by L.J. Shen
“I can make your life a living hell.”
“Go ahead.” I gesture to her with my hand. You already are. “Be my guest.”
“Is this war, Daria?” A spark of madness ignites in her eyes. I’ve seen this flash before, the day Penn suggested we should be friends all those years ago. The adrenaline zing. This is how you know a Scully is excited.
I pretend to yawn. “If you want it to be? I’ll bring my tanks; you’ll bring your sticks.”
“Paper tanks.” She smiles sweetly, and for some reason, her gaze on my face makes me feel naked. At some sort of disadvantage. “Glittery paper tanks I can crumple in my fist. It’s on, Followhill.”
Penn leaves three hours before my birthday party starts.
An hour after Bailey and my parents left to stay at a Malibu hotel for the night, to be exact. They cleared out of the house until Sunday morning so I can throw the mother of all bashes. Before Penn moved in, I was notorious for my parties.
Before he left, Penn and I stood at the door, making out, groping, and kissing for long minutes before Via descended the stairs. Penn groaned, tearing his mouth from mine with a pained frown. Shame she didn’t catch it. At this point, I wanted her to see that we were still on. I recently told Knight and Vaughn about us—I had to tell someone, and Marx knows I can’t trust Esme and the cheer crew—and they both told me that I’m crazy for doing my foster brother even though I haven’t explicitly mentioned sex.
Principal Prichard, on the other hand, has been avoiding me on principle all week since those text messages. I think he is testing me. Or maybe he wants me to crawl back to him. Things have been awkward since he caught Penn and me in the locker room. I know I need to face the music, but I have so many war fronts, I can’t even begin to tackle the Prichard problem.
Now that my party is in full swing, I can sit back and relax for the first time in what seems like a lifetime. I watch people cannonball into my pool, lit in a million different lights, from my spot on the couch overlooking my backyard. I’m tucked next to Esme and Blythe. Knight, Colin, and Vaughn are sitting on recliners around us. Gus is nowhere to be seen, and I’m guessing Via is somewhere, sucking the souls out of random babies while pretending to be their unassuming nanny. Mel was so excited that Via “agreed” to stick around for the party.
“I’m so glad you’re making friends, Via.”
Yeah. My friends. And not by freaking accident, Mother.
“Where is Gus?” I ask as I sip from my champagne. I put a handful of my junior minions in the kitchen on bartender duty, and they’ve been serving us champagne and imported beer all evening. Not that they care. They get to mingle with high school royalty and be seen. Not to mention, they got a Followhill invite, which is practically a winning lottery ticket in this town.
The thing about parties at All Saints High? If they’re good, with a lot of alcohol, sex, and good music, you usually don’t know about them unless you’re in.
Next year, they’ll pass it forward and act just like me. For tonight, though, they will bask in my afterglow but only from afar.
“He’s been working on the new chick for like, two hours or something.” Colin takes a sip of his beer, nudging Knight’s thigh for him to pass him the joint.
“Via?” My mouth goes dry. I hope they are not hooking up. Penn absolutely hates Gus and vice versa.
“Yeah, her.” Colin yawns, pointing at me with the beer. “I hope she knows he is called Texas Gus for a reason.”
“Gus is called Texas Gus?” Blythe wrinkles her nose. Esme reddens next to me, downing her drink in one go.
“Correct.” Knight passes Colin the joint he just meticulously rolled using my mascara wand. “He once gave a certain girl pink eye by shooting his hot sauce in a strategic direction.”
Blythe snorts. “So embarrassing. Who was it?”
Esme pretends to text on her phone, but her fingers are not moving. Knight smirks, averting his gaze to her.
“Guess it was someone who wasn’t worth fucking.”
“Excuse me,” I singsong (like my mom, I realize after I do), slipping from the couch to go look for Via and Gus. “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine is blasting through the speakers as I make my way across the packed living room, crammed with teenagers drinking, dancing, and making out against the walls and furniture. I hear laughter from upstairs as people jump from Bailey’s window right onto the trampoline outside and make my way to the second floor, holding the bannister as my vision sways. I’m drunker than I thought I was, zigzagging my way upstairs. I start throwing doors open, my pulse picking up as I do. Penn’s is locked, but I knew it would be. I saw him packing everything that might’ve hinted at his presence into trash bags and tossing it straight into Vaughn’s pool house earlier today. He’s not taking any chances. I haven’t been bringing any friends to my house ever since he moved here, and I’m guessing he knows it’s a sacrifice. What I don’t tell him is that I do it gladly. What I never voice is how freaking proud I am of him going through all of this without complaining.
When I reach my room and open it, I find Via writhing in my bed with Gus on top of her. Their mouths are fused, and he is running his fingers up and down her bare leg. She is wearing a dress I don’t recognize. Mel must’ve taken her shopping between the time she broke my heart and the time she crushed it with her fist, just to make sure that it’s extra dead.
“Texas Gus,” I purr, and Gus’s eyes shoot up from Via, but he is still on top of her. “Take a hike. I need to have a word with Mississippi Sylvia.”
“Nah, Followhill. I think I’m comfortable right”—he thrusts his jeans-clad crotch onto Via’s groin, and she is laughing evilly—“fucking”—he leans down to bite her nose—“here.”
I elevate my phone to my face and start typing with a cheerful bravado I don’t feel.
“I guess I’ll report it back to your QB1. You know my daddy always puts him in charge, making sure everyone’s on their best behavior when I throw parties.”
“Bitch.” Gus nips at Via’s lips one more time before he jumps to his feet, grabbing his varsity jacket from my lilac bed bench and storming past me, his shoulder brushing mine.
I continue standing at the door. I’m not even going to touch the subject of them making out on my bed with a ten-foot pole. It makes me want to throw up in my mouth, and I’m mad about it, but not as mad as I am about her sleeping with the enemy—quite freaking literally.
Via huffs and gets up, about to leave, but this time, I’m the one to close the door behind me and push her back onto my bed. “Sit.”
“Give me one good reason to.” She makes a move to stand again.
“It’s about your brother, and if you care about him at all—which you haven’t shown any signs of doing in the past four years—you will listen.”
I settle next to her on my bed. We’re both staring at our feet. I feel tipsy and frustrated with the past few days. Just when I thought I was making real progress with Penn and Mel, Via came back and screwed up everything.
“What’s going on with you and Gus?” I demand.
“As if I’ll ever tell you anything.” She sulks. I peek at her from my peripheral vision, and tears are brimming in her eyes. It must be so hard for her to see all this and know it wasn’t a part of her youth. That it never would be. She can’t get her high school years back.
“Have you ever been kissed before Gus?” I trail my linen with the tip of my finger, trying another tactic but also genuinely curious.
She snort-laughs through her tears. “Get to the point, Daria. We’re not friends, and this is not a heart to heart.”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “I just want you to know the whole picture before you date Gus or even mess around with him. He and your brother have an open beef. I heard there was mad trash talk the day the Saints beat the Bulldogs on the football field when the season started. Penn came over to our school a few days before that to try to patch things up with Gus, but it didn’t work. Pe
nn thinks Gus cheated somehow in order to win,” I explain, manically trying to convey to her the level of hate these two share. “And every single time I see them in the same vicinity, Gus is trying to throw Penn off-balance.”
Via takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.
“I feel like Penn gave up on me the moment I ran away, and that nothing I can do will ever narrow the abyss between us,” she admits. I perk up, looking at her cautiously. This sounds a lot like an admission. And an admission is better than an attack, which is what I’ve been getting since the day she came to live with us.
“How so?” My voice is so small and encouraging, barely a whisper.
“Penn is being weird with me. Not exactly hostile but…distant. I feel like I’ve let him down so much by leaving. As if I had a choice. I thought Rhett was going to kill me at some point. And Penn, no matter how much he loved me and was there for me, he was still only a child himself. He couldn’t protect me. I realize that I’m the only one to blame—”
“No, you aren’t,” I cut her off. “Rhett is to blame. Your late mom is to blame. Your school, and the system, and to an extent, even my mother for not noticing. But not you.”
“Penn isn’t to blame,” she stresses. “And he is the one who got hurt the most.”
Now I have my own admission. The truth is clogging my throat, and the alcohol begs for me to let it loose. It’s a confession. A difficult one. But one that would make her let go of her inhibitions and guilt, and maybe start building a strong bridge to cross that gulf.
“Penn and I are also to blame,” I admit quietly.
“What?” Her eyes shoot to me. “What in the hell are you talking about? You didn’t know each other back when that happened.”
I tell her everything about that day. Rehashing the entire thing from the moment I stood at the door and prayed not to see her to the moment Penn gave me my first kiss. And all the horrible things in-between. The letter. How he tore it. The glee I felt when he did. How I wrote about it in my little black book that same evening. How the book got thick.
“He tore it, but he didn’t know. He didn’t know, Via. He didn’t know,” I keep repeating.
After I’m done, I feel out of breath. As though I just ran a marathon. I shift my entire body on the bed so I can look at her better. She is shaking, and tears stream down her face. I realize my mother never told her that she got into the Royal Academy. And why would she? It’s cruel, bittersweet news. I try to hug her, but she shoots up to her feet. I do, too.
“There wasn’t one day in my life I didn’t think about the letter, and about you, and about what a horrible person I am,” I confess, tears blurring my vision. It’s true. Even when I hated her, I hated myself more for what I did. I still do. This was when Mom became Mel. When my downfall started. “Please, believe me.”
The slap comes out of nowhere. Sharp as a knife and full of heat. I feel her palm on my cheek long after she withdraws it and instinctively raise my hand to rub it.
You just got slapped. My brain is screaming at the rest of my body, an echo ringing between my ears. Ad infinitum.
“And that makes it okay?” Her entire face twists. “You and my brother ruined my life. Rhett was an abusive jerk. Mama was unresponsive and passed out eighty percent of the time, and your mom was pushing me away because you couldn’t handle us being close and she didn’t want to upset you,” she tells me, and I choke on my breath. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know Via and Mom weren’t super close. “I would have never left had I known I got in! I would have made it through, Daria.”
“I know.” I’m sobbing, bracing my hands on my knees and shaking my head. The tears burn where she slapped me, but drunk and armor-less, I acknowledge that I deserved it. “God, I know.”
My shoulders are shaking as the sobs flow through me. I advance toward her, planning…I don’t know, even to go down on my knees if I have to, but she backs up again. Her legs hit my nightstand, and she picks up the first thing she can get her hands on—a golden alarm clock Luna brought me from her family trip to Switzerland a few years ago—and aims it at me.
“Stay away from me, Daria. I mean it.”
“Please don’t think any less about your brother. That wasn’t my intention at all. I just wanted you to know that everyone was to blame for what happened four years ago. But now you’re back, and we can make up for that time.”
“You can’t make up for that time!”
She is screaming at the top of her lungs, hunching her body from the effort to produce such a profound yell. We’re lucky the music is deafeningly loud outside. “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell is playing, and I can’t help but agree with the sentiment.
Love is so contaminated. It tarnishes all that is beautiful and corrupts the soul. Love is so much uglier than hate because when you hate, you’re not confused. When you’re in love, you’re dumb.
“You can’t turn back time. I was miserable and abused in Mississippi, only in a different way.”
“So why did you give my mother trouble about coming back?” I’m trying to gain control over my voice, my muscles, my heart. “Why did you want to stay there when Mel begged you to come back?”
“Because I hated you too much!” She throws her arms in the air.
“Because I knew I was going to get a front-row seat to the perfect life of Daria Followhill. Because a part of me knew you would seduce Penn. Because that’s what you do, Daria. You take everything that I have and make it yours.”
“Funny.” I sniff, my mouth filling with bitterness. “I feel the same about you.”
Via shakes her head. She dashes out my door, and I run after her. I push past people and bark at them to move out of the way. I probably look possessed, and everyone is glancing over their shoulder to watch Queen Daria running after her new foster sister. But I can’t let her walk away from this conversation. Not like this. Not when nothing has been sorted. Panic rushes through my veins like a river. The more I try with her, the harder she pushes me away.
Eventually, I lose her in the crowd and get swept away by Alisha, who wants to raid Mel’s closet and see what Fashion Week garments she has ordered this season. I comply on autopilot.
The princess’s castle is falling apart.
And I know that, soon enough, doomsday will arrive.
But I just smile and wave, as princesses do.
Even—and especially—when they crumple.
You think you are so fake
But you’re the realest thing I’ve ever seen
Painful to watch
Beautiful to see
Shattering to touch
Curiosity killed the cat, and it was about to land my ass in equally deep shit, too.
I knew coming back home before I got a text clearance that the party was over was a special brand of stupid, but my dumbass self is here anyway.
The party is in full force when I park the Prius all the way on the other side of the neighborhood, a mega creep move if I ever made one. I make my way to the Followhills’ mansion by foot, wearing a ball cap to stay under the radar, approaching it with hands tucked deep inside my pockets.
“Yo. Little shit.” I hear someone chuckle behind me and—because intelligence is not my friend tonight—decide it’s a good idea to turn around. It’s Dean Cole, Knight’s dad. He is sitting on the front porch of his colonial—a weird architectural design for SoCal, but apparently, his wife is from Virginia and he is crazy about her so he designed her the perfect Southern-style house from scratch—sipping a Bloody Mary.
“You think it’s a good idea to go in there?” He jerks his chin toward the Followhills’ mansion.
I spit my gum out and kick it all the way to the Spencers’ lawn.
“Nope.”
“Just checking.” He laughs.
“What are you doing up?” I eye him curiously. Is he snitching for the Followhills?
I can hear feminine coughing from his house. He winces, tossing his Bloody Mary back and finishes it with a gulp.<
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“Missus is feeling under the weather. She’s about to join me outside for some fresh air.”
I have nothing to say to that, so I just nod.
“You can crash here tonight,” he offers.
“Nah. I have some unfinished business with your spawn’s friends.” I bite off a callus from my palm and spit the dead skin on the ground.
Maybe I just want to be near Daria and Via. Make sure they haven’t killed each other yet. I turn to leave.
“Do you love her?” Dean Cole’s voice makes me stop dead in place.
I don’t know how he knows.
I don’t know if that means Jaime and Mel know, too.
And I have no idea why my face feels so hot.
All I do know is that now’s not the time to think about this question.
I shake my head, chuckling. “It’s just harmless fun.”
“Harmless for who?” he calls as I resume my way to the Followhills’.
For me, I want to say. The tin man.
“Are you gonna tell Jaime and Mel?” I turn around as I continue walking backward.
He refills his glass with a bottle on the arm of his recliner, his eyes on the liquid.
“And miss out on the moment he finds out and kicks your ass? I think I’ll let your sloppy ass do the job for me. But save me a front-row seat when that happens.”
“Deal.”
I slip behind the pool house, a good few feet from Gus and the All Saints football team.
In my defense, I didn’t come here with the intention of playing Sherlock and eavesdropping. The task rolled onto my lap the minute I slipped through the backyard. I was about to cross the lawn and find my sister to make sure she wasn’t overwhelmed when I heard Gus’s voice. Now, I can’t stop listening.
“…if we don’t make it to State, Coach’s going to cold-blooded kill us. Principal Prichard is going to burn whatever’s left of our bodies, and the mayor is going to kick us out of town.” I hear their running back moaning into his beer. “And, Gus, dude, I know we’ve been lucky, but you’ve seen our form at practice. We, like, suck.”