Hating, Hurting: A Stepbrother Bully Story

and I couldn’t keep the wide smile off my face. I made it!
“So you’re the cheerleading type, huh? I wouldn’t have guessed,” Sarah said. Coming from her, it didn’t seem like an insult. She didn’t seem to care what type I was, looking over a pile of papers, a pen in between her lips.
“Yeah, I didn’t know it either until I managed to not trip over my feet that first day,” I said with a laugh. “Studying already?”
Jules peeked over at Sarah’s notes and groaned. “That’s for next week’s quiz.”
Sarah shrugged. “It never hurts to prepare is all I’m saying.”
I mentally filed this away to be revisited at a quieter time later tonight – I already had a ton of homework piling up and hadn’t registered that we had a Math quiz, too. My mom, as sweet as she was, was super strict about my grades and made sure I performed to my fullest potential. Which was why I didn’t tell her that I was considering applying to med school. There would be no backtracking from there, and I didn’t want the possibility of disappointing her once her expectations were raised.
I glanced at Hans again, remembering his pointers about the various classes. Be careful in Math. Ms. Jones will find any excuse to penalize you. Mr. Bennett likes it if you offer to put away all the Bunsen burners afterward. And: Avoid the last seat in the second row in English. It brings bad luck.
I had trouble gauging him and what he thought of me - specifically, what his thoughts were of my mother and I. Cole read like an open book, although the extreme hatred befuddled me, but Hans played with his cards kept close to him. He didn’t make me feel welcome, exactly, despite his apparent easygoing ways. I just hoped I wasn’t overcalling it and losing a chance to let someone who could be really like family in. And family was something I had always craved for. We were a tiny unit, my mother and I, ever since my father left us when I was one. Of all the things I was thankful for, it was that he left at a time when I had barely formed an understanding of who he was to me. It meant there was almost no pain, that my tender age acted as a cushion to stop all the questions from tumbling in. Like: How could he? How does anyone leave their own child, their toddler, their flesh and blood and never look back? Don’t they feel any attachment to the little being they brought into the world? I looked like him. My mother had never told me that, but I had found a picture of the two of them in a box under my mom’s bed back home. I had his blue eyes and light hair, and he looked exactly like a boy any girl would fall for: white, cocky grin and sexy dimples. Sometimes I even asked myself, even though I knew it was pointless: was it something I did wrong? Was it me? So I was glad to never have any memories of him, not to have had that bond with him that I might have had had he left at a later period in my life.
It didn’t mean I was perfectly happy without him, however. At a time when my friends had a father to hold their hand and stop boys from teasing them, I learned that crying didn’t solve very much and turned to biting those boys whenever they pulled on my pigtails instead. My mother did her best, but she couldn’t stop me from looking at my friends when their dads came to pick them up from school and gave them bear hugs.
And now I was seventeen, too old to form any real sort of daughterly attachment to Marcus. Count your blessings. I took a deep breath and resolved to think positively. Not too old to be making new relationships with people who mattered. Looking at the twins again, I wondered what sort of relationship we were likely to have twenty, thirty years from now. I couldn’t see it, but then I again, I had always thought I’d stay in that small house my mom and I used to live in, and live a mediocre life, perhaps becoming a nursing assistant at an old folks’ home. And now, I was thinking of med school. Neurosurgery even. Never say never.

Chapter 6
Cole
There she goes again. I allowed the familiar resentment seep into my pores, washed down further by bitterness and a healthy dose of anger, as I watched the innocuous girl strut down the halls without a care in the world. As if this life were meant for her. As if she could come here and take over my life, my family, my house, my food, my car. I knew she slept well at night, whilst I tossed and turned until I finally gave up, only to doze off in the early hours of the morning and be met by the same horrifying nightmare. It was as if someone had their finger on the replay button and was having the last laugh. Sometimes I gave up all pretense of trying to sleep and just watched her, her eyelids fluttering as she slept, letting my mind go wild and imagine all the ways I would exact revenge.
The girl didn’t know, but her arrival in Gray Lake breathed life into the skeleton of a being I had become. Being a football star, worshipped by most of the school and town - it would mean something to someone who cared. Caring was only possible for those who had a heart, and mine had died a long time ago.
Visions of dark water and heavy breathing flashed in front of me, and my breath caught, keeping me in a stranglehold until I felt myself my oxygen supply cut off, my eyes brimming with moisture from the pain. And I relished the pain, felt