Starcrossed

door.
    Helen ripped her arm out of Lucas’s grasp again. Undeterred, he just grabbed her by the hand and held it hard. Helen had two choices. She could put up a fight in front of the entire store, or she could go quietly holding the hand of the most despicable boy in the free world. She was so frustrated she could feel a repressed scream squeezing her lungs shut, but she had no choice.
    Lucas frog-marched her past a chestnut-haired beauty that Helen guessed was the other cousin, Ariadne. She tried to smile at Helen compassionately even though she was clearly just as inflamed by the Furies as everyone else was. For a second, Helen considered smiling back, but she didn’t possess Ariadne’s self-control. She was too angry to manage it. Fleetingly, she thought that Ariadne had to be the nicest person in the world if she could attempt to be kind in that moment.
    “Don’t even look at my sister,” Lucas growled through gritted teeth, jerking brutally on Helen’s hand as they walked past tiny Cassandra. Cassandra opened her mouth to say something to her brother and quickly shut it, turning away.
    “I have no food in the house. What am I supposed to do for dinner?” Helen growled through her closed-off throat.
    “Do I look like I care?” he replied, dragging her out of the store.
    “You can’t treat me like this,” she said. He was leading her across the lot. “We hate each other. Fine. Why don’t we just stay away from each other then?”
    “And how has that worked out so far?” Lucas asked, sounding frustrated rather than sarcastic. “Do you always come to this same store at this same time every Saturday, or did you come today on a whim?”
    “No, never. It’s the busiest day of the week. But I needed groceries,” Helen sputtered. He laughed incredulously and squeezed her arm even harder.
    Helen suddenly realized how many random events and raw impulses had driven her decisions these last few days. When she thought about it, it was as if she had stopped choosing for herself days ago.
    “The Furies won’t allow us to avoid each other,” he said in a dead voice.
    “Then we can make a schedule or something . . .” Helen began, but she knew it was a lame suggestion and trailed off before he had a chance to shoot it down. An ancient, supernatural force was compelling her to kill Lucas. It probably wasn’t going to be deterred by something as prosaic as a time-share.
    “My family hasn’t decided what we want to do about this, about you—yet. But we’ll be in touch,” Lucas said. They got to her car. He shoved her against the driver’s door, as if he couldn’t stop himself from trying to hurt her one last time. “Now go home and stay there,” he ordered again, and stood over her while she fumbled with the keys.
    For a moment as she backed out of her parking space she considered gunning the engine and hitting him with the car, but she didn’t want to mess up Kate’s paint job. Angry tears started pouring down her face as soon as she was out of the parking lot, and they didn’t stop until she was at home, splashing cold water on her face in the kitchen sink.
    She felt humiliated in a dozen different ways. Some of that humiliation she had brought on herself by attacking Lucas at school, but he seemed determined to belittle her. She wasn’t even allowed to go grocery shopping now. How was she going to explain that to her father?
    The thought of Jerry derailed any nascent plan of escape. She was hopelessly outnumbered, and unless she was willing to leave her father behind to fend for himself she had to wait until the Delos boys were done deciding how to handle her. She leaned against the kitchen sink and stared at the block of knives on the counter. If she had Lucas cornered the way he did her, she would have already picked out which knife to use. What she didn’t know was why . Why did they hate each other so much? What purpose could all that anger possibly serve?
    She suddenly thought about Hector, about the way he had smiled at her, and a carpet of goose bumps unrolled down her arms. If she was ever alone with him, she knew he would kill her. Not just bully her like Lucas did, but actually, joyfully, kill her.
    She was still leaning up against the sink half an hour later when her dad finally made it home. He froze midstep and looked around the kitchen, giving the entire room a fast once-over.
    “Did I do something wrong again?” he asked, his eyes wide.
    “Why do you keep asking me