by S Doyle
“Someone has to try. Would you really have wanted your first time announced to the entire school along with the prize money that went along with it?”
“I haven’t…I mean, it doesn’t matter. What do think I can do?”
“We have to find whoever put the list together in the first place. That will be the person holding the book. At the very least the betting stops.”
Beth looked over her shoulder to the crowd where we could still hear her sisters giggling.
“They think it’s cool to have a junior as a boyfriend. They think it will make them popular. They don’t understand.”
“No,” I snorted. “Why would they? Right now, sex for them is just this thing they’ve heard about. A titillating idea. Elicit, dangerous, exciting. Or maybe they’ve already kissed someone and felt that punch to the gut and it’s something they want to explore.”
Beth touched her neck. “Yes. That gut punch.”
“But sex is different than an idea. It’s more than a simple feeling. It’s fucking. It’s having a man slip his hard cock deep inside your body. And pushing you, pushing you so hard that it hurts and feels good at the same time.”
I could hear her slight panting.
“You know what I mean. Right, Beth?”
I didn’t know why I was taunting her. Maybe because of what she’d said about Javier at The Club. But I knew now, the way her breath shallowed, the way her fingertips danced around her neck, I knew she’d lied about him and the damn closet.
She looked up at me and nodded. “Of course.”
Liar.
“Of course,” I purred. And I had to resist hard the urge to trace the skin along her neck where she continued to touch herself.
“You’ve…you’ve done it then?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “This past summer. She was older. Twenty. I met her at fundraising event my family attended. The daughter of some actor who I won’t name drop. We hung out for a few weeks before she had to go back to college. She taught me how to fuck, how to make her come. It was quite an education.”
Beth swallowed. “Well, good for you.”
“I had to know how to do it, Beth. I had to learn. I couldn’t be…”
“No. Of course you couldn’t. Fitz Darcy. Excellent in all things.”
There was a sharpness in her voice.
“You can’t possibly be angry.”
She laughed. “You’re right. I can’t possibly be. I have to get back to the twins.”
“Will you help me? Will you help me find who put this list together and is taking the bets? If for no other reason than to spare us and anyone else on that damn list the humiliation.”
“I don’t know if I can save them from themselves,” Beth said solemnly, but then she nodded. “But I’ll try.”
It was only then I realized, we both realized, I’d had my hand around her arm this entire time. She had to pull on it because my grip was still tight. Almost like I was reluctant to let her go.
I watched her march toward her sisters, her back straight. She was of average height, slim build but she carried herself like a queen. I could always spot her in the crowd. Always. Even on a football field with a stadium filled with people, I could always find Bennet.
We would do this thing together then.
For the first time not as enemies.
6
Beth
Sitting in the bathtub filled with hot water and suds, ear buds in my ears, I wasn’t really listening to the music. I thought it would relax me, but that was impossible.
How could I relax when my brain was filled with things I couldn’t push out of it?
Fitz thinking we shouldn’t be enemies this year. Fitz wanting to work together to stop whoever was targeting our sisters for humiliation.
Fitz fucking.
“You can’t possibly be mad.”
Why had he said that? Had I sounded mad at the time? Because he was absolutely right. There was no reason to be mad. We weren’t friends. We certainly weren’t in a relationship. I told him as often as I had the chance that I loathed him. That I wished to beat him at any challenge in which I could compete.
I didn’t care about some twenty-year-old girl. I didn’t. Maybe I cared only that he got to do the thing before I did. I’d specifically wanted to wait until I was seventeen—what I’d considered the appropriate age. He’d turned seventeen in June. Don’t ask me how I knew his birthday, I just did. So it made sense he had the same thought. But now that he’d done it and I hadn’t, he had one up on me.
He knew how to make a woman come. He’d been taught. He would know what he was doing the next time he was with someone, while I would be a fumbling idiot virgin.
Furious, I splashed the water with my hand.
“Damn it!”
There was a knock on the door loud enough for me to hear over my not-so-calming music.
“What?” I called out as I took one of the buds out.
“Are you okay?” my mom asked. “The girls said you were upset about something that happened at the party.”
I’d said nothing about the list to Kit and Lyd. Mostly because I didn’t want to see their excited reaction when they learned they’d been specifically targeted among the entire female freshman class.
They would think it was funny and sign of their attractiveness and popularity instead of what it actually was.
A signal to everyone in school that my sisters, Star’s sisters, were senseless girls ripe for the attack. No one would have put Star’s name on a list. She was too sweet and good. No one would dare put my name on a list like that, either. I was too smart to be duped by something as silly as a seduction.
Mary, sadly, was too unobtrusive to warrant anyone’s attention in that way.
But Kit and Lyd…they were fools and, in turn, they made the entire family look like fools. At a time when our own father had chosen to abandon us.
I wanted to hit something again.
“Seriously, Beth? Are you all right?”
“Fine, Mom,” I called out. “Sorry, I was listening to music.”
“You can talk to me,” she called through the door. “If you were upset about something.”
No, I couldn’t. My mother could not handle one more ounce of stress. If she thought her daughters were under some kind of attack from sleazy upperclassmen, it would only send her deeper into a tizzy. A worry that somehow the family itself was being held up for ridicule.
“Not upset,” I said loudly. “You know the twins exaggerate.”
“Okay. I’ll leave you alone. Heard the Bulldogs won. They said Fitz was amazing.”
Of course he was. He was brilliant, athletic and he knew how to make a woman come. Beyond that, he was on a quest to save the honor and integrity of freshman girls everywhere.
Then why did I want to punch him in the face?
And why did I have this crazy idea that, at some point tonight, he’d been thinking about kissing me. Or had I been thinking about kissing him?
“Damn it,” I whispered so my mother wouldn’t hear.
This was a new complication in my life I wasn’t certain I could handle.
After all, there was a lot on my plate.
A – Deceive everyone I knew about my father’s abandonment and our current money troubles.
B – Keep up my grade point average while taking on an after-school job.
C – Find the person behind the Freshman Bait List. Stop him and anyone else from betting on my sisters’ lost virginity.
D – Add AP Spanish to my course list to make Fitz suffer.
Where, in all that, was I supposed to find time to kiss Fitz? Or not kiss Fitz?
Stop thinking about kissing Fitz!
Lunchroom
Monday
Beth
“Is there room for us?”
I was about to take a bite of my salad when Fitz’s voice cut through the noisy buzz of the lunchroom. I turned and saw him and his crew, Ed and Heath.
“What ar
e you doing here? You eat over there,” I said, pointing to the other side of the room.
Not to say there was assigned seating. But it went without saying we all had our place.
Lunch breaks were broken up by the classes.
Eleven-thirty for the freshmen. Noon for the sophomores. And twelve-thirty for the juniors. Technically, the seniors ate at one o’clock, but since they were allowed off campus for lunch few ever ate in the lunchroom.
As this was our third year in high school, we had long since established our circles and our seating habits. It was simple. The pecking order of who sat where was based on popularity. The room consisted of six long tables in rows. The popular crowd sat on the left half of the room. The not-so-popular crowd on the right.
Then the tables were broken down even further. Far right, mid right and center right. Far right being the least popular. Center right being as close to popular as one could be while still being on the unpopular side of the room.
Reen, Janie and I were center right. Had we made a push this year, we could have actually asserted our way onto the center left table. But none of us thought it worth the effort.
Fitz, Ed and Heath, naturally they were the far-left table. The most popular table in the room because it allowed them to see everyone with their backs up against the kitchen. And of course, everyone could see them.
So them standing at our table, making it appear as if they wanted to eat with us, was…unprecedented.
Fitz took a seat anyway. Ed crowded in next to Janie who actually made a squeaking noise and Heath sat on the other side of the table next to Reen who was now sandwiched in between Locke and Heath.
“What are you doing?” I asked Fitz.
“We agreed on Friday night that we were going to work together. Outside of a couple of classes, one study period and passing each other in the hallways, this is the only time we can all get together and talk.”
Of course I’d told Reen and Janie everything that had happened Friday night. Well, I only told them about the list. They were thoroughly outraged on my sisters’ behalf and agreed to keep their ears open for any gossip or the barest hint of someone placing a bet on something.
But what else was there to do?
“You sound like you have a plan,” I said. “Do you?”
“I do. First I need answers.” Fitz looked at Locke. “Who showed you the list?”
Locke, who had sat with us again for no other reason than Reen had practically dragged him along, blinked at Fitz’s question.
“Sorry?”
“You said someone showed you the list.”
“Noooo,” he said slowly as if speaking to someone of inferior intelligence. Something I imagined Fitz would not appreciate. “I said, I saw the list. Seeing it and being shown it are two different things.”
Fitz gritted his teeth. “Fine. Where did you see this list?”
“On a phone.”
“How could you see a list on someone’s phone unless they unlocked the phone to show you,” Ed asked smugly as if he’d caught Locke in a lie.
“I have my ways,” Locke said coyly.
“Don’t be an ass. Just tell us,” Heath said.
Locke seemed to consider the order, then it seemed he considered about five other things before he finally said, “I guessed the password.”
Fitz snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“Actually your cynicism is warranted,” Locke said apologetically. “Guess is an inaccurate word. I deduced the password.”
“You want us to believe you figured out someone’s password?” Ed said skeptically. “How? By watching someone type it in. Stalker much? You like looking over people’s shoulders?”
“Hmm, I can see your point. But no that’s actually not how I did it. Most people use face recognition anyway. No old iPhone models for the students of Haddonfield Hight. Still it comes in handy that a numeric password is still required. Would you like me to tell you yours, Ed?”
Ed’s fork froze midway to his mouth. Today was spaghetti day and everyone knew the football players got extra helpings so they could carb up before practice. We all looked to him and waited.
“Bullshit,” he said, putting down his fork. “No fucking way.”
“Of course you’ll need to change it once I announce it to the table. If I’m right, that is.”
“You’re bluffing,” Fitz insisted.
Locke smiled. “Three. Nine. Seven. Three.”
“You motherfucker,” Ed snarled nearly coming out of his seat. “How the fuck do you know that?”
Locke smiled. “I told you, I deduced it.”
“Sit down,” Janie told him. “It’s just some sort of parlor trick. Like guessing what card you’re holding in your hand. This is all pointless. Just tell us whose phone it was, and we’ll approach that person.”
“I can see you’re the practical one in the group,” Locke said, smiling at Janie. “However, not that simple. The person whose phone I temporarily confiscated was the person making a bet. Not the person taking the bet. The money was sent to a generic Venmo account.”
“I don’t like it,” Reen said thoughtfully.
“What’s to like?” I asked her. “It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard of in this school, and I’ve heard of a lot of disgusting things. Betting on sex. Corrupting minors. It can’t be legal either. Age of consent in New Jersey is sixteen.”
Fitz looked at me funny then.
“What?”
“That’s a weird thing to know. The legal age of consent in the state.”
“I might have looked it up,” I said, shifting in my seat. It was one of my reasons for waiting to have sex.
Reen brought her fingers together in temple under chin. “Yeah, like these people care about the law. As long as it’s not statutory rape, no one gives a fuck. People in this school have money, Beth. Real money. Someone holding a book like this, we’re not talking chump change. How much was the bet for?”
Locke smiled at her as if she were a puppy and he was patting her head for performing a new trick. “Excellent question. One thousand dollars.”
I gasped. “What? A thousand dollars.”
“Now you understand the stakes,” Locke told the table. He looked directly to Fitz. “You want to find the person behind this, save the honor of your sister and all those vulnerable young girls. That’s noble. But you might be getting in a little over your head. There are, to my count, four hundred and eighty-nine students in this school. Assuming the betting was only limited to students, ruling out those girls named on the list, and those who can’t afford to play, not accounting for sex or sentimentality, you’re looking at a betting pool of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Someone is not going to easily part with that much cash. Not willingly.”
I looked to Fitz who was looking back at me. “This isn’t a game.”
“No,” he said coldly.
“Still want to take the perpetrator down?” Locke asked.
“Perpetrator,” Heath muttered under his breath. “The way this guy fucking talks.”
Fitz held my gaze as he nodded. Then he stood abruptly as if to make his point.
“This is my fucking school. Which means I make the rules. When someone put my sister’s name on that list, they knew who they were fucking with. It’s personal. I can’t let this go.”
Fitz left then and Heath and Ed scrambled to follow.
“Swell,” Heath said, clapping Ed on the back as they walked away. “Now we’re on a crusade.”
“Hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Janie repeated. “Beth, what would someone do to win that kind of money? How far would they go?”
Rape. That was the ugly word no one wanted to say. We didn’t want to think it. We didn’t want to breathe life into it. But for that kind of money, for someone who needed it, there was only one way to guarantee the outcome of a girl’s lost virginity.
This time I stood.
“I need to go find my sisters.”
; “Beth, a word.”
I was walking down the hallway toward the freshman wing of the building. Not that I had any idea what I was going to say to Kit or Lyd when I found them. That the male population of the junior class might be out to rape them for large sums of money? Knowing Kit and Lyd they would want to know if the prize money was the same for each of them.
Hearing the relatively soft-spoken words in the loud hallway, I stopped, fixed a polite smile on my face and turned.
“Yes, Miss Havisham?”
She crooked her gnarled finger at me in a gesture to approach her. She was standing in the doorway of her classroom in her typical uniform. The woman wore nothing but white pantsuits. There were times I speculated that she must own more than a dozen in varying styles. Always white. To go with her white hair, I supposed.
She backed into her classroom and took a seat behind her desk. Once inside the room, I noticed Fitz sitting at one of the desks in the front row. He looked as he always looked when sitting behind a desk. Like he didn’t fit. His legs were too long, his thighs too thick. The way he carried himself, he was always more man than student.
But he was a student. Just like me.
I took a seat three desks away from him. As if the camaraderie we’d established at lunch was gone and we were back to being what we always were.
“I imagine you’re both wondering why I called you in here. I know technically you’re still on lunch. It was luck I happened to both find you wandering the halls,” she began. “As you know I head the debate team of which you two are members.”
“Miss Havisham, technically Fitz is only a part-time member as his football activities prevent him from participating in some of our fall events.”
“Miss Havisham is aware but thank you for the reminder that I’m only a part-time member of the team. It makes me feel so included.”
I pressed my lips together. Really, did he think I could suddenly hit a switch inside and turn what was years of enmity into warm and fuzzies? This is what we did. This was how we acted. Not like we were in the woods Friday night. Not puzzle-solving crime-fighters who worked together to reveal the bad guy.
