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chapter twelve: a monster of their creation

a/n:

this is a dialogue-heavy chapter!

tw(s) -- blood, vicious goldberg slander

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That following Monday, at seven in the morning, Lester Averman punches Rick Riley in the lip.

Nobody knows why. Nobody knows what Greg Goldberg ran halfway across the city to tell him, nor do they know about the forum posts about how close his girlfriend and the varsity captain seek to be getting, or about the hatred he's been harboring for the dark-haired, pig-headed boy ever since the term started. All they know is that the redhead stormed up to the bigger boy's locker over an hour before classes started and caught him off guard by socking him right in the mouth.

Well, they also know that Rick snapped back and nearly broke his nose.

The resulting fight was barely that, ending just as quickly as it started with Scott breaking through the crowd and pulling them apart.

But, that's not what Rory heard.

One of the members of the swim team was in the crowd egging them on and told his girlfriend, the setter on the volleyball team. His girlfriend then told Rachel during their mandatory weight room time, and Rachel, just minutes later, burst into their shared bedroom to tell Rory. The story she got was all chopped up—— far from the truth and completely framing Rick as the aggressor, which didn't seem to faze his sister, but certainly made Rory's heart drop so far into her stomach that she began to miss the dull thump of it against her ribs. She thought that her captain was on an upward climb; she hadn't witnessed him hurting anyone in a decent span of time and he'd been opening up to her a lot, and, surely, those were signs of change, right?

Then again, she thought with a pang, standing across the room from Rachel with a wide and helpless gaze, she was the one to tell Rick about the things Averman was saying.

It could've been all her doing.

So, she left all that she was doing and hunted down her boyfriend, instead.

And, after ten minutes of searching, she finds him sitting on one of the desks of an empty math classroom, a wad of bloody paper towels held up to his nose and Dwayne standing dutifully by his side.

"Oh, shit." She says from the doorway, the sound of her voice making both boys' heads snap up in her direction. "Hey, uh, I just heard."

Rory brushes past Dwayne without so much as a second glance and slots herself in the space between Les' knees. After a moment of hesitance, he sighs, shoulders sagging, and lets her pull the paper away from his face just long enough to discern that nothing about his face seems too out of the ordinary.

"It doesn't look broken." She assures him. "Does it hurt?"

"M'fine."

Les' voice comes out muffled and nasally because of his plugged-up nose and he jerks his head away from her touch when she goes to hold his face in her hands. That hurts Rory a bit, a sharp jerk in her stomach that makes her heartbeat pick up the pace, and she frowns down at him, her brows furrowed, as he stares back with this strange, indiscernible expression.

What's his deal?

"You're covered in blood. Can I at least help you with that?"

With another huff, Les lets her take the paper towel again and tilts his head back so she can take one of the least filthy bits of it and gingerly wipe the blood from his skin. When Rory gets too close to his nose for comfort, he winces, and she whispers an apology that he doesn't respond to.

In fact, he's only spoken one word to her this entire time.

Which makes her nervous.

"Okay, what's your damage?" She steps back, still frowning, however petulant that makes her feel. "What the hell happened out there, Les?"

Dwayne, who has been awkwardly lingering in her periphery, clears his throat before Averman can open his mouth to speak. She sends him a look that's more scathing than she intends over her shoulder.

"I'm—— Let me give y'all some privacy." He gestures with his thumb toward the door and makes a break for it, not bothering to listen to their responses.

Eyebrows once again meeting in the center of her forehead and several voices in the back of her head screaming to run as well (as well as the distant echo of her mother telling her to stop doing that with her face), Rory turns her attention back to her boyfriend.

"Well?" She prompts after a few seconds of smothering silence.

"It was nothing." Les grumbles. "Goldberg——"

She takes half a step back and her face scrunches up. "What does Goldberg have to do with Rick?"

Les ignores her interruption and continues over her. "Goldberg said something. I got upset, I punched the guy, and he tried to kill me."

Rory's stomach drops, impossibly, even lower than it already was.

She wanted Rick to be the aggressor so damn bad.

"What did he say?"

"He said..." Les stops to sigh. "He's been here a lot. Julie's been, like, tutoring him so he doesn't have to stay on the bench all season."

(Suddenly, with another twist of her gut, Rory remembers how that was going to be her job before it all went wrong.)

"Anyway, he said that he saw you go into Rick's room right after we dropped you off..."

Her boyfriend's face turns slightly sheepish as his sentence fades into nothing. Perhaps even a little guilty. Lester struggles to meet her gaze as she tries to come up with something to say, and then the realization of what he's implying and why he's acting like that hits her with such a rush of emotion that it makes her dizzy.

"Wait... so, Goldberg thought I was cheating on you?"

...

"Greg Goldberg told you he thought I was cheating on you and you believed him?"

Averman swallows at the sight of tears welling up in her eyes. "It.. sounded plausible."

"It sounded plausible?"

Rory's voice goes up an entire octave and, betraying her, breaks.

"Do you have any idea what they're saying about you?" His voice, in response to her up in pitch, gets louder. "You're—— going out with him after hours and wearing his jacket and hanging out in each other's dorms! Everybody thinks that you're sleeping together!"

"Why do you think we're sleeping together?!"

Her anger sits like a balloon in her chest. It fills and fills and fills with hot air until it takes up all the room her lungs need to breathe.

And Lester sits there, staring at her like he can't believe what he's hearing, only fueling the fire.

"You never denied it!"

"I never had to! You refused to talk about it and, instead, started a fistfight that you lost!"

Lester winces.

"How could you think so lowly of me, Les?"

"I don't—— It's not—— He likes you."

"Who cares?"

"Who cares?" He repeats, incredulous. "I care."

"It shouldn't matter that he likes me because I'm your girlfriend!"

"Yeah, well, you two are made for each other! He has the right money, and the right status, and the right looks—— what was I supposed to think?"

"Oh, my god!" Rory pushes away from him and runs her hands through her hair, swallowing past the anger rising in her throat. "You were supposed to trust me! You were supposed to trust me because I love you and I have never, not even when we were living hundreds of miles apart, not trusted you for a moment! Why can't you extend the same gratitude to me!?"

Lester doesn't answer her.

The balloon pops.

They only want you because your wealth and status are shiny and new. Her father cautioned all that time ago, the first in a long list of things he had to say about her former friends over the past months. The moment they realize you are not their equal and think that you are no longer beneficial to them, you will be left behind.

He was right.

He was always right.

(How could she ever have doubted that?)

"My father was right about you." Rory admits in a  voice much smaller, much more heartbroken, than the one she was using. "He was right about all of you."

Lester's face pinches with confusion.

"Go to the nurse. Fix your own goddamn nose. I don't care." Rory shoves the paper towels into his chest. "I'm done. We're done."

"Did you just break up with me?"

"Yeah." She says, tears slipping from her eyes. "Maybe now you can go find some suffocating, insecure girl just like you."

Lester calls her name as she leaves the room but she doesn't turn back to look at him. She doesn't look at Dwayne or any of the others pretending to not be lingering by the door, either. She just, chin up as if she wasn't crying at all, weaves her way through the student body, storming her way to the Junior homerooms like she's on a warpath.

When Adam sees her walk past their homeroom, he hops up from his seat and rushes after her.

"So..." He says, slightly breathless, his eyebrows knitting with concern as he gets a good look at her face. "You heard."

"Mhm. Of course, I did. Just got the whole story."

"Please don't do anything you'll regret."

"Oh, trust me," Rory laughs mirthlessly as they reach the room she was looking for, "I won't regret this—— Hey, Goldberg!"

A few of the Ducks, and a couple of stragglers just trying to get ready for the day, jump at the sound of her voice. Goldberg, whose back was turned to her, swivels in his chair and away from the group of kids sitting around him (likely to hear all the gossip he had.)

His eyes widen and he sits up ramrod straight as she slaps her palms down on the surface of his desk.

"Who do you think you are?"

"Rory——"

"Don't try to blubber your way out of this." Rory hisses. "We both know what you did."

"Alls I did was tell him what I saw! I didn't think he'd go and punch the guy——"

"No. All you saw was me enter a friend's dorm room to speak to him. You told Averman that I was cheating on him because, ever since Charlie went and decided that I was persona non grata, you all have been foaming at the mouth and waiting for me to mess up so you could ruin my relationship like the awful friends you are."

Guy, who must've entered after her and Adam, tugs gently on her sleeve. "Ror——"

"Stay out of this, Germaine!" She yanks her arm out of his grip and, after glaring at him briefly, fixes her gaze on Goldberg again. "Y'know what, Greg? Maybe if you, I don't know, focused this king of energy on getting higher than a D in any class you've ever been in or actually learned how to stop nine out of the ten pucks that came your way, you wouldn't have been getting tutored by the starting goalie in the first place!"

"Jesus Christ, Rory!" Adam almost yelps.

"But, I guess I have to give you credit for your first-ever accomplishment." Rory's gripping the sides of the desk, now. To keep steady? To keep from strangling him? A mix of both, surely. "I just broke up with him. My relationship is over."

Goldberg's face slackens with shock.

"Yeah. Congratulations. But guess what?"

"... What?"

"If I ever hear that you're talking shit about me or notice you meddling in my personal affairs again, I will call the team of very expensive lawyers that represent my family and they will tie you up in so much litigation that your parents will have to close up shop." She looks up at the rest of them, then. "That goes for all of you, actually. Leave me the hell alone."

Making eye contact with Charlie is like looking into the sun. It makes her violent—— she wants to hurt him, to make him bleed, to take him by the shoulders and ask him what he thinks of her now.

(If he loves her like Adam said he does, then why is he doing this to her? Why won't he defend her? Why does love not exist the way it does in books, or in the way her grandfather loved his wife even in death?)

Rory is not a creature of her own creation.

Like Frankenstein's monster, made up of pieces of all the people who have pretended to love her and then left her in the dirt, she stands in that classroom and looks at all the people who were surprised that their pitchforks and torches got the reaction they got and feels nothing but pure contempt.

So, she leaves with that, a mess of tears and lips curled back over teeth in a scowl. Adam stays behind, mind reeling, for a few seconds.

"What the hell, guys?" He asks, and doesn't wait for an answer.

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"I'm so stupid."

"No, you aren't."

"Yes, I am."

Rory doesn't think she's cried this much since she found out her grandfather might die.

She hadn't gotten the opportunity to.

Her summer was a blur of hospitals, vacations, and frequent sit-downs with the very legal team she just threatened to sic on her former friends between private sessions at the local rink with an interim coach who reminded her so much of Wolf Stansson that she took to hiding from him in the bathroom like a child whenever she could.

There was no time allotted for her to cry in the tightly packed schedule the family firm's public relations team had her on.

There was no time to even think about it while she was helping her father do some more than sketchy things (just to get backstabbed in the end.)

But now, sitting in her dorm room with Adam while Rachel valiantly keeps guard at the door, Rory sobs so hard she gags and ponders about how she's gotten herself into this situation.

"No, you're not." Adam says with a little more urgency.

"Everybody in my life warned me that this would happen." She blows her nose into a tissue from the box he's holding. "I don't know why I thought anything would go differently."

"Because it is going to go differently. You'll see."

Rory ignores him. She knows he's trying to help, but he isn't, and she thinks he might be trying to convince himself that everything will get back to normal more than he's trying to convince her.

"It won't." Rory sniffs. "It's never going to be the same, and it's all my fault."

Adam looks down at her, then, with a slightly tilted head. "What do you mean?"

Rory doesn't get a chance to answer him (which is good because, after so long, the truth leaped right to the tip of her tongue) because Rachel makes a strange noise and then Scott, who must have slipped past her, comes into their dorm, Rachel, looking angrier with him than Rory thought she was capable of being, hot on his heels.

"You're an asshole." She hisses at him, poking a perfectly manicured nail into his chest.

Scott sucks his teeth and brushes her hand away from him, turning to face Rory with a wide-eyed gaze and his eyebrows at his hairline. "What the hell happened?"

"She broke up with her boyfriend." Adam responds for her.

"Aw, man. That sucks."

"Yeah." Rory laughs wetly. Understatement of the year. "He, uh, thought that I was cheating on him with Rick. I got tired of being accused of stuff that I'm not doing, and never being given any grace, I guess."

Halfway through her explanation, Rory casts her eyes down. It's one thing to let him see her all puffy-eyed and red in the face, but it's another for him to see her cry.

"I have to—— I have a whole bunch of his stuff. I don't want it. I have to get rid of it."

Scott crouches slightly in front of her and she sees that he's frowning when his face comes into view. "We can do that for you, can't we Rach?"

Rachel, who has been standing over in the corner with her arms crossed over her chest ever since her long-time crush barged into their room, nods a little too eagerly. "Oh. Totally. I can start now, if you want."

With the slightest bob of Rory's head, Rachel pushes off the wall and declares that she's going to go ask maintenance for a box.

"You're not going to leave us now, are you, Myrtle?" Scott asks her quietly as Rachel departs.

That earns another mirthless snort out of her as she yet again averts her gaze to the balled-up tissue in her lap. "I couldn't even go home if I wanted to."

(Around her, Scott and Adam exchange a glance. The older boy confused and the younger just shrugging.)

"Good." Scott says. "'Cause it would suck to lose you over some jerk who can't handle how cool you are."

Rory smiles pathetically as he bumps her shoulder with a fist in an action that is so distinctly brotherly that it makes her want to call her cousin right away, if anything just to hear his voice.

Scott clears his throat and stands up, changing the subject. "Would it be okay to let Rick in? I talked him down from beating the kid up but he wants to talk to you and Rachel wouldn't let him in."

"Yeah."

She finds herself regretting giving permission, though, because as soon as she sees Rick, who has a slightly swollen bottom lip, she feels even worse.

"Hey."

Rory goes to say something but her lip wobbles and she looks back at her lap once again with a crestfallen sigh.

"What?" He asks, a crooked grin on his face. "Is my face that bad?"

"No, it's just——" Rory cuts herself off with this simultaneously annoyed and exhausted noise.

Rick looks at Scott and Adam, who sighs.

"Rory broke up with Averman."

"Oh."

"Yeah." Rory gnaws on the inside of her cheek. "Oh."

There's a beat of awkward silence where none of them seem to know what to say and Rory thinks that she might prefer it that way.

"Do you want to skip?"

"What?" Scott asks his roommate as both Adam and Rory's heads snap up to look at him.

"Do you want to skip class today?" Rick repeats himself. "She's in no position to do anything, I don't want to look people in the eye after being decked by some rugrat loser, and no one can be mad at us because Buckley's in my dad's pocket. Hell, Rachel can come, too, but you'll have to ask her because she'll rip my throat out for talking to her."

Scott rubs the back of his neck. "She's, uh, not happy with me at the moment either..."

Both of their gazes drift to Rory.

She really doesn't want to skip class. The thought of it makes her skin crawl.

But, at the same time, the thought of having to sit with those kids—— with her ex-boyfriend—— all day makes her want to die. Rick was right. She'd be unable to focus on anything other than the beating her heart just took, and, while that would have just about the same effect on her grades as missing a whole day, it would have a worse effect on her self-esteem.

"I could probably convince her, yeah."

Rick's eyes lit up and Rory almost felt compelled to actually smile.

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Less than twenty minutes later, with a box of all of Averman's things left in Cole's possession, the five of them find themselves crammed into Rick's car and driving off campus.

Adam, Rachel, and Scott are all in the backseat; Rachel in the middle and leaning into Scott, who was forgiven and has an arm wrapped securely around her shoulders, while Adam leans on his fist and looks out the window. Rory sits in the passenger seat, wearing a loaned hoodie from Adam and just enough makeup to make herself look less dead, and curls her knees to her chest, trying to not be annoyed by the way Rick chews gum.

But, once she's exhausted herself with thinking about everything but Averman and has chewed the skin around her thumbnail raw, she looks up from the road and turns to him, anyway.

"You're chewing gum." Rory's nose scrunches.

She doesn't know exactly why it bothers her so much.

Maybe it's because of the incessant noise, or the fact that she's just annoyed, or the cloying mint smell that permeates the air. (Or, maybe, it's the fact that, though she will never admit it, she was growing to like the way that nicotine mixed with his cologne.)

"You said you don't like it when I smoke, so I'm chewing gum." Rick says it so casually, with a shrug of his shoulders and another grin, that he doesn't notice the way that it winds her.

"Really?"

"Yeah. Your company is worth more than ten cigarettes."

He glances off the road to wink in her direction.

Rory smiles, too, and pushes a few wispy hairs from her face. She watches him drive for a moment, soaking in the way his face looks when he concentrates on something, before she rests her chin on her knees and goes back to watching the trees whip by.

(And Adam looks between them warily, a pit forming in his stomach. Rick Riley has just done what no other man in her life could and gave up on a vice for Rory—— and she's blushing over it.)

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a/n:

word count — 3635

ha! so! listen,,, she said new year, new me (this is the first thing I posted in 2024)

adam:

rip to lester averman but if i had a girlfriend whose family owns a billion-dollar company deigned to date me, i simply wouldn't be a dick to her. (those varsity boys are going to kill him.)

i've only seen one theory about the secrets rory is keeping but it was almost correct and I am vaguely concerned that you'll figure it out before the reveal.

comments and votes are super appreciated! they let me know that you guys like my writing and they motivate me to continue! thank you