Mayhem at Prescott High

by Stunich, C. M.

  “Aaron, you need to learn to relax a little,” Vic purrs, slicking a single finger along my wet folds before he spanks me again. “Bernie broke the rules; Bernie is being punished.”

  “I still don’t see why you get to do all ten spankings,” Hael grumbles, his voice colored with lust. I can just imagine him cupping his hard cock through his boxers as he watches.

  “Because I.” Victor slaps my ass. “Am.” Another. “The.” Spank. “Boss.” He pauses there to chuckle while I struggle to catch my breath, digging my fingers into the moist dirt of the lawn. Knowing they’re all looking at me, that they’re all turned on, and that I’m the only girl that can fulfill their needs … all of that helps temper some of the rage I’m feeling right now. “Six down, four to go. How ya feeling, Bernadette?”

  “Can we just get this over with?” I snarl. Each second that passes while I’m bent over his lap is agony. And if he thinks he’s getting anything beyond this, he’s got a surprise in store.

  “I want to savor this moment,” Vic replies easily, and I can just imagine him staring Aaron down from across the lawn.

  “Wait, did you stop filming?” Hael asks, clearly talking to Callum. I don’t hear his response because Vic chooses that moment to spank me a seventh time, smoothing his hand over the burning flesh of my ass. He’s putting a lot of force into it, so that each impact of his palm on my cheeks walks that fine line between pain and pleasure.

  “After this, Bernie …” Vic starts, but I just wiggle in response, and he can’t help himself. He finishes spanking me, and then laughs as I struggle violently to my feet, backing away from him and yanking my pajama pants up. If only the neighbors had seen … I mean, Aaron’s next-door neighbors already think we’re weird enough. Wouldn’t this just top their suburban sundae?

  I turn around to find all five men fixated on me. Even Oscar doesn’t do much to hide his expression. They each think they’re getting something, but I’m not sure they’re ready for a group session just yet. They all look at me like maybe I’ll choose them for the night.

  “After this, what, Victor?” I ask, turning to look at him and then backing toward the sliding door. Aaron lets me slip past, his arms still crossed over his chest, attention focused solely on me.

  Vic stands up, like he thinks he’s about to get laid, but I just turn and flee into the house and up the stairs, slamming and locking Aaron’s door behind me.

  Instead of giving any of those bastards an encore performance, I use my own hand to pleasure myself into sleep, my ass smarting and aching against Aaron’s flannel sheets.

  We all decide to take a day off and chill at Aaron’s place, but the girls still have to go to school, so I end up yawning in the passenger seat of the Bronco, wearing pj’s and one of Cal’s hoodies. Aaron drops Kara and Ashley off first before heading toward Heather’s school.

  “Are we going home soon?” she asks when we’re about halfway there.

  The word home triggers something in me, and I shudder, despite myself. That duplex, with Pamela and Neil, it was never home. Speaking of … I can only imagine what Pam’s doing without her partner-in-crime by her side. I’m honestly shocked she hasn’t so much as reached out to me.

  Kind of freaks me out a little.

  The money Vic gave her will only last so long, and then she’ll be after me for more, extorting me in exchange for my keeping Heather with me. I know that woman, and she is nothing if not a selfish, manipulative bitch.

  “Why would you want to go back there?” I ask, hoping like hell she doesn’t say something terrible like I miss daddy. I always monitored their interactions as best as I could, but the Thing was nothing if not manipulative. I’m not sure that Heather was ever aware that she was in danger around him.

  Aaron and I exchange a look when Heather doesn’t answer, the silence stretching thick and uncomfortable between the three of us.

  “We can get your things, and move them into my house,” Aaron suggests, tattooed hands squeezing the wheel so hard that his knuckles pale. “Would that help make it feel like home? We can even get you a bed and you can share a room with Kara and Ashley.”

  I look back to see Heather staring at her lap. She’s picking at the glittery skulls on her leggings, her brunette hair hanging forward and hiding her face. My heart clenches at the sight because I can tell she’s horribly, desperately sad about something.

  “Our house,” she starts, and then sighs. “With Mom and Dad, that was the last place I saw Penelope alive.” My vision flickers with white splotches, and my heart plummets into my stomach like a comet, leaving a crater that I’m not sure I know how to fill. “Plus, her room is there, and all of her things …”

  “Which we’ll pack when we go back for our own stuff,” I say, breathless and trying my very best not to cry. I stare out the windshield as Aaron holds out a hand for me to take. I squeeze his fingers in my own and thank the fucking universe that he came back to me, that he’s mine again, that I never truly lost him at all. “We’re not staying with Mom or Neil anymore. Are you okay with that?”

  Heather doesn’t respond for a minute, and when I glance back to look at her, I see teardrops falling onto her leggings. I wish I could let her read Pen’s journal. When I open it, and I see the loops and twists of her pretty handwriting, I can hear her voice in my head. But how can I let Heather read it when it’s so awful? How can I let her crack those pages and find out that when Penelope was fourteen, she dressed up in a cute outfit and went out with her friends. She had a single beer. Not unusual for a student at Prescott High, to start drinking early.

  How do I let Heather read about what happened when she came home, how the Thing amped up his assaults from molestation to rape. How Penelope tried to seek help. How they blamed her skirt and that beer on Neil’s twisted, fucked-up depravities.

  “Penelope is always with us, Heather,” I say instead, my hands shaking. Like I said before, I’m pretty sure I have PTSD or something. But it’s not like I can go to a shrink and tell them all my problems. Hey, yeah, so, I’ve always had panic attacks when talking about my dead sister, but they’ve increased in intensity after I buried her rapist alive in a bloodred satin-lined coffin. “If you think about her, and you remember her, and you love her even though she’s gone, it doesn’t matter where we live or if we even have any of her possessions. She stays alive through our memories.”

  Heather doesn’t say anything as we pull into the circle drop-off lane in front of her school. She shoves the back door open and slams it behind her. When she takes off running, her backpack bobs against her skinny body, and I just lose my shit.

  I drop my face to my hands as hot, salty tears stream down my cheeks.

  “Oh, Bernie,” Aaron murmurs, reaching out and brushing hair back from my face. I can hear in his words how much he hates to see me hurt. So even though parents are honking behind us, and we really should get moving, he unbuckles his seat belt so he can lean over and give me a hug that’s so tight it almost hurts.

  That’s what I love most about him: he always has the emotional capacity to give when I’m feeling empty inside.

  “Hey,” he says after a few minutes, when most of the other cars have zoomed around us cussing and screaming and flipping us off. No joke, parents of school-age kids are fucking cray. “I have something I want to give you.”

  I look over at him, and I see on his face that this is something serious. It’s not like when Hael tells me he wants to ‘give me something’ and then flashes his dick. Which, I might add, he’s done twice in the last week.

  “What?” I ask, but Aaron just shakes his head, running his fingers through his chestnut hair as he sits back in his seat and puts the Bronco in drive. It starts to rain on our way home, fat droplets that turn into hail about a half a block from the house.

  The Harley and the Camaro are still parked out front which tells me everyone is still here.

  I like that, the rain and the company and feeling cozy in Aaron’s house while Heather is saf
e at school.

  I wipe my tears away with the sleeves of Cal’s sweatshirt, but as soon as Aaron and I walk through the front door, Oscar’s eyes snap to mine and I can tell he knows I’ve been crying. Dick-face, I think at him, because I just don’t have the energy to argue.

  “You okay, Blackbird?” Hael asks as I pass by the kitchen and find him cooking eggs in nothing but his boxer shorts from last night. I nod, but I don’t bother to explain, intent on following Aaron up the stairs and into his bedroom.

  He closes the door behind us as my breath quickens.

  This is his room in this house, but it’s almost mine. Since we’ve officially gotten back together, if I sleep in here, he usually does, too. Before that, he either slept in the room with the bunk beds or on the floor in the girls’ room. Even when he was ignoring me and acting like I was an imposition in his life, he was being accommodating.

  “You didn’t bring me all the way up here just to ask me to suck your dick, did you?” I joke, but Aaron just gives me a tight-lipped smile.

  “Nope,” he says, opening his closet door and digging through the random shit that’s packed inside of it. There’s some old sports equipment, dirty clothes, action figures that he probably hasn’t touched since he was ten years old. I smile and cross my arms over my chest, leaning my shoulder against the wall next to the door.

  Aaron clears the crap out of his way, uncovering a small shelving unit in the corner. It’s one of those plastic ones you can get at any department store, with little pull-out drawers stuffed with odds and ends. He opens the bottom one and extracts a small cardboard box.

  “What is that?” I ask as he rises to his feet and turns to face me, holding the box close to his chest. Aaron closes his eyes for a moment, like he’s trying to prepare himself for what he’s about to do. My pulse starts to race, and I push up from the wall. “Aaron Atlas …” I warn as he finally opens his beautiful eyes up to look at me.

  “We’ve been keeping these for years,” he says, still clutching the box. “I probably should’ve given them to you sooner, but I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea. With all my heart, I truly wanted you to leave and make a life somewhere else, a life without blood and guns and dead bodies.” He hands the box over to me and our tattooed fingers tangle together into a very pretty picture. “But now that you’re here, I may as well give you the world—even if it’s not the exact one I had in mind.”

  “What is this, Aaron?” I ask, feeling a drop of sweat slide down my spine. I’m afraid to open the box and see what’s inside.

  “Just open it,” he commands me, and because I’m damn-near positive that whatever is in this box is going to shake me, I sit down on the floor. Aaron joins me, and I’m reminded of that one time we played spin the bottle with just the two us, so we’d have an excuse to kiss each other.

  The box has a few cobwebs clinging to it that I swipe away with a shaking hand, carefully lifting the flaps so I can look inside.

  What I see blows me the fuck away.

  My breath catches, and I get so dizzy that I have to close my eyes to keep from falling over. Even sitting down, I feel unsteady.

  “Bernadette,” Aaron whispers, and I open my eyes again.

  Inside the box, I see a stack of old photos and a USB drive. These are all the pictures of Penelope that I thought I’d lost when the boys loaded my shit up in the backyard and set it on fire. At the time, my sister was still alive, so while I was heartbroken, I wasn’t suicidal about the whole thing. But then … Pen killed herself.

  Or … was killed. I’m not sure I can ever get the answer to that particular mystery. The Thing wouldn’t have told me anyway. Even under torture, I’m not sure he would’ve shown all his cards. That’s the thing about those psychopathic narcissist types; they can literally rewrite reality in their heads and start believing their own lies.

  Actually, there’s a South Park episode called “Fishsticks” that perfectly encapsulates that point.

  I dump the contents onto the floor, looking for one photo in particular. My eyes are swimming with tears again, but I know that Aaron isn’t judging me. There. I find what I’m looking for: a strip of pictures from a stupid photobooth at the casino arcade. Mom and Dad used to go there to mingle with their fancy high-roller friends. I have very few memories of life before my father died, like my subconscious blocked it out to protect me.

  After all, how could I keep going under the current conditions if I had memories of what life was supposed to be like? I needed to get used to the crap I’d been handed and deal. That was the only way.

  “Jesus,” I murmur, looking down at Pen’s smiling face. She was only seven in this picture; I was six. We were so goddamn cute, so innocent, unspoiled and perfect. My thumb rubs across the picture, wishing I had more than just this. Wishing I had my sister back. “Killing Neil didn’t bring her back, Aaron,” I say, even though that’s a stupid statement to make. Obviously killing Neil Pence wasn’t going to resurrect my sister from the dead. “For so long, all I’ve wanted to do is hurt him, make him pay.” I look up from the photo to find Aaron watching me carefully, like he isn’t sure if he should just listen or if he should scoop me into his arms and take over, stroke my hair back, murmur sweet things in my ear. “Now that he’s gone, that it’s done … I feel empty.”

  Aaron gets onto his hands and knees and crawls over to me, my first love wrapped in ink and violence. But when he presses his forehead to mine, all I can feel is his compassion, his need to protect. On the day of his father’s funeral, Aaron told me that he wished he could take care of all of us, that he wished he were strong enough.

  He’s spent years granting his own wish. He can and does take care of this family; he is strong, on the inside and the outside.

  “Fill all of that emptiness with my love,” he whispers, eyes still closed. I want to close mine, too, because I’m crying so hard, but I love the way he looks on his hands and knees in front of me. Such a beautiful boy, and an even more handsome man. “We’re here to warm up that void, Bernadette. Get used to it.”

  I smile, dropping the photo to my lap. Our faces rub together and then our mouths meet. Aaron kisses me properly, stealing my soul away through my mouth, making it his. In return, he gives me his own soul, and I accept it with greedy fingers and a desperate heart.

  “You and me, we’re fucking fate,” he says, his mouth moving against mine as he speaks the words. My arms wrap around his neck as our tongues tangle. He takes great care to push the photos safely to the side and then climbs on top of me, encouraging me to lay back on his rug so he can ravage me with his lips. “You’re all there is for me, Bernadette. I live and breathe by your command.”

  Aaron shoves my pants down my hips, breaking our kiss to drop his face between my thighs. He puts his mouth on me, lips hot and tongue greedy, tasting me and groaning with pleasure at the same time.

  He takes his time with it, moving his lips to mine, and his cock to my opening only after he’s certain that I’ve been satisfied several times over. We don’t leave that room until it’s time to get the girls, and when we do, I make sure to take Penelope’s picture with me, so I can give it to Heather.

  “Here,” I tell her when she climbs in the car, and the way her face lights up tells me that’s all she needed, a reminder that Pen was alive once, that was happy, that she was real.

  I decide that later, when everyone else in the house is asleep, that I’m going to bury the journal in the backyard, and all of its dark, awful secrets with it.

  The only memories I want to carry with me from now on are happy ones.

  It’s obvious that Mitch is royally pissed off about what happened on Thursday night. That is, the fact that we didn’t spring his trap whatsoever. It’s hard for me to keep a straight face when I see Kali on Monday. I’ve only ever seen people get their mouths sewn shut in movies, but holy fuck, she looks like a monster.

  The lower half of her face is puffy and misshapen, each hole where Stacy’s girls plunged the
needle red and scabbed over. At this point, I bet she knows that Neil is dead. How could she not make the assumption? After all, the last thing she saw was him dragging me out of Prescott High in cuffs.

  We work on poetry in Mr. Darkwood’s class, as per usual, but all I can think to write about are the boys.

  I’m obsessed with them. I suppose they’re also obsessed with me, aren’t they? Based on everything they’ve told me, I wasn’t imagining it when I watched them from across the schoolyard and imagined they were mine. They were and they always have been.

  Leather, lust, and lips.

  My vision narrows to a single point; my breath quickens.

  So many hands, so many mouths, cocks and friction and heat.

  An endless eternity of darkness speckled with starlight.

  Limitless possibilities edged in violence and romance.

  Me, and you, and us.

  I pause, roll my eyes at my own shitty poetry, and then draw a giant dick over the top of the words before I turn it in. Mr. Darkwood doesn’t bat an eye; he’s well-used to getting hand-drawn penises in his inbox. I drew ball hairs and veins on mine, so it’s nice and detailed.

  “I like your lipstick,” I tell Kali, drawing my finger across my lips when I see her and Billie in the hall together. They glare at me, and I decide that, based on their facial expressions, they’re not properly cowed just yet.

  Apparently, a drive-by and a dead friend weren’t enough to shake Billie Charter.

  Apparently, sewn-together lips a dead possible baby daddy weren’t enough for Kali Rose-Kennedy.

  We’ll have to correct that.

  By Thursday, things seem to have settled a bit which freaks me out. Last time Mitch and his crew went quiet, they planned the Halloween attack.