by Katie May
Milk’s next words have me freezing in place, stealing the remaining warmth from my body. “He doesn’t teach in the high school, but the middle school. Science. Maybe you guys remember him? Mr. Gurrel. But again,” he levels us all with a penetrating glare, “you didn’t hear this from me.”
Mr. Gurrel.
Mr. Gurrel.
Mr. Gurrel.
His name plays on repeat in my brain as I stare blankly at my desk.
My middle school pervert teacher just had his dick cut off.
It could be just a random coincidence…
But when has life ever been that simple?
Chapter 44
When I arrive at the cafeteria, none of the Devils are there. I scan their usual tables and then the one I sit at with Emmett, Karsyn, and Mariabella.
But no Devils.
I don’t even know what I plan to do when I find them. Confront them about Mr. Gurrel? I know they’re behind this. Cassian no doubt told the others what I told him. Ask them if things have changed between us? Punch Lucas in the face? The last one sounds the most appealing, to be completely honest. While my anger towards Elias and Karsyn has ebbed somewhat after our nights together, I still can’t figure out how I feel about the two remaining creatures of hell.
I bite my lip, feeling uncharacteristically anxious as I approach the empty table, but a soft hand on my arm stops me.
“Pee!” Mariabella begins to drag me towards the table she sometimes sits at with the other cheerleaders. “You’re sitting with us today.”
“Don’t call me that,” I whine, scrunching my nose up and sticking out my tongue. “It’s worse than baby.”
“Baby?” She cocks a blonde brow as she slides into a seat next to Brittany, a senior cheerleader. I’ve always liked the quiet redhead with the pretty, heart-shaped freckled face and glimmering green eyes. “Are you getting kinky on me?”
“It’s a long story that involves one of those people who shall not be named,” I say with a pointed look at the other girls. I know all of them, but I haven’t ever engaged them in conversation. I think the one to my right is Laura? Maybe Laurel? And despite our budding friendships, I’m not quite ready to reveal all of my deepest, darkest secrets to them.
Especially the ones involving the Devils.
“So which one do you prefer? Pee or baby?” Mariabella teases, and I can’t help but note the jealous glare Brittany throws my way. Interesting.
“Neither, you weirdo.”
Mari simply sticks out her tongue at me.
“Practice is going to be brutal today,” a cheerleader named Cat gripes as she shoves a grape into her mouth. She brushes a dirty blonde lock behind her ear as her other hand plucks at a thread on her oversized hoodie. I swear that girl has an entire collection of those things, since she wears a new one every day. “Coach is making us start practice for competitive instead of just sideline.”
“I heard that we’re going to spend two hours just on tumbling,” Gabriella adds.
“It shouldn’t be too bad,” Brittany muses. She reaches across the table to steal a fry from Cat’s plate, her arm purposely brushing against Mariabella’s breasts. I am so going to ask Mari for all of the juicy details tonight. Because subtle boob touches?
Girl, what are you hiding?
“You would say that,” Gabriella huffs. “You’re the best tumbler on the team. Well, besides Peony.”
It feels good to talk and laugh with other girls. I love Mariabella, don’t get me wrong, but this…hanging out with a group of girls…feels nice. I’ve never experienced the comradery of female friendship before. The gossip. The inside jokes. For the first time in forever, I feel like I belong somewhere.
But a pit opens up in my stomach and swallows me whole at the reminder that I used a spell to get where I am. I wouldn’t be on the team without the flexibility potion.
“What the fuck?” Gabriella breathes, snapping me out of my pensive thoughts. Across the table, Mariabella’s eyes widen into saucers as her mouth drops open. I follow the direction of her gaze to see four familiar figures stalk into the cafeteria.
They move with an imperiousness and grace that make everyone stop what they’re doing and stare. The sheer confidence they exude takes my breath away. They seem to innately command the respect and attention of everyone in the immediate vicinity.
“What do they have in their hands?” one of the girls whispers, but I don’t look away from the Devils to see who spoke.
One by one, the four men move to stand on the table in the center of the cafeteria, scowls marring their handsome faces. In their hands, they hold bowls of a foul-smelling, clumpy-looking liquid. Is that…? I lean forward to get a better look, my eyebrows practically disappearing into my hairline.
Is that chili?
I remember back in middle school, when they cornered me in the cafeteria and dumped cold chili over my head. They began to laugh obnoxiously, while angry and humiliated tears pricked my eyes. I remember thinking about how much I hated them, how I wished they would pay for their sins.
If the Grim Reaper had a physical form, she would look like Peony Simone.
Smoke wafts from each of their bowls now, indicating that it’s still hot, as their cold, expressionless eyes survey the crowd.
Before locking on me.
I wilt underneath their combined stares, even as the rest of the cheerleaders begin to whisper amongst themselves, wondering what the fuck is happening. Only Mariabella remains quiet, reaching across the table to take my hand in hers.
And then in complete unison, almost like they rehearsed this beforehand, the Devils dump the bowls over their own heads.
Silence descends as every student gapes at them in stunned disbelief.
And then the laughter starts. It’s not instantaneous, more like a rippling wave. One person breaks into loud laughter near the back of the room, followed immediately by another. And then two more. And then ten more. It isn’t long until the entire room breaks out into giggles and points at the disheveled kings.
“What the fuck?” Gabriella screeches, tears of laughter running down her cheeks as she stares at the Devils. The reddish-brown clumps stick to their heads and drip down their faces, staining their clothes.
Mariabella glances at me with an eyebrow raised, and I nod once, easily able to read the question in her eyes. Her face darkens when she realizes that the Devils once did the same thing to me, five years ago, and I wonder if she remembers that moment. If she remembers me standing in front of all of my classmates, shaking and terrified. How can she not? I doubt there’ve been a lot of instances in her life where she witnessed a girl being shamed in front of the entire school at the hands of chili.
Behaving as if nothing unusual has happened, the four Devils step down from the table and move to their usual seats, seemingly oblivious to the chili covering their bodies and faces. Lucas sits beside his student council friends, while Cassian joins members of the marching band. Elias simply sits in an empty table near the corner of the room, his eyes never leaving mine as he kicks up his boots and places them on the table.
And Karsyn…
Instead of joining his football friends, he moves to the empty table he’s been sitting at with me, Mariabella, and Emmett.
“Fucking hell…” I murmur, pushing back my seat. To Mariabella, I whisper, “I’ll be right back,” and she nods in understanding.
I move through the throng of giggling students, all of whom point at the Devils as if they’re caged animals at a zoo. I stop when I’m in front of Karsyn, my hands on my hips.
“We need to talk,” I say sternly as my eyes latch on to the glop of blood-red meat in his blond hair and dripping down the front of his white shirt.
Like before, the other three get up as well and follow when we move into the empty hallway. This close, I can smell the chili wafting from their bodies. Since the incident five years ago, I’ve had an aversion towards it. I refuse to even be in the same room whenever we have chili dogs. O
f course, that didn’t stop my mom from having them as often as she could. I’m pretty sure they’re her favorite food by now.
“What the hell was that?” I ask when I’m positive we’re alone, whirling on them.
“A grand gesture,” Cassian says with a smirk. “What did you think, baby?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to remember how to breathe properly.
Don’t get arrested for murder, Peony. Don’t get arrested for murder.
“I don’t understand. Why the fuck would you do that?” I snap, feeling as if I’m standing on a tightrope located hundreds of feet above the earth and someone has placed a match near the end of the rope. I’m forced to watch it smoke and burn, helpless to save myself.
“Because we once did it to you,” Lucas responds. Those icy orbs of his caress my face as he takes a step closer. “You wanted your revenge, didn’t you?”
“Revenge doesn’t fucking work when you do it to yourself!” I huff…though, I’m not sure if my words even make sense.
“So, would you prefer to pour chili on us yourself?” Karsyn queries, genuinely confused.
“What? No!” I shake my head from side to side, struggling to articulate my thoughts. “Look, I know what you’re trying to do—”
“We’re trying to apologize for the shitty things we did once upon a time.” Cassian shrugs his broad shoulders. “You said you wanted us to pay, so we’re helping. We made a list of everything we ever did to you. By the end of this week, all of that will be done to us. It’s called karma, baby. But in this case, we’re bringing karma down on ourselves.”
Are they completely insane?
I glance from face to face, searching for a voice of reason, but the other three all nod seriously. Even Elias, though when my eyes meet his, he quickly looks away.
I can’t help but note how tired he seems. How disheveled. His brown and purple hair doesn’t look brushed, hanging in loose waves around his neck. Dark shadows mar the skin beneath both of his eyes. I hate the cloying darkness I can see in his face, emanating from his very pores.
And…
“Oh my god. You idiots.” I reach towards Elias, ignoring the way he winces, and brush at a particularly large dollop of chili that is resting on his neck. Beneath the meat, his skin is red. “Why did you guys use hot chili? You fucking burned yourselves!”
Lucas gives me a droll look, almost as if I’m an imbecile. I would take offense to that if it wasn’t Lucas’s natural expression.
“I told you. We did it to you five or so years ago. Now, we’re doing it to ourselves…but we’re making it ten times worse,” he supplies, voice impassive.
“Next week, we’re heading to the paintball arena,” Karsyn continues, resembling an eager, besotted puppy. He reaches forward to take my hands in both of his. “We paid a bunch of freshmen to shoot at us. We’ll have to run and hide without any guns for two hours.” The smile fades from his face as he lowers his forehead to my own. “I was sincere before when I apologized. I—we—want to make it up to you.”
“But I don’t want this,” I hiss. “This is…”
“Revenge,” Lucas states simply. “Our revenge on ourselves.”
“You’re all fucking crazy.” I shake my head vehemently, almost as if I can unhear all that was said. Do they even hear themselves? Surely they’re not deluded enough to think that physically harming themselves will assuage everything they did to me once upon a time.
“Crazy for you, baby,” Cassian teases with a wink, and I roll my eyes. I honestly can’t tell if he’s serious or full of shit. Half of the time, I think he actually has feelings for me, but then the other half…
“We were talking,” Elias whispers, staring at the ground. “About you.”
The air seems to spark with an electrical charge as all four of the men glare at one another. It’s Lucas who decides to speak first, unsurprisingly.
“We all have feelings for you,” he confesses, but like every other word he has said so far, his voice remains devoid of any emotion. He could’ve been telling me that he stole my homework instead of something like that.
“And we know about the whole…” Cassian makes one of his hands into a circle and slides a finger on his other hand in and out of it. “Dirty, dirty, bang, bang.”
“And you want me to…what? Choose one of you?” When they don’t immediately answer, staring at me with an unnerving type of intensity, I laugh humorlessly. “Date you all? Is that really what you guys want?”
“It might not go anywhere.” Cassian shrugs again, attempting to appear cool and nonchalant, but I can see a hint of vulnerability spark in his dark eyes. “But we all want to see if this…” He gestures between the five of us. “…is something.”
“It’s nothing,” I protest immediately, but a little, tinny voice in my head begins to scream at me to accept their offer, to forgive them. “Who said I even wanted to date any of you?”
Hurt flashes in both Karsyn’s and Elias’s face at my words, and I instantly feel like shit. The moments we had together were special, I admit that, but Lucas and Cassian? Why in the world would I ever even consider dating them?
But then I remember the way Lucas sat across from me in the diner, listening to my story without judgement. The fierce glimmer in his eyes when he promised to protect me.
I recall Cassian’s face when he saw the new violin case in my hand only a couple hours earlier. He tried to hide it, I can tell he did, but for a brief moment, his face was unguarded and full of hope. And later, when we were talking and he smiled down at me, it wasn’t tainted by pain or anger. It was just…a smile. A heart-thumping, toe-curling smile.
Oddly enough, it hurts more to heal than it does to be broken in the first place.
“Mr. Gurrel,” I blurt as another thing occurs to me. All four of them freeze, only their eyes moving to track my every move. I begin to pace in front of them, feeling an awful lot like a caged tiger. “Did you guys…?”
Lucas smiles, slow and predatory. A shark sniffing blood. “And if we did?”
I gape at him—at them—in unsuppressed horror.
“You cut off a man’s cock?” I try to sound outraged, but amusement laces my tone before I can contain it. There’s no denying that a darkness exists inside of me, a beast that demands freedom. And maybe that’s what always connected me to the four of them. They saw the roiling sea of darkness in me from the very beginning, and instead of running from it, they embraced it with their own form of…affection? No, that’s the wrong word. What happened five years ago was in no way affectionate or loving.
But was it torture?
Maybe for some, it was designed to be, but not for all. As I allow my eyes to drift from face to face, I find them landing on Lucas more often than not. The way he stares at me now…
It’s the same way he stared at me years ago.
It’s fucked up and so incredibly twisted, but I have to wonder…
Was that his way of showing affection?
Lucas’s smile curls upwards, though the shadows remain haunting his eyes.
“We made the little piggy squeal for what he did to you,” he says without preamble. Without even fucking remorse. “He didn’t see our faces, though.”
Lucas Scott is quite literally a monster. A psychopath, I think they’re called. Or maybe it’s a sociopath. I can never remember the difference between the two, even with the AP Psychology class I took last year.
I also have the feeling that, if I let him, he’ll become my psycho.
“I…I can’t deal with this right now.” They’re the only words that spring to mind. I can’t even begin to unravel my own emotions, so how the hell am I supposed to deal with theirs? I wonder if this is how it feels to jump off of a plane. To feel your stomach tighten as the ground rushes towards you like a dart approaching a bullseye. And then, there’s the stomach-dropping feeling you get when you pull open your parachute, allowing the currents to drag you aimlessly through the sky.
Even
a month ago, I wouldn’t have believed this possible. That Elias, Cassian, Karsyn, and Lucas would stand in front of me, wanting to be…in a relationship? With me? It sounds stupid even to my own ears, and I half wonder if there’s a cameraman hiding behind the corner, ready to jump out and scream, “Gotcha!” That thought stings worse than if I walked straight into a hornet’s nest.
“Peony…” Karsyn takes a step towards me, expression verging on desperation, but I easily sidestep his hands.
“I’m going to go, um, practice,” I mumble.
I’m feeling too much, too soon, too hard. This shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t want my own emotions to smother me. But trying to grapple them back into submission proves to be impossible. I bite my lip to hold my tears back as I shove Karsyn and Lucas aside, easily stepping between their muscular bodies.
How can they want to date me? They barely even know me.
Maybe they’re deluded, stuck in a fantasy where the charming, handsome guys get the poor girl. A Cinderella-type story where they’re the lead characters.
Because in reality? I’m not a catch. I’m not the girl they’ll all orbit around like planets with the sun. I’m just a crazy bitch with a voodoo doll and a slight obsession with the four of them.
Maybe they just want me because of what I am, what I represent.
Maybe they have gotten a taste of my darkness and now want more.
But they’ll come to find out that my darkness is encased in barbed-wire and pointed blades. The moment you touch it, you get stabbed.
There’s no escape.
Chapter 45
I stare intently at the closed violin case, willing it to…do something. Anything besides sit there and taunt me. My fingers itch with the need to touch it, caress it, pluck its strings.
But doing so will feel like surrender, and I’m not quite sure I’m ready for that yet.
Biting down on my lower lip, I turn back to the sheet music and bring the school’s violin back underneath my chin. As I begin to work through a song I wrote for my music composition class, I allow my mind to wander.
