That had to count for something, right?
—
Usually I only heard from my mom every couple of months.
Her phone was deactivated half the time because she was always behind on her bills. She’d disappear for five or six weeks, then I’d get a call out of nowhere from a strange new number. Other times she’d email me from a public computer, or give me a quick call using someone else’s phone.
Like so many things about our lives, I grew up without realizing there was another way to exist. Most people would find it strange or uncomfortable, going without a reliable connection to the outside world. With me and Mom, that’s just the way things were. When the bills got paid, life was good. The rest of the time we made due.
Mom had always been a motorcycle club groupie, so I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t surrounded by big men and loud bikes. It sounds bad, but I wasn’t entirely unhappy growing up. Before Teeny I remembered traveling and doing fun things with other kids.
Then everything changed.
Before she met him things were good, even though we’d been living in our car for a while after the last man she’d hooked up with dumped her. We’d slept in the car lots of times over the years, so I wasn’t scared. She used to make a game of it and that was fun. Then one day Mom dropped me with a friend and disappeared for a week. When she came back, she told me I had a new daddy, his name was Teeny, and that we were all going to be a family together. That’s when we moved into his house.
I loved it at first—I had my own room and everything.
When school started that year, I’d gotten to ride on a big yellow school bus with a bunch of other kids, and I even made some friends. At eight years old, kids tend not to notice the fact that a girl in their class hasn’t had a bath in three days, or that her clothes are too small. The teachers were onto us, of course—I remember strange people in suits coming to the house, checking our cabinets for food, and asking my mom a lot of questions—but I still felt like I fit in.
Then slowly I realized something wasn’t right.
For one thing, I didn’t get invited to play with other kids after school, or to their birthday parties. For my tenth birthday I had a party and only one girl came. Her mom didn’t drop her off. She just stood around, watching nervously while my mom fussed with my cake, and then they left before we even had a chance to play games. Slowly I learned that I was biker trash, and even if the kids didn’t know it, their parents did.
By the time I hit middle school, all the kids knew it, too.
There was normal and then there was us.
But when I left California, I left Biker Trash Becca behind. Regina and Earl looked at me and saw who I really was—a young girl who needed help. They opened their home and their hearts to me, and the rest of Callup followed suit. For the first time in my life I really belonged. Not only that, I was safe, surrounded by layers of protection. First Regina and Earl, then my new friends at the school. Their families adopted me, too, and standing guard over all of us were the Silver Bastards, who considered the town and its inhabitants their own.
Even now, despite the weirdness with Puck, my life was good. Almost normal. I had a job, I had school, and I was still in control.
Funny how one phone call can completely fuck up everything.
—
My cell phone started blowing up around two that afternoon, but I was just starting an evaluation, so I ignored it after a quick check to see who was calling. Mom. Shit. I’d have to call her back after school . . . Then she called me four more times in ten minutes and I started to freak out. Another hour passed before I could get away and check my messages. The first was calm enough, at least on the Mom Scale.
“Baby, you need to call me right now. It’s important.”
By the second message she sounded upset. Not that my mother getting upset was anything new—she was always either in a great mood or ten seconds from losing it, not much left in between.
“Becca, I just tried calling your apartment. I don’t know why you can’t live somewhere that has better service. You really need to call me. Now.”
It was the third message that really worried me, though. This time she sounded scared. Like, scared for real. Combine that with the repeated calls and warning sirens started going off in my head.
“It’s important, Becca. Please call me. I need to get away from Teeny—it’s not safe here anymore. I know we’ve had our differences, but I really need your help now.”
My breath caught, then I forced myself to calm down. She’d said she was ready to leave him half a dozen times. Then she’d change her mind . . . Would she really go through with it? When I was younger, I’d always wondered if Teeny was a wizard, because he seemed to have a near-magical hold over my mother.
I called her back, fingers trembling. She didn’t answer and I didn’t leave a message. For all I knew Teeny would steal her phone and listen to it, so I sent her a vague text instead.
ME: Mom—ill be at school until five and then home for the evening. Call me.
I was useless after that. All I could think about was Mom and Teeny and whether she was serious this time. Well, that’s all I could think about until four thirty.
That’s when distraction arrived in hot-guy form.
News spread through the school in a flash, of course, and all the girls were whispering and giggling about him. Nothing unusual there. Stressed out or not, I was still a functioning human woman so I decided to do a discreet walk-by to the bathroom to check him out. My breath caught.
Tall. Built, with strong arms and spiky blond hair.