Bullies Sla-pped New Girl Cheerleader — Unaware Her Father Is A Hell Angels
Chapter 39
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Her phone buzzed. She looked at it. A text from Amber: "Coach Reeves wants to know if you want to come to dinner. She said there's a diner on Fletcher that has good pie."She looked at the message. She thought about the week. About wet notebooks and broken clasps and recording on a bench in the shadows. About 60 hours that had started in a parking lot and ended in a hearing room that smelled like floor wax. She thought about Monday at 7:00 a.m.She typed back: "Tell her I'll be there in 10 minutes."She put her phone in her pocket. She looked at the street one more time. Then she turned and went down the steps and walked toward Fletcher Street. And she walked the way she'd walked into the college on her first day, which was the way her father had taught her, which was the only way she knew: like she belonged there, like she had somewhere to be, like she was going in the direction she'd said she was going.On the drive home, on a stretch of highway outside Harlow Creek where the road goes long and flat before it rises toward the ridge, Ray Malone rode at the back of the line. Walt was up front. The others were spread across the two lanes the way chapter rides comfortably, with room. The night was cold and clean, and the stars were the same stars they'd always been.Ray thought about a girl on the steps of a community college with a leather bracelet on her wrist and a face that had stopped trying to hold everything in at exactly the right moment, and started again at exactly the right moment after that.He thought about a woman at a graveside 11 years ago who had looked at a 10-year-old standing beside him and said, "Take care of her." And how he'd said, "I will." And how he'd meant both things that statement contains: that he would make sure she was safe, and that he would make sure she became the kind of person who could take care of herself.He thought about the hearing room, about sitting in a stackable chair for 45 minutes saying nothing, about how that was sometimes the entirety of what was needed from you: not force, not intervention, just presence, the undeniable physical fact of it. You are not alone.