Bad Girl Reputation by Elle Kennedy

“So here’s how it is,” Randall says, talking down his nose at me. “You’re not welcome back here. Long as you’re in town, you stay the hell away from me and my family.”

Not his family anymore, the way I heard it. But I bite back the snarky remark, along with the rush of scorn that rises in my throat. He has no right to speak to me in that tone of disgust, not after the way he behaved last year.

We were admittedly wasted that night back then, the girls and me, while Rusty kept trying to talk me into going out to his car with him and fooling around in the parking lot. I was gentle, at first. Laughing it off and making my way around the room to avoid him. Clinging to the girls because there was safety in numbers. Until he cornered me against the jukebox, tried to slather his mouth on mine, and jammed his hand up my shirt. I shoved him away and told him, loud enough for the whole bar to hear, to fuck off. Thankfully, he’d left, albeit cranky and dissatisfied.

That could have been the end of it. I could have gone back to my friends and let it go. Certainly wasn’t the first time I’d been hit on by an overaggressive older man. But something about the encounter had stung me right to the bone. I was pissed. Fuming. Absolutely irate. Long after he’d gone, I sat there stewing over the encounter and all the ways I should have stuck my foot in his groin and rammed the heel of my palm into his throat. I kept throwing down shots. Eventually Steph and Alana left, and it was just me and my friend Trina, who’s probably the only person in our old circle of friends who had me beat for wild instincts. She wasn’t ready to let what Randall did go and said neither should I. What he did was wrong, and it was my responsibility to not let him get away with it.

In front of me now, Randall stands up straight, bearing down on me. I back up onto the sidewalk, glancing around for my best exit. Frankly, I have no idea what this man is capable of, so I assume everything.

“Look,” I say. “I own that I acted crazy by showing up at your house the way I did. But that doesn’t change the fact that you felt me up in a bar after I spent the whole night trying to get away from you. Far as I’m concerned, it’s you who needs a reminder to keep his distance. I’m not the one looking for a confrontation.”

“You better keep your head down, girl,” he warns, growling at me with a wet, phlegmy voice full of impotent anger. He’s getting off on the power trip. “None of that partying bullshit. I catch you with drugs, you’re gonna find yourself in the back of this car. So much as sniff trouble around you, you’re going to jail. Hear me?”

He’s aching for a reason, the slightest provocation to nail me. Too bad for him, I left that Genevieve behind a long time ago. From the corner of my eye, I spot Heidi and the girls standing at the entrance to the bar, waiting for me.

“We done here?” I ask, keeping my chin up. I’d walk into traffic before giving Randall the satisfaction of knowing his threats affect me. “Good.”

I walk off. When the girls ask, I just tell them to watch their backs. Wherever we are this summer, whatever we do, it’s a sure thing he’ll be watching. Biding his time.

I’m not about to play his game.

Later, at home, I lie in bed still rigid with anger. There’s tension tugging at the muscles in my neck. A throbbing pressure pushing against my eyeballs. I can’t be still. So that’s how, at nearly midnight, I find myself sitting on the floor at my closet, surrounded by boxes, yearbooks, and photo albums, taking a walk down memory lane. An ill-advised walk, because the first picture in the first album I open? One of me and Evan. We’re eighteen, maybe nineteen, standing on the beach at sunset. Evan has both arms wrapped around me from behind, one hand holding a bottle of beer. I’m in a red bikini, resting my head against his broad, shirtless chest. We’re both smiling happily.

I bite my lip, trying hard to fend off the memories attempting to bat their way into my brain. But they barrel through my mental defenses. I remember that day on the beach. We watched the sunset with our friends, then took off alone, walking in the warm sand toward Evan’s house where we locked ourselves in his bedroom and didn’t come out till the next afternoon.

Another picture, this one at some party at Steph’s house, and this time we’re sixteen years old. I know it’s sixteen because those awful blonde highlights in my hair had been a birthday present from Heidi. I look ridiculous. But you wouldn’t know it from the way Evan is staring at me. I don’t know who took the photo, but they managed to capture in his expression what I can only describe as adoration. I look equally smitten.

I find myself smiling at our young, besotted selves. It wasn’t long after that party that he told me he loved me for the first time. We were hanging out in my backyard floating on our backs in the pool, engaged in a pretty serious conversation about how much we wished our mothers gave a shit about us, when he suddenly cut me off mid-sentence and said, “Hey, Genevieve? I love you.”

And I’d been so startled to hear him utter my full name and not Fred, the dumb nickname whose origins I don’t even remember, that I sank like a stone. I didn’t even register the second part of that statement until I came up to the surface, eyes stinging, coughing up water.

His indignant expression had greeted me. “Seriously? I tell you I love you and you try to drown yourself? What the hell?”