Havoc at Prescott High

by Stunich, C. M.

  “Seven. If we come to an agreement, I'll tell you their names. Not before.”

  “Mm.” Victor makes a sound and leans forward. “You know we'll take any deal, no matter how savage, but there's always a price. The question is: what are you willing to pay?”

  My voice is strong and clear when I reply.

  “Anything.”

  Victor smiles at me, and then pauses, looking up and over my shoulder.

  “Sorry, I'm late.”

  Aw, fuck, it's Aaron. My nostrils flare as he takes a seat across from me, and then freezes, green-gold eyes going wide. He doesn't move, doesn't say anything. We both know what happened between us before.

  “Whatever. We know all we need to know anyway.” Victor stands up and comes around the table. I stand up, too, and he ends up coming so close to me that I can feel his breath stir my hair. “We'll get back to you on Friday. Remember, though, if you accept our price: you will pay up.”

  Victor takes off, Hael following close behind him. Oscar and Cal share a look over the top of Aaron's wavy chestnut hair.

  He, on the other hand, is still staring at me like he's seen a ghost.

  “Of all people, I never expected you,” he says, almost like he's disgusted. He stands up and storms off, shoving chairs out of his way as he goes. I barely recognize him as he makes his exit, that sweet boy I once knew covered in tattoos, his body hard and taut with muscle. The only parts of him that are the same are the lips that gave me my first kiss, and that loose, mussy hair.

  “He's going to have to learn to play nice,” Oscar murmurs as he flips open the cover on his iPad. I’m surprised he even has one. Other schools, nice schools, they have iPads and laptops. At Prescott High, we're stuck in the nineties. Or, rather, our funding is. We use lined paper, binders, and pencils. Lucky us. More than likely, Oscar probably stole the one he’s got in his inked hands.

  “Yeah, we don't treat clients like that.” Callum pauses and then smirks at me. “Only marks. You know that, though, don't you, Bernie?”

  I stand up and spin away in a whirl of white-blond and pink, storming out the door only to be snatched around the bicep by Victor. He pushes me into the brick wall and then puts a palm next to my face, leaning in.

  “Is the first name on your list Principal Vaughn?” he whispers, and when I look away, Vic laughs in my face, his breath hot against my mouth. He pushes up off the wall, stalks toward the edge of the brick patio, and lights up a cigarette.

  One of the math teachers—Miss Addie or something—sees us, but then puts her head down and keeps on walking. Pretty sure Hael’s fucked her. I walked in on them once. Well, I walked in on him with one of the teachers, her clothes disheveled, her lipstick smeared. I can't remember which of the blond math teachers it was.

  “Principal Vaughn.” Victor laughs, and the sound is so twisted and full of malice, it makes my ears bleed. “Go home, Bernadette, and we'll see you in the morning. It's still 193 44th Street, isn't it?”

  “Don't ever come to my house again,” I growl at him, and then I take off for home.

  My home life is worse than my school life. I’ve tried to make it better on more than one occasion. I’ve called social services, but my foster family was even worse. I’ve tried running away, but then the cops dragged me back and put me on house arrest, and then I was just … trapped in hell.

  Once upon a time, my family was wealthy. But then my father killed himself, and my mother lost the house, and well, I can barely remember what it’s like to feel safe and secure, to know there’ll be food on the table and a roof over my head.

  Pamela, she still lives that old fantasy of having money.

  “Bernadette,” she calls, trotting down the stairs in pearls and a designer dress. She probably charged them to one of the dozen stolen credit cards she keeps in her purse. My backpack is literally falling apart, and my little sister doesn’t have any shoes that don’t have holes in them, but sure. Buy yourself a nice dress and some fancy jewelry.

  The thing about my mother is, she doesn’t do drugs, she only drinks at parties, and she paints a very pretty picture with her blond hair and bright green eyes. I’m almost certain that she’s a psychopath. Once, when I spilled a cup of juice on the last of her fancy rugs, she locked me in the bathroom after filling the tub with bleach. The fumes made me so sick that I passed out.

  “What?” I stand there in the front entry with my backpack on one shoulder, hating her with every breath and wishing she’d move out of the way, so I could retreat upstairs to my room. Heather will be at the after-school program I signed her up for, so at least for an hour or two, I don’t have to worry about my little sister.

  Besides, the thing I call my stepfather won’t be home for hours yet. He works the swing shift at the police station, an on-duty cop with a taste for depravity. And he has so many friends, so, so many. It’s terrifying. I don’t feel safe anywhere.

  “Can you do that thing with my hair? What’s it called? A fish-mouth braid?”

  My own mouth tightens, but I don’t bother to correct her. If she wants to call a fishtail braid, fish-mouth then who am I to stop her? Maybe she’ll look like an idiot in front of all the fancy friends who’d drop her in a hot second if they knew how poor we really were?

  “I have homework,” I say, refusing to make eye contact with her as I brave the stairs and push past her. Her freshly manicured nails tighten on the banister, and I do my best to hold back a flinch. I can remember those shiny perfect nails digging into my skin, leaving tiny crescent marks that hurt for hours. The trauma runs so deep, in tracks and canyons across my heart, that I forget that I’m just as tall as she is now, just as capable. The physical violence between us has lessened, but the verbal and emotional abuse remains the same.

  “Homework? Since when do you care about homework? That school for delinquents is hardly an academic palace.” I ignore her scathing words and head straight for the room I share with Heather. I don’t look at Pen’s room or think about how I should’ve made her sleep with me, in a locked bedroom, as far away from the Thing as she could get. I didn’t know I had to protect her, my older sister. Maybe in her own way, she was protecting me?

  My throat tightens up, and I slam my door as hard as I can, making the walls shake. Mom screams something at me from the hallway, but I flick the extra locks I installed, and then jam my headphones over my ears. When the Thing realized I’d added a chain lock and a deadbolt, he’d looked me right in the face and laughed.

  “You think I couldn’t get in there if I wanted?” he’d sneered, and then he’d let his fingers dance over the gun on his hip. As if I could ever forget that he’s a cop, and I’m just a seventeen-year-old loser who got bullied so bad she was afraid to go to school.

  My life is a perfect storm, full of lightning, thunder, and rain clouds, swirling in from all directions. No matter where I go or what I do, I can’t escape it. And that’s why I spent all summer thinking, wondering if I should call on them, those Havoc Boys, wondering if their price is worth a pound of flesh.

  I finally came to the conclusion after I found one of Pen’s journals: it is.

  It really, really is.

  No matter what it is they did to me.

  No matter what it is they do to me.

  Two years earlier …

  My feet are bare, and the ground hurts. There are sticks, thorns, and stones all over the place, but I can’t stop running. If I do, they’ll catch me, and I’m afraid to see what those dark grins and awful laughter lead to.

  I know what monsters like to do in the dark, and I won’t let myself be taken by them, those awful, awful Havoc Boys.

  They dragged me out of my bed in the dark, without waking my mother, my stepfather, or either of my sisters.

  They told me to run.

  So even though it’s pouring rain, I do it. I run, and I don’t stop until I can’t catch a breath, falling to my knees and soaking my pajama pants straight through. I tried to circle around and go back to the hou
se, but two of them were waiting there for me.

  I’m just lucky they didn’t see me.

  Choking on my shuttered breaths, I rise to my feet and keep going, and I don’t stop until the rain lets up and the sun kisses the horizon. By then I’m so exhausted, I can barely keep my body upright.

  This time, when I go back, they’re gone, but I know that’s not the end of this.

  Not even close.

  Somebody called out Havoc, somebody made a deal.

  And this time, I’m the mark.

  At school on Friday, Victor finally pulls me aside, grabbing me by the elbow and dragging me into the dark theater where Callum is trying on questionable looking masks. The places Vic’s fingers touch, they burn. The sensation makes me sick to my stomach.

  “We have a price for you,” Vic says, circling around me like a shark. I can smell him, too, this pungent mix of bergamot, tobacco, amber, and musk. The stink of it makes me shiver and then bite down on my tongue to hide the reaction. God forbid I give Victor or the other Havoc Boys even an ounce of physical appreciation. They’re pretty, I’ll admit that. But they don’t need to know that I know that.

  “Finally,” I spit, because that caustic, bitter nature of mine was learned, not gifted to me from birth. I never asked to be this way, this ornery, this angry, but I wasn’t given many choices. In order to keep myself and my sister safe, I adapted to the harsh world I was thrust into. “Like you said, no talking in circles, be direct and all that.”

  “What happened to you?” Victor asks, tilting his head slightly to one side, his dark eyes even darker in the mysterious shadows of the theater. Prescott High hasn’t received proper funding in years, but Ms. Keating busts ass every fall to raise money for the arts programs. She thinks artistic endeavors can heal damaged souls. It’s a lofty ideal, but impractical at best. Nobody can save us, society’s throwaways. “You used to be so …” He reaches out and lifts a lock of my hair, tossing a dark smirk my direction. “Sweet.”

  “You,” I say, without flinching, without hesitating. From a chair in the front row, Hael chuckles, playing with his phone, probably texting some girl. Out of them all, he’s the biggest whore, hands down. Oscar sits on the edge of the stage, legs crossed at the knee, working on his iPad again. “Now what’s my price?”

  “Seven people, identities unknown,” Oscar says, his voice mellifluent and mellow, but dangerous as hell, like a fine bottle of brandy one could drown in. It’d be so easy to, with those sweet, smooth sips. Might kill you in the wrong dose, but it goes down easy. “One of whom I’m simply assuming is that cop father of yours.”

  “He is not my father.” The words come out like the first snap of hoarfrost on the branches, unforgiving and merciless, destroying the sweetness of spring and summer in an instant. I’ve never been more adamant about anything in my life.

  Vic watches me, unperturbed, as Callum pauses and slips a Phantom of the Opera mask over his face, snapping the elastic in the quiet space. Aaron isn’t here, his lack of presence as strong a statement as any words he might say if he were.

  “Pardon me, that cop stepfather of yours,” Oscar continues as Vic watches me, dark and unyielding, a stone wall that can’t be breached. What makes this work, what makes Havoc an option for me, is that they’re neither black nor white, just this unrelenting sea of gray. Make a bargain, pay a price, reap the rewards. I know what’s expected of them, now I just need to find out what’s expected of me.

  But I’ve already had this conversation with myself, and I know how far I’m willing to go: I’ll pay anything, do anything, to get what I want. What was left of me, of Bernadette Blackbird, died along with my sister, so my only recourse here is revenge. I’ll take it.

  “But regardless of parentage, a cop is a cop,” Oscar continues, pushing his glasses up his nose with his middle finger. His lenses shimmer in what little light there is. “And that’s a big job, dealing with someone like that. I’ve spent all week calculating the risks, and there are many.”

  “Too many,” Vic scoffs, shaking his head and running his tattooed fingers through his dark hair. He surveys me, a girl he’s known since we started attending the same elementary school ten years ago. We were never friends, per se, but I remember when I first transferred from the fancy Montessori school downtown, and the other kids picked on me for being snobby (maybe I was, I don’t remember). Victor stood up for me once. He pushed a kid down the slide for pulling my pigtails.

  I haven’t forgotten.

  I also haven’t forgotten that when I was fifteen years old, he locked me in a closet for a week with nothing but bottled water, granola bars, and a bucket. All because Kali Rose-Kennedy asked him to. That bitch. I’ve always wondered what I did to make her hate me.

  “Why do you do it anyway?” I ask, feeling Vic’s hot gaze sweep over me like a summer storm. His attention, it burns as hot as his fingers on my arm. When he looks at me, I can barely breathe. There’s a fine line between hate and lust, isn’t there? I’m sure I feel equal parts of both when he stares at me with his heavily lidded eyes, long lashes, and hard mouth. This is a man built of sin and heartache. He’s as broken as I am. “The whole Havoc thing? I’ve never understood it. You’re not beholden to anyone, so why tell the whole world that you are? That one word can command you?”

  “Have you ever been lied to, Bernadette?” Victor asks me, his voice dark and deep and full of shadows. He doesn’t move, but there’s a charge in the air that says he could destroy my carefully crafted façade before I could even think to try and stop him.

  “What do you think?” I snort back, adjusting my leather jacket and noticing that his eyes don’t move from mine like most guys. Even with a high neckline, I’ve noticed that most men only see what they want to see, and oftentimes, it’s breasts that they’re interested in, covered up or no. Victor keeps his attention on my face, destroying me with that hard gaze of his.

  “When you’ve been lied to by everyone around you, when you have nothing else, you realize the one currency you can carry is truth. So a single word does have meaning. A promise does hold importance. And a pact is worth carrying to the grave.” He steps back from me, his boots loud against the polished floors of the stage. “Do you want to hear the price or not? It’s not too late for you to back out and run, you know that, right?”

  I nod, resolute in my determination. My heart thunders in my chest, waiting, anticipating. Sweat drips down my back. Hael makes a sound, and Callum lifts up the mask, but nobody moves.

  Vic maintains that ironclad control over my gaze.

  “If we take this job, you become ours.” His words hang in the quiet air, almost like a threat, almost like he’s warning me away before we even get started. But he underestimates how deep my determination goes. A slight smile works its way across his lips as the door at the end of the room opens and a troupe of theater geeks—or as close to theater geeks as we get at Prescott High goes—steps in. “Get the fuck out,” Victor says, not bothering to raise his voice or even glance their way. “We’re busy in here.”

  There’s absolutely no hesitation from the group as they scramble to obey Victor’s command.

  I open my mouth to make some snarky-ass comment, but the words won’t come. Instead, I clamp my lips shut and squeeze my hands into fists at my sides. If I make my palms bleed by squeezing too hard, nobody has to know.

  “If we take this job,” Vic repeats, taking a step closer to me, so close that the toes of his boots kiss mine. He touches a finger to my chin and then trails it along the length of my jaw. I’m trembling now, whether in rage or desperate, needy ardor, I’m not sure. Does it matter? “You become one of us, a Havoc Girl.”

  I swallow hard.

  “Now who’s talking in circles?” I manage to get out, wishing he’d stop touching me, knowing that if I take this deal, he never will. Vic’s smirk deepens, and he leans in, hovering his mouth over mine.

  “You’ll do what I say when I say it,” he continues, and I feel myself brist
ling. I hate being told what to do, hate it with a passion. I’ve been ordered around my whole life, by one person or another, and I haven’t exactly ended up on a bed of roses. “In all areas.” Vic slides his fingers into my hair, and I jerk away. The small act of protest makes him chuckle. “If you want this, you'll be our plaything. You’ll be our accomplice. Bernadette, if you want this, it’s blood in, and blood out. Do you understand that?”

  “I—” I start to answer, but Victor cuts me off with a look, all hard lines and dark shadows.

  “No. I don’t want an answer yet. Take a few days to think about it, Bernadette. Decide if your life is worth your revenge.” He steps back, and I hear Hael make a noise of protest from the front row.

  “For fucking real, Vic? Make her answer now.” Hael stands up and starts toward the stage, but a slow, menacing look from Victor stops him cold, and he curses, backing up with his palms raised.

  “Take the week,” Vic repeats, moving away from me and hopping off the edge of the stage, his boots loud on the cement floor. “Because once you give your answer, you can’t take it back.”

  “You’ll do what I say when I say it.”

  I’m not sure Vic could’ve uttered a single other sentence that would’ve infuriated me quite so much. The sex angle, I expected. In fact, I was almost hoping for it. Sex is easy if you approach it the right way, just two bodies working off their basic instincts. Never mind that I’ve only ever been with a few guys, and even then, only a handful of times. Never mind that one of those guys was Aaron Fadler.

  “Shit.” I grab a book off my nightstand and chuck it at the wall as hard as I can. I’m satisfied when it leaves a dent, but that doesn’t push back the anxiety or the worry as I rub my palms over my face. “You’ll be our plaything.” How else am I supposed to interpret that? I’ll be at their beck and call for sex, all five of them. What was it that Vic said, a Havoc Girl?

  My skin tingles, and I wrap my arms over my chest. When I was in middle school, I watched them from afar with desperation, always wanting to be a part of their little group, knowing that I never would be. And then sophomore year happened, and no amount of pleading could stop that wave of pain.