“Wait. He said ‘riffraff’?”

“It might have been another word.”

“Oh.” I rub my sore elbow and shake my head, staring at the ancient carpet. “How’s Dad handling it?”

Mom gives me a rueful smile and reaches for another stack of napkins. “I think you can probably guess.”

I stand up and start pacing around the tables. “Crap,” I mutter. “What now?”

“Why on earth did you go there, Julia?”

I stop pacing and look at her. “I had to tell Sawyer something. He’s the one who knocked my pizza over earlier . . .” I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. All I know is that I should probably stop talking.

“He knocked your pizza over? On purpose?”

“No! Nothing like that. It was an accident.”

“What kind of hooligan would do that? We should be the ones slapping a restraining order on him,” she says.

Oh, hey, there’s a way to ruin my life even more. “Please, please don’t do that.”

“We just might.”

“Well, that’s great.” I get up and grab my gloves. “I’m going to bed.”

I stomp into the kitchen just as Trey pulls a pizza out of the oven. “Is that the one I messed up on? They still want it, this late?”

“Yep,” he says. He cuts it, grabs a box and slides it in, then maneuvers it into the bag.

I’m so frustrated I want to punch the wall. “Okay, awesome,” I say. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” I reach for the bag.

“I got it,” he says. “Go upstairs.”

I bite my lip. He makes me want to cry. I know I should object, but I don’t. “You won’t believe what I did,” I say.

“Probably not.” He smiles and grabs his coat and keys, then the pizza, and he’s out the door. “Wait up, we’ll talk. It’ll be fine,” he calls as it closes.

“Thanks, Trey. I will,” I say, but he’s gone. All I can hear now is Dad slinging crap around upstairs. I head out of the restaurant as Trey’s taillights disappear, and start making my way upstairs to deal with Dad.

Seventeen

When I enter the apartment, Dad is fuming. At first, he just looks at me and shakes his head—it’s the Demarco way of exuding disappointment without a word, and it works. The irony here is that he’s standing in the middle of the dining room, next to where I think there might be a table and some chairs somewhere, but they’ve been loaded with piles and piles of his junk for the past nine years. Yet nobody ever calls him on that.

His silence is thick. Finally I speak up. “I’m sorry I went to Angotti’s. I just had to tell—”

“No!” His voice thunders, and he starts in. “You do not ‘just have to’ anything with the Angottis. Ever. Do you hear me? Do you want to ruin our business? You want the newspaper to find out that the Angottis have put a restraining order on the Demarcos? What does that say to the community?”

“They haven’t done that—”

He starts pointing at me. “Not yet. Not yet. Better be never. You stay away from that boy. Do I need to find a new school for you? Is that it?”

My jaw drops. As much as I dislike my school, at least I have Trey and Rowan there. At least I can look at Sawyer once a day. “Dad, seriously! Are you really trying to ruin my life?”

He gives me a suspicious look. “What are you doing with him?”

“Nothing! I swear.”

“Then why do you have to tell him something?”

I take a breath and go with the first thing I can come up with. “School project. We’re on a team. The teacher assigned us.”

He narrows his eyes, but I can tell he wants to believe me. “What class?”

“Psych,” I say. It’s almost not a lie.

“You stay away from that place,” he says once more.

“I will, Dad. I’m sorry.”

• • •

When I wake up Monday morning after a terrible night’s sleep, I fight off all the thoughts about what could still happen to Sawyer. I can’t deal with that right now.

All I can think about is that I did what I had to do. I warned him. And just because everything’s all turmoily, and my dad’s a messed-up freak, and the boy I L.O.V.E. probably thinks I belong in an asylum, doesn’t change the fact that I have now satisfied whatever weird business has been going on in my head, and I am now free. I yank open the curtains and look out at the windows across the street. None of them show me an explosion. I cross my fingers and hope it’s over.

I also hope Sawyer won’t tell the whole world what I said to him. But the chances of this? Zero.

And Dad’s just going to have to get over it.

• • •

Five insanely overdramatic things I heard Dad muttering to himself last night as he paced the hallway outside my room:

1. “You have betrayed the name of Demarco!” (Yo, Shakespeare, live in the now)

2. “Why couldn’t you just deliver the pizza to my dear friends?” (So you and Mrs. Rodriguez are hanging out now?)

3. “Now look what you’ve done. You’ve fired the first shot!” (WTF?)

4. “No more deliveries for you. We’ll hire a boy.” (Oh, o-kay)

5. “Why do you want to break my heart?” (big sigh)

And now I’m grounded for two weeks, which is no big deal because I don’t go anywhere anyway. The worse punishment is that I’ve got to go to school and face the impending ridicule.