Riot Rules

by Callie Hart

  Constant stimulation? Hah! That sounds about right. Mara tires of her infatuations every three or four days. In this instance, that personality trait actually bodes well. This foolish infatuation with Wren will be over before it truly even begins. Even so, I can’t really believe what I’m hearing. Mara falling for Wren is tantamount to a field mouse falling in love with a rattlesnake. She’s going to scamper up to him with cartoon love hearts in her eyes. He’s going to take one look at her, sink his fangs in, pump her full of venom and swallow her down in one bite. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen it happen. Mara’s been reckless before, but I’ve never known her to be plain fucking stupid. Wren Jacobi is never a good idea.

  “You can stop looking at me like that now, Carrie. You’re hardly one to talk. I know you’re hot for blondie.” Mara’s eyebrow crooks up into a challenge. Shit. I haven’t hidden my little obsession as well as I’d hoped. Mara’s daring me to deny it, when she knows full well I can’t.

  So, I don’t.

  “Dashiell’s nothing like Wren.”

  “Ooooh! Dashiell!” she croons. “Dashiell, Dashiell, Dashiell. You’ve practiced that, you little slut. Oh, Dashiell!” She throws her head back, rubbing her hands over her chest, moaning indecently. “Fill me up, Your Lordship. Make me come all over that beautiful English cock!”

  Blood rushes to my face. I’m suddenly very, very hot. There must be steam coming off my cheeks. I grab Mara’s hands, trying to pin them to her sides, to stop her from molesting herself as she acts out me getting plowed by Dash, but she’s covered in some sort of glittery moisturizer that reeks of coconut and she keeps slipping out of my grasp.

  “Dash! Holy fuck, Dash! Fucking give it to me!”

  “Mara! Christ, quit it!”

  “Why stop now? Show’s just getting interesting.”

  All three of us whip around at the deep, low voice. Mara slides off the table, swearing obscenely when she sees Pax—inked up and menacing—standing there, watching us with those stormy grey eyes of his. Pres…Oh shit, poor Presley. Her face has gone sheet white. She takes a step back and sits down hard. Miraculously, by some stroke of luck, there’s a chair there to catch her ass. “Pax. You’re here,” she mutters. “Look, Carrie. It’s Pax. He’s here.”

  Fuck. We took it in turns reassuring each other that there would be no way any of them would show up tonight. We must have repeated ourselves a thousand times and then some. It was the only way I convinced her to wear the tutu. And now she’s looking down at the frothy purple tulle bunched up between her legs like it’s a carnivorous animal, halfway done with eating her. She presses the swathes of material down, trying to make it less noticeable, but for every bunch she pushes down, three more spring up. It looks like she’s playing Whac-a-Mole.

  Pax casually surveys the three of us, his steely, unreadable gaze bouncing from me, to Mara, to Pres. He lands on Mara again with a vicious smile slowly spreading across his handsome face. “He’s around here somewhere, y’know. I’m sure he’d help a girl out.”

  “I—I don’t—” Mara never stutters. She stutters now. “I’m not—interested—in—”

  Pax steps forward, the muscles in his jaw ticking, and Presley lets out a strangled whimper. “Sounded like you were pretty interested in…” he says. “Sounded like you were very interested in…”

  “I was just making fun of Ca—"

  Oh, hell no. I cannot let her speak my name. I pinch her, hard and quick, and she yelps, rubbing at her arm.

  Pax looks us over like we’re all mad. “You’re Wolf Hall girls.” He delivers this statement like it’s a threat. Lord knows how he manages it.

  I square my shoulders, groaning under my breath. This is a bad idea, but I’m still going to do it. “You know we are, dude. You saw me at the hospital, like, four days ago. What do you want?”

  Pax blinks. Shifts his weight onto his right hip. Cants his head to one side. “I didn’t want anything. I was minding my own business, when I heard some sex starved pussy cat purring my friend’s name like he was shafting her in public.” He shrugs. “S’cuse me for wondering what the fuck was going on.”

  I saw on the National Geographic channel once that you should always make eye-contact with a bear or a wolf if they’re about to attack. Make yourself as big as possible. Make as much noise as you can. Do not turn and run. Seeing as I’m only five foot five, and Pax is six foot fifteen or something stupid, I doubt I’ll scare him off with my slight frame. I’m not going to start screaming in front of a bunch of strangers, either. That would be insane. But I can stand my ground. I can look the bastard dead in the eye and refuse to back down. “We were messing around, that’s all. No harm, no foul. You can leave now.”

  Laughing breathily down his nose, Pax runs a hand over his shaved head, rubbing his palm against the base of his skull, like he enjoys the way it feels. “Dismissing me, Carina Mendoza? Didn’t think you had the stones to pull off that kind of attitude. I always thought you were more of a ‘head down’ kinda girl.”

  “What? Now you have something against quiet girls, Pax Davis?” I weaponize his name the way he weaponized mine; the two words come out hard and unfriendly, which makes him laugh even harder.

  “Far from it. I like ‘head down’ girls. Usually makes ’em ‘ass up’ girls. They know when to hold their tongues. What I don’t like is when a quiet girl suddenly turns out to be a loudmouth. That,”—he shakes his head—“I am not a fan of at all.”

  Mara’s recovered from the shock of Pax finding her fake-fucking Dashiell Lovett the Fourth amongst a sea of beer pong cups. She folds her arms in front of her chest, angling her chin up at Pax defiantly. “Who let you off your leash, anyway? Are you lost? Aren’t you normally trailing behind Wren like a good little boy?”

  Goddamnit, Mara. Couldn’t keep quiet, could you…

  I was antagonizing the guy, but I wasn’t openly baiting him. He bares his teeth in a savage approximation of a smile. “You’ve got a nasty little tongue in your head, haven’t you, sweetheart?”

  “You should see it,” she says. “It’s forked and everything.”

  At this—either because this comment might as well be an open invitation for Pax to make the rest of our time at Wolf Hall a living nightmare, or the fact that the guy’s been standing four feet away from us, close enough to reach out and touch, to lean in and smell, for two whole minutes now—Presley lets out another poorly timed whimper.

  Pax jerks his head in her direction. “What’s her deal?”

  “Nothing. She’s fine. Hiccups.” The answer flies out of me a little too quickly.

  Those mercurial, winter-storm eyes narrow again. “Presley Maria Witton-Chase…has the hiccups?” He doesn’t sound convinced. “Poor Presley. D’you need a fright?” He steps closer to her. “You need a good scare? You should try me on for size, Red. I guarantee you’ll be terrified.”

  I’m pretty sure the only other time Pax has spoken directly to Presley was when she handed him a worksheet in English class. The terse, ‘thanks,’ he threw at her has been sustaining her for the past two years. Such a slew of words from him now, all of them directed right at her, six whole, if short, sentences, sends her into a complete meltdown. She covers her mouth with one hand, sobs randomly, blushes beet red, then gathers up her purple tutu in her arms and bolts from her seat to the front door like a hare streaking across a field.

  Pax watches her go with a placid, completely unperturbed look on his face. “Well. That was weird.”

  “Just leave us alone, for fuck’s sake,” I mutter, shoving past him.

  “Hey! Carrie! Where the hell are you going?” Mara yells. She shouldn’t need to ask; she witnessed Presley’s freak-out and subsequent disappearing act just like I did. Halfway to the door, I see Wren strolling down the wide, carpeted staircase to the right, wiping something red from his hands on what looks like a washcloth. Some dark-haired, pale-skinned wraith. Some ghost. Some wickedly beautiful, heartless god. His eyes skate over me like I’
m nothing. Like I’m less than nothing. He’ll be within view of Mara any second now, which means any hope that my friend might join me in looking for Pres just went flying out of the window.

  Perfect. Seriously. Just fucking great.

  “PRESLEY! PREEEEEEEZZZZ!”

  The path that leads down to the side field where all of the cars are parked is narrow and rocky. A girl would have trouble navigating it safely in sneakers without falling ass-over-tit and winding up with a mouthful of gravel. In wedges, it’s basically a broken ankle waiting to happen.

  “PRESLEY!” For fuck’s sake, where the hell did she go? My eyes have adjusted after leaving the well-lit house, but still all I can see are the dim, lumpy, dark shapes of cars to my right and a lazy smear of black on the horizon (much darker than the indeterminate grey of the grassland that stretches away from the house) that marks the entrance to the surrounding forest.

  I weave my way through row after row of cars, squinting into the murky night, trying to remember where the hell I parked my car while at the same time doubting very much that Pres had the wherewithal to make it back to there in her slightly drunk, very mortified state.

  Why did he have to be such a prick to her? She’s been besotted with the evil piece of trash for so long. God knows why, but he’s all she eats, sleeps and breathes. And in such a short span of time, he managed to be so unbelievably cunty to her. What a fucking asshole.

  “PRESLEY!”

  I nearly take a nosedive down an embankment midway through screaming her name. I only manage to save myself from a painful tumble by launching myself sideways, into the driver’s door of a monstrous, souped-up F-150.

  “Steady on, love,” a polite voice warns. “Wouldn’t wanna scratch the paint.”

  I’ve studied that English accent at great length. I know the cadence of it. The rise and the fall. The subtle upward inflection that implies condescension rather than enquiry. It’s sheer, dumb luck that I’d run into him again, for the second time in one week, out here, in a dark field. I look up, and bam. He’s lounging across the hood of a Charger that I recognize as Pax’s. The beaten-up Firebird Alderman bought me for my sixteenth birthday is only a couple of cars down. The Charger wasn’t here when we arrived earlier; I would have noticed it if it was.

  If Pax could see how Dash is lying on his pride and joy right now, his back resting up against the windshield, his legs crossed at the ankles, the heels of his sneakers sitting neatly right in the very center of the Charger’s hood, he’d probably have an embolism.

  I couldn’t give a shit about the car. All I can see is the boy sitting on top of it. Sandy blond hair turned to burnished gold in the dark. The strong jawline, and an arrow-straight nose in profile. Eyes dark, roving over the sea of cars as he looks off toward the house, huffing gently.

  He's wearing…wow, he’s wearing jeans and…a bomber jacket over a t-shirt? I’ve never seen him out of his crisply pressed shirts and dress pants. Apart from at the hospital the other day. Then, he’d been naked aside from a pair of boxers and a blood-soaked tea-towel, pressed up against his junk. I won’t be forgetting that any time soon.

  “Don’t suppose you saw two losers inside, did you?” He has something in his hand. He raises it—a bottle of something clear—and presses the mouth of it to his own, swallowing once, twice, and a third time before lowering the bottle again and wincing. “One of them has dark, wavy hair. Looks like he might have been sent to end the world. The other one looks like he just escaped from a prison camp. But…y’know. The good kind, where he was well-fed and worked out all day.”

  “I know who Wren and Pax are,” I say slowly. “We’ve been over this once already this week. I’ve been going to school with you for nearly three whole years, Dash. You think I don’t know all of your names? You think there’s a single student at Wolf Hall who doesn’t know your names?”

  He rocks his head to the side, raising his eyebrows. “I guess we have made quite the impression, haven’t we.” He takes another slug from the bottle, his throat working as he swallows down more of the clear liquor inside. It has to be liquor. No one would pound water like this. Dashiell considers the bottle, squinting one eye at it, and then he holds it out to me by the neck.

  I just look at it. “You’re offering me booze?”

  “Someone ought to take it away from me. I can’t feel my face anymore. Do your worst, Carina Mendoza.”

  I close my hand around the bottle, taking it from him, tempted to laugh. Instead, I drink, and the vile burn of neat vodka sears a pathway down my esophagus. With a past like mine, a girl learns how to deal with this kind of heat without reacting externally. Dash says, “huh,” like he’s impressed, nodding as he takes back the bottle.

  I lean against the side of the car, watching him. He seems…weird. Out of sorts. Angry. Maybe it’s like he said. Maybe, he’s just drunk. “So. You seriously didn’t know my name until four days ago,” I say.

  Without a trace of shame or embarrassment, he replies immediately with a, “nope,” that makes me want to scream. “Wolf Hall’s a big school. I’m not about to learn the names and faces of every single student in attendance. I have a very limited quantity of fucks to give, and my father’s made it very clear that they have to be cashed in on my assignments.” His words are so bitter that they bite.

  “How can you be around the same group of people, day in and day out for years and not know who they are? You’d have to do it on purpose. Like, willfully block everyone out. That takes effort.”

  He hikes his legs up, bent at the knees, soles of his sneakers flat against the hood. He rests his elbows on his knees, slowly turning the bottle of vodka around in his hands. “So what if I did? What’s the point in making connections with people who won’t impact your life in any way? Sounds like a waste of time and energy to me.”

  “Wow. That’s…really depressing.”

  “I tend to have that effect on people,” Dash agrees. “See. If I were making friends with everyone at Wolf Hall, the entire student body would be miserable. I’m doing you all a service by forgetting you. Here.” He holds out his hand, leaning toward me, and it takes me far too long to figure out what he’s doing. He’s trying to help me up onto the hood. To sit up there. With him. Beside him.

  Holy shit.

  I can’t move.

  Dash tips his head to one side in an ‘oh well’ type of gesture. He laughs into the open mouth of the vodka bottle as he holds the beveled glass against his lips. “It’s not catching, y’know. The melancholia. This level of deep unhappiness stems from well over a decade of pressure, neglect and intense judgement. Doesn’t transfer with a little skin contact.”

  “I didn’t think that taking your hand would turn me into a pessimist.”

  Dashiell shrugs again, his nonchalant makes-no-difference-to-me response to everything. It’s irritating, that stupid shrug of his. The spark of annoyance that he kindled in me back at the hospital strengthens, like an ember, blown upon and stirred back to life. He really does think he’s so apart from all of this. He considers himself an outsider. A tourist, observing the rest of us as we go through the motions of getting an education, eating, sleeping, breathing, getting good grades and bad grades, missing home, and getting our hearts broken. He thinks he’s above all of it, like none of it is happening to him at the same goddamn time.

  Scowling, I place my hands on the hood of the Charger and I plant my foot on top of the car’s tire, using it to boost myself up. Next thing I know, I’m sitting so close to Dashiell Lovett that I can feel the soft brush of heat from his body as his arm makes contact with mine. Oh fuck. I’ve just clambered up here without thinking, and now my arm is resting up against his, and there’s nothing I can do about it because I have no room to move. Dash has plenty of room. He has about three feet of room to his right. He could shift over and put some space between us, so that we’re at a comfortable distance from one another, but does he?

  Does he hell.

  He chuckles mirthlessly.
I know what he’s thinking, the evil bastard. You acted on impulse and got yourself into this position, sweetheart. Now you have to deal with the consequences. Damn it, even his fake voice in my head has a highly annoying, sexy-as-hell English accent.

  He jerks his chin in my direction. “What are they supposed to be? Marbles?”

  Takes me a second to realize that he’s talking about the chandelier earrings I picked out before I left for the party. I touch my fingers to them protectively. “No, what the hell! They’re the planets.” Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—the precious stones all lined up along the lengths of gold chain represent the most important heavenly bodies of our solar system. Dash squints at them.

  “No Pluto, then?”

  “Pluto isn’t a planet anymore.”

  His lip curls up. “Debatable.”

  God, shut the hell up, Carrie. What the hell are you talking about?

  He doesn’t seem offended that I’ve revealed myself to be a space nerd. He offers me the vodka again, this time resting the bottom of the bottle on the top of my thigh, which is also dangerously close to coming into contact with his leg. He turns his head forty-five degrees and looks right at me. “What does it matter to you if I don’t care about my fellow classmates? You act like my indifference is some sort of personal insult.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter to me one bit.” I pull on the bottle deeper than I intend and nearly choke on the rank alcohol. Forcing down the monster mouthful gives me a second to pull myself together, though. When I’m finished convincing my eyes not to tear up, I look to my right, returning his far-too-close stare. “I just don’t like rude people. I don’t like people who think they’re better than everyone else. And that’s how you come across, Lord Dashiell Lovett the Fourth.”

  In the dark, he grins, strands of his hair falling into his face, obscuring his handsome features, and my toes curl in my shoes. Damnit, this was not supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to get close to him and then melt at the first sign of a smile. I was supposed to stay the hell away from him. Alderman would flip his shit if he could see me right now. If I’d just stayed the course and walked past him at the hospital, this insanely attractive panty-wrecker still wouldn’t have a clue that I existed. And that would have been safer. That would have been much safer than this.