I sit down and somebody—maybe Vic—puts that stupid ass crown back on my head.
It’s mostly symbolic, mostly just for fun.
Oscar kneels down on the floor beside me so that he can watch. He can watch as the tattoo artist cleans the left side of my neck and transfers the design we’ve been working on for weeks right there, beneath my ear.
Five names.
Not just letters.
But names.
“Necks hurt,” Oscar tells me, his eyes half-lidded and protective. “Horrendously so.”
Our hands curl together, and I close my eyes as I think about all the hiccups and potholes and bumps in the road we’ve been through in the last half a decade. He still gets scared sometimes, still brings me to the tattoo or piercing parlor, so that he can feel that sharp slice of pain and remind himself that physical pain is never as bad as emotional. Never. And also, that it’s okay to hurt and bleed and maybe even cry, although he never does.
The boys sit with me while I get my tattoo, and then they each get their own (even Aaron who already has Bernadette etched into his flesh).
My name, their skin.
All of us marked, drawn together with blood and ink and bullshit.
Then, even though we’re hurting a bit, we go out. We party. We drink. We dance.
We go home together, and that’s the best twenty-third birthday present I ever could’ve asked for.
Ten years later …
“Stop it, Bernie,” Heather snaps at me, slapping at my hands. I’ve got a cigarette hanging from my lips as I desperately try to fix a stray strand of hair that’s clinging to her forehead. She looks beautiful—of course she does because I’m a Prescott bitch through and through and I know just how to do makeup—but she keeps fussing like she’s second-guessing herself. “My date will be here soon.”
“Do you know how relieved I am that you’re bisexual?” I ask, because when I found out Heather was going to her senior prom with a girl, I was elated. Nobody knows how tricky boys can be better than I do. I have five of them, after all.
“You’ve mentioned it, and it’s weird, so please stop, okay?” she asks, pushing me back and sliding her hands down the front of her dress. “Do you really think a boy would try anything with me anyway?” She gives me a look that isn’t hard to interpret.
Nah, there are three kids you don’t mess with at Fuller High.
Not unless you want them to destroy you.
Some weird, stupid part of me almost wanted Heather to go to Prescott—especially with Ms. Keating as the principal. Things are different there now. Shit, all of Prescott is different. All of Springfield is different.
There will always be an underground; there will always be blood to shed; Havoc will always run it.
Turns out though: there’s something called a happy middle ground for most things. For us, it was Fuller High.
Oak Valley is too elite; the wealthy are grotesque and obscene.
Prescott High is too sad; the building and the learning tools might be new, but the students are still the same old rachet southside folks they’ve always been.
Fuller High seems okay, though. And, as Heather stares back at me from matching green eyes, I find myself smiling. Sometimes, when I walk into a room and the sunlight is just right and the air is perfumed with that lemony body spray that Heather loves because Penelope loved it, too … I see my older sister in my younger one. My breath catches and I’m so fucking certain that Pen’s come back to life that tears spring to my eyes, and my chest tightens, and my heart thunders.
It’s never a disappointment though when I realize that Heather is Heather and Penelope is gone, because I’m proud of who my little sister is becoming. I’m proud of myself, too, for raising her and loving her and giving her the life that she deserves.
“Do you think it’s possible that I could just, like sneak out of here and not tell the boys I’m leaving?” Heather’s gaze darts toward the staircase behind me like she’s worried Callum might be crouching there and watching. He’s done worse things to her dates. This one time, when she tried to date some douchebag from Oak Valley, the guy climbed out of his car to find Cal already perched on the roof.
Suffice it to say he never made it up to the front door to knock. Heather was pissed at first but later she admitted to me that if a guy isn’t strong enough to face off against Havoc for her then they aren’t worthy of her love and affection.
Goddamn it, but I love this kid.
“Do you think it’s possible that pigs can fucking fly?” Aaron asks, appearing in the direction of the parlor. It’s beautiful now, papered with textured wallpaper that I picked out and applied myself because even with Ruby’s money now safely in Victor’s hands where it was always meant to be, I don’t like paying people to do things for me. And even if putting the wallpaper up was a pain in the ass, it was worth it because every time I look at it, my chest swells with pride and I remember that with a little gumption and a whole lot of determination, you can do anything you put your mind to.
You can raise three little girls even when you’re just barely past the little girl stage yourself. You can fall in love with five beautifully broken boys. You can wreak havoc and make chaos, chase mayhem and incite anarchy, and in the end, you can find your own sort of victory. Whether that means putting up wallpaper or running an underground that functions in the dark without being consumed by it.
There are still drugs in Springfield; there are still prostitutes; there are still murders.
But Havoc is always there, always watching. The hammer of justice is in our hands, and we’re not afraid to use it. There are no children being sold and no girls disappearing down the I-5 corridor. There are no cops whose hands are not tied to justice or Havoc or both.
Prescott High has been renovated, and it’s full of laptops and iPads and teachers with degrees who don’t beckon girls into selling their bodies on webcams. There’s a dance studio where Callum teaches little kids who can’t afford to pay for expensive classes in any of the Oak neighborhoods but whose hearts are so full and so ready to learn that they find themselves with scholarships to places far and wide.
“Bernadette?” Heather says, waving a hand in front of my face. Both she and Aaron are staring at me, waiting for me to come out of my reverie and remember that my little sister, the one I worked so hard to save, is graduating high school next week. Going to prom this week. She’s going to college in New York and I’m both sad and excited all at the same time. “You’re not writing poems in your head again, are you?” she asks, but I just give her a wry smile.
“Where’s Kara?” I ask instead, because I’m not ready to explain the full feeling in my heart just now. It’s bursting and overflowing and the only reason I’m not frightened by the intensity of it is because I’ve gotten used to feeling this way over the last ten years. Shit, the Havoc Boys—who now, really, can only truly be called Havoc Men—make me feel this way every goddamn day.
“Right here!” Kara says, coming down the stairs in a dress that’s black and sultry and much more like something I would’ve worn in high school than what Heather’s got on. She’s dressed in pink and sparkles, and I can’t help but wonder if, like her body spray, the dress is an ode to a sister that she doesn’t remember nearly as well as I do but misses all the same.
I smoke my cigarette as Kara bounces over and presses a kiss on my cheek, her floppy, curly chestnut hair piled into a bun but with tendrils that escape and spring against her cheeks and forehead in a way that reminds me of Aaron.
My eyes turn his direction as Kara offers him a kiss as well, clearly also attempting to make the great escape before the other boys find us. Only … it’s too late.
“I told them you two were trying to get out of here before they could grill your dates,” Ashley says in that smug fifteen-year-old way of hers, like she knows fucking everywhere. Heather and Kara both give her death glares, but Ashley doesn’t care. She’s so enamored with my boys that she slips up someti
mes and calls them her dads in conversations with other people. She’s a bit of a snitch, too, when it comes to tattling on Kara and Heather, but we’re working on that.
“Not a chance in fucking hell,” Vic says, cigarette dangling from his lips. Ever year, I’m certain that he can’t possibly get more beautiful, that I’ll never be able to find him more handsome than I did the year before. And yet, year after fucking year, he proves me so wrong I could cry when I look at him. My husband. My boss. My protector. My emotional clone.
A knock sounds at the door, but I’m not surprised. In order for their dates to get up to the front door at all, they had to pass through the gate, past security. I’ve known for the last several minutes that they were on their way.
“I’ll get it,” Hael says with a Cheshire cat grin, chuckling as Heather groans and Callum perches on the staircase, a cruel smile painting his fairy-tale mouth. Oscar waits nearby, a brand-new iPad in hand, watching the door open with eyes the color of the full moon and twice as mysterious. “Well, hello there,” Hael drawls, dragging both Kara’s date and Heather’s date into the room by their wrists. “You must be Brody and Bailey. Nice alliteration by the way, any relation?”
The poor teenagers look half-ready to shit themselves already, so I step forward and give Hael a friendly slap on the shoulder.
“You’re scaring the fuck out of them,” I say, gesturing with the cigarette and wishing I’d dressed up in something even remotely resembling like, what a mom might wear. Then again, that’s sort of fucked-up, right? To assume that having a kid requires a change of style. I imagine that when the boys and I do start breeding like rabbits the way they’ve all been dreaming about for the last ten years, I’m still going to want to wear sweats with pink bats on them or cigarette pants covered in jack-o-lanterns. Anyway, when you’re the queen of Havoc, you can’t dress in mom jeans and chunky sweaters with cowl necks, now can you? “Hi there, I’m Bernadette; this is Havoc. And you’ve got nothing to fear as long as you don’t mess with our girls.”
Heather groans again and Kara buries her face in her hands for a moment, but hey, it’s better than if the boys do the talking. Callum is casually playing with a knife while Oscar makes notes on his iPad in just such a way that making notes is just as menacing as playing with said knife.
Aaron and I take a few pictures and then let the kids get on their way. What we don’t tell them is that they’ve got Havoc Crew members on their asses all night, wearing skeleton masks and waiting in the shadows. But hey, anything to keep them safe. That’s been the point of everything I’ve done up until this point.
When I flop onto the black jacquard couch later, it’s with a sigh of such intense relief that I couldn’t even begin to explain it. It’s like … I’ve been on a very specific journey for an entire decade, and that decade is now coming to an end. Heather is graduating, and she’s moving to New York for school while Kara starts college life in the dorms at the local U.
It’s almost like … I’ve hit a finish line somehow.
Heather made it; she’s safe; she survived.
You’d be so fucking proud of me, Pen, I think as I spot her ghost standing in the corner, smiling at me and wearing the prettiest pink skirt and the brightest pink lipstick and beaming like the whole world is on fire and burning just for us. There is no end to the things that I can do, that I can accomplish.
“I’ve always been proud, Bernadette,” she tells me as I choke on tears and try to hide my reaction from the boys.
Of course, that’s never a thing, hiding from them. Because they always know. Not once in the last ten years have I not felt seen by them. I rub absently at one of the scars on my shoulder where Martin’s bullet tore through, and I smile sadly at Pen’s ghost until she fades away with a wave, leaving empty space in my heart that I have no choice but to fill with love.
“You okay, wife?” Victor asks me, offering up a scotch that I accept between grateful hands. The booze burns on its way down, tasting like fresh fruit, butterscotch, and oak. It’s far nicer than the crap we drank in high school. That is, except for the one exception of the fancy stuff we stole from Coraleigh’s beach house. Fuck, that feels like it happened a million years ago.
“I’m okay,” I promise, holding my glass in my left hand and grabbing my journal with the other. I’ve taken to keeping one, ever since Aaron got me that one for Christmas during senior year. This is where I write the first drafts of my poems. There’s just something so … visceral about seeing my hand move, the page indenting with the press of a pen. After, when I’m ready to edit my raw work, I type it out on my laptop, format it for digital eyes. I’m damn near ready to publish my first book of poetry. Since, you know, getting published as a poet through traditional means is damn near impossible, I’m going the self-publishing route. I’m a soon-to-be indie motherfucking author, baby. “I’m just processing.”
“It’s fucking hard, right?” Aaron asks, drawing my attention over to him as he sits next to me on the couch, reminding me of that first night we spent at Oak Valley Prep. This is like a mirror to that except instead of my being upset about Pamela and Penelope, I’m celebrating Heather and Kara. “Seeing them leave with dates and wicked intentions. Kara was practically drooling over that Brody guy. And isn’t prom when most teens lose their virginity?”
I give him a look that says bro, do you remember what we did in high school? But he isn’t paying attention to it, staring at the fire as Hael pulls kindling from the basket nearby and lights it up for us. Teenagers are fucking skanky hos is what I want to tell Aaron, but sometimes parents just need to pull the wool over their eyes so they can sleep better at night. Also, I gave Kara a giant box of condoms last week when I found her naked with Brody in the pool out back.
She’s just fucking lucky that I’m the one that caught her. The Havoc Boys are too goddamn overprotective for their own good.
“Virginity is a patriarchal social construct,” I remind them, but that doesn’t do much to assuage Aaron’s fears. He downs the rest of his drink as I chuckle, letting my pen drag across the page as I contemplate starting a new poem. Sometimes, I sit here for hours and hours and nothing comes to me. Other times, I have to leap out of the shower and grab the nearest tube of lipstick so I can scrawl messy words across the bathroom mirror. “Anyway, they’re safe with our crew. That’s all that matters. Let them make their own decisions, find their own tragedies, and dig up their own triumphs.”
I write that down, just in case.
“So,” Hael begins, perching on the arm of the couch opposite where Aaron and I are sitting. Victor takes his drink over to the fire so he can rest a hand on the mantle and stare down into the flames. Oscar, surprisingly, is also having a drink tonight. Most of the time, he stays sober while the rest of us get fucked-up and it works out great in case there’s a crisis that needs to be handled. Seeing as we’re still Havoc, there’s always a crisis, but we get through it each and every time. Together. As a family.
“So, what?” I query back, tapping my pen against the page and lifting my eyes to look at him. He meets my gaze with a warm honey-brown one, his smile more than enough to tighten the muscles between my thighs. I decide then and there that tonight is a group night meaning nobody is allowed to retreat to their own bedroom. I’ve got like, empty nester syndrome or some shit.
“Since Heather and Kara are leaving …” Hael trails off and shrugs his big shoulders. “Do you want to start making babies?”
I snort and give him a look that very clearly says fuck off and die, Hael Harbin. He howls with laughter at the sight of my expression while Cal very carefully pulls his hood down, revealing that beautiful blond hair of his.
“We could start having kids,” he suggests with a loose shrug of one shoulder. “Or we could travel first. I hear Nantucket is nice this time of year.”
“Nantucket,” Aaron snorts with a laugh of his own, shaking his head as his green-gold eyes blaze in wonder. How we managed to get here, to this beautiful happy endi
ng, is anybody’s guess. But we did it. We made it. And all I had to do was die to earn it. “Fuck Nantucket.”
“How about Paris?” Oscar asks, musing aloud as he finally sets his iPad aside, loosens his tie, and kicks off his shoes. His eyes are so sharp and so beautiful that when they fall on my face, I swear that I’m bleeding and I never want to stop. My head gets light and dizzy, and it feels like I’ll be forever falling into him.
“Paris?” Vic asks, turning around with his obsidian eyes dark and a wry smile on his lusty menace of a mouth. “You fucking think we’d fit in there? Frankly, I’m down for a staycation that involves fucking, fucking, and more fucking.” He moves over to stand beside me, and I drag my attention away from Oscar to look at him. Each and every time, it’s like a punch to the gut, but in the best possible way, like my breath is being siphoned from my lungs but I’d pay for the privilege of dying in such dark bliss. “And yeah, if it involved getting you pregnant, all the better.”
“Oh, leave her alone,” Cal breathes, pouring himself another drink as he points at my journal. “As much as I’d be down for a Havoc baby, Bernie has other dreams. Let her write her poems. She’s a brilliant fucking poet.”
“I mean, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I mumble, but then Aaron is taking the empty glass from my hand and curling his fingers around mine.
“I think we’d all go that far,” he says, and then he stands up and pulls me to my feet, even as my mind starts to twist words together the way an oil painter mixes colors on her canvas.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who dreamed in prose and pretty phrases.
Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys Book 5) Page 49
