“Rock on! We’ll have lunch and last block to plan our takeover attempt on the school. I’ve already decided. Me and my girls are ruling. Now, I’ll walk you to first period. You’re two buildings over so it’s gonna be a hike.”
“Are you over there, too?”
“Nah. I’m here.” She hitched her thumb at the door only a few feet away.
I glanced at the clock at the far end of the hall. We had six minutes until the tardy bell rang. “Won’t you be late to your own class?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry.” Grinning that sly little grin of hers, she twined her arm through mine. “This is my humanitarian deed of the day. Besides, you’ll owe me. And yes, I always collect. Ask anyone. There’s not a single person in this school who doesn’t owe me a favor. True story.”
As tiny as she was, she had no problem pushing her way through the crowds, telling people off or flipping them off when they did or said something she didn’t like. But she kept up a steady chatter with me, telling me everything I “needed to know to survive.”
“She’s a skank. He’s a player. He’s cute but almost OD’d last year, so he’s a bad bet. She’s a two-faced, lying, cheating witch. That’s right, Trina, I’m talking to you,” she shouted. “By the way,” she added just for me, “Trina cusses, which means cussing is trashy, which means my golden rule is to never cuss. I have class. Unlike Trina, the skank of Birmingham.” That last part was, of course, shouted.
I half expected the pretty but, well, somewhat masculine Trina to fly across the hall and introduce Kat’s teeth to her fist, but Trina just fronted and moved on with a glare that promised vengeance.
O-kay. New note to self: never mess with Trina. Her tank was regulation, but still managed to show off her muscular arms and tats. Her hair was chopped to just below her ears, and there were scars stretching across the back of her neck. Like, scars that resembled teeth marks.
And I really needed to stop rubbernecking, or I’d paralyze myself.
“He’s gay but in denial,” Kat continued, as though nothing had happened, “so just a heads-up not to try and tap that. Now his friend over there is loaded, but he’s a total douche. Oh, and she’s so snotty you’ll need Kleenex just to talk to her. Actually, just pretend that entire group has the plague, and you’ll be the better for it. She’s not bad. He’s—crap!” She ground to a stop, forcing me to do the same. “Laugh like I just said something amazingly hilarious.”
Laugh? Seriously? Did I even remember how?
She slapped my arm and whispered fiercely, “Laugh!”
Okay, so I forced out a laugh. I’m embarrassed to admit I sounded like a frog had jumped into my throat and played bongos on my voice box. Even Kat was horrified, her mouth hanging open so wide that I could see her tonsils.
She recovered quickly and tossed her hair over her shoulder, throwing off her own magical laugh. It was like an angel played the harp on top of a rainbow. So not fair!
“Why are we doing this?” I asked quietly.
“Don’t look now, but that’s my ex over there.”
Surely I’m not the only one who takes “don’t look now” as “there’s no better time than now.” I looked.
“Bad Ali!” Another slap to my arm. “Bad, bad, bad Ali! Have you no self-control?”
“Sorry.” I rubbed away the sting. Did I stop looking, though? No. I stared. Hard.
To the right of us was a group of eight boys. If I’d ever needed a visual definition of serial criminal, I now had one (or eight). They were tall, all of them, and they were stacked with muscle. Most sported tattoos on their arms and piercings on their faces. A few wore chains around their waists, as if the metal links were belts, but on those bodies they could only be weapons.
Proof: two of them had house-arrest anklets on display over their dirt-caked boots.
They were shoving one another, laughing and punching each other on the arms. One of them even rubbed his fist into another’s hair, holding the guy by the waist and forcing him to stay hunched over and take the abuse while others pointed and called him the worst kind of names.
“There used to be more of them,” Kat said. “Two died last year from some disease that turns your blood into a toxic sludge, basically causing you to rot from the inside out. It’s not contagious or anything like that, or so the proverbial ‘they’ say—pamphlets were sent out to all the students because everyone was totally panicking—but it’s weird that two guys got it at the same time, you know.”
I caught a note of…something in her voice. “Did you know them?”
“Yeah, and I thought I’d cry forever. And this might be horrible to say, but I’m kinda glad they went together. They were best friends and you never saw one without the other. And wow, this little chat became morbid. My apologies.”
“No worries,” I said—even though I was worried. I never wanted to think about death and blood again, much less talk about them. “So which one is yours?” I asked, changing the subject back to the living boys.
She snorted with disgust. “The blond, and he was mine. Was. He’s not anymore and won’t ever be again.”
I scanned the crowd. Two were black, one had a shaved head, two were brunettes, one had jet-black hair and two were blond. I wanted to look over the blonds, I really did, but once I spotted the one with hair so black it was almost blue, I was stuck.
He wore a bright red baseball cap. There was writing in the center, but I couldn’t make out the words. He was the only one not horsing around. With his back pressed into the lockers and his arms folded over his chest, he watched his friends with lazy amusement.
He was gorgeous, and I absolutely, no question, had to be drooling. After a quick and hopefully stealthy check—big shock, I wasn’t!—I found myself wondering what color his eyes were. Brown maybe. Or even hazel. Either way…wow, just wow. Deer? Headlights? Hi, I’m Ali.
“Yo, Kitty Kat,” someone called. I forced myself to stop staring at Red Hat and glanced—at one of the blonds. “Come over here and give me a proper hello. You know you want to.”
“What I want is for you to go to hell,” she called back.
“Aw, come on. Don’t be that way, baby.” He was the taller of the blonds, with cold brown eyes and a face that would have made the devil hide in a shadowed corner, sucking his thumb and crying for his mommy. Even though I couldn’t imagine him winning a girl like Kat, I could imagine him cheating. He had to be the ex. “You love me, ’cause you just can’t help yourself.”
“I hope Rina gave you an STD.”
The boys around him snickered, and the fact that he maintained his grin—rather than murdering Kat—surprised me.
“That’s harsh, baby. I was just teasing when I called you by her name.”
“Both times?”
Yep. The ex. Sooo Trina the “two-faced, lying, cheating witch” had to be the very same Rina he’d messed around with over summer break. And, honestly? That totally blew my mind. Kat was one of the prettiest, most feminine girls I’d ever met, while that Trina person was hard-core.
Although, so was the ex. Besides that I’m-totally-a-serial-killer face, he had black bands tattooed around his wrists and brass knuckles tattooed over his…well, knuckles.
“I’m not mad, though,” Kat said. “You lied to me, and I lied to you. We’re even.”
Finally he lost the grin. “When did you lie?”
She gave him a Sweet’N Low smile, as if his amusement had been poured into her. “Every time we messed around. I didn’t actually enjoy myself, if you know what I mean.”
“Burn,” one of his friends said.
He shoved the boy away. “Don’t be that way,” he pleaded to her, and I would have bet he was only halfway kidding. There was a desperate gleam in those dark eyes.
“Don’t tell me what to do. And by the way, I’m not teasing when I do this.” Kat flipped him off times two, and all of his friends erupted into a fresh round of snickers.
His confident facade faded, but still he said
, “I’ll change your mind and I’ll win you back. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Actually, it’s just a matter of time before I feed your balls to my dog.” In an aside to me, she said, “Remind me that I need to buy a dog.”
The black-haired one finally glanced over at us—yeah, I’d returned to staring at him—and I forgot all about Kat and her problems. Violet, I realized. Those eyes of his were the most amazing shade of violet. I’d never seen so beautiful a color.
Had to be contacts. Right?
He gave Kat a once-over and grinned a hello. I barely stopped myself from chewing on one of my nails, a disgusting nervous tic I’d broken years ago. Would he look directly at me?
Answer: yes.
The moment our eyes met, the moisture in my mouth dried up and I lost focus of my surroundings. He was all that I could see, all that I wanted to see. And in the span of a single second we were no longer across the hall from each other—
—we were pressed together, his arms wrapped around me, my arms wrapped around him, and we were kissing. Miracle of miracles, he was five inches taller than me, practically dwarfing me. I loved it! And oh, glory, I loved what we were doing....
I had never been kissed before, but his tongue was definitely in my mouth, and my tongue was definitely in his, and we were practically eating each other’s faces.
“Ali,” he breathed as he drew me closer, squeezed me tighter.
“Cole,” I breathed back. I couldn’t get enough of him and never wanted to stop. He was so warm. So very warm, when I’d been so cold all summer. No matter how many blankets I’d piled on top of me, I’d been cold. I wanted to stay here, just like this, forever.
My fingers tangled in his hair, knocking off his cap. He angled his head, taking my mouth deeper, harder.
“You taste good,” he rasped. He smelled of sandalwood and something fruity, like a strawberry lollipop just freed from its wrapper.
“Talk later. Kiss now—”
“—Ali. Ali!” Kat stepped in front of me. She was frowning, waving. “Hello? Anyone home?”
I blinked and realized I was in the same spot I’d occupied before. And with that realization came another. I’d never crossed the hall, never met the boy in the hat halfway—Cole, I’d called him—never plowed my fingers through his hair. Never touched him, and absolutely never kissed him, yet my lips tingled and I was having trouble drawing air into my lungs.
“You okay?” Kat asked, her concern evident.
She was so short I had no trouble peeking over her shoulder at the group of boys. Nearly everyone else had abandoned the hallways. Maybe because the tardy bell had been ringing—and was only now fading. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. How long had I been staring at that boy?
At least he was staring at me, too. Or maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. He was scowling at me, and it was the kind of scowl you saw on a guy in a dark alley just before he crunched your face into the dirt and stole your purse. One of his friends was tugging on his arm, trying to get his attention.
Red Hat snapped his teeth at me and turned away to stomp out of the hall. His remaining friends traveled after him, one of them muttering, “Mind telling us what that was about, my man?”
I leaned against the lockers to find my balance. Only then, with distance between us and his gaze unlocked from mine, did I manage to catch my breath. “The one with the hat,” I said to Kat. “What’s his name?” I probably should have assured her of my mental competence first, but I craved info about him too badly. And really, could I assure anyone of my mental competence just then?
Kat’s head fell forward, as if suddenly too heavy to hold up, but her penetrating stare remained on me. “Why? Are you interested in him?”
My mouth floundered open and closed. I was interested in knowing what had just happened. How I had just…envisioned kissing him. How that vision had seemed so real that I’d felt his heat, his strength. So real that my body had reacted physically.
“Just curious,” I finally said, trying for a nonchalance I didn’t feel. But my words were the straight-up truth. I was curious.
She wasn’t buying. “That’s Cole Holland, and girl, you so don’t want to date him. Trust me.”
Shock blustered through me. His name really was Cole? But…how had I known that?
You heard someone else call him Cole, that’s all. A subconscious thing.
Maybe. Probably. “Why?” I croaked.
“Because I’m totally trustworthy. Hello, you’ve met me, right?”
If I hadn’t been in such a state of upheaval, I would have rolled my eyes. “Not why should I trust you. Why don’t I want to date him?”
“Oh. Well, for starters, because you’re intimidated by him.”
“I’m not intimidated by him.”
She rose on her tiptoes to pat the top of my head, and said, “Since you won’t admit that little truth, how about this one? Because he’s the leader of that rabid pack of animals and he’s totally dangerous.”
Dangerous. Yeah, I got that. “You dated one of his friends.”
She spread her arms, as if I’d just made her point for her. “And look where I ended up—cheated on and brokenhearted.” The soft snick of closing doors filled the hall, and she glanced around. “Come on. Let’s finish this on the way to your class.”
Now that the halls were deserted and I could move freely, I should have relaxed. But I felt like I’d been plugged into something. A battery, maybe. I had energy. And there was a soft buzzing sound echoing in my head. Even the lights in the hallway seemed brighter.
“Cole’s, like, the worst of the lot,” Kat said. “He speaks, and the rest of them jump to obey. They skip school a lot, and do…well, your guess is as good as mine. No, probably not as good, but close. And yeah, you’d think I’d know for sure, but Frosty was stellar at keeping secrets. Obviously. Anyway, they’re always wounded, so you know they like to throw down in the nastiest way possible. And did I mention that they’re secretive? Cole is the worst, but Frosty is second in line for the title of The Vault, I promise you.”
“Frosty?”
“My ex.”
“I got that, but his name is…”
“A nickname, yes. He accidentally locked himself out of his house one winter. By the time he was found he was covered in ice and completely frostbitten. They nearly amputated all of his limbs. True story.”
“Really?” Because I hadn’t noticed anything missing, and if they’d nearly amputated all of his limbs, surely they would have taken a few of his fingers, the most vulnerable part of the hand.
“Fine, he only lost a toe, but frostbite is treacherous. Anyway, the only girls who get to hang with them on their private little adventures are Mackenzie Love—Cole’s ex—and Trina, who you had the misfortune to meet earlier.”
Cole still hung out with his ex? That had bad news written all over it. Not that I cared. Or wanted to, I don’t know, go on a date with him, marry him and have his babies. I just wanted answers. Really.
What had happened in that hallway—or rather, what had not happened—was freaking me out. I mean, I’d always had a strong imagination, as evidenced by the monster in the wedding dress I was convinced I’d seen, but this little mind-vacay of making out in the hall with a strange boy I hadn’t officially met far surpassed anything else I’d ever thought up.
“Just a warning,” Kat said. “If you hang with them, Mackenzie will corner you and threaten your very existence. Oh, and your friends will drop you and you’ll be known as trouble.”
I could handle the name Trouble. Again, not that I was considering doing anything with Cole. “Were you dropped when you dated Frosty?”
For a moment, only a moment, she radiated sadness. Then she flipped her hair over one shoulder, grinned and said, “I’ve always been known as big-time trouble, and though no one has yet realized, I’m more trouble now that Frosty and I— Or is it Frosty and me? I can’t ever remember. Whatevs. I’m more trouble now that we’ve spilt, but you’ll
learn to appreciate that part of me, I’m sure.”
“Already do,” I said, and I meant it.
We reached a red door, and she stopped. She hitched her thumb at it and said, “This is you.”
I peeked into the classroom through the small window on the door and wanted to run. Or vomit. No, both. Kids were everywhere, and there were no empty seats. The teacher was at the front, already lecturing. The moment I walked inside, silence would take over and every eye would find me.
Maybe I’d turned green or shuddered, because Kat said, “Nervous?”
“Yes, but only a little…lot.” I’d always had difficulty lying. “Want to ditch?” I asked hopefully. We could start fresh for block two.
“No, I don’t want to ditch, and I’m not even going to attempt to figure out what a little lot is. I want to make an entrance in my own class. After all, the center of attention is the best place to be.”
Uh, no, no it wasn’t. I backed up a step. “I’ll wait for you outside, then.”
“You’ll be fine,” she said, merciless. “They’ll love you. And if they don’t, well, let me know who I need to punish. That’s a specialty of mine, just FYI. So is tough love.” She patted me on the butt. “Now go get ’em, baby cub.”
“Kat, wait. I—”
“You heard the part about tough love, right? And P.S. In a few months, you might graduate to a full-on tigress, but until then…” She opened the door and gave me a push inside the room. “You’ll have to endure the growing pains.”
* * *
I survived first block with only a splash of humiliation. The “teacher,” and I use the term lightly, made me stand at the front of the class and tell the students a little about myself and why I was late. Apparently there were to be no breaks for anyone. Not on the first day, and certainly not for first timers who should know how to read a map.
My thinking on the matter: Mr. Buttle—whom I would forever call Mr. Butthole—was on a power trip, but whatever. I got through without any internal scarring because a very cute boy with puppy dog brown eyes smiled encouragingly at me, then made the universal jerk-off sign the moment Mr. Butthole turned his back, sending everyone into peals of laughter, thereby taking the attention away from me.
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