Trust Me (11 page)

going on here by touching stuff,
he thought. But he wasn’t Rae. And all he could do was wait. Make that wait some
more. He’d already been waiting more than two hours.

He knew he should probably be working on his list of problem words, as Rae called them. If he was going to take
those academic tests at Sanderson, then he needed all the prep time he could get. But all he could think about right
now was Rae. “Would you please just get your butt out here?” he muttered. “Please?”

He changed radio stations, listened for half a minute, and then changed stations again. The music felt like it was
scraping the inside of his ears. Didn’t matter what kind it was-it all irritated him almost to the point of pain. He
clicked the radio off. The silence in the car was only marginally better.

“Crap,” he muttered. He slammed his fist into the dashboard, and he could feel the force of the impact all the way
up his arm. “Good job, Fascinelli. Real intelligent. Helped a lot.” He got the urge to punch the dash again, but he
didn’t give in to it. Anger Management 101
-Punching stuff is not the answer to any problem.
And it messed up your
hand.

Besides, Rae was probably safer in there than most places, with all those guards and security systems. If she
hadn’t been acting so weird, like she was hiding something, something big, then he actually wouldn’t be that
worried that she was inside Scott State.

Maybe it has something to do with Yana,
Anthony suddenly thought. He could see Rae lying to him if she’d
promised someone else, like Yana, that she would keep a secret.

Anthony tilted his head from side to side, letting the muscles crack, the desire to punch something fading. It took
him a while, but he thought he’d finally figured out the Rae situation. She was lying to protect a friend. Total Rae. He
stretched out his neck muscles again, then twisted his torso from side to side, working out the tension in his back.

When he leaned back in his seat and looked out the windshield, he saw Rae and Yana walking toward Yana’s Bug.

Should I just go?
he wondered.
If this is about Yana, I
-

Too late. Rae had spotted him. Her mouth went slack. And even from where he sat, he could see the muscles in her
throat working. Anthony shot a look at Yana. She looked concerned-concerned for
Rae.
She had one hand on Rae’s
shoulder in a protective way.

So he was wrong. Big-time wrong. Whatever was going on here had nothing to do with Yana. Anthony climbed out
of the car, slammed the door, and strode over to Yana and Rae. “What’s going on?”

“Hello to you, too,” Yana said. Anthony didn’t bother to glance at her.

“What’s going on?” Anthony repeated, trying to make his words come out a little softer but not having much
success.

Rae pulled in a shaky breath. “I’m working on a paper comparing and contrasting the treatment of men and
women prisoners. The warden let me and Yana take a tour,” she answered, her words crashing into each other
because she was talking so fast. “It was pretty intense.”

Liar,
Anthony thought. Rae’s expression had changed when she’d seen
him.
It was like someone pulled the plug
on her.

“They made us stay in the hole for a while,” Yana added. “It would give even you the creeps, Anthony. And you
know our little Rae. She’s a lot more sensitive than she preten-”

“Get in my car, Rae. I want to talk to you. Alone,” Anthony said, biting out the words.

“Rae and I already decided we were going to stop and eat on the way home,” Yana told him. “Why don’t you follow
us and-”

“Get in the damn car, Rae,” Anthony ordered, ignoring Yana’s narrow-eyed glare. He knew he was being a bully.

But he didn’t care. He’d been right about there being something going on with Rae. And now he knew it involved
him. He wasn’t waiting one more minute to find out what it was.

“It’s okay, Yana,” Rae said. “Just wait for me?”

“I’ll be right over there.” Yana jerked her thumb at her Bug.

Anthony turned on his heel and headed back to his car. He heard Rae trailing a few steps behind him. They both
got inside without a word, then shut their doors.

“What right do you have to be sneaking around following me?” Rae asked before he could say a word. But she
didn’t sound angry. She sounded kind of scared… scared or about to cry. She better not. He was not in the mood to
deal with tears right now.

“I was afraid you were putting yourself in danger, all right?” Anthony shot back. “You’ve been lying to me for days,
and I thought you were trying to deal with something too big for you to handle alone.”

Rae shook her head. “No. Just a paper, like I told you.”

“Will you stop lying!” Anthony burst out. His hands balled into fists, and he had to concentrate to get them to
uncurl. “If you were just working on a paper, why’d you tell me your dad needed your help at a cocktail party?”

“That night he did,” Rae protested. “I was just working on the paper today.”

“There was no party, Rae. I called your house,” Anthony told her.

“Oh,” Rae whispered. “Oh.” She pulled her sleeves down over her hands and rubbed them together.

Anthony felt like someone was playing cat’s cradle with his intestines. He hated seeing Rae like this, like a
frightened little girl. He reached over and ran one finger down her cheek. “I pretty much know what’s going on,
anyway. I just need you to tell me the details.”

Rae looked over at him, her blue eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “You do?”

“Yeah. Our guy-the one who tried to kill you, the one who kidnapped Jesse-has decided to make a play for me.

You, for God knows what reason, figured it would be safer for me if you and Yana tried to deal with the guy alone.

Am I right?”

Rae hesitated.

“I know it has something to do with me,” Anthony pressed. “I saw your face when you saw me. You didn’t look
pissed off that I’d followed you. You looked… horrified. If someone’s coming after me, you’ve got to tell me
everything.”

“No one’s coming after you.” She gave a harsh laugh. “Not that I know of, anyway. Get too close to me and pretty
much anything can happen, right?” She rolled her window down halfway and stared out as if there was a freakin’

circus going by.

Uh-uh. If she thought he was just going to drop it now, she was dreaming. “Okay, so no one’s coming after me.

Great. But I still need to know what the hell is going on.”

“That time we touched fingertips, back when you were in the detention center, I-well, I found out some stuff about
you,” Rae answered, still looking out the window.

Anthony gave a noncommittal grunt, even though his guts were stretched so tight, they felt like they could start
snapping any second.

“One thing-the big thing-I got was how much you longed to know your father,” Rae continued.

“Longed?
Longed?”
The word tasted repulsive on his tongue. “The guy was a sperm donor, nothing else,”

Anthony insisted.

Rae turned to look at him. “We both know that’s not true. I know how many times you’ve wondered if you were like
him.”

“So what if I have,” Anthony muttered.

“So I decided… I decided that I would find him for you, you know, by using my fingerprint thing,” Rae confessed,
her expression a mixture of hope and apprehension.

Anthony’s eyes locked on the Scott State buildings. “And this-” His mouth went dry as sandpaper, and he had to
swallow a couple of times before he could get out another word. “This is where you found him?”

A tear spilled out of one eye and rolled down Rae’s cheek. “Yeah.” She reached out and put her hand on his arm,
twisting her finger in the cloth of his jacket. “I wasn’t going to tell you. I swear.”

Anthony jerked away from her. “You weren’t going to tell me? You were going to protect poor little Anthony from
the truth about his father? Because my father’s nothing like yours, is he, Rae?”

Rae didn’t answer. Another tear slid down her face. She didn’t bother to wipe it away.

“What did he do?” Anthony asked.

“Can’t we just pretend this never hap-”

“What did he do?” Anthony repeated.

Rae met his gaze directly. “He took part in an armed robbery.” She stopped, but he could tell there was more.

Could see it all over her face.

“And,” he prompted, his voice hard.

Rae winced. “I’m sorry, Anthony, but he-he killed someone. I’m so sorry.”

“Get out of the car,” Anthony ordered. He couldn’t stand to look at her, to see the pity in her expression.

When she didn’t move fast enough, Anthony reached across her and opened her door. “Get out. Right now.”

She left without another word, without a glance back.

Why would she want to look at him? His father was a murderer.

Anthony is never going to want to talk to me again. He’s never going to want to see my face,
Rae thought. She lay
on the living-room sofa, staring up at the ceiling. She wished her dad was home. The place was too quiet. There was
nothing to drown out her thoughts.

The stereo remote was on the table next to the overstuffed armchair. It was only about three steps away. But Rae’s
blood had been replaced with cement, slowly hardening cement. She didn’t think she could make it to the remote.

And she definitely couldn’t get all the way over to the stereo.

Her cell phone was in her purse, which was on the floor. She could probably snag it without even sitting up. But
who was she supposed to call? Not Anthony. The image of his face when he ordered her out of the car sprang up in
her mind. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the pain and anger she saw there. But of course closing
her eyes didn’t help. The memory of Anthony’s expression in that moment had been burned into her brain. She was
never going to be able to forget it.

She could call Yana. Yana would listen or fill up the silence with chatter if that’s what Rae wanted. But God, Yana
deserved a few hours of peace. She’d had to listen to Rae blubber all the way home-and she hadn’t even said, “I
told you so.” Not even once.

Yana knew it was a bad idea from the start,
Rae thought.
But did I? No. Not me. Not Rae, the girl who’s sure she

knows how to solve everybody’s problems, well, except her own.
It had been so egotistical to just think she could
go poof!-and give Anthony the thing he’d wanted all his life.

Thought he’d wanted.

You weren’t going to tell him,
a snively little voice in Rae’s head reminded her.
You were never going to tell him.

“But he found out. Because of me,” Rae muttered. Tears started to sting her eyes again, and she furiously blinked
them away. They weren’t for Anthony. They were just tears of self-pity, and that disgusted her.

Rae sighed, dropped her hand into her purse, extracted her cell phone with two fingers, then used her shirt to
polish it off. The last thing she wanted to hear right now was more of her own thoughts. Once the phone was clean,
she held it up in front of her face and stared at it. She really needed to hear a human voice, preferably the voice of
someone who didn’t think she was scum.

“Oh, stop it. Just stop it,” she said out loud. The main reason she wanted to talk to someone was that
she
couldn’t
stand herself. If she had to spend one more second alone with herself, she’d start screaming until she got put in a
padded cell somewhere.

I could call Dad,
she thought. But she never called him for no reason, and she couldn’t think of a passable reason
right now.

Marcus.
The name popped into her head from nowhere.
I could call him.
Just the thought of talking to Marcus
made her feel less cold and hard inside. She dialed his number before she had a chance to talk herself out of it.

He answered on the second ring. “Hello.”

Rae’s tongue tied itself into a knot. This was the first time she’d called Marcus since before The Incident, since
before the hospital, before their non-breakup breakup, before Dori. “It’s Rae,” she managed to get out.

“Rae, hi,” Marcus said, sounding one hundred percent happy to hear from her.

“Hi,” Rae repeated.

Marcus laughed. “Hiiiii,” he groaned in his Frankenstein voice.

Rae smiled, her lips trembling. She promised herself she wasn’t going to lose it on the phone with Marcus. “So,
what’s up?”

“Well, I’m sorta trying to get back with my old girlfriend, but I did a lot of stupid stuff, and I’m not sure I’m going to
be able to get her to forgive me,” Marcus answered.

Oh God. She wasn’t expecting him to go
there.
She’d thought he’d keep it totally light, the way he had at Sliders.

“Um, hmmm, tough one,” Rae said. “Maybe you need to just give her some time.”

“I know. I know. But it’s making me crazy.” Rae could almost see the long dimples appearing in his cheeks.