A Matter of Trust by Lis Wiehl

Author:Lis Wiehl
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2012-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

Charlie had offered to scrub the rug clean, but Shiloh’s mom had insisted it was fine, fine, fine. When it was clearly not, not, not.

Twenty minutes after their very awkward exit, they were sitting in Jeremy Donaldson’s living room with a tray of Ritz crackers topped with cheddar cheese. Jeremy’s mother had offered it to them before scurrying from the room.

Jeremy had close-cropped, dirty-blond hair that emphasized his high forehead and long face. He looked unfinished, like modeling clay that needed some sharp edges cut into it.

“So we understand you and Darin used to be close?” Mia slipped a Ritz cracker into her mouth.

He looked down at his oversized feet. “Yeah, we were friends in grade school, but in middle school we kind of grew apart. I mean, you can’t really base a friendship on your last names starting with the same letter of the alphabet.”

“Were you aware of Darin being harassed at school?” Mia asked.

After a moment he nodded. “I tried to tell him if he just changed a few things it would get better. Like you don’t show up on the first day of high school wearing a rainbow-striped scarf. I mean, didn’t he want to have a life?” His knees began to bounce. “To do that, you’ve got to fit in. You don’t want to be noticed, at least not for something like that. But Darin wouldn’t listen.”

Everything was rawer when you were a kid. Your terrors, your joys, your humiliations. You hadn’t learned how to put a good face on things. You hadn’t learned the importance of plodding forward, of ignoring even the deepest wounds. You hadn’t learned that no one was paying as much attention as you thought. Not even you.

“What kinds of things did they do to him?” Charlie asked.

“Once they locked him in the supply closet with a girl and said he couldn’t come out until he’d gotten to second base. That was last year. This year from day one they’ve been going after him in PE, you know, teasing and pushing him in the showers. Pinching his chest and twisting. The PE teacher just stays in his office, so he doesn’t see what happens. But then he heard Darin wasn’t taking showers, and Darin got in trouble.”

Jeremy took a shaky breath. “The day before he died, I saw Darin at the end of a hallway after school. He was down on his knees and crying, and blood was coming out of his nose and dripping onto the floor. Two guys were standing in front of him. They had their backs to me.”

“Who were they?” Charlie asked.

His eyes swung from Mia’s face to Charlie’s.

“Jeremy, we need you to help us,” Mia said. “Do you know the kids who did these things to Darin?”

He bit his lip.

She added, “We also heard that someone might have beaten up Darin after school on the track last year. Do you know who that was?”

Jeremy swallowed. His knees were still going.

After a long moment Mia said, “We heard it might be some boys named Brandon and Reece.

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