Invincible (14 page)

really matter, because hearing Taylor say those words made me feel very proud, and my body all warm and tingly inside.

Not that it didn’t have its downsides. In fact, it was kind of depressing hearing her talk about
me
, not knowing that the infamous savior that she spoke so fondly of was sitting right next to her.

“Well, enough of that,” she says. “Before I leave, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Yeah?” I say.

“I know this will sound ridiculous, and completely too late to ask, but I’ve been having trouble studying for the History test, and well, I was wondering if you could help me.”

“Sure,” I say instantly, though I was a little confused as to why Taylor was so hesitant to ask for help. A girl like her, you’d be surprised that she needed any at all. “We can head to the library after school.”

“Actually,” she says, “I’d prefer if we
just studied at my house.”

Jack slams the book he’s reading against the table, looking at me and Taylor with a shocked expression. The same one that I was trying to mask at this very moment.

“A-are you sure that’s okay?” I ask. “W-what about your parents-?”

“It’s okay. I think they’ll be pret
ty glad if you came,” she says.

I was lost. Why would Taylor’s parents be glad to have me in their home? They didn’t even know me. And why would a person like Taylor Morrison want to study a day before the test anyway?

“W-well, I g-guess I have no choice,” I say. “It’s cool with me.”

“Great,” she says.

She then smiles and grabs her stuff, leaving early to turn in an article for the school paper.

As the door closes behind her, Jack begins to laugh.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing,” he says casually, shaking his head as he returns back to his book, a smirk slightly crossing his face. “Nothing at all.”

What on earth was going on here?! Why was Jack being so stupid all of a sudden? Why would Taylor ask for help out of the blue, and why does it have to be at her house? Not that I had any problems with it, because I liked her, and wanted to spend as much time with her as possible, but I wasn’t sure she felt the same way. After being with Rick for so long and being treated so badly, even I wouldn’t expect her to be interested in a guy like me. I couldn’t. She couldn’t. Could she?

After I exit the shower, I look through my closet, and search for a pair of decent clothes to wear to Taylor’s. I knew it seemed useless, but it didn’t hurt to try and make an impression. As I put on my button-down shirt and khakis, I look down at my watch and realize that it’s almost four.

Brad was still at work, so he couldn’t drop
me off. It was probably better that way. If he did, he would’ve gone overboard and tried to come along, and interrogate Taylor and her parents, which would’ve made it more awkward for them than it would for me.

I thought of running to Taylor’s house, but then I thought that maybe I should take it easy on the super-speed. Since I was now under everyone’s radar,

it would be kind of hard to go unnoticed. So I decided fly full-speed to the house.

I land a few miles from Taylor’s house and walk the rest of the way. As the house comes into view, I notice Taylor standing outside t
he front porch, waiting for me.

“Hey,” she says, coming down the steps.

“Hi,” I say.

“Like the wardrobe change. You must take studying pretty seriously.”

I shrug. “Well, you know.”

“Where’s your dad—I mean, guardian?”

“He’s at work.”

“Really, how did you get here?”

“Took the bus. I-I wouldn’t recommend it, though. The routes I took were insane.”

We then laugh together, my eyes admiring hers as the blood rushes through her cheeks.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go inside.”

We go inside, and as soon as I can get my foot through the door, she introduces me to her parents.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Mr. Morrison says, shaking my hand. “Taylor here talks about you all the time.”

“Same here,” I say, responding to the first comment, hiding the fact that I was baffled by his second.

“And you’re so handsome,” Mrs. Morrison says. “Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if you two-”

“Mom!” Taylor snaps.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, slightly embarrassed. “It’s just so nice to see Taylor have friends over.”

I awkwardly nod my head. “I understand,” I say.

Her parents were very welcoming to me. However, her older brother, Owen, was another story.

He didn’t say anything when I introduced myself and wouldn’t shake my hand. He just stared at me with an angry crazed look.

“Don’t mind him,” says Taylor, pulling my arm. “Let me show you around.”

After Taylor gave me a quick tour of the house, we then went upstairs to her room, which I thought of course, was the most interesting room in the house. With newspaper clippings, and pictures of her and her family scattered all over the golden walls, a computer desk with scattered papers, and a twin bed with a brown folder sitting on top.

“I’m sorry about my brother,” she says, closing the door behind us. “He’s a little overprotective.”

“I can see that,” I say.

She laughs and walks over to me. “It just that ever since Rick…” Her smile disappears.

“Hey,” I say, grabbing hold of her hand. “It’s okay.”

The feel of her hand is warm against mine, slightly moving my thumb against her smooth skin. Then I realize…I’m touching her hand!

I’d thought she would attack me, but instead she looks at me in a curious way, an expression I couldn’t understand. Then I snap away my hand.

“Anyway,” I laugh, awkwardly changing the subject, “your parents seem to like me.”

“I guess so,” she says, playing along.

I walk over to the walls and gaze at the newspaper clippings, observing the important events from the past and present.

“I see you take your work home with you,” I say. “You must really love the papers.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s sort of a dream of mine, to be a journalist.”

“That’s a pretty interesting dream.”

She smiles. “I want to show something.”

Taylor walks over to her bed and sits down, leaning against the nightstand beside it. As I sit next to her, she opens the drawer and pulls out a grass green binder. She hands it to me and I open it, finding laminated pages of the school paper. The pages containing the articles she’d written.

I skim through them, amazed at how beautifully written her words were. How she explained things, never leaving out a single detail, giving each tiny fact the same attention as the important ones, and how she made one sentence impossible to put the page down…it just took my breath away.

“Do you like them?” she asks anxiously.

“Do I?” I say breathlessly. “These are amazing. Your work is amazing. And you. You are-”

But then I stop, curiously looking at the pages. As I flipped deeper into the binder, I began to notice that some of the pages were being crossed out. I tried to flip away, thinking that this was just an article that Taylor wasn’t satisfied with, but that wasn’t the case. Page after page were deeply engraved with giant X’s, created by a red marke
r.

What was going on here? Why was she crossing
out these sections of her work?

After being blinded by red, I stopped turning when I noticed an untouched page, containing an article of the school’s tennis team, written by Taylor. I started to read, but then I pause, finding a slightly faded X on the page. An X that didn’t seem to belong to that page. Or at least that side of it.

I remove the paper from its plastic slip and turn it over, seeing another X on the front page, and underneath that was a picture of Rick and Taylor, wrapped in each other’s arms, smiling. Above the

picture, from what I could make out, read
EVANS AND MORRISON CALL IT QUIETS.

I look up at Taylor, who instead of looking back at me, sta
res down at the page in shock.

“You didn’t write this, did you?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No,” she murmurs.

I stop to another page that shows Rick playing football and the headline reads
EVANS SCORES TOUCHDOWN
. I turn to another page and it’s Rick. And there’s Rick again. And again. And again and again, until I finally put it together. All of the crossed out pages either involved Rick, or him and Taylor.

“Okay,” Taylor says, snatching the book away. “I think that’s enough.”

She stuffs it into her drawer and then looks at me with concern, the nervousness visible in her eyes.

“Who wrote that article?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It just made its way to the paper. Right after I left him. It said things. Things that Rick had told them. Things that weren’t true. That I thought I was too good for him, that I was the one treating
him
like garbage, when it was really the other way around.”

Her eyes glisten with tears, and she looks down at the floor, not wanting to me to see them.

I had now seen the effect of Rick’s doing. The toll it had taken on her. The way it made her feel to look at him, talk about him. The way she thought he would change, not knowing her attempts were useless.

“Taylor,” I say gently. She lifts up her head to look at me. “You didn’t deserve him. He’s not going
to change. That’s the way he always was. Way before you met him. And you shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened. If he can’t see what a beautiful, smart girl you are, then that’s his loss.”

Taylor’s eyes widen. “You…you think I’m beautiful?”

Oh, no. Word vomit. This time, there was no way to dance around it. I said it, and she heard it, so there weren’t any other options to choose from, but to tell her how I feel.

I nod. “Yeah.”

Taylor smiles and wipes away her tears. From there, we just stared, looking into each other’s eyes as my response begins to seep in.

“We should start studying,” she says abruptly.

I shake out of my trance. “Uh-yeah, sure,” I say. And with that, we pulled out our books and began to study.

After half an hour, there was a knock on the door. It was Mrs. Morrison, telling us to come down for dinner. We then went downstairs to the dining room, where everybody else was already seated at the table.

As we ate, everyone explained themselves to me. Mr. Morrison talks about his job as a tax attorney, Mrs. Morrison talks about her book club, and of course, Owen doesn’t say anything.

It was so nice of them to mention their everyday lives to me, but it wasn’t like I could say much to them, besides the fact I that have amnesia, and I’m the heroic savior that’s gone viral in the last twenty-four hours. But I decided not to disclose those topics, and instead talked about Brad and school.

All the while, I noticed Taylor smiling at me from across the table, and without questioning her, I smiled back.

After finishing dinner and returning to my studies with Taylor for a while longer, it started getting late, and it was time for me to go. I say goodbye to her family, and she walks me to the door.