncertainty that it was going to stop.It had stopped. She'd lost her position as co-captain. She'd lost some friendships that turned out not to have been friendships at all. She transferred to Harlow Creek at the start of the semester with her scholarship intact and most everything else unsettled.She didn't regret it. That was the thing she came back to over and over. She didn't regret it.