Swell (Complete)

Chapter Sixteen (Part Two)

"I am not ok now,
But I'll find a way now,
I've been here before,
But you sure are more, more, more,
Than I bargained for."

....

Iain was the one who dropped Adora off home when school finished. She sat on her bed staring out the window; she hadn't even bothered to find her mum.
She'd received a few texts to check up on her, short replies probably hadn't convinced anybody that she was.
Agatha was lying on the other side of the bed, her long body straightened out in the last warmth of the sun.
Who would do it?
Adora still couldn't fathom someone she knew who would hurt another person. Most of her canopy had been let down around her bed before she had sat down, it had become a protective net from the world outside when her father had passed.
A loud engine shattered the afternoon quiet and Adora frowned. It grew louder and suddenly it stopped. Not a vehicle from the highway, those faded into and out of hearing.
She cocked her ear towards the window, waiting to hear the sound again; when it didn't come she let go of a sigh and closed her eyes.
The next sound she heard was just a few moments later. "Adora?" Her mother's voice and the gentle knocking of her fist.
"Yea?" Adora replied lazily.
"You have a visitor."
The door broke away gently from the frame and Adora opened her eyes to see Will standing beside her mother.
"Hi." He gave her a crooked half smile.
"Will." She sat up and away from her pillows in surprise.
"I'll be downstairs in the kitchen, lasagne for dinner tonight OK?" Anne let Will step into the room.
"Uh, yea, thanks, Mum." Adora got off her bed and pulled back one side of the canopy as her mother pulled the bedroom door shut.
"Sorry to just turn up." Will watched as Adora secured the side behind the wrought iron bedhead. "I just wanted to check on you."
Adora let the magnetic shells stick together around the bedpost and turned to give him a forced smile.
"I'm OK."
He looked from her to Agatha and back again. "The card today..." He shook his head at her. "Don't blame yourself."
She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn't find any words. She scoffed and pulled together another wall of her canopy, securing it with another set of magnetic shells attached with ribbon to pull the tulle in.
"Look, if you had an idea of who would hurt Brett before it happened, maybe then you could pretend there was justification to blame yourself, but you don't even have a clue now, so don't." Will put a hand gently on her arm to make her look at him.
She met his eyes, Tom's eyes and felt frozen to the spot.
No, they weren't Tom's eyes, there was something less intense about them, something that was more... comforting.
"Please." He added quietly.
She remembered the comfort she had felt when he had ridden to the hospital for her on Sunday morning.
The enjoyment she had when they had been playing guitar in Brett's garage.
"Will..."
He heaved a sigh and let her arm go. "Sorry, I shouldn't really be... It's just that my ex left me a card, well a note really, not long before we moved here. She just skipped out on us. Nobody saw it coming, not even her family. She'd never told Marti that she had fancies of running away."
Will moved to the middle of the bed, a safe distance from the curve of either of the sides of the canopy walls and sat down on its edge. "I blamed myself for her leaving, and I know it's not like anyone got hurt, physically anyway, it's just that I keep thinking I wasn't good enough of a boyfriend for her to stay."
Adora remembered Tom telling her about Elissa, Will's ex and Marti's best friend.
She hadn't expected Will to talk to her about it and now he had, she didn't know what to say.
"I know, like I said, very different, but my point is that you can't stop something you don't know is going to happen. Hah, sometimes you can't even stop something if you do know it's going to happen. Which really goes to show that you can't blame yourself." He was looking up at her now, and she was still holding the gathered net and magnetic shells.
"I'm sorry, about your ex." She managed quietly.
He frowned a little. "I didn't come here to get your sorry, I didn't tell you about Liss for it either. It's just that we never really know what someone is going to do and so we can't hold ourselves responsible for their actions. You can't think that the person who hurt Brett really knows what love is. If they did, and they really loved you they wouldn't have hurt him."
Did she know anyone who didn't understand love?
Somehow that was the only way it made sense to stop blaming herself.
"You're right. Someone who loved me wouldn't want to hurt someone I loved." She sat down on the bed beside Will and Agatha groaned and stretched out behind her.
Will looked down at the cat as if he hadn't even realised she was there. "Exactly."
"Thanks, Will."
"No thanks, just... no self-blame." Will shook his head.
Adora nodded slowly. No self-blame, thinking about what he and Marti had said about the card sender started to make it feel less like her fault.
Marti believed the person who hurt Brett would have to be insane, right?
Will thought that they couldn't know what love was if violence was part of their love.
They were right, weren't they?
But Adora didn't know anyone who was insane, or who thought love had to involve hurting someone, so who could have done it and sent the card?
"Are you OK?"
Adora scoffed. "I think I will be." She nodded, looked at the digital alarm clock on her bedside table and then looked at Will. "Do you have anything against old cartoons?"
"Old cartoons?" He asked in confusion.

Tom had felt uncomfortable all day, from the moment the police told him what had happened to his car, what they suspected him of, what he couldn't remember doing, Debbie's mean words to Adora outside the police station, and then the locker hall fight with his brother after finding out about the card.
Tom might not have been able to remember what had happened Saturday night, but he could be sure he hadn't put the card on Adora's locker, not unless she skipped her locker in the morning.
Then he may have put it there on Saturday night, but that was reaching.
Tom clenched his fist and slammed it into the drawer of his desk.
Now even he unsure if he had done it!
His parents had been cautious when they had first heard of the accusations, they were lucky that Debbie's family had lived in Wheeler Falls as long as the Dodgers' and Brett's, because she had been able to help shake a lot of rumours with her insistence that she was with Tom.
His parents had been a bit upset he hadn't called them from the station, but he was an adult and he had no idea how much he was suspected of the attack initially, and before it had gotten too gruelling in that room, Debbie had shown up.
The sound of the motorbike made Tom's fist unclench and it was only then that he realised how sore his hand might become from the punch and how late it had gotten.
Where had his brother been?
He stood up and left his desk, making his way to the hallway as he heard the front door close.
"Where were you?" He asked, folding his arms across his chest as Will pulled his boots off by the door.
His brother looked up and Tom saw his jaw line tense. "I was out with a friend."
Tom's chest immediately tightened. "Oh? It's pretty late for a school night."
"We lost track of time." Will shrugged and hung his leather jacket up on its hook.
"I didn't know you had made any friends." Tom said, maybe thoughtlessly, but he couldn't convince his tension to fade.
Will frowned at him. "I was making sure Adora was OK. Feel better?" Will pushed past Tom into the hallway and closed his bedroom door behind him.
Will had been out at Adora's?
Tom's guarded stance dropped with his stomach.
How long ago had Will arrived at Adora's? What had they done for so long? Will had missed dinner, had he had it at Edgar's Escape?
Tom took a deep breath and clenched his jaw, leave it, just go to bed. Don't get jealous.