by Angel Lawson
“What’s my deal? Are you fucking kidding me?” I take a gulping breath. “For one, I spent four Saturdays getting this wall prepped and ready. Four. Goddamned. Saturdays. And you come in here and fuck it up?” I slam my hand into Heston’s shoulder, sending him stumbling back. “For two, this is a twelve-year-old. A twelve-year-old who has fuck-all to do with you!”
Ansel, seeming entirely unconcerned, says, “But look at it? It’s absolutely hilarious. That picture of the kid? How could we not?”
Even the old Hamilton would have found this stupid. Picking on a twelve-year-old? Where is the fucking victory in that? Where is the challenge in punching down like this? What’s the fucking point? Bashing someone because they’re gay—because they’re different—that’s never been my thing.
Heston comes charging back to me, fists clenched. “We just know you had to spend all that time with Adams, and we figured this would make it worth it. Don’t you think?” His smile is cutting. “Unless, you know, you actually like hanging out with her.” His blue eyes hold mine. “Do you?”
I step up to him, nostrils flared as I challenge, “Why? You looking to steal another girl from me?”
He huffs a laugh. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t think I don’t know about Reagan. You’ve been marking her up for weeks now.”
“You were stringing her along,” he spits. “Either that or using her for a cover. Maybe you learned something from your sister—like how to stay on the downlow when you're fucking the town trash.”
Heston’s eyes dart above my shoulder and widen before I can even get my fist in the air, which seems strange enough to stop me.
I hear Ansel mutter a sharp, “Fuck.”
I close my eyes, inhaling deep and measured. “Dewey’s behind me, isn’t he?” And that’s it. I’m even more screwed. I grimace and turn around, mind racing to come up with an excuse, but it doesn’t matter.
It’s not Dewey.
Gwendolyn stands five feet away, staring up at the poster with a pale, horrified expression, blue eyes swimming with something devastated and stunned.
I hear the guys scrambling behind me, the ladder creaking. In that moment, I’m aware of two things. One, that they’re about to run and leave me holding the paint can. And two, that Gwendolyn has this all wrong.
“Do you think this is funny?” Her gaze drops to me, and her voice. Fuck, her voice. It’s rough with unshed tears and so much hurt that it’s like a physical blow. The intensity is a punch in the gut.
“Please, just wait!” I hold up a palm, beseeching. “This isn’t what it seems.”
It looks like it’s an actual effort for her to lift her arm, to extend a finger toward the wall. “There’s not a poster making fun of my brother on the wall?” Her eyes flick to the can in my hand. “And you’re not holding that paint can?”
I dart my gaze down to the can and chuck it toward the ladder. I hold up both my hands. “I just got here and saw them doing this. I swear. I’m as pissed as you are. They completely wrecked all the work we did.”
“Shut up.” Her words are a harsh whisper. “Shut the fuck up, Bates. Don’t you dare blame this on someone else. Oh, my god.” She presses her fists into her stomach like she’s staving off a sob, eyes shining with unshed tears. “This is about Friday night, isn’t it? You finally got me to take your disgusting ‘test’, and that’s all this was about, wasn’t it? This whole time. Tricking Gwendolyn ‘The Freak’ Adams into getting on her knees and debasing herself for you.”
“Holy shit,” Heston says from beside me, voice cracking. “She gave you a blow job? Oh, shit, this just keeps getting better.” He laughs, leaning forward to peer at her. “And is that a mark on her neck? Jesus, this is gold.”
I turn around, shoulders heaving, and feel my face crumple into something murderous. Heston looks over at the others, and then back at me, a bitter smirk plastered on his face as he backs away. A second later they’re all gone, bolting across campus.
When I face Gwendolyn again, it’s the most painful thing I’ve ever seen. Her expression is pure devastation, tears now tracking down her cheeks. She looks broken.
My heart clenches painfully, because I wasn’t lying to Xavier before. Seeing her hurt? It’s agony to me. But another part of me is incredulous and pissed off.
I scream, “I didn’t trick you!” and wave my arm around erratically. “This wasn’t me. I would never do that to you, and I’d never fucking do that to Micha. If you’d just calm down and listen to me, you’d—” Nothing I’m saying is working, I can tell from the anguish in her eyes, and that’s the scary thing. I’m used to her being mad at me, hating me, fighting me, tooth and nail and piss and vinegar. But the heartbroken defeat in her eyes? Desperation runs through me. I swallow thickly. “Gwendolyn, I lov—”
“No!” She sobs, stepping back. “Shut up! You do not get to say that to me. What is wrong with you?”
I step toward her. “But—”
“Did you know it was him, all along?” She keeps backing away, no matter how many steps I take toward her.
I stop, face falling as I watch the tears stream down her cheeks. “What are you talking about?”
“Heston’s shoes!” she cries. “You can’t tell me you didn’t know! He’s your friend, you live with him. How many people have orange shoes?”
It suddenly dawns on me. “Wait, Heston’s the one who kicked you?” I can’t even fathom the disbelief in my voice. It makes perfect sense. Nevertheless, it’s still a lot to wrap my head around. This is a guy I’ve spent serious amounts of time with. If he were capable of something fucked up, shouldn’t I know?
I’m still processing this when Gwen shakes her head, backing away once again.
“Fuck you, Bates.” She swipes the tears from her cheeks, and draws her spine up straight, looking me in the eye. “Never speak to me, or anyone in my family again.”
In a blink, her shield is clicked firmly back in place, effectively shutting me out. I don’t try to stop her when she walks away. Why bother? Everything is stacked against me.
I should have known.
It was all too easy, the way we could just fall into each other like that. Too easy to think she could love me back. Too easy to think that she could trust me. If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else, and I don’t deserve any less. Hadn’t I already decided that?
The rage I felt toward Heston is dwarfed by the jagged, sharp things rattling around in my empty chest, a multitude of ‘could have been’s and ‘shouldn’t have’s.
But I should have seen them coming. Gwendolyn Adams hit me like a hurricane and now that she’s gone, there’s nothing but pain and destruction in her wake.
I have no fucking idea how to clean up this mess.
They’re all in the suite when I arrive. Emory and Ansel are on the couch, Xavier is in the kitchenette, and Heston is just walking out of his room.
Gwen was right.
His shoes have a wide, orange stripe around the soles.
“So you beat up on girls now,” I say, letting my rage simmer just under the surface. Everyone stops to look at me, but Heston doesn’t even have the sense to look worried. “Between that and picking on twelve-year-olds, it’s almost like you’re a complete chicken-shit.”
Xavier’s eyes ping between us. “Did I miss something?”
Emory pipes in, “You’re blowing the poster thing out of proportion. It’s just a joke.”
“What if it’d been Vandy up there?” I turn to him, blood boiling. “You think she’s safe just because you’re a Devil? You think these guys aren’t whispering behind your back all the time about how she’s pathetic and crippled, but—and I’m quoting Ansel verbatim here—perfectly bangable?”
Emory looks at Ansel, jaw clenching. “Is that a fact?”
Ansel gapes at me like a fish. “Bro, what the fuck?”
“Time out!” Xavier makes a ‘T’ with his arms. “What poster? What girl? What the hell is g
oing on?”
Heston steps in. “Our boy here got him some rotten-ass pussy, and now he thinks he’s better than us.”
My lip curls. “I’ve always been better than you, Heston. Gwen had nothing to do with it.” I shrug out of my jacket and turn to the others, ordering, “Here’s what you’re going to do. The two of you are going to go down to the field and take that fucking poster down before people start seeing it. The poster, the programs, all of it.”
Emory rolls his eyes, still eyeing Ansel with an edge of hostility. “Why the fuck do we have to do it?”
Ansel agrees, “It was Heston’s idea.”
“Because,” I explain, rolling up my sleeves, “in about three minutes, Heston’s not going to be moving very much.”
I don’t miss the gleam of anticipation in their eyes, and I’m not even surprised. Animals. They’re all fucking whacked-out, high on the whiff of their own testosterone, and will turn on one another at the drop of a hat. For all the talk of the Devils being about integrity to our families’ legacies, there’s no actual loyalty here.
“Jesus, another fight?” Xavier huffs. “Is violence really necessary here?”
Without breaking my gaze from Heston’s, I say, “He kicked Gwen in the face, and then vandalized the school by committing a hate crime against her little brother.”
There’s a moment of stillness, silence.
Xavier exhales. “Yeah. So that’s all systems go on the violence thing, I guess. Come on, guys, help me move this.”
Xavier, Ansel, and Emory start moving the couch, butting it against the wall. They move the coffee table next, clearing the middle of the floor.
Heston scoffs at me. “I’m not fighting you.”
“Oh, I know.” I bend down to tighten my shoelaces, just in case. “I’m neither a girl nor a twelve-year-old. You’re too much of a pussy to take someone your own size.” I straighten, shrugging. “Doesn’t exactly put a damper on my plans.”
His face is stony and blank, but I can see in his eyes that he’s starting to get nervous. “Lay a finger on me, and I’m not going to bother with the dean. I’ll just call the cops.”
“Seems smart, given the mountain of charges you’d be facing.” I glance at the others. “I mean, we have witnesses and a mountain of evidence. You’ve got jack shit.”
Emory narrows his eyes at Heston. “Are you really that much of a little bitch?”
Heston’s jaw clenches as he looks between us all, realizing that the only way to even remotely save face here is to take it like a man. “You’re pathetic,” he says to me, walking to the middle of the room. “You think beating my ass is going to prove anything? At the end of the day, you’re still the piece of shit who turned his back on his own fucking people. You don’t deserve to be leader of the Devils.”
“There are no Devils anymore.” I step up to him, letting the searing anger boil under my skin, imagining what his face is going to look like after all this is over, and how satisfying that’ll be.
Once I do that, it’ll be better.
It has to get better.
When my fist crashes against the hard edge of his jaw, I don’t feel a thing.
26
Gwen
I barely remember getting to my room. My bag’s still sitting on my bed, unpacked, from when I’d arrived back at Preston. For no real reason, I suddenly remember my first night in here, feeling as though it wouldn’t be so bad. It was a nice room. Private. It had everything I needed, allowed me to live minimalistically, without the threat of other people clawing their way in. I look around the space and something about it feels terminally small now, as if the walls could close in and crush me if I stood here long enough.
I feel the sour taste of bile rising in my throat long before my stomach even finishes churning. I bolt for the door, darting down the hall to the communal bathroom, and crash into the nearest stall. My knees crack against the floor as I fall, emptying my breakfast into the toilet bowl. It feels like my insides are being pulled out, and I wouldn’t even really mind it if they were. There’s something black and sickening in there, roiling around, and I want nothing more than to purge it.
Because these are the noxious remnants of what I felt for Hamilton Bates.
The toilet gurgles loudly when I flush, and I sit there on the floor, gazing listlessly at the graffiti littering the stall.
Priscilla Yates farts in her sleep.
These boys ain’t shit
TJ + MB 4eva
Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt personally victimized by Dr. Ross
Gwendolyn Adams is in room 418. Stay frosty!
I blink at the jagged scrawl. Much like TJ and MB, it’d been scratched into the metal instead of just scribbled with a marker. It’s not something that can be painted over or erased. It’ll always be there.
Always.
Just then, I hear someone enter the bathroom, door closing heavily behind them. I hear footsteps—the delicate ‘clack’ of heels—and the sounds of shifting fabric. I close my eyes and wait for them to enter a stall so I can sneak out unseen. But whoever it is, they must be at the mirrors instead. With a steeling breath, I stand, brush off my pants, and push the stall door open.
Reagan’s gaze jumps to mine in the reflection of the mirror. It only lasts a split second before her eyes return to her face, carefully applying a coat of lipstick. She doesn’t live here like I do, but I know she has friends in the dorm. It’s not my first time seeing her here.
It’s the first time she ever says anything to me, though.
“Well, that didn’t last long.”
I blink at her, feeling a distant sense of confusion. “Excuse me?”
She puts her lipstick away, her eyes jumping to mine again. “You and Hamilton.” She leans back and fluffs her curls, arranging them carefully over her shoulder. “Not that I’m surprised. It’s just that when a guy dumps you for another girl, you generally hope they have a longer shelf-life than a gallon of milk.” She looks at me, those ruby red lips pressing together. “But I know that look, so let me be the first to welcome you to the Hamilton Bates cast-off club. It’s a lot less exclusive than it used to be,” she mutters.
I hug my arms around my middle. “How did you—”
“You can’t really think I’m that stupid,” she says, eyes narrowing. “The two of you were about as subtle as a sledgehammer.”
I shift my gaze to the floor, swallowing against the sour taste in my mouth. “I’m sorry.”
She snorts a laugh. “No, you’re not. And if you’re going to go around poaching from other girls, at least have the decency to own it.”
“It wasn’t—” My throat seizes around the sad, messed up truth of it all. That it wasn’t what she thinks. That it wasn’t real.
She doesn’t seem to care, anyway. She picks up her bag and finally turns to me, looking me in the eye. “You want to know what the most screwed up thing was? When I realized that his obsession with you was no longer just about his long-standing hatred of freaks, I actually asked myself ‘what does she have that I don’t’. And there for a moment, I thought that was the way. To piss him off, like you did. One second of him glaring a hole into your head was more emotion than he ever showed toward me. But no.” She smiles snidely. “Not even parading around with someone else’s Devil’s mark could get a rise out of him. And do you want to know why?” She pushes off the counter, sauntering forward until she’s close enough that I can count her perfectly curled eyelashes. “Because Hamilton Bates is a black hole of nothing. You scratch the surface, you just find more surface. The problem wasn’t that you had something I didn’t.” Her grin is a dark, twisted thing. “It was that you didn’t have anything at all. So, if he chewed you up and spat you out, then I’m curious. What exactly does that make you now?”
I stand there for a long time after she leaves, watching my own tear-stained face in the mirror, and I don’t make a sound.
No one would hear it, anyway.
I spend the next
hour locked inside my room. I can’t go to classes. Just the thought of it is enough to make my stomach heave again. The only reason I end up leaving at all is for Micha—because I know that poster is still up, and I don’t want others to see. When I know I can go out without a total breakdown, I drag myself out to the athletic field right after first period has begun but find that someone’s already cleared it. There’s nothing left but a few torn corners of yellow program paper.
My relief is two-fold; that hardly anyone would have seen it, and that I won’t have to report it, as clearly the administration already knows.
For this, at least, I won’t be the snitch who ruined everything.
I go back to my room and collapse onto my bed. I tell myself that this will be the last of the tears, that I can just get it out now, it’s only right, and aren’t I owed this? Aren’t I allowed to be human, just for one day? To hurt and feel and be something.
My mind keeps running back to that moment in front of the wall, the moment he was caught. He’d started to say “I lov—"
The lengths, the sheer cruel lengths, Hamilton Bates will go to ruin a person is a level of commitment impossible for me to comprehend.
When did he decide to do it? The day after the locker room? When coach told us about the co-captainship? Or was it earlier? After the party with Sky?
I cry myself to sleep, paranoia swirling in my brain.
I have no idea how much time passes. For a long time, my dreams waver between utter monotony and horrific nightmares, but neither is powerful enough to jolt me awake. Eventually, my sleep grows dreamless, an eerie feeling of vacancy permeating my mind. I float there for a long while, long enough that I awaken thirsty, with a pit of hunger nagging my hindbrain. I fall back into sleep, instead. There’s nothing here for me. No one to protect and nothing to look forward to, just the endless expanse of ugliness and shame.
The knock comes so late that it’s already dark outside my window. My bladder and I aren’t on the best of terms, and my joints feel creaky and disused when I finally climb out of the bed and cross the room.
