Bedroom Bully by Harper West

21

Rebecca

After tossingand turning for nights on end, I finally decided to do something about it. I threw the covers off my body, followed the most insane hunch of my life, and started poking around.

And what I found put a few more pieces together.

“There had to have been an accident,” I murmured.

My sister had been pretty tight-lipped about the scar along her back. But my knee-jerk reaction was that she had gotten it in a car accident she had been in. Back when I was a freshman in high school, there had been a lot of chaos around it. Maggie had called Mom and Dad in the middle of the night crying about it. All of us had rushed to the hospital to make sure she was all right. However, by the time we had gotten there, the doctors said they had taken a look at her and declared her fine.

That scar on her back told a much different story, though.

“There has to be news about it somewhere,” I murmured to myself.

I took to my personal phone while I brewed coffee at three in the morning. Not much sneaked by in the small town where I grew up without some sort of mention in the local newspaper, which meant a car accident probably would’ve been front and center. I plugged in every combination of words I could come up with, from “car crash Maggie Loren 2011” all the way down to “Joseph Ryker Maggie Loren car accident.”

But after over an hour of searching, I had come up with nothing.

“What am I missing?” I whispered to myself.

I racked my brain, trying to pull details from that fuzzy night. I had fallen asleep practically the second we had gotten to the hospital, especially after the doctors told me my sister was okay. I didn’t care about anything else after that, and she lent me her shoulder for me to use for a nap while we sorted things out with the police that evening. But that was all I remembered.

Until the caffeine finally kicked in.

“Oh, shit,” I hissed.

Finally, the magical phrase of “Loren Ryker midnight accident summer 2011” revealed what I had been looking for. It hadn’t made it into the papers, but a blog had been written about the incident. I found it weird that the newspapers hadn’t run anything on it. Then again, Joseph’s parents had been just about as stuck up as he was. They probably paid to keep it out of the newspapers, probably so their golden boy didn’t have a shred of bad press, even as a child.

However, this blog had everything I had been looking for.

“Bingo,” I murmured.

Not only was there an article with supposed quotes from Joseph and my sister, but there were pictures. Pictures of the mangled Audi convertible, which was very obviously a Ryker sort of vehicle. There were pictures of the scene, where tire skid marks and broken glass littered the roadside. There were even pictures of my sister and JoJo at the scene, but something looked off.

While my sister was crouched down and looked to be crying into her knees on the side of the road, JoJo seemed practically unscathed.

“That can’t be right,” I murmured.

I closed my internet browser on my phone and pulled up Google Drive. I had an email account specifically so I could store old photos that I never wanted to lose, no matter what phone I had. And as I dug back into my archives, I found family photos from a few days after the accident that sent us flying to the hospital in the middle of the night. It didn’t take me long to dig up pictures of my sister looking all banged up and tired, with a bruise across her cheek, a scab cutting through her lower lip, and stitches just above her left eyebrow.

It looked like she had been pummeled with softballs or something.

The accident isn’t what struck me as odd, however. What struck me as odd, among many things, is why JoJo looked just fine and my sister looked like she had been shoved headfirst into a deploying airbag. And the more I scrutinized that part of my life, the more I found things that made absolutely no sense.

Like, the lack of punishment my parents put my sister through over that evening.

Or the lack of restrictions they brought down upon her head after sneaking out and getting into a wreck.

I remembered none of that shit taking place, and even though I wanted to blame my mind for the blank—since it was the middle of the night—my gut told me there was something more to this.

That I was on the right track.

Maybe that’s why they hate each other.

Part of me wanted to call Maggie and ask her what the hell was up with that night. As a teenager, it didn’t strike me as odd that my parents hadn’t punished her. I mean, a hospital visit and a near-death experience, practically, was punishment enough in my opinion. But, with this bullshit between her and JoJo, I wondered if there was more to all of this.

I wondered if the accident had something to do with why they hate one another.

I tried to dig deeper into the issue, but the only source that held any sort of proof of the car accident was the blog. So, I tried to backtrack to find out who owned the blog. Their last post happened all the way back in 2015, and my rudimentary I.T. skills didn’t yield a name or an email address to contact the owner of the domain.

Which left me stuck.

“Fuck,” I groaned.

I knew that the accident was at the root of this issue. Or, at the very least, the catalyst. I had no idea how to obtain the information, though. In the pictures from the accident, there was only one car. The Audi. There wasn’t another banged-up car, or downed power pole in the background, or even a guard rail that had been mangled in the process. No matter how much I brightened my phone or tried to enhance the pictures, there were no clues as to what caused the accident in the first place.

Then, a thought occurred to me.

“Mikey,” I hissed.

I hopped over to social media and quickly found him on Facebook. I rarely got on in the first place. My social media accounts were things to keep me entertained whenever I couldn’t sleep, versus my sister who posed in practically every outfit she donned during her day. She excelled in thirst traps and trends, while I was content with stealing everyone’s memes and accepting book recommendations from people I’d never meet.

And when I found Mikey’s page, I shot him a message.

Hey there, Mikey.

I don’t know if you remember me, but it’s Becks, Maggie’s sister. I was wondering if I could pick your brain about the car accident my sister was in? Please don’t tell anyone; she’d kill me if you knew this. But she’s starting to struggle a bit physically and while she keeps denying it, I think it has something to do with the car accident she and JoJo were in all those years ago. Do you remember it?

If so, do you have any info about that accident that the newspapers don’t already have? She’s not talking about it, and at this point her doctor is desperate.

Thank you for any help you can provide for us. I just want my sister to be okay.

I sent the message and didn’t expect anything to come of it, but almost immediately Mikey read the message. I held my breath and chewed on my lower lip as I waited for his response. He typed and then stopped typing. He’d do it again, then stop. I knew he was considering his words, and I wondered why he felt the need to do that in the first place.

Please, don’t let him see through the lie.

Mikey: Hey, girl! Long time no fuckin see. Hate it about your sister. Anything I can do?

Panic and hope gripped my soul as I quickly messaged back.

Me: Hey! Someone who’s up as late as I am most nights. Guess some things do change.

Mikey: I know, I know. I hated staying up late when I was a kid. I loved my sleep. And now I can’t seem to get enough of it.

Me: You and me both. So, you said you remember the accident that night?

Mikey: Yeah, I’m surprised you don’t.

Me: LOL! I remember the hospital part briefly before I fell asleep in the waiting room.

Mikey: AHA! Sounds like you. But I’m not sure how much help I can be. Em never really talked about it much.

Me: Do you know why she’s so finicky about it?

Mikey: Your guess is as good as mine. I tried to press her a few times about what happened that night, but she’d always shut down. And it was such a long time ago that I probably can’t tell you more than you already know.

Me: Could you try for me? Please? At this point, you’re my only hope.

Mikey: Sorry, girl. I wish I could help. But that damned accident was so fuckin long ago that even if I could force myself to come up with something, I’m not even sure it’d be truthful.

Me: Well, thanks for talking to me anyway.

Mikey: Hey, anytime. I hear you’re in Cali now! How are you likin it?

I kept up the small talk as much as I could before I backed out of the conversation. I figured it was a dead end in the first place, but it had been worth a shot. Mikey had been her best friend back during our high school years. The two of them shared everything, including boys sometimes. So, the mere fact that he didn’t have information about the accident either told me that one of two outcomes was true.

Either she didn’t talk with him about the accident, which meant she was hiding something about it.

Or, she forced him into secrecy and the secret itself is so bad that he doesn’t want to open that can of worms.

Either way, it only stoked the fire in my gut to figure out what the hell happened that night.

“I guess I could try and call his family,” I murmured to myself.

I felt tempted to do it, too. But it felt too much like an invasion of their privacy. There had to be a way to get the answers I sought without any of this getting back to my sister or JoJo. And since I had already taken a risk contacting Mikey, I knew I couldn’t risk trying to contact his parents as well.

Especially in the same evening.

“Why doesn’t anyone tell me anything?” I grumbled.

As much as I hated it, I ended up dragging myself back to bed. I wouldn’t get any other answers tonight and I needed sleep before another hellish week at work started. I pushed myself off the couch and dragged my ass back to my bedroom where I flopped down into my pillow face-first. I managed to get my phone on its most recent charger: a wireless charger that I had splurged on a few days ago. And after I heard it beep, I relegated myself to a few hours’ sleep.

While I turned over my predicament in my dreams.