Chaos at Prescott High

by Stunich, C. M.

  I touch the knife at my side, knowing that my time for jumping Neil is running short. It’s now or never, but looking at Aaron, I don’t feel quite as sure as I did. Giving up Bernie for life, I don’t want to do that, but I will. Because I’ll never be selfish when it comes to her again.

  “Besides, who’s to say killing him now won’t find its way back to her? Everyone knows she hates him. He’s sent her to juvie for attacking him before. We can’t take the risk, Hael.”

  I frown, and my hands squeeze into fists at my sides. But I already know that he’s right, just like I knew about Vic. I might act like an idiot sometimes, but I’m not as stupid as I look.

  “Every night he’s in that house, there’s a risk that he might touch her, that he might put his hands on her. Aaron, I couldn’t live with myself if that happened.”

  “It won’t,” he tells me, reaching out a hand, palm up. It takes me a minute to realize that he’s asking for the knife. With gritted teeth, I give it to him because I’m not sure what I might do with it if I don’t.

  Well, okay, I do know. I’d destroy Neil and I’d probably howl with laughter while I did it.

  I reach up to scratch at the back of my head.

  “Well, you gonna explain or what?” I snap, listening to the sound of a car door being shut. After a few seconds, the engine starts up and Neil disappears into the night. I didn’t do it. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Am I still that same selfish asshole I’ve always been? The thought infuriates me.

  “Look, he knows we have the video now. He knows we’ll come for him if he touches her. Right now, we have to work on building Havoc, so we can help her later.” Aaron plays with the knife for a minute. “Someday, she’s going to come to us, and she’s going to call Havoc. We have to give her a weapon she can actually use, something that’ll help her escape.”

  He stops talking. I get it. We all want that for Bernadette, a normal life. A life that is, specifically, not the one we live. Well, except for Vic. I love the guy, he’s my best friend, but he can be … intense.

  “I love her, too, you know,” I say, and Aaron nods. He’s lucky. He’s the only one of us who got to pretend, at least for a little while, that she could be his. “So we use the video to keep Bernie safe?” I scoff and rub my hand over my face. “I don’t like this. We shouldn’t be using a video like that as a weapon.”

  “We can, if it means keeping both Havoc and Bernie safe.”

  Aaron meets my eyes again. We’re similar in a lot of ways, me and him. We both want to be the good guy yet we both do evil things. We’re both inextricably lost somewhere in the middle.

  “Okay,” I say, exhaling and putting my hands on my hips. “Okay. But someday, he has to die. You know that, right?”

  This time, Aaron actually smiles. It’s a sad smile, but it’s a smile, nonetheless.

  “I know,” he replies, and together we walk down the block and climb into the welcoming arms of my Camaro. She isn’t done yet, but she’s getting there, and when she is, I’m going to paint her a violent cherry-red.

  And one day, I’m going to take Bernadette for a spin.

  Mark my words.

  November nineteenth, Now …

  Bernadette Blackbird

  “She didn’t take it well,” Hael says, sitting at a stool in front of the kitchen peninsula, his chin in his hand, a frown on his face. “She threw her coffee in my face and tried to knee me in the balls. I’m a little worried, to be honest with you.”

  He watches as Oscar goes down a checklist of things that need to be done before the wedding. It isn’t a huge affair—after all, besides the Havoc Boys, we’ve only invited six guests. With Victor’s choice of venue, it wasn’t difficult to put together a ceremony in the twenty-thousand-dollar budget.

  Actually, I’ve only spent about half of it—most of it on the dress.

  “Worried about Brittany?” Aaron asks, making a scoff of disbelief in his throat. “You really think she’d break the deal she made with us?”

  “I have no idea,” Hael says, narrowing his eyes slightly. He’s clearly thinking about Brittany’s father, the chief of the Springfield police and the leader of a newly developed anti-gang squad in the area. The fact that he ever got involved with her shows me that even if Havoc seems to have its shit together, we’re all still in high school.

  There’s a lot to learn.

  “Hey kiddo,” I say when Heather comes tromping down the stairs to search in the fridge for some juice. She gives me a look that very clearly says, I’m busy, so what the fuck do you want? I raise an eyebrow and she whines at me.

  “I’m in the middle of a game, Bernie,” she complains as Victor slips past her and into the kitchen, wrapping his arms around me from behind. My eyes narrow, but Heather gives a dramatic groan.

  “Why are you always kissing on each other?” she demands, slamming the fridge door and turning to glare at us.

  “Whoa,” Hael whistles with a laugh. Victor’s big body shakes behind me as he chuckles.

  “Because we’re in love,” he murmurs, resting his chin on my shoulder. I can see Aaron rolling his eyes at the comment.

  “Well, I don’t want you to be in love,” Heather declares, lifting her chin and crossing her arms over her Spiderman t-shirt. “I ship you and Aaron.”

  “You ship us?” Aaron echoes, and it’s like he can’t control his face anymore. His lips twist up into a shit-eating smirk. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” Heather says as Vic stands up straight and frowns at her. Kara and Ashley come down the stairs just a moment later, and my sister wastes no time in asking them their opinion. “You guys agree, right?” she says, cocking her hip out like she’s sixteen instead of eight-going-on-nine. Holy fuck, I’m going to have trouble with her as a teenager I bet. “You ship Aaron and Bernie?”

  Kara looks nervously at Vic as he stands behind me, looming over everything like he always does.

  “I don’t want to be rude …” she starts, proving that she has most definitely been raised by Aaron and not by me. Look at Heather: you can tell it’s in our blood to be bitchy. “But I think Aaron and Bernadette are meant to be together.” She glances down at Ashley who, shockingly enough, actually decides that today is the day she’s no longer afraid of me.

  I must truly be a part of the family now.

  “I ship Bernie and Callum,” she says, and he snorts from behind me, perched on the edge of the counter as he taps his heels against the lower cabinets.

  “So two votes for me, one for Callum, and zero for any of you assholes,” Aaron clarifies, pointing at Oscar, Hael, and Vic. “I’ll take it.”

  “From the mouths of babes,” I murmur, grabbing the black veil I laid out on the counter and tucking the comb-part of it in my hair. It hangs over my face like I’m attending a funeral. Gross. I take it off and chuck it across the peninsula, deciding that I’d rather have my face bare anyway. I want to actually see Vic when I marry him, not hide behind a mosquito net while I walk down the aisle.

  “Yeah, well, from the mouth of the boss, you’re marring me regardless of who they ‘ship’,” Vic growls, snatching an apple and flipping the girls backs off as they run up the stairs. They don’t see him do it, but it’s honestly funny as shit. “You ready for tomorrow?”

  I nod.

  Because the wedding is not the hard part, the courthouse bit is.

  After school, we’re meeting Pamela so she can sign the papers of our marriage license.

  I’d rather give myself an enema with battery acid.

  “Not really,” I reply, because out of all the people on my list, Pamela is the one who holds the most weight.

  Neil, arguably, is my most hated … but Pam? She was supposed to be my mom. There’s no bigger betrayal than that.

  “Too bad,” Vic says, grinning around a bite of apple. “Because it’s happening, whether that bitch mother of yours likes it or not.” He pauses to look down at the piece of fruit in his hand, like it’s Snow White’s poisoned appl
e or something. “I hope for her sake that she cooperates. She wouldn’t want to see the extent of my temper if she doesn’t.”

  I’m quite literally shaking as I stand on the courthouse steps in the sexy white dress that Havoc picked out for me inside of Billie Charter’s trailer. When I put it on after school and looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognize myself.

  To clarify: I didn’t recognize myself in a good way.

  I do not look seventeen. The dress clings to my curves and the back dips low, showing off a pale arch of spine and what little there is left of me that isn’t inked. The ends of my hair are dyed a fresh pink, and the blond waves are hanging loose around my shoulders.

  To be fair, I haven’t looked my age for a long time. Pain and loss and violence, those things worm their way into your eyes; they change a person. So if someone were to look at me, they could see in the emerald green of my irises that I’m an old soul.

  Today, it’s my makeup, and my body, and my tattoos that tell a different story.

  “The combat boots were a hideous choice, really,” Oscar says, checking the time on his iPad and frowning hard. Pamela is late and he doesn’t like it. Sorry to tell him, but she hasn’t shown up on time to an appointment in her damn life. We might be waiting awhile.

  “Shut your face, Oscar Montauk,” I grind out, shivering, my teeth chattering against the frigid frost of late fall. “Have you ever stood on cement in heels? It hurts. I wasn’t about to wander around the courthouse in them.”

  Oscar just purses his lips and pretends like he doesn’t care what I have to say. My argument to that would be … why did you bareback fuck me on my period? I mean, come on, man. He can’t fool me anymore. He literally confessed to being in love with me. Did he think I was just going to forget that happened?

  “I suppose this wouldn’t be a good time to offer you up the birth control pills that we stole?” he asks in just such a way that I know he’s needling me on purpose. “You’ll most definitely need them for the honeymoon though.”

  “As soon as this is over,” I say, gesturing at him with the bouquet of white roses in my hand, “I’m going to beat the snot out of you, do you understand that?”

  “So you don’t want the pills then?” Oscar asks, lifting his head up to look at me. Something he said the night we went after Donald pops into my head at random, and I feel my cheeks flush with heat. “I'm a master of knots.” Is he really, though? I’d be curious to find out.

  “I’ll take them,” I snarl and Vic laughs.

  “Or not,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. I ignore him, which is actually a pretty difficult thing to do, seeing as he’s wearing the tux he bought for the wedding. Since today is more casual though, he didn’t bother with the pink tie I picked out.

  Pink, of course, for Penelope.

  The only reason we’re dressed up at all is because getting the license is the important part. After this, all that has to happen is we sign and date and mail that shit in on Saturday. The rest of this operation is just for show.

  Plus, I knew it would piss Pamela off. She’ll recognize this dress as designer, recognize the value of the ring on my hand, recognize that I’ve moved past her and her shit.

  “There she is,” Hael says, pointing across the street at a curvy blond in a short, red dress.

  Hah.

  That’s Pamela for you, trying to outshine me, even on a day like this.

  She notices the Havoc Boys before she even finishes crossing the street. No surprise there. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to miss these assholes. Not only are they handsome, but they’re covered in tattoos, and they look at the whole world like they’re on the verge of taking control of it.

  “Bernadette,” Pamela says as she pauses near the courthouse steps. The wind tousles her hair around her pretty face. Her green eyes scan me from head to toe, evaluating, sizing me up, judging me. I can tell the moment she decides I’m prettier because she scowls. Everything is a competition to this woman. “Do you have the money?”

  Callum tosses the Burberry bag full of cash at my mother’s face, smiling as she scrambles like a rat to catch it and checks inside to verify its contents.

  “Don’t worry, Mother, my dowry is all there.” I clench my teeth together as she pretends to count the bills inside. There are far too many, and she’s far too dumb to count to a high enough number to actually verify that there’s ten grand worth of bills there.

  She looks up at me again, like she’s never seen me before, like she has no idea who I am.

  I don’t suppose that she ever has though, so it’s not surprising.

  “Let’s get this over with. I have a luncheon to attend.” Pamela waltzes up the steps like she’s important, sauntering past the Havoc Boys and failing to notice the way all five of them turn their heads, stalking her like prey.

  Name number seven on my list.

  I only know that I don’t want her dead. I can’t explain why, but I feel strongly about it. I should probably tell the guys before they get an idea in their heads that I can’t scrub lean.

  “You heard the woman,” Victor says, nodding with his chin in the direction of the front entrance. We head inside together, and thank fuck we find out that the marriage office is down the righthand hallway and not the left. To go down that one, toward the courtrooms, you have to pass through a metal detector.

  The boys consistently fail those at Prescott High five days a week, but they just pay off the security guards, so it doesn’t matter. Might be a bit harder to do that here.

  Once we get to the office, Victor and I use one of the ancient computers in the room to fill out our information. When we get to the final screen that asks how we’d like our names written out, he clicks the option that reads Bernadette Channing before I get a chance to stop him.

  “You goddamn prick,” I snap, and the woman behind the counter looks up at us with wide eyes. Her look very clearly says, How can you get married if you talk to each other like that? She doesn’t understand the sort of passion we have though.

  It’s … explosive, but in the best possible way.

  To pay Victor back, I click Victor Blackbird on the second screen and hit submit.

  “You cheeky cunt,” he snaps right back at me, and then we end up sitting in silence with Pamela until our number is called.

  She does what she has to do, flashing her ID and signing the papers with sharp, angry movements. When she’s finished, she doesn’t say goodbye. Shit, she doesn’t even ask about Heather. Instead, she just clutches her Burberry bag in tight fingers, her red nails digging into the handle the way they used to dig into my arm.

  Pamela leaves the way we came in, and she doesn’t look back, not once.

  “She isn’t invited to the actual wedding,” Vic tells me, putting his big hands on my shoulders and giving them a squeeze. “She knows that, right?”

  “You could only get her to come if you paid her,” I tell him, closing my eyes as he kneads the tightness from my muscles.

  There’s only one thing that’s worrying me.

  Pamela usually likes to make a scene. Even with all the money Victor paid her—which came right out of our wedding budget—she should’ve been more … well, more of a bitch.

  It makes me wonder if she isn’t up to something. Or at the very least, if she knows that her husband is.

  “Do you know what you eventually want to see?” Vic asks me mildly. I open my eyes, watching the other four boys smoke in the breezeway outside as people walk by and gawk at their brazenness. My boys in black. I smile.

  “You mean, as far as Pamela’s punishment?” I shake my head. “Not yet. All I know is that I don’t want her dead.”

  Victor grabs my face in his hand, turning me to look at him.

  “You’re too kind for this world, Bernie,” he says, leaning down to steal my soul out through my lips. I don’t believe a damn word of that, but I appreciate the effort. “Now, tell me how the hell I’m supposed to wait three days to marry your ass?�
�� He growls at me, and I shiver.

  Several women passing by the open door of the office turn to gawk, rubber-necking the fuck out of my future husband.

  I narrow my eyes on them

  “You know, the only advice Pamela ever gave me that was worth any salt was this: find your man and lock his ass down.” I turn to smirk at Victor. “I always thought it was bullshit, but hey, here we are.”

  “Ah, right, lock my ass down,” Vic purrs, kissing me again. “Mine, and four other guys’, right? Should be a romantic honeymoon.”

  He laughs as he moves past me and into the hallway, but I can tell the idea pisses him off royally.

  I’m sure the honeymoon week/Thanksgiving break will be fascinating, a study into the emerald green depths of human jealousies.

  My mouth twitches.

  I’m looking forward to it already.

  Friday, November twenty-second, is Hael’s eighteenth birthday, and yet another long drag at the coal mine known as Prescott High.

  “Things are going to get lit tonight,” he crows during our break between second and third period, leaning back on the front steps and basking in the sun like a snake. He’s grinning so big that the sunlight catches on his white teeth, reflecting back at me. Victor has paid Stacey Langford to throw a party for his best friend in the old Prescott High building, so it’s pretty much guaranteed to be good.

  Then tomorrow … marriage. To Vic. My heart lodges in my throat, but I banish the feeling of dread. That cold lump in my stomach isn’t about Victor; it’s about the Charter Crew and the Thing. Last time we had a party, Danny died.

  Then Ivy died.

  And now here we are, in a war that’s fought in shadows and surprise. I chew my lower lip.

  “Don’t stress, Blackbird,” Hael says as he sits up and the other boys start to trickle out of the front doors to take their seats around us. Cal sits close to me and offers up a fresh cigarette and a cold chocolate milk with a straw. My favorite. “We’re expecting trouble.” Hael leans in close to me, nuzzling my face with his. “Girl, that’s what makes it fun.”